Somehow I got the shaft and was stuck in the back when Bill took his photo with us at TechEd. I volunteered to lay down in front but the photographer did not like that idea.

On May 22nd and 23rd  the New York chapter of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) held its first annual two-day IT Architect Regional Conference where I was a speaker.  This event received the highest rating of any conference run by IASA to date.  It was considered so successful that we are already planning the 2009 version. 

IASA is a vendor-neutral association of/for/by architects all over the world.  The New York IASA chapter is one of the most successful IASA chapters in the United States. Sponsors of the event included Sun, Oracle, Microsoft and Robert Half.  Although this was a regional conference attendees came from as far away as Nashville Tennessee, Boston and Redmond Washington. 

The conference featured over 30 speakers from sponsor companies, the local architect community and others arranged in common keynote sessions and four breakout tracks (Enterprise Architecture, Software Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture and Architecture Fundamentals).  Keynote speakers included presentations on:  Software Plus Services, presented by Joseph Williams, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Enterprise Services; Interesting Real-world Architectures and the Handbook of Software Architecture presented present by Grady Booch, Chief Scientist, IBM Corporation; The Next Generation SOA Grid--Not Your MOM's Bus, presented by David Chappell, Vice President and Chief Technologist, Oracle and Technology Strategy in the World, presented by Paul Preiss, President of IASA.  The Breakout sessions also featured many presentations by local architects from companies such as Bloomberg, Group Health, Hartford Insurance, Weightwatchers and Microsoft.  

For more information about the conference agenda see http://www.iasahome.org/web/itarc/nyc/agenda.

Ever since the new ASP.NET MVC framework was announced in October, posts about it have spread about it like wildfire through the .NET blogosphere.  There's usually at least 2-3 MVC stories a day that show up on DotNetKicks.

At the last Philly.NET code camp in January, there was standing room only for the ASP.NET MVC talk (see photo to the right).  Similar crowds have shown up at the HLS DevCon in Atlantic City, Central Jersey .NET & Fairfield/Westchester .NET user groups to hear about it.

With all the buzz going on about the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, I'm happy to announce a one day Firestarter event in NYC covering it on Saturday, June 7th!  Join us for a day in New York City to learn more about the ASP.NET MVC framework and see what everyone is all excited about.

At the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter, we’ll give you a quick tour of the framework, then peel back the layers and dive deeper into how it works.   As part of that, we’ll spend time discussing the design and development practices that lead to the creation of the MVC framework.  By the time you leave, you’ll have enough knowledge to get fired up and start building web applications with it.

More Info

When it comes to design patterns, the MVC is the granddaddy of them all.  First described in the late 70s, the MVC pattern remains very popular in the world of web applications today.  

ASP.NET MVC provides a framework that enables you to easily implement the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern for Web applications. This pattern lets you separate applications into loosely coupled, pluggable components for application design, processing logic, and display.
ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for Webforms. It provides an alternative choice when designing a Web application. Using ASP.NET MVC offers the following advantages:

• It enables you to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns
• It facilitates test driven development (TDD)
• It provides more control over the URLs you publish in the application and over the HTML that is emitted by the application

Registration is now open. Don't wait as this will likely fill to capacity quickly:

Register Here!

Lunch will be provided.

Agenda: 

·        Intro to ASP.NET MVC & .NET 3.0/3.5   9:00-10:30

·        Intro to MVC/MVP patterns   10:30-11:30

Lunch 11:30-12

·        Intro to Test Driven Development 12:00-1:00

·        Routing  1:00-1:30

·        Controllers  1:30-2:30

·        Break 2:30-2:45

·        Views  2:45-4:00

o   Strongly- vs. Weakly-Typed

§  What’s the difference?

§  Why would you choose one over the other

§  Ways to effectively use Weakly-typed

o   UI Helpers

§  Overview of framework helpers

§  Rolling your own

o   View Engines

§  Overview of WebForms ViewEngine

·        File location/mappings

·        Using “standard” ASP.NET stuff:  ASPX, ASCX, Master

·        REST & AJAX – WCF, Dynamic Data, MVC AJAX  4:00-5:00

Thursday, May 15, 2008
WPF Beyond the Basics: Playing Tricks with the Visual Tree

Subject: 
You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=126267 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
The Visual tree is one of the core concepts of the WPF framework. All things visible in a WPF application are objects from the Visual tree. In this talk I'll give a quick overview of the Visual Tree and then get into interesting ways of manipulating it. We will also look into the styling and templating aspects of visuals. The ideas presented here should be immediately useful to custom-control developers and application developers in general. The session will be very hands-on with cool demos and live coding! The techniques discussed here were used in my blog posts on ElementFlow, GlassWindow, Drag 'n' Drop with attached properties, Genie Effect, etc.

