I’ve been excited by LightSwitch since I first saw it more than 18 months ago and the recent release of the Beta 2 version and the updated Training Kit has just got me more excited.
The Training Kit includes the following content:
All content has been tested to work with Visual Studio 2010 SP1. The setup scripts for all hands-on labs and demo scripts have also been updated so that the content can easily be used on a machine running Windows 7 SP1.
You can download the Beta 2 release of the LightSwitch Training Kit from here: http://bit.ly/coLyVC
I’ve been on the NSW.NET committee for a little while now and have been to (and presented at) a few of the breakfast sessions. They’re generally a great mix of useful technical and business information and this month’s is no exception.
Business opportunities in the cloud; journeys of Microsoft and its partners Our April event features both Tim Molloy, Online Strategist at MYOB and Gianpaolo Carraro, Director of Developer & Platform Evangelism at Microsoft Australia. Tim will discuss the challenges overcome in transitioning a large customer base to the cloud using Azure, whilst GP will describe journeys which several Microsoft customers and partners have taken towards cloud computing, the problems they faced and the solutions they adopted. Booking Information Venue The Grace Hotel Level 2, 77 York Street Sydney, NSW, Australia Date 5 Apr 201 Time 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM Member $35.00 Non Member $55.00
Our April event features both Tim Molloy, Online Strategist at MYOB and Gianpaolo Carraro, Director of Developer & Platform Evangelism at Microsoft Australia. Tim will discuss the challenges overcome in transitioning a large customer base to the cloud using Azure, whilst GP will describe journeys which several Microsoft customers and partners have taken towards cloud computing, the problems they faced and the solutions they adopted.
Book here.
Community stalwart, MVP and Regional Director Adam Cogan is running SharePoint 2010 developer training around the country at the end of this month (and the beginning of next). From their newsletter:
In this FREE 3 hour session, you will learn why Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) is the fully integrated solution to manage projects, giving developers, testers and management a single source of truth for all project needs. Using TFS to develop for SharePoint will make the development and maintenance process much more efficient and effective.
More information from their site here.
I am the guest editor of the (Australian version of the) MSDN Flash for next week. I expound on a view I’ve held for a while - namely that two of the most important attributes of a good developer are boastfulness and laziness.
Boastful, in that a good developer wants to share learnings with as many other interested people as possible. Lazy, in that a good developer wants to avoid doing things repetitively or even redoing work someone else has done. It’s also the sort of lazy that would prefer to spend eight hours writing and perfecting a text import routine than doing two hours of data entry, even for a one-off job.
A great way to encourage and exercise these two essential skills is in the developer community. Of course, this means different things to different people, but generally there is somewhere for everyone.
All around the country, there are groups of like-minded individuals that meet to talk about a range of technical topics, from.NET to SQL to infrastructure to Silverlight and a bunch of places in between. The best way to find a local group is to go to http://www.technicalcommunity.com/ and search based on location and technology from the front page.
Many organisations have a thriving internal technical community with regular meetings and presentations, an active mailing list and great exchange of ideas. If you’re interested in establishing such a group within your organisation, please reply to this mail and we’ll chat about how I can help you.
Of course, there are lots of places online that developers (and other technical folk) hang out. The MSDN forums are a great place to search for answers and ask and answer questions. In Australia, we also have a presence on LinkedIn and Facebook.
A good example of the community helping the community is Michael Kordahi’s new link blog MakeAwesomeWeb. With contributions from some of our leading community members, this is a must-visit site for anyone doing next-generation web development.
It’s often hard to keep up with the news. Michael and I publish a weekly(ish) podcast called FranklySpeaking which spends about 30 minutes discussing current technology and often interviewing someone interesting from the local or international community.
While we’d like to think we’re wherever you’d like us to be, you may have some suggestions as to how or where we can help you develop your boastfulness and laziness. Let us know what we can do and we’ll try to make it happen.
Another great training/education opportunity for folks in Sydney is being run by Readify on Thursday 17 March. Presented by community experts (and Readifarians) Tatham Oddie and Aaron Powell, Readify promise:
Based on the latest Web technologies from Microsoft, WebMatrix, coupled with patterns and practices from Readify’s extensive hands-on experience, you will start from an empty screen and build a complete web application over the course of a day*. What’s more, you’ll be able to take the techniques, tricks and tips you learn back to your workplace for immediate application. You won’t need to re-write your application, just implement what you learn, piece by piece. Each topic covered during the Dev Day will demonstrate techniques you can use individually or together as part of a single narrative. This intensive Dev Day will cover the following technologies, pillars of Microsoft’s WebMatrix: NuGet IIS Express Razor MVC3 Orchard CMS IE9/HTML5/CSS3 jQuery SQL CE4
Based on the latest Web technologies from Microsoft, WebMatrix, coupled with patterns and practices from Readify’s extensive hands-on experience, you will start from an empty screen and build a complete web application over the course of a day*.
