My big news from the last two months is that I’ve released a new Pluralsight course – Creating and Selling a Digital Product. I’ve also managed to progress a bit towards the next release of NAudio. Here’s links to the new posts I’ve done in the last few months over at my new blog.
NAudio
Miscellaneous
I'm delighted to announce that my sixth Pluralsight course, ClickOnce Deployment Fundamentals is now live. In it I go through all the options available for customising your ClickOnce deployment, as well as how to handle updates, the capabilities of the deployment API, and what gets stored where on the disk. I also have modules covering some of the more advanced parts of ClickOnce such as handling pre-requisites with the bootstrapper, signing your deployment, and using the MAGE tool.
You may be surprised that I'm doing a course on ClickOnce, since it is now a fairly old and oft-maligned technology. As I explain in the course, it's not the right choice for all installers, but for simple .NET applications, it may actually prove to be the simplest solution for keeping your application automatically up to date. I go through some of the pros and cons in the course, as well as pointing out a few alternatives you might want to consider.
I've tried to give a fairly comprehensive coverage of ClickOnce capabilities in the course, but you can't cover everything, so here's some of what I consider to be the most helpful resources if you are planning to use it yourself.
I’m also hoping to follow this up with another post about the process of signing your ClickOnce applications. I actually attempted to buy my own code signing certificate which I wanted to use in my demos in this course, but it has proved surprisingly difficult to complete the purchase of my certificate (certainly a story for a future blog post), so for the course I just used a self-generated certificate. As soon as I finally get the real deal, I’ll post showing what difference it makes to the warnings you receive during installation when your app is signed by a certificate issued by a trusted Certificate Authority.
I blogged in August about some of my Pluralsight course recommendations, and so I thought I’d give another brief roundup of some of the best ones I’ve watched in the last month or two.
Hack your API First (Troy Hunt). With the “shellshock” and “heartbleed” vulnerabilities making national headlines, everyone wants to be sure that their website or network connected application is secure. But do you have the confidence as a developer that you know how to ensure your programs are safe from attack? Troy Hunt has created several security related Pluralsight courses, and they are all excellent as well as being a lot of fun to watch. This latest one gives lots of practical guidance on how you can ensure any APIs your application exposes or uses can be kept secure.
Executable Specifications (Elton Stoneman). Lots of developers (myself included) have embraced the practice of writing “unit tests”, but often these tests are very low level and only cover small components in isolation. What if we could write specifications in such a way that acceptance testing of the whole stack could be automated? Don’t believe it’s possible? Well you might change your mind after watching this course. Elton Stoneman does a superb job of showing the power of the SpecFlow framework. I’ll definitely be watching more of his courses in the future, and looking out for a chance to try SpecFlow on one of my own projects.
F# Functional Data Structures (Kit Eason) F# is a language I find very exciting and I am slowly getting to grips with it’s syntax. The real challenge though is to go beyond simply writing C# code in the F# syntax, and to start taking advantage of the power of functional programming. In this course Kit Eason guides you through the various data structures offered by F#, showing you how, when and why to use them. You should definitely check it out if you are learning F#.
.NET Interoperability Fundamentals (Pavel Yosifovich). Probably the biggest headache for me when I started creating NAudio was having to learn how to interoperate with unmanaged code effectively. I’ve done a huge amount of P/Invoke to Windows APIs as well as COM interop for the more modern Windows APIs, and it has been a painful and error prone process. This is the course I wish I could have watched 10 years ago. Pavel knows his stuff, and really I’d describe this course as an expert chatting about everything you need to know to effectively work with unmanaged code. Well worth watching if you need to do any kind of interop.
So that’s my recommendations for this month. I know there are probably plenty of other good ones I missed, so let me know in the comments what you’ve been watching. And I know my blogging output has been reduced over the summer. I’m hoping to get back up to speed in the near future, and I’ll have news to share about my next Pluralsight course soon.
Those of you following my blog will know that I’ve been working on a course entitled Windows Forms Best Practices for Pluralsight. I’m pleased to announce that it is now live, and you can check out some of my ideas for how to write better Windows Forms applications (as well as how to incrementally migrate away to a newer technology).
The approach I took was to make a small Windows Forms demo application in the style often seen in typical line of business applications – all the code sits inside the code behind of a monolithic main form. And through the course I improve this application in various ways, both from a usability and a maintainability perspective.