Speaker: 
Pavan Podila
Pavan Podila has worked on a wide variety of UI technologies with current focus on WPF/Silverlight, Flash/Flex and DHTML. He has a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science with specialization in Graphics and Image Processing. He has been working with .Net since 2004 and WPF since 2005. In the past he has worked with Java Swing, Eclipse plugins, AJAX UI frameworks and Trolltech Qt. His primary interests are in 2D/3D Graphics, Data Visualization, UI architecture and computational art. He blogs actively on http://blog.pixelingene.com.

Date: 
Thursday, May 15, 2008

Time: 
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM

Location:  
Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor

Directions:
B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr
1 to 50th St./Bway
N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

I will be doing a make up session for the snowed out meeting last winter up at the Montreal Visual Studio User Group.

Conférencier: Stephen Forte, RD New-York, USA
Note: Cette présentation sera en anglais (yes my French sucks)

Architecting an application starts with the database. Different applications need different data models. Fifth normal form is great for an OLTP database but reporting databases need more of a flat denormalized structure and different web sites need several different types of data models: eCommerce sites need different data models than traditional publishing sites. You need to optimize your data model for your application’s performance needs. Concurrent users, Data load, transactions per minute, report rendering and query seek time all determine the type of data model you will need. See how different applications and different parts of an application can use different data models and how you can architect your database to fit into your application’s needs-not the other way around.

Address:

2000 McGill College, 4th floor

I have always watched the development community's fascination with Ruby on Rails with much concern. It seemed like it was gaining much popularity because it was easy to use and spit out web sites based on an easy to use framework rather quickly. What's wrong with that?

A lot. Rails makes it easy to build an application by drag and drop and stitch things together with some glue code. It gives you a platform for most of the plumbing and never forces you to understand the mechanics of objects or other more sophisticated coding techniques. This leads you to some fast and easy web sites that don't scale past the RoR framework. Great for a fun site or a prototype, but not so good if you need to scale past what the RoR framework has to offer.

Some sites are learning this the hard way. Twitter has had some major outages recently and some very public scaling problems. They are mostly a RoR shop and there are rumors that they are going to swap out RoR, rumors that they of course are denying. If Twitter moves away from Ruby, it could do much damage to Rails' adoption in the future at startups that have large aspirations. I am not saying that all of Twitter's problems are caused by RoR, some very large consumer facing sites are built on Rails, but rather are a byproduct of using an application framework to build a large public site (not to be confused with an API framework like .NET or J2EE). Rails gives you a framework and makes it simple to build sites that fit into that general framework. Once you step off the reservation, you are in for a world of hurt. If you are building a site that fits the Rail mold, then if you have good engineers you may be able to scale to a gazillion users, but you lost most of the ease of use of Rails by doing so. If you are building a site that does not fit the Rails mold, then you will have scaling issues, mostly because Rails was not designed to do what you want it to do.

Some in the rails community have broken ranks, the most entertaining one is Zed Shaw, a god in the RoR community, with his infamous exit rant Ruby is a Ghetto back in January.

What I am really saying is that there are no shortcuts. You have to learn how to code and use platforms that scale to the goals of your application. Sometimes this means writing your own code and object model and data access layer.

LAST CHANCE FOR $100 OFF! REGISTER BY April 30th

36 Sessions for $350? The ITARC brings dozens of speakers from New York and around the world together to ensure that architects in the region get the training and education they need. We have tracks for enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, software architects and senior developers.

The IASA is an non-profit international association of IT architects, which is why we have worked so hard to provide such a low cost, high caliber event. Want to become a speaker someday? How about influence the agenda at a major conference to cater to your exact needs? Getting involved with the New York ITARC is how you can do both as this conference will be held yearly. So attend this year and speak the next!

The conference only holds 250 so get registered today.

