 Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Announcing the NYC Agile Firestarter
Are you just starting out with Agile, XP or Scrum and need to get up to speed? Or do you know a thing or two about Agile but want to learn the basics so you can implement it in your organization? Then this Firestarter is for you. We’ll take you from 0 to 60 in 8 hours. Bring a laptop with Visual Studio 2008 Express edition or better for an all day hands on seminar led by some of the NY area’s Agile practitioners. When: Saturday June 27th Where: Kaye Scholer LLP
425 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10022 Time: Registration and welcome 8:30am Cost: $8 (to cover the pizza and materials) To Register: http://agilefirestarter2009.eventbrite.com Agenda: • Registration and Welcome • Intro to Agile (Steve Bohlen) • Agile Estimation (Steve Forte) • Test Driven Development (Steve Bohlen) • Pizza! • Continuous Integration (Alex Hung) • Refactoring (Mark Pollack) • Dependency Injection (Mark Pollack) • Retrospective Erik Stepp • Wrap up Register today, space is limited! More info is here: http://www.agilefirestarter.net
Monday, May 04, 2009
11 TechEd Sessions next week-hope to see you there
I will be doing 11 sessions at TechEd in Los Angeles next week: four breakouts and one TLC, plus 6 panels. I will also be a speaker idol judge. Should be a lot of fun! Here are the sessions, notice the 9am Monday morning session on stored procedures, should be a cool discussion: Full Breakouts: DAT403
What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Stephen Forte and Richard Campbell
5/11/2009 1:00PM-2:15PM
Room 151
DAT312
Solve Problems without Spending Money: Microsoft Office Access and Microsoft SQL Server
Mary Chipman; Stephen Forte
5/12/2009 2:45PM-4:00PM
Room 403A DPR206 Tech·Ed Daily Scrum Stephen Forte 5/13/2009 10:15AM-11:30AM Room 515B
DAT401
Data Access Hacks and Shortcuts
Stephen Forte
5/15/2009 10:45AM-12:00PM
Room 502A
Technical Learning Center Session: DPR04-INT
Tools and Agile Teams
Stephen Forte and Joel Semeniuk
5/11/2009 4:30PM-5:45PM
Blue Thr 2 On-Line Panels. If you are not attending TechEd, they usually post these online to view for free: PAN67
The Pros and Cons of Stored Procedures
Adam Machanic; Jeffrey Palermo; Maciej Pilecki; Michael Wang; Stephen Forte; Tobias Ternstrom
5/11/2009 9:00AM-10:00AM
501C PAN59
Agile: A Process or an Excuse?
Chris Menegay; Joel Semeniuk; Richard Campbell; Stephen Forte
5/11/2009 11:00AM-12:00PM
501C
PAN62
The Most Persistent Microsoft SQL Server Myths (And Why They Are Wrong)
Adam Machanic; Maciej Pilecki; Michael Wang; Stephen Forte; Tobias Ternstrom
5/12/2009 9:00AM-10:00AM
501C
PAN53
The World Turned Upside Down: Development Strategies for Lean Times
Armen Stein; Kent Alstad; Luke Chung; Mary Chipman; Paul Sheriff; Rockford Lhotka; Stephen Forte
5/13/2009 1:00PM-2:00PM
501C PAN58 Migrating Your Data Tier to SQL Server: Strategies for Survival Armen Stein; Luke Chung; Mary Chipman; Richard Campbell; Stephen Forte 5/13/2009 9:00AM-10:00AM 501C
PAN65
The Data Access Menu: Making Intelligent Choices
Kent Alstad; Paul Sheriff; Richard Campbell; Rockford Lhotka; Stephen Forte
5/13/2009 2:00PM-3:00PM
501C
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Video Drivers, Prison Riots, and Silverlight
I am over in Bangalore, India speaking at the Great Indian Developer Conference, and as I get on stage for my first session my laptop does not project to the monitor. Oh well, I guess I have to reduce my five gazillion by one trillion screen resolution. Still not working. Tried the old reliable, rebooting. Still no dice. We try another laptop just to make sure it is me, not the monitor, sure enough it is me. I was the first speaker at the conference and now the conference organizer is sweating. He offers his laptop and I say as long as you have SP1 on it. He said, Windows XP SP1? I was like, not that SP1, Visual Studio 2008 SP1. No dice. Now I was sweating (it was 40C/104F). Did I mention that my session is now 5 minutes late? I determine it is my Win7 video driver and give up trying. I decide to let fate take over. I make an announcement: “Anyone in the audience have a laptop that I can borrow? One that has a lot of ram and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 installed?” Blank stares. Now I am getting nervous, brought me back to a time in 2001 where I demoed beta2 of .NET without .NET installed on my machine. Time to hand wave and make jokes about George Bush. (That always worked in Egypt.) Then my hero showed up. Prashant lent me his laptop and we got going and life was good. I had to borrow the generic AV laptop for my Scrum session later in the day and Satheesh lent me his for my last session on Data Access hacks and shortcuts. In Belgium at TechDays Joel did an agile talk with no slides: I wrote the slides on the fly (we were being agile!) Now I will start speaking at conferences without a laptop! (Er, maybe not.) Last night in my hotel the TV talked about a prison riot. Don’t ask me why, but prison riots always get my attention. I watched the story and it turns out that the inmates were not complaining about the conditions, they were complaining that they were not allowed to watch cricket. Yes, cricket. So I started to pay attention. The next story was about a huge win by Chennai in the Indian Premier League (IPL). (Yes more cricket.) Then the next story was about a