- Posted by Shay Friedman on November 19, 2011
On Thursday I had the honor to do a virtual talk at LIDNUG – the LinkedIn .NET User Group. A stage where lots of .NET celebs like Scott Gu, Jeffery Richter, Jeff Prosise and others have talked in the past.
I’d like to thank all the attendees and the LIDNUG crew who made this possible – Inbar, Peter and Brian – you guys rock!
About the talk – I focused on the dynamic capabilities of C#. Started with some black magic done using the dynamic keyword, then moved on to practice witchcraft with the combination of IronRuby and C#, and ended with the new and shiny .NET spell-book also known as project “Roslyn”.
The talk was recorded and it can be found on YouTube:
The code samples from the talk are also available – click here to download them [2.47Mb].
I had a blast, hope you did as a well.
All the best,
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on October 5, 2011
It’s been a while since NDC2011 took place but I figured out I’ve never officially published the slides and videos from this incredible event. First and foremost, I’d like to thank Program Utvikling for having me as a speaker second year in a row – you guys ROCK! this year’s conference just strengthened my belief that NDC is the best .NET conference out there. So if you have one conference you wanna go to, this is, IMHO, your best pick.
Anyway, I had two sessions this year – IronRuby FTW and Ruby on Rails vs. ASP.NET MVC:
IronRuby FTW!!!
Thanks for the attendees that chose my session over Scott Guthrie’s – very much appreciated! :)
Abstract:
Ruby has been a home for some great innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Cucumber and Rake. In this session you will get familiar with the IronRuby language and its amazing ecosystem and you will learn to take advantage of it in everyday tasks like testing, building, enhancing current code and more. Come and see how IronRuby makes your development life better and happier!
Slides:
Videos: Dowload MP4
Ruby on Rails vs. ASP.NET MVC
I had lots of fun preparing for this session and doing it as well. Apart from my comparison, I ran a little scoreboard during the session and asked the audience a few times to vote for their favorite framework – ASP.NET MVC won by 1 vote! this is not a huge surprise – even though Ruby on Rails is still ahead in terms of community and external packages, the fundamentals of both frameworks are pretty solid at the moment and quite similar…
I did this session a year ago (with MVC 2.0) at Epicenter2010 and Ruby on Rails won 8 to 2… So this result is a very good sign that ASP.NET MVC is in the right direction – Good work Microsoft!
Abstract:
Last year was the year when two great web development frameworks arrive at the .NET world – ASP.NET MVC 3.0 and Ruby on Rails (via IronRuby). It is the time to get to know these frameworks and learn their advantages and disadvantages. In this session, Shay Friedman will walk you through the good, the bad and the ugly of both frameworks providing you points to consider when coming to choose one of them.
Slides:
Videos: Download MP4
Upcoming Gigs
In the next month I’m going to present four sessions in three different conferences and locations. If you’re around, come say hello.
GOTO Amsterdam – October 13-14 (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
I’m going to run a single session – “ASP.NET MVC 3 Hidden Tips, Tricks and Hidden Gems”. You’ll also be able to find me on the conference party, the Meet the Speakers event and generally where they serve beer :)
Time and place: October 13th, 13:20-14:10, Foyer room.
Abstract:
The ASP.NET MVC framework has been around for more than two year now and has been constantly gaining popularity since then. However, despite that fact a lot of MVC developers are not aware of various hidden gems that can make their development experience much easier and nicer. In this session we will go through some of those which were added in the latest version – ASP.NET MVC 3.
ScanDev on Tour – October 18th (Stockholm, Sweden)
Very excited to come back to Sweden (too bad it’s not gonna be snowy, though :) ). On ScanDev on Tour I’m going to present two sessions – “ASP.NET MVC Hidden Tips, Tricks and Hidden Gems” and “Introduction to Ruby on Rails”:
Session: Introduction to Ruby on Rails
Time and place: 10:30 – 11:20, Web Room
Abstract:
The most famous Ruby–driven framework is, by far, Ruby on Rails. In the last few years this framework has been gaining popularity and now is a great time to get to know it. In this session, Shay Friedman will build an entire Web 2.0 site from scratch while using and explaining the key features of Ruby on Rails. Come and see what Ruby on Rails is all about and what's made it the success it is today.
Session: ASP.NET MVC Hidden Tips, Tricks and Hidden Gems
Time and place: 13:30 – 14:20, .NET Room
Abstract:
The ASP.NET MVC framework has been around for more than two year now and has been constantly gaining popularity ever since. However, despite that fact, a lot of MVC developers are not aware of various hidden gems that can make their development experience much easier and nicer. In this session we will go through some of those which were added in the latest version – ASP.NET MVC 3.
