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Philly Code Camp 2011.1 will be held April 9th at DeVry in Fort Washington. And we have a great line up of tracks this year, even a couple new web related tracks lead by John Petersen and Marc Ziss. We always have a great turn out of interested and eager developers because we have great topics, presented by even greater speakers, and that is why we cannot do it with out you, the speaker. So if you are interested in submitting a topic for one of the following tracks: ...

We are now in the process of accepting sponsors for Philly Code Camp 2011.1. The charity we are sponsoring this time around is: So if you would like to count yourself amongst these fabulous companies, please feel free to contact me to join our family of sponsors. You can find the information about sponsoring Code Camp 2011.1 after the break. Code Camp 2011.1 Saturday April 9****th 2011 from 8:30-5:00 Hosted at DeVry University in Fort Washington, PA ...

Recently Jeff Attwood asked: Is meta description still relevant? In the question he quoted an anonymous “expert”: Meta descriptions are used by Google probably 80% of the time for the snippet. They don’t help with rankings but you should probably use them. You could just auto generate them from the first part of the question. To be honest I think this recommendation comes from stalwarts in the SEO community who just can’t move past the fact that their knowledge of how search worked back in 1999 isn’t how it works in 2011. It use to be that the description tag was used as the blurb below the title, because no real analytics was really done on a page. Everything you searched for was based on the keyword or the description meta tags. ...

I know I am really late with this post given that my daughter, Elizabeth Nicole (Betsy), was born on November 29, 2010 at 5:06 am. But, in my defense, she is my first and she has kept me really busy for the last 5 weeks. (that is my excuse and I am sticking with it) And will most definitely keep me busy for the next two decades. Her birth was an amazing experience that I won’t soon forget. Even five weeks later, I still get a rush thinking about the miracle that I witnessed. And what a privilege it was to witness such an amazing event as your child being born. ...

Yesterday night I had decided, that this morning I was going to sit down and write a post on the uses of the IsSectionDefined method in the Razor syntax, and how useful it was for determining if views were implementing certain sections in a layout. (which is very useful and provides a great deal of flexibility in your design) However this morning I awoke to find that Scott Guthrie had written about the same subject, and who am I to compete against The Gu. ...

Recently I decided it was important to get away from Google App Engine as my CDN, mostly because I have encountered personally and have been told that many internal corporate networks are blocking Google App Engine IP’s. And since most of my content posted to this blog is relevant to developers, who typically work in the corporate world, I decided to make the move. And boy am I glad I did. ...

For the life of me I couldn’t find an easy option to enable pinging, an ICMP Type 8 or Echo Request response, through my Windows 2008 R2 firewall. Every hit on Google told me to follow some steps through the GUI that ended up not being in R2 anymore or execute the following command which doesn’t seem to work in R2 either. netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8 enable netsh would always respond back and tell me that firewall was depreciated, but not give me much more to go on. ...

This is my first attempt at an Entity Framework (EF) based Repository Pattern. I took a stab at this while working on a new project, and I am really liking the ease of use this is providing me. So I thought I would share… Before I get started, I wanted to make a special call out to Dane Morgridge’s EF Repository on CodePlex which is based on T4 templates. His project originally got my gears turning as to how I would make my own repository pattern for EF. Also I wanted to pre-text this blog post with the actual code which I have posted up on GitHub Gist: ...

If you already didn’t have enough reasons to use Google Chrome, I found out that it now has brought the goodness of a one textbox search solution to all sites that support the opensearch specification, including Stack Overflow, not just the one currently registered with the browser, which by default is usually Google. This is a new to me feature, and I am using Google Chrome 7, so if anybody has any information on when this was released I would love to know. ...

I recently had the need to find out how much time elapsed during the execution of just my action, so I created a handy little action filter based on System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch. This action filter adds the elapsed time to an HTTP header, appropriately named, X-Stopwatch. I choose to use a header instead of a response in the content body, so that it could be used both with non-HTML responses (binary, JSON, XML, etc) and HTML response. I was amazed at the usefulness of this simple piece of code, because it instantly gave me insight in to the actual execution time of my action to see if my optimizations were having any effect. It allowed me to monitor the execution time of code that I can specifically and easily control the performance of. ...