ITARC 2008 Agenda - Check out the latest speaker additions

Featured Keynotes:

• Interesting Real World Architectures and the Handbook of Software Architecture, Grady Booch, Chief Scientist, IBM Corporation
• Service Oriented Architecture, David Chappell,Vice President and Chief Technologist, Oracle
• Technology Strategy in the Real World, Paul Preiss, President, IASA

Noteable Speakers:

• The Spring Framework, An Architectural Perspective, Mark Pollack, Principal Software Consultant, SpringSource
• IT Architecture Business Value, Cliff Berg, Consultant and Author
• Enterprise Architecture as a Strategic Weapon, Alexander Pelaez, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Group Health Incorporated
• Multiplatform Virtualization Architectures, Tony Iams, VP and Senior Analyst, Ideas International
• The Value of an Architect, Douglas Houseman, Architect, Cap Gemini
• Me :)
• Click here to take a look at the full agenda.

Early bird pricing ends April 30th so click here to register online.

Registration

Register before April 30th to receive a $100 discount. IASA members receive an additional discount in addition to the early bird special:

Register before April 30, 2008

Register after April 30, 2008

IASA member

Non-member

IASA member

Non-member

A group discount of 20% is available for groups of 6 or more. Contact 512-615-7900 to take advantage of the group discounts.

Click here for the event website.

Click here to register online

Click here to register by check.

Questions or comments? Please contact:: CynthiaRubio@IASAhome.org

Speaking at the NYC SQL Server User Group tonight on Database Design Patterns, the popular TechEd Session. Click here to register.

Meeting Location:
Microsoft New York City Office
1290 Ave of the Americas
Sixth Floor
New York, NY  10104

Meeting Time: 6pm.

Topic:

Database Design Patterns: Architecting the Right Data Model for the Right Application

Description:

Architecting an application starts with the database. Different applications need different data models. Fifth normal form is great for an OLTP database, but reporting databases need more of a flat denormalized structure and different Web sites need several different types of data models: eCommerce sites need different data models than traditional publishing sites. You need to optimize your data model for your application's performance needs. Concurrent users, data load, transactions per minute, report rendering, and query seek time all determine the type of data model you will need. See how different applications and different parts of an application can use different data models and how you can architect your database to fit into your application's needs and not the other way around.

I spent the week on Microsoft's Redmond campus for product team meetings and the MVP summit. One thing that always surprises me is the growth of Microsoft. I have been traveling out to Redmond to meet with the big evil empire since 1996. Back then I was like "holy cow there is a lot of growth." Now 12 years later, it is more of the same. Cranes everywhere, it looks like Dubai or Shanghai. Across the expressway, it looks like they are building a huge complex. I joked to my friends in the car that this is the new building to handle all of the new Yahoo! employees.

It is always amazing to me just how well Microsoft treats its 3rd party developers. Arguably we are the reason why Microsoft beat out Apple in the 1990s. Apple had user design specifications and an approval process, and Microsoft just treated us like gold; and we also were able to build anything we wanted and install it on Windows independent of Microsoft. While this may have made Windows less stable, it also made it a standard. Businesses can hire anyone to build them custom software, and that is still true to this day.

Apple is making the same mistake with the iPhone as they made with the Mac. They treat 3rd party developers poorly. Microsoft flew out 4,000 developers this week and showed us their roadmap and vision for the next three years, and some ideas that span out even further. (Watch out Amazon S3 and Google, when I can use SQL Server in the cloud, why do I need you?) They had frank discussions and never once said "we can't answer that question." (Even questions on Yahoo! sale and how far MS is behind Google in search.) This went up to the Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer level.

Apple does no such thing. As Wired Magazine points out, they are the new evil. They close down fan blogs and sue children who try to report on new features. We have to wait until MacWorld to get an announcement.

Memo to Steve Jobs: It would be nice to know in advance (like a year or two) about your new stuff. Then we can build apps for it. Giving us a half baked SDK with tons of restrictions (and a approval process that is draconian) will just have us build for other platforms like Java, Linux and Microsoft. Oh ya, your arrogance does not fit well with the software developer crowd-we think *we* are the center of the universe.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

WPF Meets the iPhone User Interface

You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=126266 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.

The iPhone is one of the most compelling and exciting user interfaces to appear in recent memory, with many innovations that make it a pleasure to use. How can you deliver a similar experience with your .NET WPF applications? In this session you will see how to implement these features in.NET as you watch the iPhone interface recreated (and running on a Windows laptop) using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology with both Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft’s Expression Blend. You will also learn when it’s best to use VS 2008 or Expression Blend for different WPF tasks.

