I had a quick visit to Sydney this week, my first time back to Sydney in something like 18 years. Flying in from Hong Kong was only about 8 hours, and when Adam Cogan picked me up from the airport, he took me directly to Watson’s Bay where we went Stand-up Paddle Boarding. The weather was cold and a storm was brewing, making conditions, well a little crazy. TJ, Adam, and I risked hypothermia and had a blast!

On Wednesday morning, I did my now (in)famous Scrum Seminar. You can download the seminar slides here. I said that the most important things to success in implementing scrum are the engagement of the product owner (both with writing the user stories and in the daily scrum) and that it is ok to change scrum. We spent a lot of time on estimation and Team Velocity as well. We had some laughs at Adam’s expense as well as got off topic with a quote of mine that “Windows is nothing without Excel!”

That evening I spoke at the Sydney .NET User Group. I was doing a “Silverlight Line of Business” talk. It was basically about 2.5 hours and in the first half I did my WCF Walk through with some extra bells and whistles including building an Astoria service and consuming it. At the break I showed the Telerik Data Services Wizard and it was a huge hit, specifically the auto-generation of the SIlverlight Application. (I also showed a feature that will ship very soon that allows you to style your application via the wizard.)

After the break I talked about WCF RIA Services that shipped the other day. Just like before, I ripped off Brad Abrams blog here and showed items 1-5, plus #8 with a PowerPivot client. The PowerPivot client seemed very popular!

It was a great trip and I hope to be back soon.