Category Archives: Presentations

Local meetup – AngularJS intro

Posted by on 18 November 2015 1 comment

Lately I’ve been toying with AngularJS and I wanted to share my findings in a short practical presentation. I will be building a small SPA (single page application) with AngularJS and run through the most commonly used directives and features of the framework.

If you are in Bucharest on 8th of December, after work (19:00) drop by and have a look 🙂 The presentation will be in the ADCES group, the location being Electronic Arts (AFI Park 2).

Entrance is free, just register on this event either via Facebook or via Meetup. Hope to see you there 🙂

PS: Did I tell you that we’re having beers afterwards? 😉

Bing it on, Reactive Extensions! – story, code and slides

Posted by on 1 June 2013 2 comments

I held a presentation at UBISOFT Buchares headquarters for the RONUA local programmers user group recently as I’ve announced earlier.
Here’s the contents, step-by-step, final code and slides.

————- [scroll way down for the downloads]

I was recently tasked with rewriting an app component by leveraging Reactive Extensions. I knew little about Rx (the short form of Reactive Extensions) and all I remembered was that it has two interfaces IObservable and IObserver and it seemed dull at that time.

Basically the component enables search without needing to hit ENTER or a “Go!” button, although provides for these. After the user finishes typing an async request goes to the data store and searches for the phrase entered and fetches the results. In the original implementation the component used a lot of timers, event handlers, private fields all making up a nice spaghetti bowl of code.

Let’s do this step by step and see how our little (demo) app develops. Fire up Visual Studio 2012 and start a new WPF project (.NET 4.5 preferrably). The very next thing we’ll install Rx. Right click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select “Manage NuGet Packages” (you can also use the Package Manager Console if you like it better). Search online for “Reactive Extensions”.

In the result lists (this requires a functional internet connection) select ‘Reactive Extensions – WPF Helpers‘ (the nice thing about NuGet packages is that it automatically resolves and installs all the dependencies). Accept the license(s) (you know what’s the most common lie told these days? “I have read and accepted the terms of the license” :P).

In our demo we will use Bing as the data store which we’ll target through our searches (sorry, Google was too difficult to setup, offered less search requests per month and no C# demo code. Thanks Google, thanks again.). In order to do this you will need a Microsoft Account (I guess we all have one these days). Go to http://www.bing.com/developers/ and then select “Search API” -> Start now (this will lead you to https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/5BA839F1-12CE-4CCE-BF57-A49D98D29A44 ). There are paid subscriptions and a free subscription. Hit signup and go through the process (leave a comment if you are unable to go through this process).

In the end you will need to obtain the (Primary) Account Key and the Customer ID. These are available under “My Account” -> Account Information ( https://datamarket.azure.com/account ). We’ll use these later so save them. Also, don’t share them with other people because these are your credentials. Also visit “My Data” ( https://datamarket.azure.com/account/datasets ) and click on “Bing Search API”‘s “Use” link (far right, https://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/explore/bing/search ). Capture the “URL for current expressed query” : “https://api.datamarket.azure.com/Bing/Search/v1/Web“. We’ll also need these later.

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Bing it on, Reactive Extensions!

Posted by on 10 May 2013 1 comment

Next Tuesday (May 14th, 2013) I will be presenting a small demo of how Reactive Extensions can help you out in a desktop application.

I’ll develop a small WPF app that will do internet searching via Bing.

Anyone in Bucharest is free to drop by and watch my demo or my colleague’s demo (Alexandru Gatej will be presenting “Aspects of plan caching and recompilation in Microsoft SQL Server”).

Location and time :

Beginning at 18:30 (Alexandru’s presentation will go first) at UBISOFT Romania ( <- click for map ), 2 Expozitiei Boulevard, district 1, Bucharest. Hope to see many people!

Efficiently serving binary content from SQL Server in ASP.NET MVC – local user group talk

Posted by on 7 November 2012 1 comment

This will be a local user group talk that I’ll be having, in Bucharest on Tuesday 13th of November.

