Owen's Blog

Well I’m trying to work out a way to reinvigorate and relaunch the Wellington Lunch With Geeks.

I’d be keen for any feedback on the proposed plans here:

http://groups.google.com/group/wellington-geeks/browse_thread/thread/43ba3041…

I try and keep my personal blog (bgeek.net) as free from my work stuff as possible to avoid any conflict of interest, but occasionally there are some milestones that I just have to blog about.

Xero API v2 is one of those milestones.

We’ve been working long and hard (much to my wife’s disquiet) on this release and I’m so pleased to finally be able to get it out the door.

We’ve tagged the release as a developer preview as the authentication mode is OAuth and we currently have some work to do before we switch on support for long term access tokens (currently they’re limited to 30 minute access lengths to mimic user sessions in the application)

Once we have some infrastructure in place we’ll be relaxing this limit for most web based providers (due to privacy issues we’re unlikely to relax the time limit for desktop based software)

The aim of the Xero API has always been to allow people to use Xero as an online accounting engine, and I believe we’ve taken a significant step forward on this.

I’ve also recorded a getting started tutorial screen cast available here:

[
http://blog.xero.com/developer/api-guides/
](
http://blog.xero.com/developer/api-guides/)

sorry about the bad quality, it’s my first ever screen cast and I seriously underestimated the effort that would be involved… when I regather my strength I aim to rerecord the screen-caps at a much higher resolution…

for now I hope its a suitable example for getting up and running with OAuth and the Xero API

I’m doing my “Deeper Dive into ASP.net MVC” talk at the Nelson .net UserGroup on Wednesday, if you’re in the area please pop along to the talk and say hi.
More details are available [here](
http://www.dot.net.nz/Lists/Events%20Calendar/DispForm.aspx?ID=43&Source=…
)

A Huge thank you to everyone who turned up for the Wellington Code Camp this past weekend and a huge thanks to the sponsors who helped us keep the weekend free [as in beer].

The weekend was sponsored by:

• The Microsoft MVP Program
• INETA
• Xero
• DTS
• Whitireia Polytechnic

I think the whole organising team (Kirk, Ivan, JD, JB and myself) did a great job and the whole weekend was better than I could have hoped.

I’m currently going though all the video’s from the weekend (apologies but I think i missed a couple of the talks) and I’ll see if I can work out how to put them to the slide shows that everyone had.

After a long period off from doing anything community related (Lunch with Geeks, DNUG, Blogging) I’ve decided to throw myself back in wholehartedly.

I took some time off to get married and honeymoon and recollect my thoughts about where I wanted to go to in terms of my professional life.

As such I’m speaking at the Wellington .net Code Camp this weekend and Wellington .net User Group next week both will be on ASP.net MVC framework. I’m expecting a different audience to them both but will also try and make them at least a little bit varied.

I’m eager for feedback as I’m talking at Christchurch, Nelson, Napier, Auckland, Hamilton, Palmerston North and Tauranga DNUGs as well over the next 6 weeks on the same subject.

Please come along and provide any feedback, ask any questions.

The aim of the talks is to follow on from the overview talks that have been done to death and actually dive into some working examples (at the moment I’ve based it off Nerd Dinner sample site that the core asp.net mvc team wrote for their book)

I feel I’ve had enough experience to talk with at least a bit of authority on the subject as I’ve been using the framework in earnest for the last year and a half and watched it go through all the beta stages and release candidates.

I’m also hoping to bring in plenty of the wisdom already garnered from the communities around Rails etc and pass on any advice that helps.

So come along, the weekend promises to be a lot of fun.

Code Camp:

http://codecamp.net.nz

DNUG Wellington:

http://bit.ly/gd382

Lunch with geeks was a great success this week I feel, a great many new faces to get to know.

The main write up will be here so that everyone can edit it.

Also please help out Matt Eats who is new to the area and wants to learn to programming.

We’ve suggested a couple of things

• Learn two languages (in context)
• Learn a memory managed context
• Get to know people (be part of an open sourced project, or come along to super happy dev house)
• Get a project that you want to build and understand
• Just Code It

Any I’ve missed?

Next lunch with geeks will either be in two weeks or a month, got to work out what the better schedule is.

Thanks again to all those that showed up

One of the things I love about working at Xero is that they really take development seriously, both of the Xero core offering and enabling people to leverage off our accounting engine.

As part of the core team responsible for the Xero API we’ve really started to gather some pace about offering exciting functionality that can be added to the application.

just in no particular order.

• I really, really need to do some work with testing the HTML rendered from an MVC view (thinking webrat for .net)
• Astoria looks like something to ease some recent pain I’ve had within a project I’ve been working on. (man sometimes not knowing if I can actually talk about a project is rubbish)
• I’ve a lot to learn about effective tech demos (Scott I bow down to your superior presentation style)
• I should be really careful about writing a self bashing post before sleeping on it, I’m by no means as pessimistic about yesterdays talk as i was. It actually went ok, I just need to get some more preparation.
• MVC still rocks, and I’m right to care about it. so should you.
• If I can get to the point of being a go to speaker by this time next year I’ll be happy.

In fact, that last one is an aim! I will speak at next years Code Camp, and I will try and get round all the NZ user groups this year.

• anyone want to do a codecamp lightning talk?
  http://pageofwords.com/blog/2008/08/12/DevCodeCampRegistrationsLightningTalks.aspx
  #
• don’t you just hate it when your app breaks in the middle of a demo #
• @stuartm yeah, luckly it was just environment setup for a test site… but suckes none the less #
• just read an initial draft of a book extract about the first agile project i worked on, oh heady days, and reminds me why i miss that team. #
• @fastchicken it was my first role at a company called Cresta, now part of SQS. Don’t know book name, not out yet, by John Watkins #
• @MarkLeonWatson Did a long time ago… my advise is learn MSI meanings and rules, as it’s just XML on top of MSI. #
• @MarkLeonWatson Took me a long time to get, and not much tooling outthere, lots of XML to look at. #
• @MarkLeonWatson but powerful as hell once you get it. #
• @fastchicken I seem to get credit during a whole section on Continuous Integration it’s very flattering #
• @MarkLeonWatson well it’s been 4 years and it hasn’t yet. I wouldn’t call it a build tool, it’s all about describing MSI. #
• @MarkLeonWatson I like it though don’t get me wrong, i would use it more but maintanance takes a lot of time. #
• just got burned by AparmentState in nUnit. <add key=”ApartmentState” value=”STA” /> fixes it #
• llblgen sucks again. #

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• I love pear drops num num num num #
• ok been at least 2 years since i last had a hobnob, but man they are still my favourite buscuit… nom nom nom nom #
• eyes are feeling really tired, wondering if i got a bit of eye strain #
• @katforbes hmmm you’re right….. only just though. #
• @katforbes enrolled. just wait for forms now #
• yep there goes my gmail too #
• need IoC in classic ASP.net… struggling #
• fail:
  http://www.microsoft.co.nz
  uses an invalid security certificate.
  #

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