flamboyant bollywood star who owns a team. They were caught with Paris Hilton or something, but the point was the news wanted to know how this would affect his team. More cricket. Did I mention that there are major national elections going on in India tomorrow. These elections will determine who is the next Prime Minister, but the news can only talk about cricket. So I did some more investigation. The IPL was started last year. It is an Indian professional league for cricket-club based, representing cities. This is a new concept in India and has been wildly successful. The opening matches were only played a few days ago and season two is under way. Talking to a finance guy about the IPL today, I discovered that the larger markets attracted larger investors who spent a ton of money and have huge payrolls (sounds like the Yankees.) So the smallest market, Rajasthan, the team with the smallest payroll, are the defending champions (sounds almost like the Tampa Bay Rays.) I was about done with my IPL education when I came across this blog post by fellow Regional Director Vinod Unny. The IPL web site, a site with more hits than you can imagine, streams the matches using Silverlight. The site also has a pretty cool interactive Silverlight based scoreboard where you can get real time stats and drill down into a player’s history. There are even tons of photos using deep zoom. Pretty awesome stuff (even thought it is cricket!) IPLT20.com is estimated to get over 400 million unique page views from 45 million visits and 10 million unique visitors during this tournament. A huge win for Silverlight and proof that i can’t get away from technology ever, even when investigating a prison riot….
Friday, April 10, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Hit me baby, one more time….
I have been on the road since Feb 1, visiting customers, speaking at conferences, and attending the MVP summit. I am in-between flights and finally found *the* video, the video of Sasha and I singing “Baby one more time..” at the EMP in Seattle. For those of you who where not there, there is a rock band called “rock and roll-aoke ” where you sing karaoke with a live rock band. So no matter how bad you are, you still sound ok. MVPs lined up to sing with the band. I was trying to find folks to come sing Britney Spears with me. Only Sasha Krsmanovic was brave enough. Sasha signed us up to sing. But unfortunately we were like 10th on the list at 11pm when the EMP was closing. No Britney! :( Enter Paulette Suddarth. Paulette runs the MVP summit and we drafted her to come sing. Somehow she was able to bribe the band to push our names up on the list and we were the closing act. Lots of RDs came up on stage to help! Thanks to Darcy for taking the video and posting it.
Monday, February 23, 2009
The Importance of Code Camp in a recession
I received an email from the Mix registration group that my 3rd night at the hotel will be free. Good marketing tactic on the Mix team’s part, this will help people justify the travel if the travel expense is lower. Many have argued that the live in-person event is dead, due to a sharp recession and free ways to learn like web casts and blogs, etc. I think reports of live events death are incorrect. Humans are social and need interaction. We need to go to events to talk to each other, complain about Microsoft’s data access strategy, and see if speakers will embarrass themselves. But I think that the days of the large industry trade show (CES) and large industry events (PDC, TechEd, Mix) are numbered. What will replace them? Code Camps. The NYC .NET User Group that I am a co-moderator ran a Code Camp in January. There have been several other code camps in the past few months and they have all been very popular and well attended. Code Camps started as a way to supplement the monthly user group meeting. They are community driven. Now people are attending in larger numbers since they can’t justify a travel budget. What I also found what attendees liked about code camp was the ability of the Code Camp to present some alternative points of view (we had some open source sessions and some sessions that would never make it to TechEd since they may have said a bad thing or two about MS in the session.) The attendees also liked the agility of the event, open spaces, and discussions. Emerging markets are now doing Code Camps. I just attended and spoke at the Cairo, Egypt based .netWork’s code camp last week. Based about 45 Km out of Cairo, about 500 people took off work and traveled to attend the free event 2-day even. Four international speakers came as well as several local speakers. It was a great event and run at a very low cost. Even better is that it got technical education to people who desperately need it. I think that in a down economy, Code Camps are going to be more and more important and continue to evolve. Industry events will not die, but they will change in size and scope to be smaller and more agile. Code Camps will force “Conference 2.0.” As a conference speaker myself, it will be great to see what that looks like.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Women in Technology: MDC New York: This Tuesday
The Microsoft MSDN DevCon is this Tuesday. All you women attending, we will have a special Women In Technology event running in tandem sponsored by Lego. You can catch a video of me talking about women in technology here.
