Thursday, November 18, 2010
Windows Workflow 4 - Patterns, Practices and Usages

Subject:
You must register athttps://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=150257 in order to be admitted to the building and attend.
Everybody who writes code wants to build great software. If that software is a server application, part of being great is scaling well, handling large loads without consuming too many resources. A great application should also be as easy as possible to understand, both for its creators and for the people who maintain it. Achieving both of these goals isn’t easy. Approaches that help applications scale tend to break them apart, dividing their logic into separate chunks that can be hard to understand. Achieving this is a primary goal of Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). This session covers some basic concepts , windows workflow 4 architecure , its best patterns and usages.
Session Includes:
1. Workflow Architecture , business problems and technical case for using workflow.
2. Best Patterns and Practices.
3. Hosting using AppFabric and IIS , contract base routing.
4. Parallel Programming in Windows Workflow.
5. Workflow as a service model.

Speaker:
Navneet Srivastava, Emerging Health Information Technology
Navneet is lead architect and manager of engineers in the Product Development division of Emerging Health Information Technology, a subsidiary of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He oversees design and development of the breakthrough clinical intelligence application, Clinical Looking Glass, employing cutting edge Microsoft technologies and a host of best practices. In past positions, Navneet has developed other healthcare applications with national distribution.

Date:
Thursday, November 18, 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.

At TechEd Europe 2010 in Berlin, I will be doing three breakout sessions and one panel discussion: Silverlight v HTML5.

My breakout sessions are:

• Scrum, but
• Agile Estimation

This is the first time I am formally doing the Scrum, but session, however, Joel and I did it at TechEd North America at our pre-con. We’ll (I invited Joel, even though he is not an “official” speaker to do the session with me) walk the audience through a few slides about Scrum, Kanban, XP and “Agile is about values, not rules” and the “buffet table” approach. After about 10 minutes of us blabbing, we will open it to questions. We are prepared to speak about four scenarios: Scrum/Agile in the Enterprise, Consulting, Remote (and outsourced) teams, and ISVs. Should be fun, and interactive! Bring lots of questions!!!

The Agile Estimation talk is a repeat of my talk last year and we are doing it twice since there is a lot of demand.

The session times are below. When I am not doing sessions, I will be at the Telerik Booth. You can find us at E 83+E84, very close to where we were last year. I’ll be glad to talk to you about the sessions, agile in general, or the Telerik tools. If you check out our CTP of WP7 controls now, we have a special offer for you: As a special gift to all TechEd Europe attendees visiting our booth, you will receive a free license of these controls once they are finally released, if you download the CTP now.

See you in Berlin!

There has been a lot said about the HTML5 v Silverlight debate in recent days. We have a very timely BOF session at TechEd Europe next week on this very topic. Join Tomislav Bronzin,  Mauro Sant'Anna, Joel Semeniuk, David Yack,  Daron Yondem, and myself for a smack-down no holds barred panel discussion on Tuesday November 9th. It will be moderated by Tim Huckaby.

BOF10: Silverlight vs. HTML5 - Interactive Panel

Tuesday, November 9  1:20 PM - 2:05 PM

Join Tim Huckaby as he moderates a distinguished panel of Microsoft Regional Directors and some other pillars of the industry in a interactive panel discussion around the issues, excitement, bold promise and confusion around SilverLight and HTML5.

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.