*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

For the next several weeks or month I’ve got several events lined up I’ll be speaking at in different parts of the country.  If you are in these areas I hope you can stop in and say hi.

Where:  http://www.alabamacodecamp.com  (Alabama Code Camp)
When: April 14th, 2007
City:  Mobile, AL

Last year we held the Alabama Code Camp in the fall in Montgomery, AL.  On April 14th in Mobile, AL we’re having another CodeCamp.  This CodeCamp is being put on by the Lower Alabama .Net User Group.  Doug and Matthew of the LANUG are doing a great job pulling this camp together.  I’ll be speaking on two topics:  Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio and Windows Workflow Foundation.  Other speakers that are going to be there include Jim Barstow, Barry Ralston, Doug Turnure, Joe Healy, Wally McClure, Jim Wooley, Jeff Barnes, Joe Fuentes, Tony Lombardo, Kevin Boles, Robert Cain, Bruce Thomas, Todd Miranda and Brian Hitney.  That’s a heck of a line up!   If you are in the Mobile area come on out.

Where:  http://www.dayofdotnet.org  (Day of .Net)
When:  May 5th, 2007
City:  Ann Arbor, MI
Location:  Washtenaw Community College

You read that correctly, I’ll be back in Ann Arbor, MI on May 5th.  This is going to be a great home coming event since I lived in Ann Arbor, MI for eight years and also taught at Washtenaw Community College for several years while I lived in Ann Arbor.  Since Ann Arbor, MI is only 20 miles from our company head quarters in Livonia, MI I was able to work it out based on my onsite schedule.  This is going to be another great event with speakers like James Bender, Patrick Steele, Brian Sherwin, Martin Shoemaker, Drew Robbins, Steve Mushkat, Darrell Hawley, Brian Prince, Nino Benvenuti, Josh Holmes, Mark Miller, Dustin Campbell, Jeff Blankenburg, Aydin Akcasu, Chris Woodruff, Justin Kohnen, Dan Hibbitts and Joe Wirtley.  Whew that’s a mouthful!

It is going to be great to be back in Ann Arbor and I look forward to seeing the faculty along with some past students at the event!

Where: http://www.aadnd.org (Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers User Group)
When:  May 9th, 2007
City:  Ann Arbor, MI
Location:  Ann Arbor IT Zone

I’ve spoken at the IT Zone on several occasions but this is going to be the first time I’ll be speaking at the IT Zone on .Net.  Thanks to Darrel Hawley for not giving up on me.   I had to cancel on Darrel twice this year already because of a conflict with another conference (CodeMash) and then the MVP Summit so I appreciate Darrel not giving up on me and sending a hitman to Mississippi to slash my tires or something. 

Wow, what a day at CodeMash.  It has been busy.  I did two presentations today and I am worn out.  I’ve got to see a lot of people that I haven’t seen in years and got to meet people that I knew of through the blogosphere that I finally got to meet.  Here are some of the people I’ve bumped into at CodeMash in no particular order.  I’ll probably update this post as I take pictures of more people so keep checking back.

CodeMash Organizers

Ok, I said these were going to be in no order, but I thought it really wouldn’t be fair without putting those who worked extremely hard to organize this community run conference on top.  Without these guys, we wouldn’t even had a conference and they totally deserve their props.

Jim Holmes – The FrazzledDad himself, author and CodeMash organizer.  Without Jim, CodeMash may have never happened, who knows!  I don’t think I saw him without a flowered shirt and shorts the entire conference.   January 19th was noted as “Windows Developer Tools Day” by O’Reily as well.  This is a rare and priceless photo of the author holding his book.  And for the record, no he didn’t give me a copy for this priceless promotion on my blog. 🙂

Jason Gilmore – Jason works in the open source space with the publisher Apress.  I met Jason in Seattle, WA during an Asp.Net Summit last September and he was sitting right behind me when our bus got hit by some woman.   Jason was responsible for organizing all the speakers, agendas, schedules, etc.  Lots of work so if you see him around, Jim told me he does accept hugs and kisses for payment for all of his work.

Brian Prince – I met Brian last year at Tech Ed Boston thanks to the connection with Drew Robbins.  Brian basically wrote all of the IT for the conference.  Everything from the http://www.codemash.org web site, to registration, printing badges, a Windows Form application to register members at the conference and so on.   By the way, this is also a rare photo because it shows Brian with hair before shaving it off at the end of CodeMash.  I have a video along with tons of other people that I will try to get uploaded soon of Brian and Josh Holmes shaving their head to get the attendees to blog about CodeMash and help spread the word.

Jason Follas – I also met at Tech Ed last year.  We had a good time and we’ve stayed in contact since.  We even met up after Tech Ed in Livonia when I was in town where Jason learned that a penny saved is just a penny.  An ISM that he will surely carry to his grave and live by for the rest of his life.  Although he’s not presenting at the conference, he’s on staff at CodeMash and spent a lot of time gathering swag, checking rooms and helping out with whatever was needed. 

Josh Holmes – Josh roasted me in a comment for not making the list (like I would forget him).  He was already on the list but was going to make a guest appearance in the video of his head getting shaved.  Due to upload issues, I’ve resorted to my backup plan of this picture with Josh presenting at the conference on SOA.  He was also the conference MC.  I’ve known this skin head for a couple of years now, mostly while he was at SRT Solutions.  Recently he officially swallowed the blue pill and joined Microsoft as an Architect Evangelist.