Friday, January 16, 2009
An Open Letter to “Rich”
Recently I have been getting comment spam in my blog. I would like to think that my blogs gets millions of hits and I am super popular, but I realize that I have only a few thousand loyal readers on Feedburner (thanks for reading!) and sometimes I get syndicated on theregion.com or someone like Roger Jennigns posts a link to one of my essays. So my blog should not be all that much of a spam target. Richard Campbell made a real blog post about a product his company was working about a month ago. Since then there has been targeted comment spam on several blogs, including mine. Someone calling themselves “Rich” is reposting that blog post over and over in the comments of several blogs of people in the .NET community, including mine. “Rich” is most likely doing this manually since I use Captcha for comments and Gravatar icons. “Rich” has reposted this spam on all of my posts for the last month. I have went in and manually deleted them all. Due to “Rich” I now am enabling the approval process for comments into my blog. So an open message to “Rich” Just go away. You are making the community spend time on worthless tasks, like deleting your spam. We will find you, what you may not know is that we have been on this at an ISP level for a few weeks now, logging your requests and getting the real IP address you are hiding behind. The ISPs who host the blogs that you are spamming are all coordinating and will find you and shut you down. Why not make yourself useful and write a virus that takes down bin laden’s servers and leave us alone.
Monday, January 12, 2009
NYC .NET Developer Group: Code Camp Recap and Next Meeting: This Thursday
The NYC .NET Developer Group Code Camp III went off great. Thanks to our sponsors Infragistics and Code Project. Even though we had 7 inches of snow predicted, all the speakers showed up and we had well over 200 attendees and gave away a lot of SWAG. We rounded off the day with a .NET Rocks interview of the NJ (not NY!) user group/MVP community. (I called it the Jersey Boys crash the NY code camp!) I made Carl ask them each which exit they are from. (That is an inside NY joke. <g>) On the heels of our successful code camp, we are doing our normal monthly meeting this week! Since I did not speak at Code Camp and we were so busy planning code camp, we figured that I can do the talk on Thursday so save planning. Here goes: Thursday, January 15, 2009
Data Access Hacks and Shortcuts
You *must* register for this event: Registration site: http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=134659
Event Code: 134659 Subject:
Struggling with Data Access? Who isn’t? Come and see some Data Access hacks and shortcuts that will make your life easier! In a high energy demo-only session, Stephen shows: how a mere mortal can pass a custom .Net collection to a stored procedure, improves your LINQ queries with Lambdas and expression trees, making complex data models easier to manage in the Entity Framework, creative Sliverlight databinding with LINQ to REST, and transforming your database back end to get enormous performance and productivity enhancements. This is data access for the 21st century! Speaker will also provide guidance along the way about ORMs, LINQ, and EF and encourage Q&A. Speaker:
Stephen Forte, Telerik
Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, a leading vendor in .NET components. He sits on the board of several start-ups including Triton Works and is also a certified scrum master. Prior he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a New York based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Corzen was acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN) in 2007. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press). Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. He currently an MVP, INETA speaker and is the co-moderator and founder of the NYC .NET Developer User Group. Stephen has an MBA from the City University of New York. Date:
Thursday, January 15, 2009 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.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Run this Holiday SQL
--Thanks Guntherb for the SQL Query! with FirstTable as (select top 14 row_number() over (order by name) therow from master.sys.objects)
, SecondTable as (select replicate(char(32),15) theLine)
, ThirdTable as (Select replicate(char(124),3) theOtherLine)
, ForthTable as (
select (
select left(db_name(4),1) ) + (
select substring(db_name(2),2,1) ) + (
Select replicate(substring(db_name(1),6,1),2) ) + (
Select replace(schema_name(4),'s','') ) + (
select char(max_length * 2) from master.sys.types where system_type_id = 36) + (
select top 1 substring(wait_type,10,2) from master.sys.dm_os_wait_stats where wait_type like 'PageIo%' ) + (
Select substring(@@version,4,1) ) + (
Select substring(object_name(55),4,2) ) + (
Select convert(char(1),(reverse(convert(char(7),name)))) from sys.configurations where configuration_id = 124 ) + (
Select left(db_name(1),3) ) theEnd
)
select case therow
when 11 then stuff( theLine,(datalength(theLine)/2) - 1,3,TheOtherLine)
when 13 then upper(theEnd )
else stuff( theLine,(datalength(theLine)/2) - (theRow/2),therow,replicate(char(42),therow)) end ' '
from firstTable
cross join SecondTable
cross join ThirdTable
cross join ForthTable
where therow%2!=0
Friday, December 12, 2008
NYC Code Camp! January 10th
The New York City Code Camp is planned for Saturday January 10th. We have had an open call for speakers and are going to close it out over this weekend. If you want to be considered to speak, please do send a proposal now. Please send your session abstracts by Sunday December 14th to:
proposalsnyc@codecamp.us
Please create a word doc named yourlastname_abstract01.doc and mail it to proposalsnyc@codecamp.us.
