I met with almost 15 young entrepreneurs who have a clear goal: have success in life. The group is organized by roles, and is working in several projects to develop their skills about leadership and entrepreneur. Some of them already have their own ideas and ongoing business and are trying to use the business network formed by JCI +200.000 members, who meet regularly all over the world. 

I was invited by Luciano Varela to spend some time with them talking about my experiences in leadership in my previous company (TCS) and my current challenges now at UruIT Global IT Services.  

Even when I am usually boring when talking about my past experiences, I wish to have added some value to my talk and to encourage this group to move forward. I hope they invite me to some of the trainings they organize to create leaders and CEOs, as I would like to improve my skills and also meet new people.  

Yesterday I met some guys who are currently leading their own projects related to IT (PHP and ERPs development), so overall this was a nice and very productive time.  

I wish this Uruguayan young team all the best in their initiatives !

Marcelo

PS: If you live in Montevideo, and you are between 20 and 40 years old with an entrepeneur spirit, just drop me a line and I will send you JCI Montevido Chapter email right away.

During the last few years I had the chance to lead several teams of talented developers, which gave me invaluable experiences and a lot of exposure to software development processes.

 I have worked in a CMMI level 5 corporation for 3 years, and I remember being tired of following processes and completing documents with almost no tangible value for our projects but for the organization itself.

After attending to my PMP course last year, I understood that traditional development processes can be customized depending on the projects needs, and also learnt about the added value of performing some of the activities specified in the PM-Book (guide for project management in general).

Since working at UruIT Global IT Services, I have been trying to adapt the best of a traditional processes to our agile style of development. Why we need to be agile ? Because our customers expect deliveries soon, and because we are focused in using latest tools and technologies in our solutions, usually increasing risks.

However, I think that defining a procedure for identifying and monitoring risks, performing final revisions and a few quality assurance activities, estimating and monitoring costs, schedule or purchases, are helping us to have more profitable projects and satisfied customers every month.

This could be related to our customer profiles and team structure, but PMI suggested procedures are being adapted to our real needs with good results. I hope this PMP certification can help me to adapt more and more process to our organization, always with the goal of improving team productivity and customer satisfaction.

As a side note:

At the beginning, I was mentioning a challenging period in my career, and this is to the fact that I am developing other skills rather than development.

During the last year I have been working in Sales and Delivery Management, trying to reach more and more customers interested in our nearshore development services, and trying to deliver on time and with the desired quality.

This PMP certification is part of this process. I don’t have much time available during the week and weekends due to the overhead caused by my various job assignments, and I can spend some time reading blogs and news about emerging Microsoft technologies because it is part of my sales function, but I have almost no time for piloting them, except when meeting with our teams and architects.

This blog will then turn more to a personal blog, focused in best development practices, software entrepreneurs and live experiences, but also a few technology sharing.I consider myself as a lucky guy but also work committed and very entrepeneur, allowing me to reach the point where I am now, leading a company to a global vision, and helping talented individuals to reach their dreams.

I hope you get inspired from my stories from now onwards.

Cheers,
Marcelo     

This new framework for ASP.NET is quite cool. It eliminates the page life cycle, postbacks and viewstate. It divides the architecture in View, Model and Controller.

We have been using MbUnit to test the code. Having these well defined tiers really improves unit testing. We can have an object mock instead of rendering the actual page (View) for testing the Controller and be sure that all the methods are working properly, even before we finish the coding phase.

However the framework is still in Preview (2) and there are lot of changes with each release. The community around MVC is increasing every day but there is still poor documentation for some of the features. For instance, we found several issues when trying to add File Upload functionality to our MVC web site.

Last week Microsoft released the source code for the actual build of this new framework. This will definetely help to understand what is going on behind the scenes.

If you would like to learn more about ASP.NET MVC I can recommend Scott Hanselman videos available at http://www.asp.net/learn/3.5-extensions-videos/default.aspx. Scott Guthrie also published some tutorials (a bit out of date and some lines are not working with latest Preview 2 version but it worth a read) at his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/12/asp-net-mvc-framework-road-map-update.aspx

In order to test this MVC Framework you need VS 2008 and the MVC Preview 2 installed in your computer.

Soon I will be posting more about our experiences with MVC.

Have fun

From MS site: “It is the next generation of SOA and Web-based applications spanning “on premise” software and “in the cloud” services”, an approach Microsoft calls Software + Services.

Some time ago, SaaS architecture discovered a new way of delivering the software: hosting it and providing it as a service, trying to catch the long tail of consumers, using the web as the distribution channel.

SaaS also introduced several questions and issues about data and application domain ownership, SLAs, and required particular characteristics for the product in order to be suitable for this deliver method. This led also into issues for the given ISV to find a reliable hosting provider for selling their product to the mass of consumers while reducing the costs.

S+S is no more than a hibryd architecture trying to have the best of various worlds.

Basically we are talking about connecting a on-premise or on-PC software package (running in the client computer, PDA or other devices) with an ISB (Internet Service Bus - which is no more than a integration hub containing a set of well defined URIs, connecting points, providing unified access to services within the “cloud” (Internet) ) + services connected to this ISBs.

This model will then allow third party providers to join the cloud of services and the clients to have a custom (composite) version of their software installed in their devices while consuming many of these services integrated within the ISB (which actually works as an ESB and as an ecosystem for various services providers). VMs are a perfect match for assembling this user needs in an isolated space and having the web (cloud) as the environment for running the applications.