Speaker: 
Kevin McNeish, President and Chief Software Architect, Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc
Kevin McNeish is a Microsoft .NET MVP, a well-know INETA speaker and trainer throughout North America and Europe including VSLive!, DevTeach, SDC Netherlands, and Advisor DevCon. He is co-author of the book "Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET", author of the book ".NET for Visual FoxPro Developers", authors articles for CoDe magazine and has been interviewed on the .NET Rocks! Internet Radio Show. He is the Chief Software Architect of the MM .NET Framework and spends about half his time on the road training and mentoring companies to build well-designed, high-performance .NET applications.

Date: 
Thursday, March 20, 2008

Time: 
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM

Location:  
Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor

Directions:
B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr
1 to 50th St./Bway
N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

The .NET community lost one of its great leaders last night, Stephen R. Goodwin. He was 60 years old and lost his bout with cancer, a bout he almost defeated last year.Steve worked tirelessly as a User Group leader in New York City (Enterprise Windows User Group) and set up many great events and organized low cost training for user group members-the first such program of its kind. Steve was also an MVP and represented NY to Culminis.

His firm, Cartwright & Goodwin, was a Microsoft Certified Partner-but Cartwright did not exist, he made it up to sound more "white and Jewish" since he started this firm in the 1970s when the market did not look as kindly on black entrepreneurs as it does today.

I use to call Steve "Mayor Bloomberg" since he had a great photo of him and the mayor that he use to carry around. I was luckier than most, Steve only lived 1 block away and we would often ride the subway home from the user group meetings and grab a dinner at the local Japanese place where he would tell me crazy stories about his trips to Japan back in his Wall Street trader days.

You also may not know but you can catch a glimpse of him in Eddy Murphy's "Trading Places" in the gold pit of the NY Commodities Exchange-back when he was a commodity trader.

Stephen’s obituary is here.

Next week I will be in Lisbon, Portugal speaking at Techdays 2008.All my stuff is listed in Portuguese, I hope they realize I don’t speak Portuguese. :)

Will be doing three sessions:

• TSQL Tips and Tricks
• Database Design Patterns
• Test Driven Development

I am on .NET Rocks today talking about distributed teams. Enjoy.

Albany Marriott Hotel

189 Wolf Road

Albany, NY 12205  

Date & Time

March 12, 2008 9:00AM – 4:00 PM EST 

Registration Information: Click here

About the Conference

We invite you to join us for a day of developer-oriented technical sessions, featuring Application Lifecycle Management, Microsoft Silver Light 2.0, Building mobile applications with Visual Studio 2008, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation. These exciting technologies enable entirely new types of applications to be built in record time. With interoperability now available in today’s software development tools and platforms, understanding how to weave the various products and processes into a manageable and cost effective platform can be challenging. The session on Application Lifecycle management will tackle the licensing and process-centric questions that often arise in considering Visual Studio Team System 2008 for the first time, or integrating it into an existing Java or multi-platform environment. This session will also provide some best practices around developer desktop inventory management, integrating .NET and non-Microsoft toolsets; demystifying the decision-making process of Visual Studio Team System 2008. The session on building mobile applications with Visual Studio 2008 will explore the productive integration offered by VS2008 to enable product development and testing of mobile applications as well as exploring new additions to the mobile development platform. You will learn to create and integrate workflows into everyday applications using Windows Workflow Foundation. Discover the ability to create rich, visually stunning, interactive content and applications that run on multiple browsers and operating systems with Microsoft Silverlight 2.0. You will also learn about the benefits of Microsoft Silverlight from a developer perspective and get an introduction to building Microsoft Silverlight applications using JavaScript and C# using Microsoft developer and designer tools.

These sessions will target Developers, Architects and Web Designers be very much demonstration oriented, and will be delivered by seasoned developers with experience in Government and Public Sector. Seize this opportunity to immerse yourself amidst these exciting new technologies!

Who Should Attend

Developers, Architects and technical managers who wish to get an early look at the next advancement in Software Development. 

The Agenda

Microsoft will be hosting a Silverlight 1.0 Firestarter event in New York City this month on Saturday, January 26th!   If you missed the Firestarter event Microsoft hosted in the Philly area last month, this is your chance to make up for it.  This day long event is free to anyone who wants to learn about designing and developing with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 is a cross platform browser plug-in that enables for easy development of media rich web sites.  For more information, visit http://silverlight.net.

Mark your calendars now for January 26th.   Registration is now open!