LINDUG – November 17th (Virtual)
LINDUG is the .NET group on LinkedIn. I’m going to run a LiveMeeting 90-minute session – “What?!? C# Could Do That?”.
Time and place: 12PM – 1:30PM (PT)
Abstract:
.NET 4 has brought us the DLR and C# 4 has brought us the dynamic keyword. With their powers combined, C# suddenly gets super powers!
In this session Shay Friedman will show you surprising and practical things you can do today with C#, the dynamic keyword and the DLR.
Registration (free): http://lidnug-shayfriedman.eventbrite.com/
All the best,
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on April 15, 2011
I’ve just got back home after a week in Sweden. During the week I had the opportunity to travel the country a bit, to learn a few Swedish words and to speak in a few occasions about ASP.NET MVC, IronRuby and some other technologies. But above all of that, I got to meet and talk with some incredible people! it was such an amazing experience!!! thanks to all of you (you guys know who you are), you made this week one of the best I’ve ever had.
Well, yes. I know I titled this post a “wrap up” and you want the details. So…
Part 1 – Stockholm
The first part of my “tour” was Stockholm. I was invited to Stockholm by Tibi to participate in the unconference he had been planning. It had been snowing in Sweden before I got there so I was welcomed by a lot of snow. And I LOOOOOOOOVE snow! I was sad, though, that it wasn’t snowing while I was there…
Tibi hosted me in his place during my stay in Stockholm so huge thanks to him, to his wife Nicolleta and to his sweet daughters for having me!
On the day after I came we had the unconference in a very cool office in Stockholm. I was impressed that even university students showed up for the unconference! good for you! During the unconference we had very interesting and inspiring discussions about various different and unrelated subjects (in the .NET world). I got to talk about IronRuby and it was very interesting for me to hear the questions and the feedback.
Some photos from the event:
Part 2 – SDC2011, Gothenburg
The day after the unconference, me and Tibi took the train to Gothenburg to participate in the Scandinavian Developer Conference, AKA SDC or ScanDev. We got to an amazing hotel called Gothia Towers in Gothenburg where all the speakers were hosted. The conference itself took place in a convention center that is attached to the hotel. This is how the hotel looks like from outside and the inside:
On the first evening we had a speakers dinner organized by the conference organizers. They took us to a very nice restaurant and I got to meet and talk with other speakers about technologies, languages (real ones! not just programming languages!) and other stuff. These meetings are the best thing in conferences… the opportunity to chat with people from all over the world (face-to-face) is not something that you run into every day.
Anyway, the next day I had my session, The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines, and it went pretty well. I had something like 100 people attending and had lots of fun. Razor won the poll again, by the way. I wrote another post about the session, in case you want to see/download the slides or code samples.
On the evening we had some food at a nice little restaurant, had interesting discussions and lots of alcohol. Everything is a bit blurry for me from this night… I love conferences! :)
On the second day of the conference I didn’t have any sessions so I got to relax, go to some sessions myself and in general, have fun! In the evening we went to a traditional Swedish restaurant and had some traditional Swedish food. It was a blast!
Part 3 – Swenug (Swedish .NET User Group), Gothenburg
The last part of my trip was the Swedish .NET user group meeting in Gothenburg. I had two ~1 hour sessions, one was about tips and tricks in ASP.NET MVC 3 (or the session’s official name – “ASP.NET MVC Rulezzzzzz”) and the second one was about IronRuby and its possible usages for .NET devs (or in its official name, “IronRuby FTW!!!!!!!”). I must say, these were one of the best presentations I’ve ever had. It felt good, I had an awesome awesome AWESOME time, got very good responses afterwards and even all the demos worked!
Thank you Anders for having me and pulling this off.
Summary
It was an amazing week. I had a chance to speak in front of the great Swedish crowd. I met so many interesting people. I ate a reindeer (sorry Santa). And I got to see snow!
Sweden, I’ll be back!
All the best,
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on April 4, 2011
Today I had the honor to talk before the Scandinavian crowd in Gothenburg at SDC2011. My session was “The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines” where I compared ASPX, Razor, Spark, NHaml and the StringTemplate view engines.
Thanks to everyone who attended! I hope you had as much fun as I had!
