*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Last week I spoke in Ann Arbor, MI at the 5th anniversary of the Ann Arbor .NET Developers User Group (AADND).

We used to live in Ann Arbor, MI so it was great to get to go back and speak.  I got to see a lot of people I haven’t seen in a long time and it WAS A BLAST. 

This all started a few months ago when Dennis Burton and Jay Harris of AADND emailed me asking me to speak.  This was a pretty easy decision, I was in and done.

Jay and Dennis did a fantastic job with this event as they gave away an XBox, an iPad (.NET devs are gadget geeks too) and had Chipotle instead of pizza.  Oh, and they had cup cakes which looked amazing but I didn’t eat one since I am still on my low carb diet (19lbs and going).

The turn out was AMAZING to say the least as they had 78 people in attendance and it was standing room only in the back. 

As promised I am sharing out my slide deck from the evenings talk and also as a reminder I will be open sourcing the Nillius Filius project shown at the talk. I just have to finish getting everything transitioned.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the event!

Download the slide deck: BuildingNilliusFiliusInSilverlight.pdf

Last year I received an email from the leaders of the Ann Arbor .NET User Group (AADND http://aadnd.org/) asking me if I could make the trip up to Ann Arbor, MI and speak at their 5th anniversary meeting.  I checked the calendar and quickly agreed for a chance to get back to Ann Arbor where we lived for eight years.  Thus on February 9th I’ll be in Ann Arbor speaking to the group and getting to visit with a lot of friends I haven’t seen in awhile.  Here’s what I’ll be speaking on:

Talk 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. 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.”

If we’ve met face to face at one point or another and you live within 50 miles of Ann Arbor I fully expect you to be there! (kidding)

Help the organizers plan by RSVP’ing here:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=187695341259851 

Also check out the giveaways! This should be a great event with great food, prizes and a very sub-par speaker that promises nothing except he will take a bath before showing up.

See ya there!

It is with great joy that I get to announce a new user group in Mississippi starting up.  The group is meeting in Biloxi, MS and is called the Mississippi Coast .NET Users Group.

I will be speaking at the first meeting of the group on November 23rd, 2010. 

The topic will be “Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio”.  Here is an abstract:

Visual Studio is an outstanding tool when it comes to building applications on the .Net Framework. It can be confusing for users when trying to initialize a new software deliverable though. For example, how do you name your projects? Where do you put third party assemblies so they can be re-used? How do you set things up for an n-tier architecture? And the list goes on. I’ve given various talks throughout the US and it never fails that I end up in a conversation with multiple people on what are the best ways to organize projects within Visual Studio. This session should answer these questions and provide some proven guidance that works. In this session we’ll cover some best practices on how to organize your projects and solutions. We’ll also look at some tricks and guidance on how to map your folder structure to your namespaces. During the session we are going to build a new application from scratch and cover how to initially incorporate an n-tier design when initializing your project. Even if you are an experienced .Net developer this is one session you will not want to miss!

Hope to see you there!

I met up with David Giard at the DevLink conference and recorded an episode of “Technology and Friends” with him.  This is now live. 

http://technologyandfriends.com/archive/2010/09/07/tf114.aspx

Before I even start about the event I need to thank INETA who made Saturday’s event possible.  INETA sponsored the “.NET From Scratch” track at SQL Saturday #28 in Baton Rouge this past Saturday.  So thank you INETA for helping out to make this happen!

The event was a top notch run event thanks to Patrick LeBlanc, Mike Huguet and others from the Baton Rouge area.  By the way, Patrick runs the SQL group in BR (Baton Rouge) and Mike runs the .NET User Group there, both great groups.

Friday evening we met up at Mike Anderson’s Seafood in Baton Rouge for a speaker dinner.  They had me at seafood.  I will say this is the first speaker dinner I’ve been to where there was crawfish.  Awesome!

After a good meal, great conversation, and fun I headed back to the hotel to work on demos, slides, and run through the deck one more time. 

The next morning I made it over to the LSU campus.  The last time I was on campus it was for a LSU vs Southern Miss football game back in the mid ‘90’s when I was in college. 

For the .NET From Scratch track we had attendees register for the track so we’d be able to gage attendance.  The room only held 50 people and I’m happy to say we filled the room and even had to cut the registration off.  What does that tell you? It tells you that even though we are at version 4.0 of the .NET framework, there is a huge void out there that speakers continue to ignore which is a way for new developers to learn about the platform. 

I wanted to say thanks to those that came to the track on Saturday.  I mean this when I say I had a blast!  It was such a great group and I hope it was worth your time.

As promised I zipped up the slide deck and the demos.  You can download them here:

.NET From Scratch Slide Deck and Demos

Hope to see you next year!