Web Application Development with Microsoft Technologies

Microsoft invited us to join a first meeting to discuss about the chance of opening a Microsoft Users Group here in Uruguay.

There are thousands of user groups (communities) across different vendors, technologies and lines of businesses.

Microsoft supports the creation of users groups as a way to promote technologies through the community.In today’s meeting, I enjoyed a great time with my partner and a few talented guys from several software companies from Uruguay, representing the top of the software industry here inUruguay - most of them already well known professionals and friends While enjoying some snacks we discussed different approaches for achieving this goal. There are a lot of user groups like the Argentina one, and it used to exist one in Uruguay too, a few years ago.

The group objectives would be to share knowledge and experiences with the community (forums, webcasts, blogs), organize live events for discussing about different topics related to our industry and microsoft technologies, or whatever we might think is relevant to share.

I think it is a great idea, but it will require different companies to work together sharing resources, ideas and knowledge, which sometimes is not so easy to achieve in such competitive market.Even when UruIT actually encourages collaboration between companies in our market, I know there might be a few who won’t be interested, but hopefully this won’t be a stopping issue for this great idea.If this idea takes off, I will soon post more information about this Uruguayan Microsoft Users Group (we still need to find a good name ).   

Last night I enjoyed a meeting in the Camara de Comercio building, here in Montevideo, with a group of young entrepreneurs from the Junior Chamber International  (JCI), Montevideo Chapter. 

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.

I have been involved in Software Development industry for more than 6 years now, and right now I am living a very challenging stage of my career.

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     

Last week we started a new ASP.NET MVC project here at UruIT.

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