The code samples from the session can be downloaded from my github account: https://github.com/shayfriedman/AspNetMvcViewEnginesSamples
And here are the slides:
A recording of the session should be available on the conference site in a few days.
All the best,
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on March 5, 2011
About a month ago I gave a session at the virtual mvcConf 2 event. My session was “The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines” where I talked about the differences between ASPX, NHaml, Spark and the Razor view engines.
The session was recorded and it is available on channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/mvcConf/mvcConf-2-Shay-Friedman-The-Big-Comparison-of-ASPNET-MVC-View-Engines (at the time of this writing, it has more than 7,500 views! amazing!)
During the session I held a few polls about the preferences of the audience… the results were kinda interesting. These are screenshots of the results of the individual votes:
And summing all of them together, Razor got 70% of the votes, ASPX got 13%, Spark 12% and NHaml ended up with 6%:
So in conclusion, my prediction is that razor gonna conquer this asp.net mvc view engine market… However, the others will stay relevant and I recommend you to check them out. If they make you happier and more productive then go with them! do NOT hesitate.
Anyway, during the session I promised to post a detailed list of resources about the different view engines – so here it is:
- Web Forms View Engine (ASPX)
- NHaml
- Spark
- Razor
Thanks to all the people who made mvcConf happen! and thanks to all attendees!
All the best,
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on February 4, 2011
2010 was a great year for me in terms of public speaking and at the moment I’m working on making this year even better!
MIX11 is 2 months away and I wanna be there and tell you about writing ASP.NET MVC view engines! But for that I need your help - please vote for my session at http://live.visitmix.com/OpenCall/Vote/Session/55 (the voting ends tomorrow, on Feb 4th). You’ll benefit two things from doing that – you’ll be able to learn about writing ASP.NET MVC view engines at MIX and you’ll enable me to visit Las Vegas after 14 years of absence! 
Apart from MIX, I’m booked for a few events at the moment already (and more are coming soon, hopefully):
- February 8th – mvcConf 2 – this is a big virtual event about ASP.NET MVC. My session is “The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines” where I’m going to compare the ASPX, Razor, NHaml and Spark view engines.
- April 4th-5th, SDC 2011 – a conference which takes place at Gothenburg, Sweden. My session has the same subject as the mvcConf one, “The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines” but I plan to modify it a bit since it’s a live presentation this time.
- April 6th, Gothenburg’s .NET UG – the exact content for that UG meeting is still being planned. More details will be published closer to the date.
I’m excited about the opportunities and about the possibility to meet some of you in person,
Looking forward to it!
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on September 15, 2010
On September 19th, which turns out to be the upcoming Sunday, on 18:30 I’m going to give a session at the Israeli AlphaGeeks user group. The topic: Ruby on Rails 3 Vs. ASP.NET MVC 2.
During the presentation I’m going to build two identical web applications with both frameworks and let you, the audience, decide which framework does a better job. It’s a battle till the very end, wouldn’t you wanna be a part of it?
To register to the event, simply email Yuval (the organizer) or register on the dedicated Facebook page.
The event will take place at 10 Haarbaa St. Tel Aviv, 4th floor. Any beverages/food/beer/cute puppies you bring with you will be appreciated.
See you there!
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on September 2, 2010
A few days ago I got back from Japan, where I gave 2 talks – one at TechEd Japan and one at RubyKaigi. Honestly, it was a breathtaking experience for me.
First of all, Japan… it’s so different! someone even called it “an alternate universe”. Japanese people are so kind and so well-behaved. And everything is clean. Sooooo freaking clean!!!! I must recommend you to visit Japan if you haven’t don’t it already. It is an experience you wouldn’t want to miss.
Secondly, I had a unique opportunity to speak both at a Microsoft and a Ruby conferences at the same week and see the different audience. They’re all developers and yet they are so different! Microsofties are the responsible grown ups and Rubyists are the rebellious teenagers. It was amazing to see the differences. Anyway, I had a blast in both conferences and met some outstanding people!
Before I move to the content of my talks, I’d like to personally thank Shozo Arai for having me at TechEd and helping me with my RubyKaigi talk and to thank Ayumu Aizawa for having me at RubyKaigi. You people rock!
And to the content of my talks (I’ll add them to the presentations page soon too)… The first one was TechEd:
The conference took place at the Yokohama Conference Center and I gotta say – Yokohama is a beautiful place. For instance, this was the view from my hotel room:
During the conference I also played Microsoft Kinect for the first time, which was AWESOME. I want one. If you wanna buy me one, please do.
