I will be presenting a half day seminar on Agile Development, Tools and Teams on Wednesday February 24th at the MCCIA in Pune. The event is brought to you free by e-Zest, MCCIA, and Telerik. Seats are limited, to sign up in advance, please email seminar@e-zest.net.

The Program Details

One of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, Scrum is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like: project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen (a certified Scrum Master) shows many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master. Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. We’ll then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. There will be plenty of time for Question and Answer. This seminar is a jump start for a certified scrum master exam. 

Who Should Attend 

Developers and development managers, especially those using the Microsoft .NET platform. 

Schedule and Agenda

The Speaker

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 is 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. Stephen currently lives in Hong Kong and will be returning to Mt. Everest again in September 2010. 

Final Details

Telerik is proud to announce that the Data Services Wizard beta was released today. If you have used the wizard while it was a Telerik Labs project, you will notice a ton of new features and improvements. If you are new to the wizard, now may be a good time to give it a try and give us your feedback.

The Data Service Wizard works with Telerik OpenAccess Q3 or higher and Visual Studio 2008. Our next beta, due in February, will support Visual Studio 2010 and WCF 4.0. The wizard will create a service layer for you using “Astoria” 1.0, the latest version of “Astoria”, WCF, or the WCF REST or AtomPub project templates. You can get a walk through here.

To highlight some of the new features, I will give you some screen shots below.

First we made the navigation and project selection much easier. Now you can select your data access layer and your service project in one simple screen.

You asked for it, we delivered it: we are proud to announce Visual Basic .NET support!

We have also made the code preview page page optional.  As you can see we generate VB code. :)

Here is the completed Astoria service:

We’ll post some more how to and videos soon.

Enjoy!

Telerik has been named to the Red Herring Global 100 Award list.  The Global 100 is Red Herring’s list of the top 100 privately held global tech companies. This is like the Fortune 500 list but for tech. This is a huge deal, past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube.

Telerik is an Eastern European company with headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria and the only company on the Red Herring Global 100 from the former “Soviet Block.” That the company's founders grew up under communism and last week were speaking at the Red Herring 100 award ceremony about capitalism, innovation, and technology is totally awesome. Shows you how technology can empower people and change the world.

It is quite an honor to work at a company in the Red Herring Global 100.

According to the Red Herring web site, the selection process is:

A group of Red Herring editorial judges will review each nomination. The editors will assess nominees on both quantitative and qualitative criteria such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their ecosystem. Specific to the Red Herring 100 Global Award, the judges will look closely at the company's global strategy to evaluate how the company will be able to handle the challenges of internationalization and a global presence.

Thursday, January 21, 2010
Leveling the LINQ to XML Playing Field

You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=144593 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.

Subject: 

This talk covers a wide range of techniques for working with XML in .NET. We’ll start with streaming techniques and XmlDocument, run through a quick introduction of general LINQ mechanics, and then examine how LINQ to XML greatly enhances XML access in .NET 3.5. Learn how to combine streamed XmlReader access with LINQ to XML and see how these old and new technologies integrate with one another in a very elegant way by implementing a simple custom iterator. We’ll work through demos in both C# and VB .NET, and also examine XML literals (an extremely handy VB-only feature) along the way.
Contrary to popular belief, all LINQ providers are not created equal. In fact, LINQ to XML has in one way proven to be the “weakest LINQ” of all. Unlike other major LINQ providers which give you strongly-typed objects, LINQ to XML offers no typed schema definitions (and thus, no type safety) for your code. There isn’t much recourse to this beyond writing code gen tools, using 3rd party solutions, or gambling on the LINQ to XSD provider (an MS incubation project). Lenni will demonstrate how the LINQ to XSD provider fills the gaping schema hole left by LINQ to XML. Attend this session (no prior LINQ knowledge required) and get the full LINQ story for LINQ to XML.

Speaker: 
Leonard Lobel
Leonard Lobel is a principal consultant at twentysix New York, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Programming since 1979, Lenni specializes in Microsoft-based solutions, with experience that spans a variety of business domains, including publishing, financial, wholesale/retail, health care, and e-commerce. Lenni has served as chief architect and lead developer for various organizations, ranging from small shops to high-profile clients. He is also a consultant, trainer, and frequent speaker at local usergroup meetings, VSLive, SQL PASS, and other industry conferences. Lenni is also lead author in the MS Press book "Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2008".

Date: 
Thursday, January 21, 2010

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 Microsoft developer community has always been a giving group. The amount of free time we give away writing blog posts, answering questions in forums, organizing user groups, code camps, and speaking at events is pretty amazing.