Replace 01 with 02 if you have more than 1 abstract. Replace yourlastname with your real last name. (I have to say this, you would
be surprised. <g>) Put in the doc:
Name:
Session Title:
Audience/Track:
Level:
Abstract:
Demos:
Demo 1 blah blah
Bio: Registration will be announced at http://nyc.codecamp.us/ soon.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
MSDN Developer Conference - New York City on January 20th
Cloud computing, Software plus services, Windows Azure, SQL Services, Live Services, Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 Framework, etc, etc…. Did you miss all of the news coming out of the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles last month? Or, maybe you caught some of it, but were so overwhelmed by the fire hose of information, you weren’t able to digest it all? (My brain is STILL on overload from all the new technology announcements & demos.) Have no fear, if you weren’t able to make it to the PDC, now is your opportunity to learn about all of the latest developer technologies from Microsoft in a city near you! A fantastic series of one-day conferences is coming to 11 cities across the US. The MSDN Developer Conference features 12 sessions in three tracks: -
Cloud Services
Use Windows Azure, Live Mesh, and more to create apps that bridge the gaps between PC, Web, and phone -
Client and Presentation
See the state of the art and future plans for ASP.NET 4.0, WPF, and Silverlight -
Tools, Languages and Framework
Learn about Visual Studio 2010, Language Futures, Oslo, and Parallel Programming
Think of this as the greatest hits of PDC coming to you! A full day of content for $99. And of course some nice giveaways as well. New York City’s Turn As one of the 11 cities in the series, our local event will be in New York City on January 20th at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. We have a great line-up of speakers on tap for New York, including: The Sessions Cloud Services
Client and Presentation
Tools, Languages and Framework Lap Around Cloud Services
Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) Roadmap
The Future of Managed Languages: F#, C#, and Visual Basic Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services
Developing Data-centric Applications WPF
A Lap Around "Oslo" (I am presenting) A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
Building Business Focused Applications using Silverlight 2
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010 Developing Applications Using Data Services (I am presenting)
ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap
Parallel Programming for Managed Code Developers
Monday, December 08, 2008
NJ ASP.NET Fire Starter-This Saturday
 If you missed the MVC Fire Starters in New York and Philadelphia over the past few months, I’m happy to announce that the ASP.NET MVC Fire Starter is coming to central Jersey next Saturday, December 13th. This is your opportunity to come out and learn about the new ‘old’ way of building web applications on ASP.NET! Feedback from the New York & Philly events were great. Due to popular demand for this topic, we’re bringing the content to Jersey.
Thanks to Infragistics, we are able to host the Fire Starter at their headquarters in East Windsor, NJ. If you’re from north or south Jersey, this is smack in the middle of the state right off Exit 8 on the NJ Turnpike. So come on out for a full day of learning about MVC. The ASP.NET MVC framework recently reached official beta status (after 5 ‘preview’ releases over the past year). The content has been tweaked and updated based on feedback from Philly & New York. | Location: Infragistics Corporate Headquarters
Windsor Corporate Park
50 Millstone Road
Auditorium Building 100
East Windsor, NJ 08520 Saturday, December 13, 2008 9:30 AM–5:00 PM | 
| 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
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. Detailed Agenda: - ASP.NET MVC Introduction
- The MVC Design Pattern
- Hello World Demo – Walking through routing, controllers, and views
- Framework Fundamentals & Practices
- C# 3.0 Primer
- Anonymous Classes
- Lambda Expressions
- Extention Methods
- LINQ
- Dependency Injection
- Routing & Controllers
- Routing 101
- Controllers – Actions & ActionResults
- Controllers & TDD
- Rendering Markup
- Views (using WebForm tools)
- Extensibility with View Engines
- Working with Data
- Creating & Submitting Forms
- UI Helpers
- Building Rich Web Interfaces
- Applying AJAX Helper extensions
- Walkthrough of ASP.NET AJAX + MVC Extensions
- Enhancing MVC with jQuer
- Action Filters & applying to AJAX
Monday, November 17, 2008
NYC .NET Developers User Group-> Meeting Thursday
Data Access Smackdown
Subject:
You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=132141 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
Microsoft introduced several new data access technologies in .NET 3.5 SP1. Which one should you use? Entity Framework? Dynamic Data? ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)? Linq? POADN? (Plain old ADO .NET) What about ORMs? Has Microsoft lost its mind? Join Stephen in a discussion on Data Access Methodologies for the 21st Century, including a discussion of ATOM over REST. Note: This will require some audience participation. Speaker:
Stephen Forte, Telerik
Stephen Forte is Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, a leading vendor in .NET components. Prior to his position at Telerik, Stephen was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a New York based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Corzen was acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN) in 2007. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (MS Press). Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder and CTO of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. He is currently an MVP, INETA speaker and is the co-moderator and founder of the NYC .NET Developer Group. Stephen has an MBA from the City University of New York (Baruch College). Stephen is also a certified scrum master. Date:
Thursday, November 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.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Tech*ED Europe Schedule
Over the years I have spoken at over 15 Tech*Eds in North America, Europe, and Asia. My favorite place to speak is hands down Barcelona. Mostly because the good show TechEd Europe puts on, but of also the audience, and the fun city that Barcelona is. Not so sure I will like it this year, I have eight sessions at TechEd! Wow, they are working me hard. Apparently they are repeating a few sessions due to delegates voting on the sessions, so all I can say is THANK YOU and hopefully you will all get a lot of value from the sessions. A lot of my sessions are interactive, and I mean that. At the Daily Scrum talks we will be passing around a microphone and it will be 100% Q&A, war stories, and interactive, no slides if I can help it. (Come on, ask a lot of questions, tell a lot of war stories make my week a little easier!) I am a certified Scrum Master and use it every day at Telerik, so if you are just curious, getting started, or in the trenches with Scrum, this is a great session for you. The Using Scrum session is more of an overview, but I would love some interaction and Q&A there as well. The CTE and T-SQL sessions are brand new content and geared to developers: both application developers (C# and VB) and database developers (T-SQL programmers/DBA types), basically anyone who writes TSQL at some point during the day. (And even thought they are titled 2008, you can use most techniques in SQL 2005.) Hopefully they will not only show you some shortcuts, but also some creative ways of thinking. If you are coming from a strict C# and VB perspective, remember I started my life as a VB 3.0 programmer 15 years ago-not a database/TSQL developer, so I gear the session to a wide audience. In the TSQL Enhancements session, I have some pretty cool ADO. NET shortcuts. And what is this Smackdown session? It is less of a smackdown and more of an overview of the crazy world of Microsoft Data Access. I was given carte-blanche by the TechEd planners, so anything goes!! I’ll be reviewing all of the SP1 technology (EF, LINQ to Entities, Astoria, LINQ to REST, Dynamic Data) and also take a walk down memory lane to use the historical context to try to predict what is next. Don’t worry we can talk about the EF Vote of No Confidence and my experiences on the EF Council. I am going to reserve the final 15 minutes or so for a group discussion on the future of data access, is it EF/LINQ, is it ORM, is it EF, or is it something different? We also take a peek at Cloud Data and its role in all of this. If you make it to Friday afternoon at 3:15 for the Scrum talk, bring beer.We’ll need it. Here are the sessions: | DAT01-IS | T-SQL: Tips and Tricks Sharing Fest! | Interactive Session | Database Platform | 11/10/2008 5:45PM - 7:00PM | | DVP04-IS | Tech·Ed Daily Scrum! | Interactive Session | Development Practices | 11/11/2008 9:00AM - 10:15AM | | DVM309 | Using Scrum to Run Your Projects | Breakout Session | Developer Managers | 11/11/2008 1:30PM - 2:45PM | | DAT313 | T-SQL Enhancements in SQL Server 2008 : Getting Down and Dirty | Breakout Session | Database Platform | 11/12/2008 1:30PM - 2:45PM | | DAT404 | Rockstar Common Table Expressions in SQL Server 2008 | Breakout Session | Database Platform | 11/13/2008 9:00AM - 10:15AM | | DAT01-IS (R) | T-SQL: Tips and Tricks Sharing Fest! | Interactive Session | Database Platform | 11/13/2008 1:30PM - 2:45PM | | DAT02-IS | Data Access Smackdown | Interactive Session | Database Platform | 11/14/2008 10:45AM - 12:00PM | | DVP04-IS (R) | Tech·Ed Daily Scrum! | Interactive Session | Development Practices | 11/14/2008 3:15PM - 4:30PM |
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Walking on Fire or Don’t Drink with Serbians (European Tour Update)
I am back from a 16 day, three country, three conference European tour. It was a lot of fun and the community is alive and well in Europe and I am looking forward to TechEd in Spain. First stop was in Amsterdam for the SDC, well actually Noordwijkerhout, but that is impossible to pronounce and it is “close to Amsterdam” as is everything is in that tiny country. They let me do the keynote (on Astoria and REST) and also speak on Scrum and SQL. There was an obligatory visit with Miguel “look at me!” Castro and Peter Bahaa to the Red Light District. Yes, there was a lot of stories about sex and drugs, but Carl Franklin randomly showed up at the SDC, so we told all on an upcoming episode of DNR, so catch it there. I then moved on to Sofia, Bulgaria. The girl came in for the weekend and we did some sightseeing in Sofia and Plovdiv. Polvdiv predates ancient Rome and Istanbul, it is an ancient city with fabulous ruins. Monday brought DevReach 2008. Once again they let me do the keynote, not sure why. But I decided to have some fun with the audience. I told them that I love Bulgarian women (true) and that I met one the night before at the bar and got her phone number. I then put up a photo of Miss Bulgaria. Then I say that she taught me how to speak Bulgarian. I said that she taught me how to say “Welcome to DevReach!” What I then said was : Аз съм глупав и дебел американец (I am a stupid, fat American.) Brought down the house, kinda forgot what the Keynote was about. After three more breakout sessions, Tim Huckaby and I spoke to the computer science majors at Sofia University. We had a total hoot and took questions as diverse as “will Apple sue Microsoft over the Surface” and “Why is Microsoft not Open Source” to “What do you think of Android?” 
After that there was a nice dinner where a lot of booze was drank. Then something crazy happened. Maciej Pilecki walked on hot fire coals. Here are some photos from Steve Smith: 
This photo is dark but Maciej and I just walked over the coals, but quickly. The performer and us pose for a photo. I think “ok I survived.” 
But then as you can see he decides to make us walk one last time, very slow. My feet were ok, but they were black for two days. So first of all, after I did this, everyone said “I saw that on myth busters!” They say: “IT IS EASY, MYTHBUSTERS SAID SO! MIND OVER MATTER!” I have one thing to say to all of them: DO IT YOURSELF AND GET BACK TO ME. The next night featured the attendee party at the Piano Bar in Sofia, and Carl played and sang “New York State of Mind” for me. Then it was off to Novi Sad, Serbia for Sinergija 08. I did a few sessions on SQL and Scrum and for the last session of the conference, I was down to drinking beer and brought a case of beer to my session and gave one away to anyone who asked a question. The first question was “Can I have a beer?” Damn Serb outsmarting me. After the conference I went out drinking with the Sinergija event staff and learned the hard way not to drink with Serbians. Then we drove to Belgrade and I spent the day sightseeing before the long journey home. 
These three events were a great experience and the Microsoft community in Central and Eastern Europe is alive and well!
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Back from Mt. Everest-Fall Speaking Schedule
I am back safe and sound from Mt. Everest. You can catch some good photos here. I have to turn around and head to Seattle for meetings with the Connected Systems Division and an SDR. The Fall schedule looks like this: - Oct 6th and 7th, Software Development Conference, Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands (3 sessions plus the Keynote)
- Oct 13th and 14th, DevReach, Sofia, Bulgaria (3 sessions plus the Keynote)
- Oct 27th-30th PDC Los Angeles, CA (I am just attending for a change!)
- Nov 10th-14th, Tech*Ed Europe Barcelona, Spain (5 sessions)
- Nov 20th NYC .NET Developers Group New York, NY (1 Session)
- Dec 2nd-Dec 5th DevTeach Montreal, PQ (3 sessions)
- Dec 10th Fairfield / Westchester SQL Server User Group Stamford, CT (1 session)
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Data Programmability Group's Advisory Council Meeting This Week
This week is the meeting of the Data Programmability Group's Advisory Council. I'll be headed out to Seattle to participate in a conversation with the Data Programmability team on the next version of Microsoft's data access strategy, including the Entity Framework. Roger Jennings today pointed out that my dismissal of ORM in general led him to wonder why I was chosen for the Data Programmability Group's Advisory Council. My pal Julie Lerman emailed me a few months ago asking "I did not know you were a DDD guy?" I was glad that Danny Simmons asked me to be on the council since I have participated on several data access councils at Microsoft over the years (Including one with Roger Jennings about 11 years ago.) I've watched Microsoft move from ODBC, DAO, RDO, ODBCDirect, OLE DB, ADO.NET and now to a more conceptual model. Sure I am not a true DDD guy and I do tend to dismiss ORM in general, so my views will insert a different view point into the conversation. Why have a council that is all the same? The whole point of this conversation is to have a dialog and listen to each other (and learn from each other.) By discussing our use cases with Microsoft, we can help them make better design decisions, and refine our own views. Anything else is just dogma.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Why is the short guy in the back?
 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.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Successful IT Architect Regional Conference in New York
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.
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
ASP.NET MVC Firestarter in New York City June 7th
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: 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
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
NYC .NET Developers User Group Meeting this Thursday
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.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Montreal Visual Studio User Group Monday
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 
Friday, May 02, 2008
Are Ruby on Rails' Days are Numbered at big sites?
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.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
The New York IT Architect Regional Conference
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: 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
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Speaking at the NYC SQL Server User Group Tonight
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.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Yahoo's New Home
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.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
NYC .NET User Group Meeting Thursday
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.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
RIP Stephen Goodwin
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.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Techdays 2008
Next week I will be in Lisbon, Portugal speaking at Techdays 2008.All my stuff is listed in Portuguese, I hope they realize I dont speak Portuguese. :) Will be doing three sessions:
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Microsoft Developer Conference - Albany, NY - March 12 2008
Venue 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 | Time | Topic | | 08:30-09:00 | Registration | | 09:00-10:15 | Demystifying the Microsoft Application Lifecycle Management Platform | | 10:15-10:30 | Break | | 10:30-12:00 | Building Rich Internet Applications Using Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 | | 12:00-13:00 | Lunch | | 13:00-14:30 | Building Mobile Applications with Visual Studio 2008 | | 14:30–16:00 | What's New in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow (WF) in Visual Studio 2008 & the .NET Framework 3.5 |
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Silverlight 1.0 Firestarter Coming to NYC January 26th
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.
![clip_image002[6]](http://smallandmighty.net/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/366ae01d4e54_10903/clip_image002%5B6%5D_thumb.gif) 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
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
NYC .NET Developers User Group-> Next Meeting
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.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Welcome 2008: Do you believe that software can change the world?
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?
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
.Network.org user group launch! (Cairo, Egypt)
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.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group-> Next Meeting
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Silverlight 101: What, Where and How |
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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.
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| 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.
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| Date: |
Thursday, November 15, 2007
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| Time: |
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
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| 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. |
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
TechEd Developers-Europe
I am speaking next week at TechEd in Barcelona, Spain.
DAT302 Database Design Patterns: Architecting the Right Data Model for the Right Application
Mon, Nov 5 17:45 - 19:00 Tent 1
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.
DAT315 T-SQL Querying: Tips and Techniques
Tue, Nov 6 17:00 - 18:15 Room 117
Take your queries to the next level! This highly technical, yet entertaining session focuses solely on advanced querying techniques to get the most out of your SQL Server 2005 database. See a series of real-world examples to extract data from your databases in ways you've never seen before. Techniques demonstrated include an ultra-fast way to do crosstab queries in SQL Server, running totals and ranking. Along the way you'll get some insight into how SQL Server works and we’ll preview some of the new capabilities in SQL Server 2008 (“Katmai”).
WEB02-IS Top Ten ASP.NET Scaling Tips
Wed, Nov 7 15:45 - 17:00 Room 112
This interactive session pulls together the best methods for improving the scalability of your ASP.NET Web site. See a variety of techniques, including caching, pooling, paging and asynchronous processing. But more importantly, learn a method for ranking each of the techniques according to the benefit to your Web site. By comparing the potential benefit of a technique with its cost to implement, this interactive session will give you a plan for what to do next to most improve your site’s performance.
Monday, October 22, 2007
October 23rd New York IASA Meeting
Topic: Database Design Patterns: Architecting the Right Data Model for the Right Application
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. The presentation will include 5 demos that cover:
1. A Slowly Changing Dimension
2. Fact Tables
3. Horizontal Partitioning
4. Table and Index Partitioning
5. Vertical Partitioning
To find out how to design the right database structure for the right situation come to the meeting.
Presenter: Stephen Forte.
Stephen is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a Manhattan (USA) based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Corzen was recently acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN). Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on database development including Programming SQL Server 2005 (MS Press) and is working on Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press). Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder and CTO of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. He currently is the co-moderator and founder of the NYC .NET Developer User Group. Stephen is also an MBA candidate (June 2008) at the City University of New York (Baruch College).
Location: The meeting will be held at Microsoft, 1290 Avenue of the Americas on the 6th floor starting at 6PM. You must RSVP to wzack at microsoft.com in order to be admitted to the meeting and so that we will know how much pizza and soda to order. J
Sponsor: Our sponsor for the meeting will be Sogeti USA. If you know of any other companies who would like to sponsor a meeting in the future please let us know.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group-> Next Meeting
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Using Blend and Visual Studio 2005 to Build Distributed WPF Applications |
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| Subject: |
This session will provide an overview of the .NET 3.0 framework with special focus paid to Windows Presentation Foundation. The demos will show the new IDE, user controls, and data binding with tiered architecture to demonstrate WPF as a rich user interface technology for developers using Visual Studio or Blend.
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| Speaker: |
Asli Bilgin, Microsoft Platform Strategy team
Asli Bilgin is an industry recognized speaker on the latest advancements with Microsoft technologies. She currently serves on Microsoft’s Platform Strategy team for Financial Services. In this role, she advises the leading banking and capital market companies on the best practices for technology strategies. Asli is a well-respected speaker at international technology conferences, and serves as a contributing editor to various technical publications. She recently worked with CNET to host the video series: “At The Whiteboard” – an overview into Microsoft’s latest developer tools including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System, and Internet Information Server 7.0. She’s also created and hosted DVD box sets for training series sets covering Visual Studio and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX with Total Training. Her book “Mastering Database Programming With Visual Basic.NET," (Sybex) has been translated into six languages and serves as the curriculum for college and post-graduate institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and India.
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| Date: |
Thursday, October 18, 2007
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| Time: |
Reception 6:15 PM , Program 6:30 PM
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| 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.
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Monday, September 24, 2007
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group-> Next Meeting
Thursday, August 16, 2007
WPF - The Beauty of the Beast |
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| Subject: |
You must register at http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=120204 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the user interface subsystem of the .NET 3.0 Framework. Its architecture requires you to rethink how to design and develop in the presentation layer. In this presentation we will explore the exciting new UI framework, learn what capabilities it has, and examine some tools used in WPF development.
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| Speaker: |
Josh Smith, New York Times (TimesReader Team)
Josh Smith has been developing desktop applications in C# since the .NET Framework was first released. He was awarded the Microsoft MVP and CodeProject MVP titles in 2007 for his work in the WPF community. Josh has been a WPF fanatic since it was in pre-beta, and has helped share his enthusiasm for WPF with others via CodeProject articles and blog posts. He worked for a couple of years at Infragistics, as a developer in their Windows Forms Development Lab. During that time he became deeply interested in user interface technologies and design. After that he had a brief stint as a software consultant in the financial services industry, but found that it did not tickle his fancy. He did, however, have the rare opportunity to create a WPF application for the Elite Model Management agency, which was shown in a video at the Microsoft Windows Vista launch events. Josh is currently working for the New York Times on their fantastic Times Reader application, which uses WPF for the presentation layer. You can visit his WPF blog at http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com
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| Date: |
Thursday, August 16, 2007
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| Time: |
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
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| 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.
|
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group Meeting-> Thursday
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Distributed Caching: Essential Lessons |
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| Subject: |
In this presentation, we will cover application development considerations for maximum scalable performance and reliability in clustered .NET environments. This presentation focuses on improving scalability and scalable performance of applications through the use of clustered caching and data grids to reliably share live data among clustered application nodes, providing transparent fail-over as a key element of uninterrupted operation and reduced load on the database tier as a key element of scalability. We will also discuss how you can simply improve performance and scalability of the existing ASP.NET applications by storing session state in a data grid.
