*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

We kicked DevLink off last night with a speakers dinner held at Stoney River Legendary Steaks.  I don’t know about everyone else but my steak was fabulous!  My compliments to the sponsors for picking such a great place.  Everyone had a good time and it was good to see people I hadn’t seen in a while.   You are probably wondering who was there so I made it a point to take a picture at every single table last night to document who was there.  You can view them here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithelder/sets/72157602387712580/

See if you notice a theme to some of the pictures, surely you’ll get it.  Hint, everyone needs more of it.  🙂

Alabama Code Camp was in Birmingham, AL this weekend.  Friday we kicked it off with a speakers dinner  where we had some outstanding tex-mex food.  And then after the event, the speakers and the code campers went out to Buffalo Wild Wings as seen in this pic. 

It was good to see fellow MVPs, Todd Miranda, Jeff Barnes, Jim Wooley and a I met a new MVP which leaves in Tupelo, MS, Mickey Gousset.   Finally I get to meet someone else from Mississippi!  It was also good to see Doug Turnure, the DE for this area.

I spoke on three topics, Structure and Guidance for Organizing Solutions in Visual Studio, Custom Workflow Activities, and What’s new in Visual Studio 2008.  Out of the three, the one that received the most praise was the structuring solutions in Visual Studio.  It really is a fun topic to speak on and something that no one else is covering.  What makes the topic so much fun is it truly helps people and answers a lot of the tough questions for everyone.

I have two of the three topics available for download on my presentations page.  I will be posting the what’s new in Visual Studio 2008 there as well, but after DevLink next week.

View the pictures from the code camp here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithelder/sets/72157602315320164/

See everyone next time!

If anyone is in between point A and B and wants to car pool up to Nashville for the Devlink conference that I blogged about a few weeks ago let me know.  I have plenty of room in the Aspen and could use the company.

Use the contact me link on the blog to email me if you don’t already have my contact info.  I’ll be leaving on Wednesday morning and returning on Sunday just as an FYI in case someone is interested.

Last year I missed the devLINK conference but kept hearing tons of great things at other conferences or events I went to about it.  I had actually forgotten about it until Colin Neller, Memphis User Group President, reminded me by dropping my name in the hat of speakers.  So it shall be, I’ll be heading to Nashville, Tn in October.

I’m really looking forward to this event since there are some great friends in attendance.  I’ll be speaking on several topics this go around.  I put in for four topics but only two have made it on the prelim agenda so far:

1. Leveraging Enterprise Library in your Applications
2. New Features and Improvements for Smart Clients in Visual Studio 2008

The other ones on the radar are:

1. Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio
2. Building Custom Workflow Activities in Workflow Foundation – A Developer’s Primer

Last year around 400 developers were in attendance.  The crazy thing about devLINK is it only cost $50!  That’s a heck of a deal, especially considering the speaker line up.  According to Google Maps it is 425 miles, 6 hours and 22 mins. 

This will be the longest trip to date in the new Aspen, should be a fun drive in the hills with the 5.7 liter HEMI.

Yesterday was the Day of .Net hosted in Ann Arbor.  It was great to see tons of people I haven’t seen in years.  I went to several talks including Dustin Campbell’s talk on Reflection.  I learned more about reflection during Dustin’s talk than I ever wanted to know.  I also went to Dan Hibbitts talk on Mobile Software Factory.  Rounding out the day I went to Mark Miller’s talks on WPF and WPF/WCF.  I have to hand it to Mark, he did a really good demo of WPF and WCF whereby he built a hockey game whereby one could be the server and the other the client.  Moving the mouse on one application moved it on the other.  From the gaming industry standpoint this is nothing new since network games have done this for awhile.  However, it was a great WPF and WCF demo to show tcpBinary messages being sent from application to application. 

As Dan has already vocally exclaimed on my other post I killed the projector during my talk.  My talk was scheduled during the last session of the day and I was ready.  What I wasn’t ready for is about 45 minutes into the session, right before I got into the really cool demos of deploying the application using ClickOnce, I kicked the power cord out of the socket and took down the projector.  If you know projectors at all you know they don’t like being shut off without warming down so essentially I took the projector out for the remaining of the talk.  Let me apologize to everyone for robbing you of what was going to be the best most well thought out earth shattering demo you would have seen the entire day.  🙂 

For those that are in the area I promise to makeup for it Wednesday when I speak at the Ann Arbor .Net User Group.