I have also been impressed by all of the MVPs who run 5ks for charity or organize other events for charity. In the past I have organized a few events that helped raise money for charity including cancer research, a school in rural Nepal, and the Indonesian Tsunami relief fund. Each time I have asked my peers in the Microsoft developer community to donate time, money, or even just a simple blog post to raise awareness. Each time I have always been impressed by just how vast and generous the response has been.

I have decided to organize a Facebook group, MVPs for Charity, and will ask all MVPs, User Group leaders, active community members, and Microsoft employees to join. On this group, I hope we can all keep each other informed of what we are doing for charity as well call on each other for help whenever there is a charity event or need.

After the disaster last week in Haiti, some of my peers in the Microsoft developer community asked me if I was going to organize another auction or fund raising drive. I am giving money to two charities the ClintonBush fund (at the request of President Obama, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are raising money), and http://www.yele.org/. I will ask you all to choose a fund and donate as well.

Have a startup? Want free software? The Microsoft BizSpark Camp is for you. You have to sign up by Monday. See below for more details.

Via Sanjay Jain…

With several successful Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Weeks (Azure Atlanta, Win7 Boston, Win7 Reston, CRM Reston, CRM Boston, Win 7 Irvine, Mobility Mountain View,), we are pleased to announce Microsoft BizSpark Camp for Windows Azure in New York, NY during 28–29 January 2010. Based upon your feedback we have made several changes including offering cash prize, compressed time commitment, and much more. We hope you're tapping into the growing BizSpark community.

The current economic downturn is putting many entrepreneurs under increasing pressure, making it critical to find new resources and ways to reduce costs and inefficiencies. Microsoft BizSparkCamp for Windows Azure is designed to offer following assistance to entrepreneurs.

· Chance to win cash prize of $5000

· Nomination for BizSpark One (an invitation only program) for high potential startups

· Learn and build new applications in the cloud or use interoperable services that run on Microsoft infrastructure to extend and enhance your existing applications with help of on-site advisors

· Get entrepreneurs coaching from a panel of industry experts

· Generate marketing buzz for your brand

· Create opportunity to be highlighted at upcoming launch

We are inviting nominations from BizSpark Startups interested in Windows Azure Platform that target one or more of the following:

• Windows Azure
• Microsoft .Net Services
• Microsoft SQL Azure
• Live Services
• Microsoft SharePoint Services
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services

The Microsoft BizSparkCamp for Windows Azure will be held at Microsoft Technology Center, New York, NY from Thu 1/28/2010 to Fri 1/29/2010. This event consists of ½ day of training, 1 day of active prototype/development time, and ½ day for packaging/finishing and reporting out to a panel of judges for various prizes.

This event is a no-fee event (plan your own travel expenses) and each team can bring 3 participants (1 business and 1 – 2 developer). It is required to have at least 1 developer as part of your team.

To participate in the BizSpark camp, you must submit your team for nomination to Sanjay or your BizSpark Sponsor. Visit Sanjay’s blog for details on how to submit your nomination by Monday, January 18th, 2010. Nominations will be judged according to the strength of the founding team, originality and creativity of the idea, and ability to leverage Windows Azure Scenarios.

You may want to enroll into Microsoft BizSpark, an exciting new offering that enables software startups to leverage Microsoft development and platform technologies to deliver next generation web and Software + Services applications. For details see here.

After a round of hacking attempts that apparently were supported by the Chinese government, Google announced on Tuesday that they are removing the censored results displayed for a google.cn search in China. If you take a look now, you can see photos of the tanks in Tiananmen Square during the massacre 21 years ago. This violates the laws of China and Google will most likely be shut down by the Chinese government and exit the Chinese market.

Here in Hong Kong the local media is going crazy. Hong Kong, while part of China, is autonomous and has a free press. Bloggers, twitter, and some media outlets are applauding Google for “standing up to censorship.” (Google’s decision on Tuesday does not effect Hong Kong.)

This was a nice play by Google. They are removing the censorship and forcing the Chinese government to shut them down, which they may well do soon. It is a move that gets a lot of blog love. Former Microsoftie Robert Scoble said that China is so important economically and: “That’s why this move today impressed me so much.”

If Google has such problems  with censorship and a corporate mission to and “don’t be evil” why did they agree to censorship in the first place when they entered China in 2006? Why would Google operate in China for four years while censoring their search results?

If Google was #1 in search in China and making boat loads of money, would they just pack up and leave? They are a business at the end of the day, so my bet is no. Google has not been making money in China and its revenues in China are “truly immaterial” according to Google. According to the Economist, Google has high expenses in China, including 700 people in the Google China office. Google is way behind Baidu in China, which has well over 300 million users (that is more than the entire population of the United States, the world’s third largest country by population…)

While I applaud Google for standing up to censorship, I feel that Google is exiting China due to business reasons and picked a fight with the Chinese government to get the automatic love of technology luminaries (who love Google anyway) and political rights activists who need a big powerful poster boy. If you think about it, it is a brilliant move, you hide the fact that you failed in a market and get tons of good press for poor business performance. Compare these headlines:

“Google exists China after years of poor performance. Fires 700 employees.”

or:

“Google stands up to censorship! Google on the side of freedom and democracy. Love live Google!”

Maybe I am wrong and if I am, I apologize in advance.

Over the past week I have been making predictions on .NET, mobile devices, and digital content. Last year I made some predictions on my  blog. Since I made some predictions last year, I figured it would be fun to go back and evaluate how I did.

Prediction #1 for 2009: Windows 7 will ship and it will not be a flop.

Not the boldest prediction, but  hey have to start off with an easy one to build credibility. :)

Prediction #2 for 2009: C# innovation along the lines of the DLR

I said that Microsoft has the “second mover advantage” where they innovate based on what is already going on in the marketplace. Last year I predicted that C# will continue to evolve based on what is going on in Ruby. I think that when you look at C# 4.0 and the support for the DLR you will see this as being true and will continue moving forward.

Prediction #3 for 2009: MVC will have low adoption

I have no way to gauge how popular MVC is, but it is more popular than I thought, so I clearly got this prediction wrong. I think that MVC is good technology, however, overkill for some classes of application.

Prediction #4 for 2009: Marketing Hype around Azure

I thought that the Windows and SQL Azure marketing engine would go into full swing in 2009. I was wrong, but we will see it go into full swing in 2010.

Prediction #5 for 2009: The LINQ to SQL users will feel betrayed

I thought that the LINQ to SQL users would reject the Entity Framework and start a movement for Microsoft to support LINQ to SQL. Back when I wrote this prediction, Microsoft recently announced that LINQ to SQL was being passed over in favor of EF. Wrong again, no petition.

Prediction #6 for 2009: I poked some fun at Alt.net

I would say that while this one prediction was meant to provoke (and provoke it did!) it also had the theme that alt.net would evolve into a mature voice for their way of thinking. This is true since alt.net has been engaging in dialog and contributing to the community.

In summary I did not do all that bad. We’ll see how well I did in 2010 next year at this time.

Last week I made some technology predictions in the Microsoft space. Yesterday I spoke about the mobile space as a whole. Today I will conclude my 2010 predictions with a look into digital content.

2010: Digital Content-The Empire Strikes Back

Already more music is sold online via iTunes then on physical CDs. Add in piracy and there is even more music in digital format. 2010 will be the year where we start to see movies and books move digital. Not much of a prediction. My predictions is that the movie and publishing industry will spend most of 2010 fighting back and in denial much like the music industry and the RIAA did 5+ years ago.

Today Netflix will sell you a device that will stream movies down to your HD TV without a computer involved. You can get unlimited movies for about $9 a month. The problem is that there are only 18,000 movies available and most of those movies are older. That is because Hollywood is stonewalling Netflix and not selling them a license to stream. Actually it is much worse than that. Hollywood is also holding Netflix hostage for new release DVDs. The studios are now planning to withhold new release DVDs for 28 days before they sell them to Netflix. Warner Brothers just inked a deal with Netflix that did just that. Now all new Warner Brothers movies released on DVD will be available for you to buy or rent at your local video store, but not available at Netflix for a month.

This is exactly the type of behavior that the RIAA and music industry would be proud of. Warner Brothers is now actively encouraging its customers to pirate the new release movie instead of getting it legally from Netflix.

Hollywood 1-Netflix 0.

But this is just the beginning.

Seeing what iTunes did to the recording industry, the technology phobic world of publishing may soon follow suit. Amazon is getting some pushback from publishers over pricing of titles for the Kindle. It is only a matter of time before the publishers “Netflix” Amazon. I suspect you will see something along those lines before the end of the year, especially that for the first time more Kindle books were sold on Dec 24th and 25th than “real” books.

Just like Darth Vader in the Empire Strikes back, the movie studios and publishers may win the battle in 2010, but they will lose the larger war. (Yes I am saying that Netflix and Amazon.com are Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.)