Attendees

Michael Kimsal – PHP programmer, ex-coworker, friend.  I haven’t seen Mike since the last time I saw him (kidding).  Actually it has been several years.  He now lives in North Carolina and even has a podcast show called http://www.webdevradio.com.
 

Dustin Campbell – I finally got to meet Dustin after reading his blog for awhile.  Dustin works for Developer Express along with Mark Miller which is responsible for CodeRush and Refactor.  If you are at CodeMash, DEFINITELY stop by the booth so Dustin can show you these tools.  Very cool.  Dustin also receives The Elder Award for the most cackles during the conference.

Bill Wagner – Mr. C# and Microsoft RD Bill Wagner is here along with the rest of the SRT consultants.   It took 5 pictures to get him to smile but he finally gave it up (the smile that is). 

And if you hang out at the SRT booth long enough he may give you a USB drive.  If you want to get one without asking then shower Bill with praises about his C# books and LINQ articles he’ll cave in.  Yes it turns out, flattery will get you everywhere with Bill.

Richard Perry (PHP and .Net developer), Jay Wren of ADP and .Net developer, Dustin Campbell from Developer Express and Jennifer Marsman, our Microsoft Developer Evangelist.

Chris Risner – Chris works at Quicken Loans where I work and is a top notch .Net developer  in both the Smart Client space as well as the Asp.Net space.  If you mention the word Ajax or beer, you have his undivided attention.  Oh, in a past life he also programmed in Java.

Dan Chrobak – Another Quicken Loans team member that made it to CodeMash.  Dan has been doing Java for several years but is working his way into the .Net space.  Dan said he wanted this pose to go out to all the ladies in the blogosphere.  I quickly pointed out that 99% of my readers are men and for the 1% left .5% goes to my lovely wife Ellen, and the other .5% goes to my beloved Mother.  He then of course retracted said statement and told me to tell my wife and my mother hello 🙂

Richard Perry – Richard came all the way from London to bless us with his precense.  Ok, that is a lie but Richard is British and since he is British his accent provides endless hours of amusement.  Combine that with my southern dialect and you have an interesting conversation no matter what is being discussed.  Richard is constantly torn between PHP and .Net and is currently seeking counseling to work this out.

Drew Robbins – Midwest Microsoft Developer Evangelist and good friend Drew shows us his tired eyes from the exhausting schedule of the conference.  He also gave a talk on building Vista gadgets.  I also got to meet his daughter and his wife late Friday evening.  He is still recovering from the Ohio State loss to South Eastern Conference team Florida.

Patrick Steele – I finally got to meet Patrick.  I’ve been reading his blog awhile and he recently peaked my interest with his new mobile blogging application he’s been working on to blog from his Windows Mobile 5 phone.  Most of the articles he posted while at CodeMash were from his phone which was cool.  I stopped him in the hall to grab a peek at the application and it is pretty nice.  Hopefully he’ll take it and post it to CodePlex as I suggested so the rest of us could chip in on it. 

If you are a developer you need to hurry up and get registered for CodeMash in January. What better way to spend a few winter days than at an indoor resort listening to geeks speak about PHP, Python, Java, Ruby and .Net? It is right around the corner and for this type of conference, it is pretty dang cheap. I will be speaking at the conference on Smart Clients so don’t forget your box of rotten fruit and fire away when I take the stage. Hope to see you there!

Somehow I forgot that I purchased a domain awhile ago.  How crazy is that?  I must have been cough, cough, really tired the night I purchased it 🙂  I went online today to renew some domains and saw a domain in the list that I had that I didn’t remember I owned and that was keithelder.net. So, to make it easy on myself when someone asks for my blog I setup a redirect on the domain to point to this blog.  So if you want to remember how to link to my blog (and in case it changes in the future) just link to http://www.keithelder.net.

I may set the domain up and do something else with it, not sure yet, still thinking and weighing options.  I think I may do the first ClickOnce deployed Blog, haha!

Presentation at LANUG
I wanted to give a special thanks to Doug and Matthew for having me down to speak at  LANUG tonight.  They’ve got a great group going there. If you are in the Mobile area and want to hang out with some truly southern warm and friendly people to discuss .Net you should check them out.  Everyone was over the top nice and not once did I get a tomato hurled at me during the presentation (a first!).  I had a blast and hope to come back next year and discuss some more enterprise patterns and practices.

[Update 1/1/2007]
All of my blogs have been relocated to http://keithelder.net/blog/ so you need to update your RSS feeds from http://blog.zorka.com and http://dotnetpimps.net/blogs/theelder/default.aspx

Tuesday night I’ll be speaking at the Lower .Net Alabama User Group meeting.  It seems our friend Joe Healy had to cancel due to the tropical storm out in the Gulf.  Through a series of connections and the power of Microsoft Instant Messenger word got back they were looking for someone to speak so I’m stepping in and doing a repeat of the presentation I gave at the Memphis Code Camp on Saturday.  Although presentations are a lot of hard work learning, planning etc., they are very easy to repeat so I don’t mind.  The group is fairly new, only been around for about a year and they haven’t had anyone present on Smart Clients yet so it should be informative for everyone.