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Doing Geek Speak Live Wednesday: Deploying WCF Services

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Speaking, WCF | Posted on 23-06-2009

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If you aren’t doing anything Wednesday, June 24th, around 3:00 EST sign up for the MSDN Webcast called Geek Speak and tune in to see me walk through deploying various WCF bindings such as TCP / MSMQ services in IIS / WAS. 

Register Online Here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032417610&EventCategory=4&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US

Bring some popcorn or favorite Deep Fried Food, sit back and get your geek own!

Speaking in Oklahoma City Monday June 1st

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Speaking | Posted on 30-05-2009

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Where’s my cow poke, cowboy hat and cowboy boots?  I need to wrestle them up because I’m going to Oklahoma City!  While in town I’ll be speaking at two different .Net meetings on Monday June 1st. 

Due to a crazy flight schedule and two speaking engagements, one Monday at lunch and another that night, I’ll be arriving on Sunday evening if anyone wants to get together at Bricktown for some dinner.  You can find me easily on Twitter to find out where I’m at and what’s going on while I’m traveling:  http://twitter.com/keithelder

This will be my first trip to Oklahoma in a long long time and I’m looking forward to it.  Here are the details on where I’ll be when on Monday.

Lunch Meeting: Demystyfying Windows Communication Foundation
Time: 11:30am – 1pm
Location: The Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative
Windows Communication Foundation was released with the .Net 3.0 framework and is the future of the platform for distributed computing. With .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) became a first class citizen with additional tooling and add ons for Windows Workflow Foundation. In this session we are going to look at WCF from the standpoint of how to transition from ASMX web services and some of the important things you should know about WCF. If you have been hesitant in adopting WCF and still writing ASMX web services, this session will hopefully put you over the edge to giving WCF a try. I assure you, once you do, you will never look back. Don’t worry though, this isn’t a complete WCF sales pitch. We’ll also do a rusty washers / shinny pennies comparison about WCF to get a real world feel for where it stands. In other words, no sugar coating, just straight talk.

Evening Meeting: Deploying WCF services: How to not pull your hair out!
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Location: The Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative
Don’t you love it when you go to a conference and the speaker shows you a new technology like Windows Communication Foundation (henceforth abbreviated as WCF)? You then head back to the office, start playing with it and then you find all sorts of things that make life difficult when it comes time to deploy it. I know how this feels and this is why you need to come to hear this talk. This session was created out of the pain experienced in deploying WCF services with IIS7 in the enterprise. What makes this talk different is it is mostly one long demo where we break things and then fix them. We’ll look at how to setup IIS7, how to configure IIS7 with multiple host headers, what that does to your WCF services and how to make everything play nicely with the other children. We’ll also configure our services and IIS7 to support the net.tcp and net.msmq protocol and talk about WAS (windows activation service). Then once we get everything working we’ll have a throw down to see which WCF binding outperforms the others.

Demystifying WCF in Baton Rouge, LA May 20th

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Speaking | Posted on 19-05-2009

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I was sitting at the computer late on Sunday trying to catch up on work from being gone all weekend when an email came into my inbox. It was marked “URGENT” and was giving off a vibe of panic.  Myself and several other INETA speakers from the South were asked to step in for a fellow INETA speaker who had to cancel an engagement.  Baton Rouge is only a 2.5 hour drive away from me so I stepped in.  Maybe someone will step in when I am in need one day.

At any rate, I will be speaking in Baton Rouge on Wednesday, May 20th at the local .Net User Group there.  I’ll be talking on WCF, building services, configuration, deployment, and on whatever the audience wants to talk about. 

If you are in the area, I hope you’ll come out!

Speaking at Tampa Bay, FL .Net User Group

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Speaking | Posted on 13-04-2009

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Thursday, April 23rd, I’ll be speaking in Tampa Bay, FL at the local .Net User Group.  This time of the year the weather should be great and the fish should be biting.

While in Tampa I’ll be speaking on WCF, you know, that technology that makes the world go around?  Think about where we’d be without services today? Things that make the Internet fun like Twitter, Facebook, Mobile Apps and more would have a very hard time working.  Think about it, they are ALL built on services.  Some don’t look at services as a sexy piece of technology but I do because it is so important.  The next time you open your mobile phone up and search for the nearest gas station you can thank a service.

Services aren’t just just for public facing applications but for companies as well.  Without services, we’d all be resorting to storing all of our data on our PC’s instead of being able to store things in the cloud. Not to mention we’d have that interoperability problem between platforms.  So yes, services are sexy!

In Tampa I’ll be breaking down WCF and showing a melting pot of things that’ll hopefully keep everyone on the edge of their seats.  I’ll also have some Deep Fried Bytes swag to give away.  If you are in the area, I hope to see you there. 

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(DFB wall clock and BBQ apron)

Speaking at Little Rock .Net User Group Feb 12th 2009

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Speaking | Posted on 05-02-2009

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Next week I’ll be speaking at the Little Rock .Net User Group on February 12th, 2009.  It is my first time speaking in Arkansas and I’m looking forward to connecting with a lot of the people in that area. 

Topic

Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio

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!