VsLive

VS Live, the largest independent professional developer conference on Microsoft technologies, is coming to Dallas December 8th – 11, 2008!. I’ve been given a special registration code that I can offer to you that will save you $300 off of your registration at the next VS Live Dallas.

Register now with code: SPJEN to save $300!

I’ll be speaking on

See you there!

What does Agile mean to you?

October 25, 2008    Category: Blog, Events   2 Comments »

I just posted this over at CommunityCast.tv

After the Tulsa TechFest this year we went around and asked several attendees and speakers what Agile Development was to them… then we asked some of the non-attendees that happened to be in the area. Here are some of the responses.

AgileDotNet2008

Last week I mentioned that I was asked to give a 30 minute high level talk on being a technical presenter in the .NET community for the first Presenter Mentor meeting in Dallas. This was a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to seeing this group grow! Although I was speaking to a .NET centric crowd, the principals and concepts that I went in to briefly should be helpful to anyone thinking about doing a lot of presenting.

Enjoy!

Direct Slideshare Link

Tulsa Tech Fest – It’s a wrap!

October 14, 2008    Category: Events   7 Comments »

Caleb Jenkins relaxing at the TulsaTechFest 2008 It seems that every year the Tulsa Tech Fest gets bigger AND better. This year was no exception. I’ve been to three Tulsa Tech Fest’s now, and each was has been simply amazing to me. Amazing that they can fit so much in to two days, amazing that the crew in Tulsa can pull so many big name and high quality speakers together, and amazing that each year they run the event so smoothly that it truly feels like a MUCH LARGER conference.

The first year over 450 people attended, last year it was moved to a 2 day event that over 700 people went to, and this year… over 1,000 attendees between two days. This year the cost of entry was 2 cans of food or $2. They raised 469 pounds of food (that’s 360 meals) for local Tulsa food banks. Awesome!

2927047894_d7793224cc_o

First, my hat goes off to David Walker and the Tulsa Developers for putting this together.

What is a Tech Fest? It’s sort of like a Code Camp, but where Code Camps are usually smaller with 1 or two tracks and usually only focus only on .NET. A TechFest is usually much larger, with some as many as 20 tracks at a time,  and they usually include a larger range of technologies and topics. (.NET, PHP, AJAX, SOA, JAVA, Designers/UX, Business Development and Process, ALM)

This year’s TulsaTechFest was definitely a huge success! My favorite moment?

The closing keynote was the highlight for me. What a great way to finish of the event. Jef Newsom held everyone’s attention talking about “improving”. Some of which was highlighted by CommunityCast.tv (I blogged about that here)

Jef Newsom - Closing Keynote at the Tulsa Tech Fest 2008

Jef’s talk was on Improving. Not Improving, the company, but on improving in general… or more specifically, improving yourself, improving your code, improving your team and your company. You know, Kaizen.

Jef did a hilarious “Improving the Movie Preview” that grabbed everyone’s attention (staring Jef Newsom as Darrel Hannon impersonating Sean Connery as “the Professor”; also staring Jef Newsom impersonating Seth Meyers impersonating Matthew McConway as “the Level 2 Support Guy”) and then went in to some real practical steps that people can take. Improving/Kaizen - Jef Newsom's closing keynote at the TulsaTechFest 2008

  • Refactoring User Stories
  • Work on one thing at a time
  • Time Box yourself and your work
  • Retrospectives (pluses and deltas)
  • Dealing with positive and negative feedback
  • Be willing to stop the line
  • Conflicts and Compromises
  • Responsibility Redefined

 

Other great moments?

I loved the UX Track. Although I ran out of time on my session on Databinding and Templating in Silverlight (too much databinding… not enough templating)

Rob Howard’s Day 1 Keynote on Enterprise 2.0 really showed how companies across the corporation spectrum are embracing social media concepts from within to connect their people and help them find the resources and answers that they need to be productive. Something that his company Telligent, Microsoft, and many others are now starting to enable and embrace.

Prizes. I’ve never been to a community event before that gave away so much. Including a 50″ Widescreen Plasma TV (each day), a Laptop (each day), a fully loaded work horse desktop(each day), MSDN Team Suit Premium (each day), a couple of Zunes and XBoxes(each day). Plus a TON of XBox games, books, software, Incredible Pizza giftcards, etc.. etc.. etc.. truly amazing.

I got to catch up with old friends as well as meet a TON of incredible people from all over the US the flew out to this event (to speak and to attend). I shot a ton of “bumber” video that we will probably use at the Agile.NET conference in Dallas in November. Buddy Lindsey and I went around one of the after conference meet ups (at Dirty’s Tavern) with a video camera and asked people about Agile development. We didn’t just stop at TTF attendees… we asked everyone. As you can imagine, we got some creative answers from the tavern patrons!

Improvements?

A couple things that I hope David and company will consider changing for next year:

The speaker’s dinner was awesome, but there were a TON of amazing people at the dinner that nobody knew (at least I didn’t know them) and most people (or just me) are probably too lazy to look them up on the web site… a quick intro around the room would have been nice.

Attendee party. Last year we all went to the Tulsa October Fest one of the nights. That was a lot of fun with everyone, this year we played Rock Band and ate Subway in one of the conference rooms. Rock Band was fun and all (epic moment: Seeing Tim Rayburn beat our Claudio’s 99% score on drums with a 100% win on vocals. Epic!) but I think that we’d get more participation and interactions if we bring back the October Fest next year (it is Tulsa Tech Fest after all)

2930877328_d86abfcbe4_o

All in all… a great time and I’m looking forward to next year!

Related links:

All photos curtsey Les Stockton and Brent Ozar

Hey, if you aren’t already following CommunityCast.tv – you should 🙂 Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just posted a new clip over there. It’s about 3 minutes from Jef Newsom’s closing key note at the TulsaTechFest… which was awesome! I’ll post more on that later. For now, here’s the clip:

See the full size clip at CommunityCast.tv.

I’m speaking at the XAMLFest in Houston today and there have been several questions around how we did our automatic dependency injection in our Silverlight applications and the tools other tools that I recommend.

I updated my recommended tools for Silverlight on Delicious and

We use Ninject for DI in Silverlight. Here’s a great blog post from Jonas Follesoe (a Microsoft Regional Director from Norway) on using Ninject to do Dependency Injection in Silverlight.

Seperation of Concerns - The way of a true master

I really like Jonas’ writing style, especially the way that he comments his code examples

Code illustrating my DataContext problem.

also… be sure to check out the very cool Expression Kolur plug in that he wrote. Awesome!

Blend add-in screenshot

Enjoy!

I just posted a new episode of CommunityCast.tv. It’s an interview with Joseph Hill, a good friend of mine that also happens to be the Product Manager of the Mono Project. If you watch the video all the way to the end you’ll see a couple of us giving Joseph a hard time for leaving the Dallas area and heading to Boston (to work for Mono).

Watch it here!

Search

Subscribe

Enter your email address: