On Saturday, November 6, 2010, we'll be holding our fourth annual Fairfield / Westchester Code Camp!  As in the past, this event will be held at the University of Connecticut, Stamford Campus.

Register now!

This year, we'll have 36 sessions (75 minutes each) across 6 tracks, given by some of the best regional and local developers, and will have topics such as WP7, Silverlight, Entity Framework, PowerShell, F#, MVC, NoSQL, SharePoint, and so much more!

As usual, we will have giveaways, food, and coffee.
Seating is limited and our focus is technology.  No recruiters, please.

I’m over in Zeist, the Netherlands speaking at the Software Developers Conference, put on by the Software Developer Network of the Netherlands. Back when this event was called CTTP, it was my first international speaking event in 1998.  I’ve been speaking at this conference every year since 1998, only missing the event in 2000. I have spoken at three other events produced by SDN over the years besides the SDN/CTTP, so this is my 15th, yes 15th time speaking at this organization’s event in the Netherlands. I have no idea why they keep inviting, me, I usually show up to sessions with beer, go to the red light district instead of my talks, or make fun of Dutch people the entire time I am here.

This year I am speaking on RIA Services and doing an Q&A on Scrum and Agile. Hope to see lots of Dutch there!

Today I spoke at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria and spoke on:

• Building RIA Services Applications
• Building RESTFul services with the OData protocol

In the RIA services talk, just like the other times I did it, I built a simple application from scratch. Here is what I did:

• Added a Silverlight Business Application
• Changed the Title to DevReaCH (I accidently hit cap locks in the session)
• Mapped an EF model to Northwind
• Created a Domain Service
• Wrote a business rule in said service
• Made fun of Canada
• Showed the client site generated code
• Added a DataGrid and wrote code to fill it
• Asked the audience if they thought the code would work
• Fixed the bug I introduced in my code
• Dragged and dropped a Data Source to datagrid with automatic binding
• Added a data pager with no code
• Added a filter with no code
• Added a “Save” button with no code
• Added Steve Jobs as a customer (and told the audience how much I hate him)
• Went into the metadata class and added validation
• Viewed the validation
• Exposed the RIA Service as an OData feed
• Told everyone about OData in <5 minutes (and said they were excused from my OData talk later in the day)

The OData talk did more of the same, same as my TechEd talk, so you can download the slides and demos here.

I also recorded an episode of .NET Rocks with Richard and Carl.

Tomorrow is a Scrum talk with Joel.

Good times.

Thursday, October 21, 2010
Charles Petzold: Multitasking on Windows Phone 7

Subject: 
You must register at https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=150256 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
They say that Windows Phone 7 can't multitask. They're wrong. Join Charles Petzold for a programmer's perspective on the multitasking features of Windows Phone 7, including tombstoning, asynchronous operations, and push notifications.

Speaker: 
Charles Petzold
Charles Petzold is a New York City based freelance writer who has been writing about Microsoft operating systems since 1984. His latest book, "Programming Windows Phone 7," will be available as a free download in October.

Date: 
Thursday, October 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.

Startups usually like to go with Open Source Software (OSS) for the obvious reasons, start ups are low on funds and OSS is free. Microsoft has a program for startups that will give the startup a copy of all of its software for use in production for free until the startup reaches a certain point of growth (usually $1m in revenues) or gets acquired by a larger entity. This program is called BizSpark and it has been around for a little while. Approximately 30,000 startups have taken advantage of BizSpark so far.

I am the co-founder and investor of a startup called Triton Works. (Picture Expedia.com for Ocean Freight.) Myself and three partners founded it in 2008 and Triton was one of the first companies to accept BizSpark “funding.” Today I am happy to announce that Triton was acquired by UBM. Triton has graduated from the BizSpark program!

Hopefully success stories like this will build awareness to the BizSpark program.

I will be speaking this year at TechEd Europe in Berlin, Germany from November 8th to November 12th. I’ll be doing two talks:

DPR201 - Agile Estimation (Tuesday Nov 9th)

Track: Development Practices

We’re agile, so we don’t have to estimate and have no deadlines, right? Wrong! This session will review the problem with estimations in projects today and then give an overview of the concept of agile estimation and the notion of re-estimation. We’ll learn about user stories, story points, team velocity, and how to apply them all to estimation and iterative re-estimation. We will take a look at the cone of uncertainty and how to use it to your advantage. We’ll then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile Estimation, including planning poker, Visual Studio TFS and much more.

And also with Joel (though he is not listed on the session as the other speaker):

DPR301 - Scrum, but (Thursday November 11th)

Track: Development Practices

Having challenges implementing Scrum in your organization? Have you been using Scrum but need to bend the rules to make it work in your organization? Do you practice a little Scrum with a mix of Kanban? Then this session if for you! Come and learn about implementing Scrum, but with a few changes. We'll look at customizing Scrum in your environment and look specifically at how to implement Scrum for the enterprise, ISVs, consulting and remote teams.

See ya there!

Microsoft is launching Windows Phone 7 today and I fear it may be too late. I, like many Microsoft watchers, was an early adopter of Windows Mobile. I used my Windows Mobile 6.x phone until it broke, and even then, I put tape over it and got another 6 months out of it.

I held out until I arrived in Hong Kong last summer to buy a new phone, a HTC Magic running Android 1.7. I liked it so much, I was one of the first people in Hong Kong to buy a Nexus One back in January-this after I had one of the first sneak peeks at WP7 on Microsoft’s campus in January.

As I used my “Google Phone” as I call it, I soon became dependent on Gmail for my main email communication, and other Google applications for my other daily chores. I use to use hosted Exchange and POP with Outlook and Outlook Web Access, now I am 100% Gmail, I don’t even have Outlook installed on my machine. I frequently show a Hong Kong taxi driver where I am going on Google Maps and use Layer (and a little Foursquare) to find new places to eat and such in Hong Kong all the time. I use the camera on the phone so much that I don’t even carry my point and click anymore. I sit at Starbucks and use the WiFi hotspot from Android 2.2 to work all day. The list goes on.

Google lured me in with a new phone and then before I knew it, I was deep inside the Googleplex and outside of the Microsoftplex.

Today, Windows Phone 7 ships. The problem with Windows Phone 7 is that it is one year too late. Last summer all the people like me with a Windows Mobile 6 phone had a new contact, or broken phone and went with an iPhone or Android. Those customers may never come back. I may not.

Last week I wrapped up a successful high altitude trek and climb in Nepal. I did this to help raise money for Education Elevated, a charity that is building a school and library in rural Nepal.

Kids first, then mountains: We visited two Hillary Schools on the trek, one in Khumjung and the other in Junbesi. We started in Jiri and it took us four days to trek to the first school in Junbese. It then took us another four days to reach Khumjung.  I scoped out the IT training. ;)

As always the kids are super cute.

After the schools, it was time to gain altitude. (Ok both schools are over 3000m/10000’.)  After we visited the Hillary School in Khumjung, we started to gain altitude and the scenery was stunning. We climbed the Gokyo Valley side, not the Everest side that I did in 2008. Even our sherpa’s geeked out and took tons of photos.

We trekked through several small villages over three days. Our sherpa were lazy. :)

After three days we reached the town of Gokyo (15,000’), right on the third glacial lake.

The next morning we climbed Gokyo Ri (5400m/17500’) and the views were amazing, the best I have ever had in Nepal. If you are planning a trip to Nepal, make Gokyo your base and Everest Base Camp your secondary target.

The cool thing about being on top of Gokyo Ri is that you have a 360 paranoiac view of the Everest portion of the Himalayan Range. Here is a video I shot trying to show it off.

We started the climb at 5:15am, I argued with Ngima Sherpa and Kathleen about that, but lost. We got up in about 1.5 hours, just in time for the sunrise. While that is cool, the sun rises directly over Mt. Everest, so the photos (and video above) are not perfect. Sorry, if you want to see a better show of Everest, you will just have to climb Gokyo Ri as well. ;)

After a short rest, we trekked to a village below the Cho la pass (5400m/17500’). The pass was very, very hard, straight up in the snow for over an hour, a lot of the time you are on your hands and knees.

Look at me climb (Yes the is Bollo Sherpa behind me, he did it in sneakers):

Our shepra’s are too cool for school on top of the pass. (But they did take the Cliff bars I gave them.)

The view from the pass is pretty stunning:

Once you are up over the pass you think the hard part is over, right? Ha! Now you have to walk in-between two Himalayan peaks (taller than anything other than about 15 mountains in the world) in the snow over a crevasse ridden field. (Thank god for my  crevasse rescue training in Alaska! I had to teach Kathleen how to probe for crevasses!)

After a few hours in the snowfield, we finally reached our destination. After about 7 hours of climbing and trekking, it was about 1pm (we started super early to avoid the wind and sun making the crevasses unstable.) After lunch, we pushed on 3 more hours to Loboche village at about 5000m/16000’.

The next day we pushed on to Everest Base Camp and then headed down the mountain.

A few days later we were back in Kathmandu dreaming about our next Nepalese trek!