Storing large binary objects (usually image files) in the RDBMS has been a blessing but for some is unconceivable. We will explore different ways to do this, from worse to best and we will take advantage of a new feature introduced by SQL Server 2012.

The location is TeamNet Int’l HQ – Sema Parc, Splaiul IndependenÅ£ei nr. 319, clădirea RiverView, etaj 8
Except an ID there is nothing else that you need to bring in order to participate to the event.
Further geographical details.

The most popular way to get there is by taking the subway as there is a station right near the building.

The official announcement can be found on RONUA’s site.

See you there!

——–

Later edit : It’s been great! Not too many people but keen to learn new stuff. Here’s two pictures from the talk. Notice a new generation of programmers forming 🙂

SQL Server 2012 local talk

Posted by on 2 July 2012 No comments

Tuesday, July 10th, I’ll hold a small presentation on the new features of SQL Server 2012 for the database developer, consisting mainly of the sequences, new paging semantics and filetables.

I’ll post the code and slides soon after the presentation. I decided to drop (oh the irony) the slides.

Anyone close to Bucharest is more than welcome to come! Details can be found here.

The opening of the evening will be made by Alex Peta, presenting a cool notification system built upon JS and ASP.NET MVC 3.

WCF Streaming – slides and code

Posted by on 26 November 2011 4 comments

I held a presentation about WCF Streaming last Saturday, November 26th, at Microsoft HQ Bucharest. I illustrated WCF Streaming in a small client/server application which was supposed to (and in the end implemented it all) :

  • Show all files available on the server in the client application
  • Allow the end user to upload a file (up to 2GB) to the server
  • Allow the user to download a file from the server
  • Display a progress bar that would update in real-time showing the progress of the current transfer (upload or download)
  • Allow the user to press the “Stop” button to stop the current transfer (upload or download)

The code to achieve this in a simple (non-robust, not production quality etc.) manner is quite small : around 50 lines of code for the server and around 200 lines for the client. The WCF runtime takes care of the rest.

Points of interest (things for which I suffered and hopefully you won’t) :

  • Cassini (ASP.NET Web development) server does not support streaming, reports a cryptic (400 Bad request) error and it’s not documented at Microsoft!
  • It’s not enough at the server level to set the maxReceivedMessageSize at the binding element, you must also set it in the maxRequestLength attribute on the system.web/httpRuntime element if you host the service in a site.
  • Don’t try to define an operation with mixed types, that is, complex types that are decorated with MessageContract and any other types (including System.String). If one is MessageContract then all have to be. Found out the hard way, at runtime (not compile time)
  • In order to get the folder path for a WCF application you must use HostingEnvironment.GetApplicationPhysicalPath.
  • In .NET 4 there is a CopyTo method on the Stream class which simplifies copying data from a stream to another.
  • Opt in for asynchronous method generation for the client-side WCF proxies

You can find below the PowerPoint slides and the code archive attached to this post.

WCF Streaming – slides

WCF Streaming – the code

IT community meeting (CodeCamp & ITSpark)

Posted by on 15 November 2011 1 comment

Saturday, November 26th, there will be a session of presentations at Microsoft’s Bucharest Headquarters.

Free entrance, drinks and lunch on the house.

The event agenda :

  • 09:30 – 10:00 Arrival
  • 10:00 – 11:00 MVC / EF (Andrei Ignat)
  • 11:00 – 12:00 WCF Streaming (Andrei Rinea)
  • 12:00 – 13:00 SQL Server Denali (Cristian Lefter)
  • 13:00 – 13:30 LUNCH
  • 13:30 – 14:00 A lap around Windows 8 (Mihai Nadăș)
  • 14:00 – 15:15 Hyper-V 3.0 È™i SCVMM 2012 (Valentin Cristea & Răzvan Rusu)
  • 15:15 – 16:30 Office 365 È™i Lync Online & On-Premise (Alexandru Dionisie & Paul Roman)

I will be presenting WCF Streaming at 11:00. But I assure you the other presentations will be just as interesting as this!

Come and join us and you won’t regret it! But first register at the event site first! Only 22 seats available at the time of the writing.

Hope to see you there!.