*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I think it is unanimous that everyone really enjoyed Lansing Day of .Net.  I know I did.

I arrived Friday evening close to 6:00 PM outside of Lansing, MI in Okemos and met up with the LDoDN organizers at Kinkos.  Jeff put me to work and I wound up preparing all the speaker name badges.  After I finished my task I thought I would personally let each speaker know that I had carefully and ever so tenderly taken care of their speaker badges.  Thus I signed the back of each and every one saying:

I folded your card. – The Elder

Once we finished at Kinkos all of us headed to the Festival of the Moon in old downtown Lansing for the speaker get together.  After an hour or so we headed down the street to a pizza place to sing karaoke where we were joined with some local developers.  Jeff, Alan, Dan and myself put our names in the pot to sing. 

I didn’t think I was going to get to sing but they called my name last.  I sang a rousing rendition of a Billy Vera and the Beaters classic called “At this moment”.  The pizza placed closed at 11:00 PM and it was a long day of travel and time to get some sleep.  We headed back to Jeff and Carla’s home where they had graciously offered up their home for out of town speakers to stay (thanks again guys!). 

The next morning I got up and stuck around the house to work on my slide deck.  I had started going down the path of reworking the slides and had to finish my “theme” I had started. 

I arrived at the conference about 9:30 AM on Saturday and met up with old friends and people I hadn’t seen in awhile.  I gave my talk on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Solutions in Visual Studio at 11:00 and the room was packed.  There were 70 chairs in the room and there were people standing up in the back of the room.  I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and later that night at the get together that said it was a really good talk.  I think reworking my slide decked helped that a lot.

After the LDoDN event ended instead of all the speakers and organizers going out to eat, Jeff and Carla decided to have the get together at their house.  Like Jeff said, it was cheaper to just buy food and have everyone over to the house than trying to go out and eat somewhere.  Not only that but a lot of the attendees came over as well which is what made it worth it for me. 

Once it got dark a bond fire was started and we sat around the fire playing guitar and singing.  This is me playing blues on Corey’s harmonica with Alan.  A bit later Rock Band was broke out and we played until about midnight.  I hadn’t played Rock Band in probably 3 months so my drumming was incredibly rusty.  I need to get back into practice mode.

The bar was definitely raised for Day of .Nets with LDoDN and I was happy I got to participate.  I can’t believe how much “community” has been built in the Midwest region just over the past year.  I think it all started with Codemash a few years ago and it has just been a snow ball rolling down hill since.  I also think Twitter has played a large roll in keeping the community together as well but that is a post for another day.

Great job to the organizers and a big thanks to Jeff and Carla for opening up their home to us.

I’m packing right now to head to Detroit for the weekend as well as the better part of next week.  Tomorrow I will be traveling to Michigan.  I’ll be landing in Detroit and then headed to Lansing, MI to meet up with the hosts of Lansing Day of .Net and other speakers.  Saturday I’ll be speaking on “Structure and Guidance for Organizing Visual Studio Solutions”. I’m pretty excited about this topic because it is one of those classic talks that never gets old.  I’ve had upwards of 10 people email me already saying they wanted to know more about that talk because they were not going to be able to attend the event.  I have the slides on my presentations section but they are WAY out of date.  I’ll be updating the slide deck once it settles down. I’m constantly tweaking things and right now the slide deck is a serious moving target.  I also need to create a video that shows how this is done.  The slides are OK but until you watch it in person and learn all the tricks you may not get it.

Woody and I are planning on trying to record a podcast or two on Saturday if time and a great topic appears magically out of thin air.  No guarantees what we record will make the air but we at least want to try to record something since we’ll both be there sporting our DFB t-shirts.  

Sunday I’ll be back in Livonia.  I’ll be in Livonia through Wednesday.  Thus if you are in the are and want to hang out, just let me know.  Text msg, twitter, smoke signal or whatever.  Now to finish packing (the worst part about traveling).

A few weeks ago I got an email from Jeff McWherter who runs the Greater Lansing .Net User Group they were going to have a Day of .Net event in June.  The email contained the normal type stuff you’d expect in an announcement for call to speakers.  Dates, times, location, etc.  but Jeff threw in a twist.  At the bottom of the email he listed drive times from the various locations to Lansing, MI.  At the bottom of it was Hattiesburg, MS.  Pretty funny!

If you don’t recall, Jeff and I rode with each other to CodeMash in January.  He was kind enough to give me a ride from company head quarters in Livonia, MI to CodeMash 2008 and back.  Great guy and if you attend different events around Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Iowa, Vermont, and Timbuck Two you will probably run into Jeff.

Being 14 hours and 23 minutes away I knew I had no hope of going, but it was nice Jeff included me anyway.  After I got the email, Jeff pinged me in instant messenger and said, “Hey, I am going to try to find a way for you to come up, can you make it?”.  I checked my schedule and the dates missed my anniversary and my birthday (never travel during those times, the Wife Approval Factor is very low). 

Jeff started passing the hat and beating the bushes and made it happen.  He broke the news to me yesterday.  Jeff, you are awesome!  Thus I am happy to announce I’ll be joining everyone in Lansing, MI for the Day of .Net event on June 21st, 2008.  I have no idea what I’ll be speaking on yet but it’ll be something off my current list.

The last Day of .Net event I did was in Ann Arbor, MI last year so it has been  along time since I’ve done a Day of .Net event.  I am very much looking forward to seeing everyone there.

