Model View Presenter

Scott Cate recently came to present at the Dayton .Net Developer's group and really had a seriously cool pattern to show us.

It's called the Model View Presenter pattern

This pattern was a novel approach to me in that it really helps separate the presentation layer from the business logic layer. In fact, it seems to create a whole new layer that allows the developer to focus on presentation in a very abstract way, and as it should, the developer doesn't need to know how the information will be displayed, and the designer doesn't have to know much about the inner workings of the application core.

I could go into more details, but they are all over the web. Do a google search on Scott Cate and Model View Presenter and you'll get plenty of hits. If you have an Ineta user group that hasn't seen his presentation, I highly recommend that you see if you can get him to speak at your user group. If you are part of a user group and hear that Scott's coming, I highly recommend that you come to see him.

Also, if you have a chance to talk to Scott after the meeting, I also highly recommend it. Scott is clearly passionate about development, and he has a plethora of development knowledge. He's pretty easy to talk to as well.

Expresso 3.0 Available

Jim Hollenhorst has just released his latest version of Expresso, and I'm really stoked.

This is an excellent piece of software, and all he requires for fully using the product is a free registration (so, basically, your name and e-mail address). It is more than worth it for this piece of software.

In fact, look for the Parse Nested HTML Tags example project for my demo of .Net regex balancing groups.

These are an extremely powerful type of expressions, particularly if you are dealing with xml or html. So far as I know, only .Net framework even supports them at this time. Unfortunately, at this point, they have not been well documented, and they are a bit difficult to wrap your head around at first. Expresso provides the best documentation and usable real world examples on this subject that I know of at this point, so if you want to learn more, please check out his tool.

http://ultrapico.com/ExpressoDownload.htm

Tech Ed

I visited Tech ed last week. This was my first year and it was a real blast.

For anyone who has never been, I recommend bringing a good pair of walking shoes, and also making sure to workout and get into some better shape before heading out there, or you'll be really sore (most developer's I know don't get that much exercise, and that convention center was big).