What’s more, you’ll be able to take the techniques, tricks and tips you learn back to your workplace for immediate application. You won’t need to re-write your application, just implement what you learn, piece by piece. Each topic covered during the Dev Day will demonstrate techniques you can use individually or together as part of a single narrative.
This intensive Dev Day will cover the following technologies, pillars of Microsoft’s WebMatrix:
For more details and to register, go here.
Telerik, the developer tools vendor, are setting up shop in Australia and are running a series of seminars for developers and testers.
There are some sensational presenters scheduled including Stephen Forte, Joel Semeniuk, Malcolm Sheridan and Jordan Knight
Here's the note I received from them. Worth a look.
Telerik Australia event: Focus on Developer Productivity
Telerik, the market-leading provider of end-to-end solutions for application development, automated testing, agile project management, reporting, and content management across all major Microsoft development platforms, is coming to Australia.
We invite you for in-depth sessions with industry experts and Telerik Senior Leadership. This event is by invite only, please do not spread the registration link and password. All attendees will receive a copy of Telerik JustCode, valued at $199.
Please note these are 4 separate seminars; you need to register for all those you intend on attending.
The Agile Buffet Table: Implementing your own Agile Process with Microsoft ALM Tools
New to Agile? Having challenges implementing an agile process in your organization? Have you been using Scrum, but need to bend the rules to make it work in your organization? Can’t get the business to “buy-in”? Come and learn about implementing an agile process in your organization. You'll look at the “buffet table” of agile processes and procedures and learn how to properly decide “what to eat.” We’ll start by defining XP, Scrum, Kanban and some other popular methodologies and then learn how to mix and match each process for various scenarios, including the enterprise, ISVs, consulting, and remote teams. Then take a look at agile tools and how they will aid in implementing your development process. You’ll see how Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 provides process templates for Agile that facilitate better planning and metrics. Learn how Microsoft’s application lifecycle management (ALM) tools can support your development process. Lastly, we will talk about how to “sell” agile to your business partners and customers. The speakers have a very interactive style so participation is encouraged and there will be plenty of time for Q&A.
PRESENTERS:
Stephen Forte, Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM (GMT+1000)
REGISTER NOW
(by invite only event, use password: Telerik&&ALM2)
Location:
Citigate Central Sydney
169-179 Thomas Street
Haymarket, NSW
Sydney, 2000
Joel Semeniuk, Founder of Imaginet Resources,
Microsoft Regional Director
All attendees will receive a copy of Telerik JustCode, valued at $199.
Agile Testing
As more product teams move to Agile methodologies, the need for automated testing becomes essential to generate the velocity needed to ship fully tested features in short iterations. In this session we will look at the differences between traditional testing and agile testing, explore some tools and strategies that can help make your automation more productive as well as how to get the automation effort started for both new and existing agile projects.
PRESENTER:
Christopher Eyhorn, Executive VP of Telerik’s automated testing tools division
Tuesday, March 15, 2011 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM (GMT+1000)
(by invite only event, use password: TestingTelerik)
20 Things to Consider When Selecting a CMS
Choosing a CMS can be a daunting task. There are plenty of Content Management Systems to choose from; ranging in price from free to extremely expensive. From this crowded landscape it can be difficult to find a CMS that effectively enables an organization to accomplish their goals. In this session, I will identify 20 things to consider when evaluating a CMS that will help you select the ideal CMS for your project.
Gabe Sumner, Developer Evangelist at Telerik
Martin Kirov, Executive Vice President of the Sitefinity CMS division of Telerik
(by invite only event, use password: TelerikAustralia)
Streamline Development with ASP.NET MVC Extensions
Tired of dealing with the bloated pages generated by your WebForms application? Wondering what the whole deal is with MVC? Already into MVC but want to get maximum performance and functionality out of your applications? In this presentation we will take a look at how ASP.NET MVC, together with the Telerik MVC Extensions, can have you developing applications with high performance and functionality, while output light-weight and easily readable HTML.
