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Interview with a Wiki Ninja and WPF Guru: Andy O'Neill

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Welcome to another interview! Today's interview is with Andy O'Neill!

 

Andy ONeill's avatar 

Some stats:

  • 32,892 Recognition Points
  • 12 TechNet Wiki articles
  • 122 Article Edits

Here are some of Andy's TechNet Guru award-winning articles:

 

Now let's get to the interview...

 

Who are you, where are you, and what do you do? What are your specialty technologies?

Hi, I am Andy (Andrew) O’Neill. I live in Liverpool, England just up the hill from Strawberry Fields and John Lennon’s house.

I’m more a generalist than a specialist since I lead teams, design and build web, windows, services and database. Recently that includes Asp.net mvc, WPF, WCF, various data manipulation and reporting and SQL Server.  

On some projects my speciality is more people orientated than technical - herding cats and taming tigers.  

I’m a long term contractor and Director of a software house.

 

What Wiki projects are you working on?

I have several ideas and the MVVM Entity framework series is ongoing. This is pretty time consuming since it’s basically a project. Like any project there are bugs.

Another complication is that it’s supposed to be beginner friendly as well as offer enterprise level design advice. Rather than just write stuff like I would normally I have to consider the reader. How much goes in each step is particularly tricky. I think the first step probably had too much in the one article.

 

What is it about TechNet Wiki that interests you?

Learning is always good.

I find the monthly Guru competition particularly interesting.

I like the mix of articles. When I am researching something I am an equal opportunity googler. You have to know what you’re looking for in order to google it though. The competition highlights things I probably wouldn’t have thought to read up on.

Sometimes the judges decisions are quite surprising so it’s also interesting to see what a group of experts feel are the most significant articles.

From a personal perspective feedback is always useful.

 

What sort of Wiki articles do you contribute?

Most of my articles are on WPF – based on article count you might think that was pretty much all I do. It’s far from the only technology I work in but I find it particularly interesting.

 

What are your favorite Wiki articles you’ve contributed?

But I love all my children equally ;^)

Tricky to pick specific articles to mention. I think the WPF Entity Framework MVVM Walk Through https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/WPF-EntityFramework-MVVM-c7167301 should help a lot of people since it’s a common requirement that is difficult for the developer new to WPF. If there are any other such articles, I’ve not found them.

The point of writing articles is to help people so the more the merrier.

I also like the CollectionView tips article: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/26673.wpf-collectionview-tips.aspx

Denormalisation is an interesting subject and can avoid a performance disaster:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/26388.sql-server-pragmatic-denormalisation.aspx

Writing the passing c# parameters was useful in that it crystalised my own understanding on the matter – which is confusing.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/26371.c-passing-parameters.aspx

 

What could we do differently on TechNet Wiki?

I think the tooling used to write articles could do with some work.

Any CSS style has to be inline, it would be nice if there were standard classes one could use.

 

Do you have any tips for new Wiki authors?

Don’t use Internet Explorer !

I now write most articles in Word. You can use the heading styles to give you heading H1,H2,H3 etc easily and I already know how to use Word. Paste in and strip formatting.

 

Photos:

Just to prove I don’t actually spend all my time in a pub drinking beer, I included a picture of me in the great outdoors. Probably on the way to a pub :^)

   

Thank you Andy for your amazing contributions!

   - Ninja Ed

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2014
    Congrats Andrew!
    Thanks Ed for sharing the great content!
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    Congrats Andy for getting interviewed. I would specifically like to know about not to use IE and use word word. I use Mozilla FF and formatting works just fine. Do you have any bug to report.
    Thanks Ed for gr8 interview
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    Nice to know you, Andrew :-)

    * several days ago I lectured at The Israeli Dot.Net User Group:
    The lecture can be download from here:
    https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Under-the-hood-of-a-4082e05c

    ** I showed 3 demos, 2 that we wrote (Multi type application, and Pinvoke Demos), and one that you wrote :-)
    This one: Communicating between classes using Messenger.
    https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Communicating-between-eadd027c
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    Congrats Andrew!
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    I added some photos.
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2014
    Thank you Ed. Congarts Andy.
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2014
    Thanks Ed! Congrats Andrew!
  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2014
    Congrats Andrew.!
    Very inspiring interview.
  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2014
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2014
    Thanks everyone, particularly Ed.
  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2014
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 03, 2015
    find this post funny, I ran into one of your post on MSDN where a highschool kid wanted help
    finding a physic engine for WPF project he had done, yoot stupid advise was to switch to unity3d,
    I flagged it and they deleted it, you are just another casual WPF Novice posing as an expert, enough is enough, their is a Kid name noemata going around saying WPF touch is broken based on a extremely flawed test
    https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/903760/wpf-touch-services-are-badly-broken

    , that he thought had been vetting based on the likes of you and Chen, do the world a favor and suspend your WPF expert posing. Guru? what a joke, Guru?guru?gru NOVICE!
  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week. Two days late
  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    May 30, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2015
    op Contributors Awards!
  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the
  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2015
    Welcome back for another analysis of contributions to TechNet Wiki over the last week.
    First up, the