*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Saturday evening I arrived back in Hattiesburg after spending a week in Chattanooga, TN and the DevLINK Technical Conference. I had a blast at DevLINK. Here’s a recap of the week’s activities.

Live Radio

Thursday evening John Kellar (DevLINK Chairman), Todd Anglin (Telerik) and myself were on the local radio station 95.3 WPLZ as guests on “You’re Live” which is a weekly technology radio show in Chattanooga hosted by David Karnes. This was a very cool experience as I had never gotten to do live radio before.  The show was an hour long and I have to say it went by in what seemed like literally 10-15 minutes. After the show aired they gave us a recording of it. I took the recording and took out the blanks where the commercials were and uploaded it to this site. You can listen to it here:

http://keithelder.net/Presentations/DevLINK2011/08-18-11-YoureLiveDevLINK.mp3 

Friday’s Keynote

Friday evening I gave the closing keynote speech for DevLINK entitled “What Software Developers can Learn from Forrest Gump". I know… it is a crazy title for a talk to give to a bunch of developers. But you know what? I think I pulled it off, crazy or not.

I thought about posting the slide deck with this post but honestly I don’t think it would do anyone any good without the commentary and stories that go along with it (especially the stories). I can honestly say that just reading through the slides would have zero impact (trust me on this one).

What I will do though is give you a link to the two books I mentioned during the talk.

http://www.amazon.com/Influencing-Integrity-Management-Communication-Negotiation/dp/0933347103

http://www.amazon.com/Got-Sales-Lenann-McGookey-Gardner/dp/0977272052/ 

Thanks to all of the volunteers that made DevLINK awesome and thanks to “Sing it or Wing it” for letting me sing Karaoke Friday night. See you next year!

Funny Tweets from DevLINK

(this one isn’t true but funny, references something I said in the keynote)

I’m honored this year to be the closing keynote speaker for DevLink 2011. I’ve been involved with DevLink in many ways over the past years and when John asked me to keynote, I couldn’t say no.

Now the fun part, coming up with something worthy enough to share with a broad audience.

I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for awhile about something I have wanted to share with developers. Really this has to do a lot with what I talk to someone about when I am mentoring/coaching them to grow as a person so they can do the surrounding parts of their job better.  What I mean by *surrounding* is sure we code and there are things we can do to make that better but there are other things we do as well like write emails, talk on the phone, and communicate/interact with human beings.

These points along with some others (I have some code examples as well) I want to discuss. For example, did you know developers have to be salesmen too? Many I have talked to find the thought of this repulsive but it is true. I learned this at an early age (even have a few stories about it) and I’ll explain why and how this is important.  

I don’t want to give the whole farm away so to speak but just know I’m working hard for everyone attending DevLink to really give you something to think about on your flight/drive back home.

Also, I’m doing a two day workshop before DevLink:

Two Day Workshop August 15th-16th, Chattanooga, TN – Introduction to .NET – .NET From Scratch

Can’t wait to see everyone!

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/keithelder

I will be speaking at two .NET User Groups in Louisiana next week.

Greater New Orleans April 12th

The first place I’ll be speaking is on April 12th at the Greater New Orleans .NET User Group which meets in Metairie, LA. Here I will be doing a talk on Silverlight, RIA Services and Entity Framework.

Title

Building the Nullius Filius of Twitter and Facebook in Silverlight, RIA Services and Entity Framework

Abstract

Let’s imagine for a minute Twitter and Facebook had a passionate love affair and produced a child (nillius filius) named Johnny. Although Johnny was born from web-based parents there was a genetic defect that caused Johnny to be born a Rich Internet Application (RIA). In this talk we are going to look at the lessons, trials, tribulations and successes Johnny had growing up being a Rich Internet Application. We’ll take a look at the journey of building a REAL Silverlight application  (Johnny) for the enterprise (not some simple demo) and talk about the pain, the joy and lessons learned. Hopefully we’ll answer the question: “Is Johnny happy with himself or does he wishes he was born from different parents so he wasn’t a RIA.”

Hammond .NET User Group April 13th

On Wednesday I’ll be speaking at the Southeastern Louisiana University campus for the Hammond .NET User Group. Since this group is mostly students I thought the best thing to do was an intro class to get everyone up to speed about .NET. After that I’ll do a Q&A and we’ll see where that leads us.

Title

Back to the Basics: What is .Net?

Abstract

No other name in history has confused more people on the planet than when Microsoft named their development platform .NET. For a lot of developers .NET remains a mystery and it is often confused with many things. This session goes back to the basics and is a primer for anyone that is starting at ground zero with .Net. In this session we’ll look at what .Net really is, the benefits of the platform, bust a few myths and show some sound reasons why you should consider it as a platform and look at lots of demos. At the end of the session, hopefully we’ll answer one of life’s most puzzling questions: What is .NET?

Last week I spoke at the Orlando Code Camp. Great event, huge turn out and both of my sessions were very well attended.

As promised I am including in this post the slide deck and demos from my two talks.

You can download the decks here:

OrlandoCC2011.zip

Thank you to those who attended my sessions I had a blast! Hope to see you next year.

Next weekend you will find me even further South than I normally am as I’ll be speaking at the Orlando Code Camp. A huge thank you goes out to one of the best places to work in the country and that is Quicken Loans (my employer) that not only allowed me to take a day off to get to Orlando but also helped out with the travel. Not only does Quicken Loans hold the current the highest nationwide ranking in mortgage origination satisfaction but the company understands community and wants to help give back where it can.

While in Orlando I’ll be doing two talks. One is a Back to the Basics talk that I was very happy that got chosen because honestly we do not have enough of these at code camps. This is the exact same session I’ve done at larger conferences such as TechEd and Codemash. Thus if you have any team members that don’t know .NET send them here!  Here is the abstract:

No other name in history has confused more people on the planet than when Microsoft named their development platform .NET. For a lot of developers .NET remains a mystery and it is often confused with many things. The Back to the Basics series is a primer for anyone that is starting at ground zero with .Net.  In this session we’ll look at what .Net really is, the benefits of the platform, bust a few myths and show some sound reasons why you should consider it as a platform. At the end of the session, hopefully we’ll answer one of life’s most puzzling questions: What is .NET?

The second talk I’ll be doing is on Windows Communication Foundation entitled “Demystifying Windows Communication Foundation 4.0”. There really is a lot of good stuff in WCF that simplifies a lot of things that really needs some light shed on it and I’m here to do just that. Why is WCF so important? Well put it this way, let me turn off services from the Internet and let’s just see how smart your Smartphone of choice is then. Services are the backbone of mobile apps and smart clients and it is important to know how to build them quickly and efficiently. Here is the abstract:

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) has gone through two major releases and is now ready for prime time but may enterprise developers are still holding onto ASMX web services. In this session we are going to learn why moving to WCF is a good thing and much easier in .NET 4.0. We’ll also look at many new features in WCF 4.0 such as simplified configuration along with multiple site bindings introduced with the latest release of .NET 4.0.

I’ll have some Deep Fried Bytes stickers with me in Orlando so if you want one that’ll be the time to acquire one.

I’ve already packed my gator gun, mosquito spray, flippy floppies and bright colored shirts. See you in Orlando!