In addition, I participated in a special MVPs launch (Japan has 200 MVPs!) where I was introduced to everyone. It was very cool and I got to meet some exciting people there.
Anyway… I also had a session there named “Let’s Dynamic – IronRuby and the .NET Framework” (that’s my translation to the Japanese name :-) ). It was the first time for me to have a translator. I had to stop every 1-2 sentences and let him translate. It was quite an experience! but I had fun and the audience seemed interested too :-)
These are the slides:
If you’re interested in one of the demos, please let me know and I’ll upload them. I’m just too lazy to do that now :-) I know the session was recorded on video too. I guess you’ll be able to view it on the conference site - http://www.microsoft.com/japan/teched/2010/.
From TechEd I moved to RubyKaigi, which took place at Tsukuba (2 hour train drive away from Yokohama):
It was the first Ruby conference for me so I had to understand what was going on first. They had these cool whiteboards where you could write various things. For example, your favorite method and favorite programming language (C# made it to the list!). Click on the picture to view in a bigger size:
They also had a huge map of the world and everyone wrote where they came from. I was the only one from Israel:
During the party of the first night I also got to meet some famous people (famous at least for Ruby developers!) like Matz (the creator of the Ruby language) and Chad Fowler (author of “The Passionate Programmer” and one of the organizers of RubyConf) as well as other awesome people.
Anyway, I had a session here too! Its name was “IronRuby – What’s in it for Rubyists?” and its goal was to show Rubyists how they can take advantage of IronRuby and different .NET frameworks like WPF, Silverlight and others.
These are the slides:
Again, If you’re interested in one of the demos, please let me know and I’ll upload them.
The session was recorded as well and can be found at http://rubykaigi.tdiary.net.
In conclusion, I had a blast!!! Japan is an incredible country and the conferences were outstanding! Hopefully I’ll get to visit there again in the future.
Arigato!
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on July 30, 2010
August is going to be a very busy month for me, speaking at DevLink, TechEd Japan and RubyKaigi. In addition, with the help of Dror Helper, we’re bringing dynamic languages to the local .NET crowd in Israel!
When?
August 18th, 17:30-20:30.
Where?
The Israeli .NET User Group (IDNUG) August meeting,
Microsoft offices, Dekel room
HaPnina 2, floor 0
Raanana, ISRAEL
What?
17:30 - 18:00 Assembly
18:00 - 19:15 “Introduction to IronRuby”
Shay Friedman
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 – 20:30 “Introduction to IronPython”
Dror Helper
Abstract #1: Introduction to IronRuby
Ruby has been a home for some great innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Cucumber and Rake. IronRuby has recently been released, unleashing the power of Ruby to the .NET world. In this session you will get familiar with the Ruby language and its amazing ecosystem and you will learn to take advantage of it in your everyday development tasks. Come and see how this great new addition to the .NET family makes your development process faster, clearer and happier.
Abstract #2: Introduction to IronPython
Do you want to learn about dynamic languages and their uses? IronPython is a good place to start. This dynamic .NET language can be used to develop just about anything – windows application, web services and Silverlight to name a few. This session will explain what Python is all about and how to write .NET applications using IronPython. The session is intended for .NET developers without any previous knowledge of Python that want to learn about the power of Dynamic Languages.
How?
Register now at https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032456794&culture=he-IL
See you all there!
Shay.
- Posted by Shay Friedman on July 13, 2010
If you don’t already know, Japan is where the Ruby language was created, back in 1995. This is the origin of this great language, this is where it all started!
So I’m very excited to announce that on this August, IronRuby is coming to Japan!
I’m going to visit Japan in August and talk about IronRuby! I will participate in two very different conferences – TechEd Japan and RubyKaigi.
TechEd Japan, the main Japanese .NET conference, will take place between August 25th to August 27th. I’m going to speak on day 2 of the conference (the 26th) about IronRuby for .NET developers.
RubyKaigi 2010 will take place between August 27th to August 29th. It is a world-class Ruby conference that hosts Ruby great minds from all over the world like Yukihiro Matsumoto (the creator of Ruby), Yehuda Katz, Jeremy Kemper and others. I’m going to give there a talk on the 29th, named “IronRuby – What’s in it for Rubyists?”.
I’m so excited to visit Japan and present in front of both .NET and Ruby developers. Maybe this will be the bridge between the large Japanese Ruby community and the large Japanese .NET community!
Shay Friedman – bridging between developers since 1983!
See you there!
Shay.