The presentation will focus on:
Caching Topologies: the limitations, trade-offs and benefits
Cache aside, read/write through and write behind architectures, where and when to use
Use cases and a topology quiz
Scaling ASP.NET web applications
The 12 essential lessons
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| Speaker: |
Aleksandar Seovic, Managing Director, Solutions for Human Capital, Inc.
Aleksandar Seovic is a Managing Director at Solutions for Human Capital, Inc. – a software development company specializing in enterprise document and content management. He has lead development effort on a number of engagements for Fortune 500 corporations, mostly in pharmaceutical and financial services industries, and has worked in the architect role on both .NET and J2EE projects. Most recently, Aleks took part in the design and implementation of Oracle Coherence for .NET, a client library that allows applications written in any .NET language to access data and services provided by Oracle Coherence data grid. Aleks is also a co-lead for Spring.NET, an open source framework for enterprise application development, and a lead developer for Web, AOP and Services modules of the framework. Aleks can be reached at aleks@s4hc.com.
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| Date: |
Thursday, July 19, 2007
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| Time: |
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
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| 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.
|
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group Meeting-> Thursday
Office 2007 Open XML Format |
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Subject: |
You must register at http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=118567 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
Open XML is the default document format for the upcoming Office 2007 system. This presentation explores the motivation and design consideration of the new format. It also analyzes the architecture and the conceptual framework of Open XML. This new format opens doors to a huge number of opportunities for developers regardless the development tool or targeted platform. Package API from the new .NET Framework 3.0 is used as an example to demonstrate how to programmatically read/write Open XML documents without resorting to Microsoft Office COM API.
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| Speaker: |
Dr. Hai Ning, Senior Software Architect, Tallán Inc
Hai Ning has over 10 years of software development experience, with MCST(BizTalk & SQL2005), MCSD.NET, MCDBA and SCJP certifications. Dr. Ning graduated from MIT with a PhD in Information Technology. His blog can be found at http://www.hyperbina.com/blog. Hai's firm, Tallán (http://www.tallan.com), is a Hartford-based Microsoft Certified Gold Partner.
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| Date: |
Thursday, May 17, 2007
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| Time: |
Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
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| 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.
|
Thursday, April 12, 2007
NYC .NET Developers User Group Meeting-> Next Thursday
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Interfacing External Hardware Using Managed Code and Microsoft Robotics Studio |
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| Subject: |
While developers write code to build software every day, not often are they exposed to code that drives and interfaces hardware. This session will attempt to bridge that gap and show how .NET can be used to effectively interface several hardware devices, including an RFID reader and tags, Phidget control boards with a variety of sensors, and a servo controller. Additionally, Microsoft Robotics Studio will be introduced along with a demonstration showing how one can control some of the hardware previously listed in an environment where concurrency and performance are key.
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| Speaker: |
Brian Peek , ASPSoft
Brian Peek is a recognized .NET expert with over 6 years experience developing .NET solutions, and over 9 years of professional experience architecting and developing solutions using Microsoft technologies and platforms. Along with .NET and its associated languages, Brian is particularly skilled in the languages of C, C++ and assembly language for a variety of CPUs. He is also an expert in a variety of technologies including web development (ASP.NET, ASP, Javascript, HTML, XML, etc.), document imaging, GIS, graphics, game development, and hardware interfacing. Brian has a strong background in developing applications for the health-care industry, as well as developing solutions for portable devices, such as tablet PCs and PDAs. Along with Jonathan Goodyear, he co-authored the book "Debugging ASP.NET" published by New Riders. He is also a member of MSDN's Coding4Fun writing team, contributing articles on a monthly basis.
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| Date: |
Thursday, April 19, 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. |
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
New AE in New York, New DE in MEA
Bill Zack will be transitioning to a new role at Microsoft. He has accepted a position as Architect Evangelist in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group at Microsoft. In his new role he will be doing a series of day-time Architecture briefings on enterprise topics in New York at Microsoft. On April 12th Bill will be doing one on Microsoft and SAP Interoperability as part of Microsoft's arcStream program. This is a series of live presentations combined with access to on-line experts from Microsoft.
If you are currently using SAP and Microsoft technology in your company but have not integrated them you should find attending this meeting very informative. If you use SAP where you work or are just interested in finding out about this subject feel free to attend. The presentation will be held at Microsoft’s New York City offices. You are invited to join.
arcStream provides a constant flow of technical information as well as networking opportunities for enterprise, application, systems and aspiring architects living and working on the east coast.
For more information see http://www.arcstreameast.net/arcStreameast.
In addition Goksin Bakir will be starting as a DE in the Middle East and Africa region. While I hate Goksin for leaving me as the last of the club to be independent from Microsoft (first Malek, then Clemens!), it is a GREAT move for him and even better for the region. I can't wait to speak at even more Middle East and Africa events!
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