 So how is Microsoft supporting all these new trends? The set of technologies with the code name “OSLO” is the answer:

 All new versions for these well known existing products will be shipped during the current year. The target is to simplify the design, development and deployment of solutions based in this new architecture named S+S.

For more information about OSLO and how it will enable you to support your S+S and SaaS architectures you can visit http://www.microsoft.com/soa/products/oslo.aspx

However, let me tell you the reasons why I have been so busy. Last month has been exciting for me. Our company is growing faster. So do I.  :D

We have some new projects, some new challenges. These includes ASP.NET developments, Sharepoint ones, RIAs , SEO and more. I am helping with some new proposals, so I hope 2008 is even better.  

What do we do ? We specialize in doing .NET Development from Uruguay. We have clients around the world, mainly Europe and U.S.

 Our prices are competitive, as well as the quality of our work and the professionals working with me. English skills and timezone is also a plus. That is probably the reason why I see a good future for UruIT.

So this has been an exciting year for me. Even when I am tired, I am happy. I hope you are happy too.

I’ll be posting some pics of summer time in Uruguay, weather is getting nice, so I am planning to take some rest during January.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a truly Happy New Year !

 Visual Studio 2008 has been shipped !

  You can choose to download the free Express versions or the complete versions with MSDN Subscription. But if you are not a MSDN subscriber, you can also get the Team Suite version and try it for 90 days !

Team Foundation Server 2008 trial version is also available for download!

 Standalone .NET 3.5 runtime is available here

So go ahead and download your desired version and checkout all the features we have been seeing around during the past year !

There is a lot of buzz around about the new MVC framework from Microsoft. This will be an Optional feature for those who want an implementation of an MVC architecture in ASP.NET.

Latest Scott Guthrie post explains in great detail how to implement a simple e-commerce site using the new framework.

MVC maps URLs to classes, instead of files in disk, as most of the other web frameworks do.

You need create your Controller classes (which use a ControllerAction attribute on each method to map the requested URL to the proper controller method and use the parameters requested from the URL).

 Scott uses Linq to SQL ORM for coding the data model. You can use DataSets, N-Hibernate or whatever you like to handle the data access and data objects.

Having such a layer architecture improves not only maintanance but also reusability. You can easily change the controller logic to render different data to the same view page.

This architecture is also very convenient for implementing test cases for each layer/class. For example, you can have a N-Unit class to test each controller.  You don’t need the View/browser to do your unit testing, so it simplifies this task a lot.

Finally you render the UI implementing Views, and having a RenderView method to the proper View from the Controller.

For the view, MVC supports aspx, ascx, master pages and AJAX.NET. MVC View Pages by default derive from the System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage base class. This class includes helpers that you can use in the UI, such as the Html.ActionLink Method that allow you to have links in the page mapping to a Controller method.

So far, using the MVC Framework is pretty straight forward.

I suggest you to read Socott Guthrie first post explaining the new model here with lot of concepts and clear samples.

Brad Adams also posted about using MVC for creating a RSS Feed and Frederk Normen wrote about using Spring.NET to handle dependencies when creating Controllers through a Controller Factory.

If you’d like to learn in detail about all of these MVC concepts, then go to Scott’s post right away !

Best of all: this is an online event, so you can attend from your home or office using the new MS Office Live Meeting 2007 !

I like most of the topics for developers, specially are the ones related to Web development. Topics will cover Web Development with Silverlight, Expression and VS 2008, SQL Server 2008, .NET 3.5 and SaaS, among others.

You can view the entire agenda and register (Spanish readers) here.

A good reading that came in the latest MSDN newsletter, about security aspects that you would need to have in mind when using SOA in large enterprise architectures.

 It covers alternatives for authentication (centralized repository for storing the keys), placing the security logic, risks of having a coupled solution, using Sharepoint as a tool for isolating islands of data, magnified security issues that might arrive with a large-scale SOA approach, and other new concepts and trends that worth a read.

You can find the SOA article here. 

In some large scale scenarios I would consider having REST in place instead. There is a new model from MS that will help us to build REST applications faster. If you’d like to read about it, its code name is ASTORIA.

 I hope you like it.

That is why I haven’t updated my blog in a long time. I just had some time to read the hot topics in the blogs, and some other articles that helped me a lot with my current assignment. So these are some of the bookmarked links for October:

•  ASP.NET MVC Framework announced

Without any doubts, the hottest announcement during October. Microsoft plans to ship a Model View Controler version for ASP.NET so you will be able to use this well known architecture in a simple way with ASP.NET.

•  ASTORIA released

Expose the database in a REST format with this new tool from MS. Big companies such as Ebay and Amazon uses this model for exposing the data, and even when it can reduce the data load and perform faster, for certain scenarios I believe that WebServices are still needed. It needs entity framework in order to work.

• Tutorials for Silverlight 1.1 (managed code)

Samples, tutorials and simple tasks you can do with Silverlight 1.1.

• Page Life Cycle with AJAX Explained

Understand how the update panel works, and avoid some common mistakes when working with it.

• 43 AJAX applications

Use these scripts to add AJAX functionality to ANY kind of website. These will definitely help to have your visitors happier.

NHibernate Data Source Control

A datasource control for NHibernate. If you use this ORM you must give it a try !

I hope these few links help you to be updated in this evolving world. Stay tuned, this week I’ll be writting about our outsourcing experience from Uruguay !