I will visiting the Lower Alabama .Net User Group on May 27th presenting a talk on Windows Workflow Foundation.  Here are the details:

Location:
  Office Mall South
  3100 Cottage Hill Road
  Building 3
  Mobile, AL 36606

Time:  May 27th, 2008, 6:00 PM

Topic: Introduction to Workflow Foundation

Foundation Scenario: Your boss gives you a task with fairly complicated business rules one day at work. You spend weeks coding it and as soon as you get done he/she informs you the business rules have changed. Your first thought is to lash out at your boss because this is a major change. Instead you politely smile and say thank you, “I’ll get right on it”. Little does your boss know you’ve used Workflow Foundation to map out all the business logic and rules. You quickly make the change declaratively within Workflow Foundation and all of a sudden you are a hero.

Workflow Foundation enables developers to quickly and easily map out complex business tasks that turn their code into declarative models. In this session we’ll explore the ins and outs of Workflow Foundation from the ground up so you’ll have a good sense of where to get started when you head back to the office. 

Slide deck is available for download.

This past week I have been in Michigan.  My reason for traveling to Michigan this week is I spoke at the MSDN Launch event in Detroit and used the time while I was up to work onsite this week as well. This is the first chance I’ve had all week to sit down at the computer and just vegetate.  It is good to finally just sit down at the keyboard and not have Power Point or Visual Studio open worrying about demos and presentations.  Five presentations this week wore me out. 

Launch Event

Tuesday was the Launch Event in Detroit.  I couldn’t believe the number of people there.  I heard 2,000 people were in attendance but I’m not sure if that was the exact count.  Let’s just say the Renaissance Center downtown was packed.  A lot of my friends said they got free copies of Vista, SQL Server, Visual Studio etc.  Personally I didn’t get any swag because I basically spent all of my time in the speakers room working slides and demos.  During lunch, I did go to a discussion panel which turned into a free for all round table session.  Alexey and I were at a table with a bunch of nice guys from Kelly Services.  We got to talking about TDD, Unit Tests, Team Foundation Server, and on and on.  It turned into such a great discussion that everyone decided to skip the panel and just keep the train a rolling.

I have no idea how much the event cost to put on but feeding that many people breakfast, lunch and providing them a cool lunch box to take home is already more than I could afford.  Attendees didn’t have to pay anything to attend the event, simply register.  There were tons of people from all over.  Michael Eaton and Dustin Campbell have blog posts that lists a lot of the people from the community that we all know. 

It Wasn’t My Fault, Let Me Explain

My session was the last session of the day.  There was one developer track session before lunch and then three after lunch.  The scheduling should have been tweaked to allow for breaks into between each one and I hope someone brings this up to the organizers so it can be addressed for other launches.  The first session after lunch started at 12:45 and was suppose to end at 1:45.  There was suppose to be a 15 minute break and then the next session started at 2:00.  The next session (mine) started at 3:00 with no break in between!  No breaks between sessions means the schedule gets thrown off.  Brian Prince and Jeff Blankenburg were covering Asp.Net during the session after lunch and theirs went pretty much to the 2:00 mark.  At about 2:10 Bill English started his session on the Office stack and he tried to get the schedule back on track.  He finished a few minutes after 3:00 but then questions poured in one after another so he didn’t end until 3:13.   I already had my laptop setup so I jumped up and started.  I looked down at my watch and it was 3:15.  Knowing we were running late I just tried to dive in and get the train running. 

After my session someone said, “man, your session was long”.  For the record my session was exactly an hour like it was suppose to be.  I had it timed perfectly and when I looked down at my watch it was 4:15 when I ended. 

From my perspective the talk went very well.  I tried to cover things from the real world perspective of “I am using these technologies right now you should be too”.  A few highlighted quotes from the talk were:

The New Hotness = WPF + Expression Blend

And

Workflow is so easy, even my Mom can do it!

After the session several people came up to me and said, “Dude, I can’t believe you covered MFC applications, I totally didn’t expect that from you”.  Here comes the “it wasn’t my fault” story.  Everyone has to understand something about Launch Events.  Everything you saw during the day was completely scripted.  In other words, I didn’t write the slides, nor the demos, nor come up with the agenda.  As a speaker at an event like this you are given everything.  And when I mean everything I mean even down to every line you are suppose to say as you walk through demos.  So for those that thought having MFC talked about at the Launch event was a little weird, it wasn’t my fault. 

Someone else said, “I can’t be you wrote in VB!”.  Again, I wouldn’t have if I had the choice, but at an event like that you have to play all sides of the fence and show a little love to everyone.  If you are a C# person and you went to an event with all VB examples you probably would feel that Microsoft was ignoring your platform and vice versa.  Thus that is the reason the talk incorporated C#, MFC, and VB. 

I tried to do my normal thing and work with what I had been given.  My goal was to try to bring some real world experience to the talk rather than just do a high level overview.  For example, the last demo I changed around which showed how to expose workflows via Workflow Foundation through WCF.  The original demo had console applications to host the WCF services.  Since the talk was about Clients, I ripped out the console apps and built the service to wire up to the WPF client.  I thought it was more important to show how a WCF service was built from scratch using Visual Studio and the new service reference additions which wouldn’t have been covered.  After I ripped out the consoles from the demos and did the timing with the new version it fit perfectly into the schedule and I thought made a lot more sense than what was originally planned.

After the Launch Event it was Geek Dinner time.  More to follow.