Malcolm Sheridan, Microsoft awarded MVP in ASP.NET
Speeding up Development Using 3rd Party Controls
Learn how to cut Silverlight development time significantly using your new Telerik RadControls. As a TechDays attendee, you will receive a complimentary license for Telerik’s RadControls for Silverlight. This TurboTalk will demonstrate how you can speed up application development while adding more functionality to your Silverlight applications with the Telerik tools. See how high-performance data controls like RadGridView and RadChart can take your applications to the next level. See how layout controls like RadDocking and RadTileView can add both richness and increased functionality, helping you maximize screen real estate. And see how RadRichTextBox is unlocking Silverlight’s power to enable editing of HTML, DOCX, and XAML content. Jumpstart your development with the RadControls for Silverlight and get the most out of your new tools by joining this developer-to-developer talk.
Jordan Knight, Solution Architect | Microsoft MVP - Silverlight
(by invite only event, use password: DevelopersRock)
Update 2 - 21 Sep 2010
I've removed the lo-res wmv links because so few of them (<5) actually had videos behind them. Use the MP4 links for lo-res and WMV-High for hi-res.
Update 21 Sep 2010
There are now also MP4 files available. These are lower resolution than the HQ-WMV files, and therefore only about a third the file size. Note that virtually none of the lower-res wmv files are up yet (and may never be - I'm still looking for clarification from the TechEd online team on this).
The content from this year's TechEd Australia is making its way up to TechEd Online. If you just want to watch/download one session, then it's really easy to do so from the TechEd Online site, but if you want to grab the content in batches, then the easiest way to do so is with a download manager. Thanks to this post from Brian Keller, my favourite is Free Download Manager.
The other side of the equation is that you need a list of the URLs to set up FDM's download list. To that end, I've generated a list of the URLs for the slides, the High-quality videos and the standard quality videos. I've pivoted by track and by speaker, as well as provided a list of all the sessions.
Note that this is an auto-generated list based on all of the breakout sessions and not all sessions are up yet nor will all of them even eventually have all three components (even though there's a link for all of them). FDM takes care of this nicely though by just telling you it can't find a file and moving onto the next one. You can even retry later to pick up any that have gone up in the meantime.
Enjoy!
Last week at the Australian Partner Conference, I presented a session on "New opportunities - developing with Office 2010 and SharePoint". Due partly to the target audience and partly to time constraints, I mentioned resources rather than delving into them deeply. I promised in the session that I'd post my resources links here.
Note that you'll soon be able to download the deck as well from the APC website.
Visual Studio 2010/.Net Framework 4 Training Kit http://bit.ly/1EEqlz
Lots of other Training Kits http://blogs.msdn.com/b/acoat/archive/2010/07/01/training-kit-redux-more-developer-resources-than-you-could-shake-a-stick-at.aspx
OpenXML SDK http://bit.ly/9lAeEv
SharePoint 2010: Developer Platform White Paper by David Chappell http://bit.ly/4BNVGI
Guidance for developing applications for SharePoint 2010
Andrew’s Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat
Platform Video http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Acoat/The-Cloud-Platform-Story/
Document Creation and Conversion with the OpenXML SDK and SharePoint 2010 Word Automation Services – Part 1
Can't believe I haven't blogged about this.
For just over nine months now, Michael Kordahi and I have been producing a Podcast called Frankly Speaking. It's hard to believe we've recorded just over a session per week for 41 weeks. We've had a bunch of great guests and we generally just chat about current tech things with a bit of a Microsoft bent.
You can subscribe to the feed here or via iTunes here.
This year at TechEd Australia (aka #auteched) the locknote was delivered by Miha Kralj, Director in the office of the CTO. The session was entitled "How IT is changing us and our future" and was delivered using a very cool style called PechaKucha – 20 slides, each on the screen for 20 seconds. Miha actually delivered 5 x 20 slides, an introduction and then a section based loosely on each of the four TechEd themes – Learn, Connect, Explore and Evolve.
The style features information overload, with each slide having at least two, and sometimes as many as four separate but complementary pieces of information appearing during the 20 seconds. Common things in Miha's presentation were a scrolling factoid across the bottom of the slide and a "Book worth reading" recommendation that appeared at about the 10 second mark.
Due to popular demand and with Miha's permission, I've compiled the factoids and book recommendations from his deck. The recording of the session itself will be available from TechEd Online some time in the very near future.
