Where’s Lou

Where’s Lou at the moment? Indianapolis! Specifically GenCon 2009.

Today was the first of four days. Played a BattleTech bootcamp with Alex, some nostalgia there for me because that’s a game I the old group in high school used to play as well. He loved it – we’re going to be getting the intro box set when we get home.

Also signed up for an interactive action game TerrorWerks. Lots of fun. Three groups of five players armed with the soft yellow pellet assault rifles on an mission in a background that reminds you of the Aliens movies. I was an engineer (or course) and near the end of the mission was severely wounded and out of ammo, and eventually died trying to pull someone back from the end of a corridor where he was bleeding to death. Yay!

Going to run now to and catch an anime “Berserk” being screened. :)

I had the opportunity the other day to read through Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 written by Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri. I like how it’s structured if you may be learning about the concepts from scratch.

The first I had heard about the book was quite a while ago when Simone sent me a few questions about Spark. In the later chapters about extending ASP.NET MVC there’s a small section that describes various alternate view engines. I have to admit that’s the first place I flipped to. :)

I especially the fact that after covering the basics early on almost sixty pages are dedicated to unit testing concepts and it’s implementation for MVC applications. A lot of times in demos and articles even though the importance of testing or TDD is stressed it seems like you don’t walk away with something actionable if you’re new to those practices.

Also ends with some real-world samples… Ah – and all of the code is downloadable from wrox.com. Very nice.