Staccato Signals: Books

Training or reference

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 09:25:47 GMT

Katthy Sierra's blog, Creating Passionate Users, is becoming a must-read for me.

I was led to Kathy's blog by the excellent Head First Design Patterns. It is now my favorite teaching book for the GOF's Design Patterns and OO principles. It is written in Java, but anyone who knows C# will be able to read the examples without much problem.

Kathy's post on 'ditching powerpoint' recently inspired me to experiment with a slideless presentation on the observer pattern. While it was not entirely successful as a presentation, I learnt more than I have from previous presentations and got more helpful feedback than I have ever done. Hopefully this talk will rock if I give it again - at DDD for example.

One of Kathy's recent posts on the need for authors to decide between writing a training or reference manual, dovetails nicely with what I learnt. A presenter also needs to decide on thier goal and make sure the audience appreciates it. Once or twice in the past I have been guilty of mixing a training presentation with a persuasion presentation. One of the areas of feedback I recieved on the observer pattern was that many people were hoping for a training session on how to use the pattern, but I delivered a mixture of training and persuasion. Most folks did not come to be persuaded to use the pattern and composite patterns built on it, but to find out how. But because my agenda was different to their expectations I did not deliver enough training to create understanding (or probably enough persuasion if that had been their desire). One of the attendees commented that teachers set a goal for a lesson such as' 80% of the audience should understand how the design pattern works' and I needed to set myself a similar goal for the session. So next time I give this material it will defintely be pitched as a training session with the aim to get everyone comfortable implementing the observer pattern, instead of an attempt to persuade.

BTW I agree with the book comments too, from a reader's perspective.

London .NET User Group 27 July

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 12:50:36 GMT

I do not have a firm running order yet but the plan for the 27th is to have a session on XP/Agile. Tentative plans include an introduction to XP/Agile, playing the XP game, and a panel session on XP/Agile.
While there may be a firmer timetable to come, please start signing up now and we will get more out later.

PS Hope everyone is well after recent events

Parser Error Message: Access is denied

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 12:51:14 GMT

When using ASP.NET you can get this error when another application has locked a file that ASP.NET is trying to load. Rebooting the machine to clear this error is a somewhat drastic option especially if it happens frequently. The usual suspect is the indexing server when you modify the contents of the bin directory or the web.config file. This knowledge base article explains the problem and walks through resolution for the problem (by turning off indexing server, or instructing index server to ignore your ASP.NET shadow directory).

The full test of the error is something like:

Server Error in '/XXXXXX' Application
Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Access is denied: 'xxxx'.

Brought to you y the 'notes to self in blog' department, but I guess it may be of help to other folks too.