REGISTER HERE

Here is the agenda:

8:30 am – 9:00 am - Breakfast

9:00 am - 10:45 am - Keynote

10:45 am – 11:45 am - Microsoft Expression Design Tools

11:45 am  – 12:45 pm - XAML Essentials for Silverlight

12:45 pm – 1:30 pm - Lunch

1:30 pm  – 2:30 pm - Developer Tools for Silverlight

2:30 pm  – 3:30 pm - Media, Markers and More

3:30 pm – 3:45 pm - Break

3:45 pm  – 4:45 pm - Silverlight and AJAX

4:45 pm  – 5:00 pm - Giveaways

Thursday, January 17, 2008
An introduction to Spring.NET

Subject: 
You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=122047 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
Spring.NET is an open source application framework that can help you more easily implement and design loosely coupled application architectures. Loosely coupled architectures bring to the table important advantages such as resiliency to changing requirements, ease in following agile practices such as test driven development, as well as lowering of maintenance costs. The central artifact in Spring.NET that delivers these benefits is the lightweight container – an object factory responsible for the creation, configuration, decoration and assembly of your application components. Building on this base, Spring.NET also provides solutions for other common infrastructure requirements to help increase productivity as well as promote loose coupling. These include support for Aspect Oriented Programming, ASP.NET development, ADO.NET data access, declarative transaction management, portable service abstractions, and integration testing.
The origins of Spring.NET come from the Java world where the Spring Framework has become the de facto standard for enterprise application development. The core concepts in the Spring Framework extend beyond the Java platform and are applicable to .NET. Inasmuch, Spring.NET combines the Spring Framework’s proven arc

Speaker: 
Mark Pollack, Interface21
Dr. Mark Pollack has worked extensively in the financial sector as an architect and developer on various front office trading systems that involved a mixture of Microsoft and Java technologies. Prior to joining Interface21, he was a founding partner at CodeStreet, LLC, an independent software vendor in the financial services industry. In 1991, Mark received a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Stony Brook University before continuing on to earn a Ph.D. in Experimental High-Energy Nuclear Physics from the same university in 1997.

Date: 
Thursday, January 17, 2008

Time: 
Reception 6:15 PM , Program 6:30 PM

Location:  
Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor

Directions:
B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr
1 to 50th St./Bway
N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

At the start of a new year we have an opportunity to be reflective and think about the experience of the past year and how we can spot trends and apply any lessons learned in the new year. At the start of 2008 I am equally reflective on the past year and what it has taught me. A lot has happened in the last year: I completed 75% of my MBA degree, I sold my company Corzen and find myself mired in a new startup, I traveled so much that the government had to give me a new passport, and I attended many weddings and unfortunately a few funerals of friends and loved ones.

While a lot has went on, I find myself looking at the impact of technology on my life and the world in general. In a year where blogs have helped shape the presidential debates and VOIP has made communication so much easier, the world has gotten smaller. Microsoft released new versions of Windows, Office and Visual Studio, and as usual I got to travel the world to explain it to developers. In the past year I got the pleasure to visit many countries and several parts of the United States.  As I visit these places, I develop close friendships. I seem to attend more weddings overseas then at home!

Because of technology, the world is smaller. You realize just how small the world is when major news becomes personal. For example minutes after Benazir Bhutto was killed, I received several text messages and emails from my friends and colleagues in Pakistan. A bomb goes off in Hyderabad, India, and Kim Tripp texts me that she is ok since she knows I know she is there.

Why I Love Technology

My career in technology is completely accidentals. I was studying for a PhD in History when I went to Wall Street after I graduated University to earn some money before I went to graduate school. I was in my managers office and he just wrote 20 reviews in a MS Word template and kept hitting “Save” not “Save As..” He asked me to retrieve the documents (but asked me not to read them since they were my and my colleagues annual reviews and bonus. I told him it was impossible since he overwrote them all. He told me to go report to the IT department the next day for a new (and better) job.  My knowledge of Save As in DOOM games got me my first technology job!

I love technology because technology is a great disruptive force. It levels the playing field. It creates new business models. It breaks up monopolies.  It makes the world smaller. Think of life 20 years ago in the United States. A political leader in another country is killed. What do you do? Turn on TV and get the “official” version of the story at 6pm or 11pm. In 2008 we get instant stories from local sources with videos of the event almost immediately on blogs from folks on the scene. We also have CNN and other networks. What if you want to call your loved ones overseas to see if they are ok? AT&T will charge you $3.55 a minute to connect to Pakistan. In 2008, there is no more AT&T as we knew them and it is free on Skype, or just $0.02 cents a minute on VOIP.

