Category: Pluralsight

Global Azure Bootcamp – Glasgow April 21st 2018

Saturday April 21st was the day for the Azure Global Bootcamp which say people attend user groups all around the world as you can see below, so we all spent a day as the Azure community learning all about Azure in many different ways from speakers all around the globe.

I took part and my talk was on learning Azure and becoming ready for the exams into the bargain.

 

 

 

As promised here are my slides:- HowToLearnAzure3

The Glasgow event was awesome and we also had Analben Mehta talking about serverless and Azure Functions and then we had Kenny Lowe talking about Azure Stack, great content and lunch and beers/soft drinks provided, all in all great to be apart of and hopefully people enjoyed they’re day.

Hope to see the people attended at the next Glasgow Azure User Group.



What I learned last week – 3rd September – 7th September

This past week I have been mainly working with KnockOutJS, if you looking for a way to create a rich UI that users will love and your building a website then I highly recommend you take a look at KnockoutJS

What I learned this past week

  • Web Essentials 1.1 for VS 2012 by Mads Kristensen has been updated, you can read more here – go check it out.
  • RavenDB Backups – I decided to instead of using the RavenDB Backup.exe – I am going to stick with just exporting the tenant database and saving this off to a network share.
  • At work we are looking at introducing CoffeeScript – CoffeeScript is a language that sits on top of JavaScript and compiles down to JavaScript but has added benefits including making your code cleaner and has much more signal to noise ratio – more on CoffeeScript soon , I’m off to learn more on it via PluralSight.
  • Redgate have taken on the 2 developers who write Glimpse and will be adding to the project – you can read more here.

What did you find useful this week? – please let me know by leaving a comment after the beep.



jsfiddle.net – what is it and why is it so useful?

If your writing a web application and using any kind of JavaScript library then jsfiddle is something worth taking 5-10 minutes to look at in my opinion.

You can try out your JavaScript (any library you can think of) add some HTML and sprinkle with CSS and quickly see the results, its a no brainer.

At work we are starting out on a web application which we will be using KnockoutJs on and jsfiddle will be invaluable, I have been watching the Pluralsight and Tekpub videos on KnockoutJs and wanted to blog about jsfiddle after watching John Papa talk about it in one of his KnockoutJS modules.

John’s courses on Pluralsight are awesome and I highly recommend them, the one I refer to was his course on Buiding HTML 5 apps (middle one below):-

jsfiddle.net is a website where you can test out some JavaScript code snippets you have, before you add them to your project, it’s an excellent little test harness for ideas and trying things out.

You can save the fiddles you create and share fiddles with others if you can’t get something working and could use some help with some tricky JavaScript.

Ok less talk more action:-

  • Browse to jsfiddle.net and then sign up for an account, the reason you want an account is so you can save fiddles for later and come back to them in the future.
  • You can add in pretty much any JavaScript library as a a managed resource so that you test all kinds of stuff, jquery, jquery ui, knockoutj, kendoui and more.
  • If you see a blog post that mentions a js fiddle and you want to it then I will show you how to use it below:-

How to create your first fiddle using jsfiddle

  1. Since this demo is going to use KnockoutJS we will add a reference to KnockoutJS
  2. Browse to https://github.com/SteveSanderson/knockout/downloads and then copy the location to the latest version of the knockoutJS library, at this moment in time this link to the file we need is :- https://github.com/downloads/SteveSanderson/knockout/knockout-2.1.0.js
  3. To add this to our jsfiddle look at the left hand side looking for ‘Add Resources’ and then paste in the link to the js file and then click the plus icon.

  4. The screen is split into 4 sections:-

    • Top Left is for HTML
    • Top Right is for any css styling you wish to add/try out
    • Bottom Left is where you add your JavaScript code.
    • Bottom right shows the output you would see in the browser
  5. Add the following into the top left hand window pane (Html):- [sourcecode language=”csharp”] <p>First name: <strong data-bind="text: firstName"></strong></p>
    <p>Last name: <strong data-bind="text: lastName"></strong></p>
    [/sourcecode]
  6. Now add the following into the bottom left window pane (JavaScript):-
    [sourcecode language=”csharp”] // This is a simple *viewmodel* – JavaScript that defines the data and behavior of your UI
    function AppViewModel() {
    this.firstName = "Bert";
    this.lastName = "Bertington";
    }

    // Activates knockout.js
    ko.applyBindings(new AppViewModel());
    [/sourcecode]

  7. And thats it we are ready to save the fiddle and test it out.
  8. To test out our code click Run up at the top and you can use your favourite browser to check for any errors that may arise as you play around with the code.
  9. A very simple demo but you get the idea on whats possible, and if like me your trying to learn KnockoutJS its an invaluable tool.

Ok now that you get the idea, go create some fiddles and test our your ideas using any JavaScript library you can think of – enjoy!



What I learned last week – July 30 – 3rd August

This week I have been busy watching the KnockoutJS videos on Pluralsight, my favourite way to learn a new technology other than sitting coding – I am also working on a little home-brew website and this set of learning videos has been very handy.

What I learned this past week

  • Visual Studio 2012 will be out August 15th for MSDN subscribers.
  • RavenDB has some very cool bundles and this week I looked at the uniqueconstraint bundle – more here.
  • RavenDB has an updated client Nuget package that allows it to work with an MVC 4 application, before this release the RavenDB client package had a conflict in the version of NewtonSoft.JSon used – this is fixed in the latest stable release.
  • Countersoft have releases a beta of Gemini 5 -if you’re not familiar with Gemini its simple, it’s the best issue tracker software on the web today bar none.

Gemini

Please leave a comment after the beep.




RavenDB Video Tutorials

RavenDB is fast becoming pretty popular and 2 of the best resources I find for learning is TekPub and Pluralsight, these sites are for developer training and require you to pay for them.

Both sites offer subscriptions but Tekpub also offers the ability to pay for a single course such as the RavenDB course, which is a nice addition.

  • Tekpub Course Details:- Tekpub RavenDB course

    In this production, Oren Eini walks Rob through the various aspects of RavenDB – from the basics through to advanced Administrative Tasks. Along the way you’ll learn how to query with the core Lucene engine, how to index your documents for searches, backups, sharding, replication to SQL Server, and how to plug all of this in to an ASP.NET MVC application.

    This series is In Production which means we are actively recording and producing content for it. Currently we have 10-12 episodes planned.”

  • Pluralsight Course Details:- Pluralsight RavenDB course

I have watched both courses and they are both superb and I encourage you to check them both out.




Need some software developer training – look no further

You’ve been asked to look at something new, or your just interested in learning something different, perhaps you always thought it would be cool to know something about a technology you know nothing about.

If you find yourself looking for a new job, perhaps the employers are looking for a skill you either don’t have or feel a little weaker in, brushing up or learning this new skill would be of an obvious benefit to you as individual. Maybe your just looking at a technology and want to know more about it and see what the fuss is about.

Keeping up to speed with new technologies is very important and I find the best way to do this is to use a resource such as the link below.

Check out Pluralsight for training from guys like Fritz Onion and Scott Allen or Tekpub from guys like James Avery and Rob Connery.

For a years subscription to Both it will cost you £350 all in, that’s it no – all the training you could want including updates and new content to learn. Its easy, fast, full of great content and developers can watch anytime they like.

I have subscribed to both and I recommend you or your team do too.



Pluralsight Training Videos – go check them out now!

Having been lucky enough to have a years subscription to the training content at Pluralsight Training I have to say that the content is superb, if you’re looking for training videos for yourself or for members of staff, the content is first class and covers beginner, intermediate and advanced levels on a variety of topics.

I have used the content to help study WCF, ASP.Net 4, MVC 2 & 3 and Entity Framework so far.

The price for the content has been reduced and I cannot tell you how good this stuff is – go check it out now, there are some free courses from time to time which will show you just how good the content is.

The website has just been updated and I would recommend this form of training to every developer – plus the mobile versions such as the Androind and Ipad versions both rock.