We are celebrating the opening of our newly designed office space. We would love for you to join us On Thursday, June 15th from 4pm to 7pm. We will have the Houston West Chamber of Commerce in attendance for the ribbon cutting. Come out and see what Improving is all about. Please register here

 https://improvinghoustonribboncutting.eventbrite.com

Whenever possible, I like using a ForEach method, instead of a for-each block. Take the code below for example:

The iteration part could be rewritten like so:

Or, even better, since the AddToPizza method takes in one parameter with the same type of the items we’re iterating over…

The iteration could simply look like this:

However, not every thing we iterate has the ForEach method. For example, regular arrays don’t. So, if our items source looked like the one below, we wouldn’t have a ForEach method:

So how do we get a ForEach method that works on Lists, Collections, Arrays, etc? Just create the extension method on IEnumerable<T>, like so:

Make sure to import the namespace for your extension methods (using statement) wherever you’re trying to use them!

From time to time I like to embrace new challenges in my professional life and it’s happening again now, as I start a new full-time job at Improving!

I’ve known several folks at the company for many years now from speaking at conferences and user groups. In the last two years I’ve done some gigs with them as a contractor at clients in Brazil and Argentina. I’ve had a lot of fun and was very fortunate as they offered me a full-time job as I move back to the US.

I’m looking forward to working with several like-minded guys I’ve known for years, taking on new challenges, and as it is bound to happen, Improving myself as a professional and a person (yes, pun intended!).

Full-time <-> Independent cycles

I started my first full-time job 26 years ago. Since then, I’ve alternated between full-time and independent jobs, but always staying at least a couple of years on each. Doing so has helped me both working on my own as well as working with others. As a hobbyist musician, I can relate this with making music in a band or as a solo artist (but I’ll save this to another post…).

Five years ago I’ve blogged about the fact I was going to work on my own, after solid 9 years on a full-time job. At the time I really needed that change both from professional and personal points-of-view. Now, five years later, I feel I’ve succeeded on that change and am ready to do it again. Working on my own during this time was great as I managed to be involved in some great projects, and it has also allowed me to go on with some big changes in my personal life.

Back to speaking…

I’m also going back to doing presentations at user groups and conferences. I’ve been missing those things, so I did a presentation last month in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and will be doing two presentation at the Houston Tech Fest 2016. I’m looking forward to hanging out with a bunch of my old buddies out there.

It seems like my blogging fever comes in waves. Ever since I started this blog (almost 10 years ago), I spend some months blogging somewhat frequently, then I go on a hiatus, and then I come back to writing, and the cycle goes on like that. The last wave came when I switched over from .NET to Ruby on Rails development. With so many things new I had to learn, there was certainly no shortage of things to write about. My posts related to Rails can be found here.

In the last three years, I’ve had just way too much going on in my personal life and blogging just gradually dropped in priority. Another thing that has made me slow down is that I really liked using Windows Live Writer

(WLW) as my blogging editor, and I could never find a similar tool, or a tool that I liked, on the Mac. Since I’ve been using more and more the Mac as my main machine, and less and less the PC, it just didn’t make sense for me to keep a PC around just for blogging.

As I’m currently having to work on some things that require a PC, I’ve set up one as a virtual machine (using Parallels on the Mac), and also set up WLW on it, so I should be able to be back into blogging here more often.

Even though I haven’t been writing, I do have been keeping track of ideas of things I’d like to write about, so that should give me a head start.

I know some of my readers have also enjoyed posts related to my musical endeavors. I decided to create a separate blog just for that! Go check it out: it’s called Sanctuary of Nevermore. A technical note about that new blog: I’m publishing it to Postach.io, straight from Evernote!

Three Locations – Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix

• Houston:   Tuesday, November 9, 2010  1:30 – 4:30 PM
  Microsoft Houston Office – 2000 W Sam Houston Pkway S, Houston, TX 77042
• Dallas:   Monday, November 15, 2010  1:30 – 4:30 PM
  Microsoft Dallas Office –  7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Irving, TX 75039
• Phoenix: Thursday, November 11, 2010 1:30 – 4:30 PM
  Microsoft Phoenix Office – 2929 N. Central Ave, Suite 1400, Phoenix, AZ 85012

Brought to you by Microsoft, CODE Magazine, CODE Training & EPS Software, this free afternoon event presents an unbiased look at the current and future development with .NET. Join me for an afternoon of free and independent information about current Microsoft development technologies! What is the state of .NET today? Which of the many .NET technologies have gained traction? Which ones can you ignore for now? What other Microsoft technologies should you include in your development efforts? This event is completely free of charge and is designed for developers as well as IT decision makers. Specific prior knowledge is not required. Attendees of this event will come away with a clear understanding of which technologies to use for various technical challenges.

Topics will include:

• Latest News from PDC!
• Visual Studio 2010
• Silverlight 4.0
• Visual Studio LightSwitch
• Expression Studio
• ASP.NET MVC 3.0
• WebMatrix
• Azure
• Windows Phone 7
• Razor
• and more! 

Note: The final list of topics is always subject to change as we are always aiming to have the most up-to-date content possible!

Signup is free, but you have to let us know you are coming. Here are the appropriate links:

• Houston Signup Link – Tuesday, November 9, 2010  1:30 – 4:30
• Dallas Signup Link – Monday, November 15, 2010  1:30 – 4:30
• Phoenix Signup Link – Thursday, November 11, 2010  1:30 – 4:30

Questions? Please e-mail info@eps-software.com or call 832-717-4445 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting   832-717-4445 end_of_the_skype_highlighting x32.

This event is co-hosted by EPS Software Corp. and Microsoft Corporation. EPS is responsible for all content presented at this event.

I’ve decided I should finally host my blog in a decent engine since I’ve never been too happy with the Spaces Live one. I went ahead and signed up for WordPress. When I pointed the browser to my old Spaces Live blog, it told me Microsoft has partnered with WordPress and could move my content over. How appropriate!  :0)

I’ll go through my old posts and better organize them, and hopefully I’ll go back to start blogging at least once a week. To the very least, I want to blog my thoughts on the latest Virtual Brown Bag‘s meeting; it’s not meant to be a “summary”, since we’re using a wiki for that now, but instead, just my thoughts as they are at that moment on some of the topics discussed.