PeterKellner.net

Over the past couple years, the focus of the web development I’ve been doing involves building highly flexible, highly scalable and straight forward web sites to implement and maintain Line of Business (LOB) applications.  As you can probably tell from my posts, I’m very “practical” focused, and at the same time have a desire to build awesome web applications.

The technology pairing I’ve chosen is Microsoft’s .Net platform with MVC on the server, and ExtJS on the client.  Though it’s possible to still use ExtJS with standard html/aspx pages, I’ve found the best combination is to use 100% JavaScript on the client (ExtJS) and have all the server side technology be 100% service based.  I’ve used LINQ2SQL extensively as well as Entity Framework in the latest Visual Studio 2010 release.

The learning curve was quite steep to actually be able to efficiently build highly flexible, highly scalable applications using these technologies, but now that I know it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m considering putting together a series of 4 Day Classes around the country (or even world) that would basically teach people the methods and patterns I’ve learned and essentially leap frog a development team into being able to quickly do what it has taken me years to figure out.  I’ve been fortunate enough to know the top 1% instructors and I’m sure with the right incentive, can get them to join me in both putting together these classes as well as teaching them.

Falafel Software is putting a three day training course in their new training facility in Capitola from Monday to Wednesday April 13-15th.  As many of you know, I’ve used Telerik control in many projects and have blogged extensively about my experiences.  The control toolkit is hugely rich and very well written.  Personally, I never had the chance to do a training class and managed to learn the toolkit on my own.  This seems like an awesome opportunity to learn from one of Telerik’s best partners.  I hope you can make it!

For more information, check out the link here:

http://www.falafel.com/telerik/radcontrols_winforms_openclasses.aspx

Last month, Michael Scherotter, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist and Silverlight expert did a great 2 day even in San Francisco on Silverlight.  His aim was to focus on designer, but as a developer, I like to see how the other half thinks.  Seemed like about 30 people were there and I’d say everyone got good stuff from it.  I had never met Michael before but have been a regular reader of his blog.  One of the things I really liked was that Mike seemed to have a great handle from both the dev side (like me) and the designer side.    His focus was around Expression Blend 2.5 Turns out he is an real architect (builds buildings not code) by training and from what I know, that brings a discipline into design that is similar to the way us Dev’s think.