Along the way I refactor it towards a Model View Presenter pattern, and improve it in various other ways such as better threading and exception handling, making it resizable and localizable.
One regret I do have is that there simply wasn’t time to show how the code could be refactored completely to MVP – I just did the first step. I have however since continued the refactoring and have a version of the demo application that uses MVP more extensively. I’ll try to make this available for viewers of my course, so do get in touch (@mark_heath on Twitter) if you’d like to get hold of this.
The course is available for viewing here. Hope you find it helpful.
Over the last year not only have I created a number of courses for Pluralsight, I’ve also watched a lot too. Most of the time, I’m not watching to learn a brand new technology, but as a refresher for something I’ve already used a bit. Often in just an hour or two (on 1.3x playback) you can watch a whole course and pick up loads of great tips.
I’ve found it a particularly effective way to brush up on my skills in a few programming languages that I’m semi-proficient in, but not completely “fluent” in. So here’s a few programming language related courses that I can recommend:
First, last year I was glad I watched Structuring JavaScript by Dan Whalin, as I had been hearing lots of people talking about the “revealing module pattern” and “revealing prototype pattern” but hadn’t yet properly learned what those patterns were. He explains them simply and clearly.
Another great course is Python Fundamentals by Austin Bingham and Robert Smallshire. It’s been a number of years since I did any serious Python development, so my skills had grown a bit rusty. This superbly presented course is a brilliant introduction to Python, and filled in a couple of gaps in my knowledge. They’ve got a follow-up course out as well which is undoubtedly also worth watching.
Third, several times over the years I’ve tried and failed to get to grips with PowerShell. The Everyday PowerShell for Developers course by Jim Christopher was exactly what I needed as it shows how to do the sorts of things developers will be interested in doing with PowerShell.
And finally, the F# section of the Pluralsight library is still small, but growing fast, and one fascinating course was Mark Seemann’s Functional Architecture with F#. It’s fast-moving but gives fascinating insights into how you could architect a typical line of business application in a more functional way.
Anyway, that’s enough recommendations for now. I have several other courses I want to highlight, so maybe this will become a regular blog feature. Let me know in the comments if there are any must-see courses you’ve come across.
I’m very pleased to announce that my third Pluralsight course has been published today. This one is entitled “Understanding Distributed Version Control”. Regular followers of my blog will know this is a subject I often write about, and have spoken on it at various developer groups. This course draws and expands on that material to provide what I hope will be a really accessible introduction to what Distributed Version Control systems are, how they work, what the workflow is, and why you should consider using them.
The course is aimed at anyone who is interested in finding out what all the fuss is about DVCS. I know that when I started investigating DVCS, it seemed quite confusing at first, so I have tried to make the type of course that I wish I had seen back then. I focus in particular on explaining the way that DVCS systems store the revision history (in a graph structure known as a “DAG”). Personally I think that once this concept becomes clear in your mind, much of the complexity of DVCS goes away.
I have also tried to show what benefits there are to switching from centralised to distributed version control systems. I know many developers quite sensibly take an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” attitude, and so can be reluctant to consider such a fundamental shift in the way they use version control. I’ve tried to show that whether you work alone on a “single developer project”, or work on open source, or work in a large team of developers commercially, DVCS has some very compelling benefits. I’ve also tried to be open about some of the limitations of DVCS compared with centralized tools. I am very enthusiastic about the power and potential of DVCS, but I do recognise that there are still some rough edges in the tooling at the moment.
The final thing I try to do in this course is give you a feel for the general workflow involved in using DVCS day to day. I’ve done this by showing demos in both Mercurial and Git. I quite deliberately chose to use two different DVCS tools to show that the main principles are the same, irrespective of the particular tool you choose. Since there are many other great tutorials as well as Pluralsight courses going into more detail on the specifics of individual DVCS such as Git or Mercurial, I didn’t want to repeat that material. Really my course is designed as a precursor to those courses, helping you understand the big picture, before you get into the nitty-gritty of learning the command line syntax for various operations.
I hope you enjoy the course and find it helpful. I love to hear feedback from people who watched the course, so let me know how you get on with it. I’m always wanting to know how I can improve my courses, so any constructive criticism will also be gratefully received.