Take the music industry.  In the past you had to deal with the big, evil, monopoly RIAA. In 2008, artists are promoting their own music on MySpace and their own web sites and MP3 files are available for  $0.99 on iTunes or free if you are willing to break the law, but I still download free music to protest the RIAA. But now Radiohead broke the mold and bypassed the RIAA and record labels and posted their new album on the web and said that you can name your own price to download. How is that for a “strategic inflection point” for an industry?

The list goes on and on. Just try looking for a job today, who uses the newspaper anymore? Or the Yellow Pages? Technology creates a new opportunity for us all.

Do you believe that software can change the world?

I had the pleasure to work on a project in a small way that can greatly help society. Microsoft sponsored a project to be built by InterKnowlogy for The Scripps Research Institute. The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, is one of the largest private, nonprofit biomedical research organizations in the US and a world leader in the structure of biological molecules.  Scientists at Scripps Research wanted a better way to organize biological research information and share it with their colleagues.  InterKnowlogy developed an application built on .NET 3.0 with WPF, and Windows Vista giving scientists a powerful tool to visualize and annotate research results.  This application allowed for faster scientific collaboration, easier access to data and a dynamic development process.  (You can read the full case study on Microsoft.com.)

I came across this application about 18 months ago. It used technology to break down barriers in Cancer research. In the past if a doctor was looking at a sample, they would annotate it and then mail it to other doctors who would look at it and mail it to more doctors. This is called “peer review” and is very important, but it takes a ton of time. InterKnowlogy built an app that used SharePoint, Office 2007 and WPF to make this collaboration instant and permanent. The application is speeding up the peer review and collaboration to levels not imagined just a few years ago. It was so impactful that Tim, the owner of InterKnowlogy got to help Steve Ballmer in New York with the Vista launch. I was invited to hang with the big boys since Tim, via technology, is a good friend of mine.

I then suggested to someone at Microsoft that they should help pay for phase II of the application. They liked it so much that they “hired” me (for free!) to recruit a virtual team of four developers overseas to help Tim with Phase II. I put out a call for developers on my blog, nothing else. I got hundreds of responses. Ultimately I referred four developers, one each from: Egypt, Mexico, Poland, and India. Microsoft paid their salaries and Tim gave them tasks to do. They worked on it for six months and came up with an amazing application. We went on .NET Rocks this summer to talk about it.

Later this year I met the Polish developer in Bulgaria at a conference. Tim hired him and now he is working full time at InterKnowlogy. When he met me he told me point blank that I changed his life. I was moved by that and realized the power of technology. Not only did we work together to cure cancer by empowering doctors and researchers, we were helping people in other countries get new jobs that make a difference and more money, all from home.

How Technology Will Change the Future

This is the tip of the iceberg. This is what little old me could accomplish in 2007; I was able to put together a team of developers from three continents and really help cure cancer (the doctor from Scripps will probably get the Nobel Prize) without leaving my house. What can you do?

I have spoken at many user groups over the last 12 years. The last time I was the speaker at the first meeting of a user group was when I founded the predecessor to the NYC .NET User Group, the NYC Access & VB Users Group in April 1995.

I am honored to be speaking at the first ever .Network.org user group in Cairo, Egypt on Tuesday December 11th.

Thursday, November 15, 2007 Silverlight 101: What, Where and How
Subject:	You must register at http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=120984 in order to be admitted to the building and attend. This session will include an overview of Silverlight – What is it? Where did it come from? and how do I develop for it. Topics will include the current state of Web Development (customer expectations, developer view, designer view), Coding with Silverlight (XAML, C#, JavaScript), Silverlight Development Tools (Expression Product Suites/Visual Studio) as well as some live demos/ and hands on coding. Both versions of Silverlight(1.0 & 1.1) will be covered.
Speaker:	David Isbitski, Industry Platform Team, Microsoft David is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft working on the Industry Platform Team covering both Financial Services and Health/Life Sciences Industries. He has over 12 years total IT experience and has been creating enterprise solutions with Microsoft Products since Visual Basic 5. He enjoys talking about technology and has taught full day courses on various Microsoft topics as well as being a presenter at numerous Microsoft Events including MSDN RoadShows, Code Camps and Remix.
Date:	Thursday, November 15, 2007
Time:	Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
Location:	Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor
Directions:	B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

I am speaking next week at TechEd in