An essay submitted as part of my application to the GreenFaith Fellowship Program. Hopefully I put my best foot forward ;-).

Basic was the first language I learned. Well, partially, in 8th grade. On Apple IIe at school and a Packard Bell 386 PC at home. A few years later, JavaScript came out and it became the first “modern” language I used. As an undergraduate physics major, I found it useful for quickly generating sample data or running some numerical approximations (simpler than Mathematica). Then I wrote a few web minor pages with DOM manipulation, before any of the modern frameworks had come out. I went to work, used it occasionally, but never had any excuses in work or home life to do more than dabble. The revolution was passing me by.

Developed to help introduce key topics in Test Driven Development, for new and veteran developers alike. Some examples are language-specific (C# / MSTest / Moq), but the principles apply to any object oriented language.

Stirring up a grassroots movement is hard work.

In the east, you have the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. In the west, there’s the Black-Chinned Hummingbird. As with many other east/west divisions in both the animal and plant kingdoms, the two hummers sometimes overlap right here in Dallas county — for example, you can find both of them at Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center at Cedar Hill. Living in northwestern Dallas County, we did not know which to expect when we set out our feeder a few weeks ago. Thus far, it is has been entirely Black-Chinned.

Recently I have been looking at ServiceStack’s OrmLite “Micro ORM” as a light-weight alternative to Entity Framework. It is relatively easy to use and very powerful, with capability for both code-first and database-first development. After learning the basic interaction, it was time to flip back into TDD-mode.

Last weekend, faith communities across the U.S. hosted more than two-hundred events aimed at expanding awareness of the reality of climate change. This was the National Preach-In on Climate Change, sponsored by Interfaith Power & Light. As Co-Chair of Dallas Interfaith Power & Light, I was excited and honored to be able to give a presentation to my own community (Bahá‘ís of Irving) and to attend the innovative Preach-Off on Climate Change in Austin. The Bahá‘í s of Austin also afforded me an opportunity to give my presentation on Moral Imperatives for Climate Action, from a Bahá‘í Perspective, at their Sunday morning devotional program. Hopefully I was able to provide something useful to a few people; I certainly received much from my conversation and participation with people from many faith backgrounds. This will, God-willing, be the first of two blog posts reflecting on the conversations.

We got up this morning with merely grudging acceptance of the breakfast we planned on attending — an introduction to the Valley Ranch home owners association and committees, for new home owners. We left the meeting feeling excited and optimistic. We already knew that it was a good, “master planned,” neighborhood. Now we feel more confident that it has a bright future as well, one that includes serious water conservation measures, ecological aesthetics, and social opportunities.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a great tool for building client/server applications in the .Net environment. It is one of those technologies that can be challenging to dig into when services are just one of many tools needed to assemble a business application, as opposed to being an end in itself. With some of my co-workers in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned in using WCF for internal, line-of-business, applications. These notes, which will be published in several parts, assume a basic understanding of WCF and contracts.