Guy Kawasaki: Reality Check
Byron Acohido, Jon Swartz: Zero Day Threat
Elting E. Morison: Men, Machines, and Modern Times
Robert Fulghum: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Janis Fisher Chan: E-Mail: How to Write and Manage E-Mail in the Workplace
Dan Heath: Made to Stick
Tim O'Reilly, Sarah Milstein: The Twitter Book
Brian McWilliams, Allen Noren: Spam Kings
Don Tapscott: Grown up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World
Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start
Nancy Duarte: Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
Michael E. Gerber: E-Myth Revisited
Clayton M. Christensen: The Innovator’s Solution
Malcolm Gladwell: Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Thomas Kelley: The Art of Innovation
Phil Baker: From Concept to Consumer: How to Turn Ideas Into Money
David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Stephanie Chandler: From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur
Jonathan Boehman, David Weigelt: Dot Boom: Marketing to Baby Boomers
Bjorn Renneus Guthrie: Tomorrow We are Driving Computers Which Look Like Cars
Sandy Berger: Great Age Guide to Gadgets & Gizmos
Russ Unger, Carolyn Chandler: A Project Guide to UX Design
James H. Gilmore, Joseph B. Pine: Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want
Chris Anderson: The Long Tail
Clara Shih: The Facebook Era
Dianne Sweeney: Kissing Frogs In Cyberspace
Michael Erbschloe, John Vacca: Net Privacy
Peter F. Drucker: Management Challenges for the 21st Century
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class
Peter Yellowlees MD: Your Health In The Information Age
Don Tapscott: Wikinomics
Jeff Howe: Crowdsourcing
Valerie Landau: The Engelbart Hypothesis: dialogs with Douglas Engelbart
For each completed evaluation form Microsoft will donate $1 to the IT Fund for Kids - a Starlight Foundation initiative.
Only 35 minutes to go before prize giving starts! Yay!
By 2014 more than 45% of new workloads will be delivered through Cloud Computing
The top 10 Web sites accounted 31 percent of all pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010.
Does information value of 50MB of YouTube kittens equal a 5MB NYT article?
Mobile phone is a million times cheaper, 100,000 times smaller and 1,000 times faster than MIT computer in 1965.
There are 60 mobile phones per 100 people – more than 4 billion total.
More than 76% of 159 million adults in US pay their bills online.
Japan has the highest concentration of fax machines: 93 per 1,000 people.
3.4 billion text messages are sent each day in the US – on average 357 messages per month.
247 billion emails are sent each day – that’s 527 million since this presentation started.
73% of senior citizens (60+ years old) in US utilize the Internet on a regular basis.
Statistically there is over 7% chance that someone just twitted about this session.
81% of all global email traffic is spam – up from 61% in year 2005.
Average US household upgrades all electronics in the house every 3.5 years.
Internet in 2010 is estimated to be over 7 exabytes large – that’s 7 million terabytes.
A typical Pecha Kucha night includes eight to fourteen presentations of 20 slides each, 20 seconds per slide.
The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet based on how the internet is described in computer network diagrams
Birthday of PC is August 12, 1981, when IBM introduced model number 5150,
IBM XT (1983) ran @ 4.77 MHz. Laptops today run @ 3,060.00 MHz.
Smartphones with touch screens account 55% of 166 million units sold in 2009.
Average American watches more than 4 hrs of TV per day (that is 2 months per year).
Video games target at least 40 hours of focused entertainment per game per user.
Wii Fit surpassed sales of Halo 3 and became $1B business in 4 months.
47% of TV viewers in US would pay for ad-less broadcasting of content.
Fastest txting is 160-character SMS in 41.52 seconds – more than 4 chars per second!
On Christmas 2009 Amazon sold more kindle e-books than paper books for the first time.
Japan is the largest market for new gadgets with over 65 million active gadget users.
Microsoft SYNC sales in Ford, Lincoln and Mercury line-up exceeded 1 million users in 2009.
US stats: 58 Million overweight; 40 Million obese; 3 Million morbidly obese.
Voice recognition software has recognition accuracy at 98.5% - still not enough for a mass adoption.
Nokia manufactures 13 (non-smart) mobile phones every second.
Mobile phone penetration in Kenya and Tanzania will hit 100% before 2013.
mPesa has 8.3 million active users – that’s 21% of entire Kenyan population.
The number of devices that are connected to the Internet is expected to pass the 5 billion milestone later this month.
Netcraft survey from March 2010 measured response from 206 million internet sites.
Internet is transferring over 2,000 PB (Petabytes) of information per month.
Cisco Nexus switch can move all Wikipedia content in 0.001 seconds.
Facebook aggregates 40 Gbps backhaul traffic per server cabinet into its network core.
Stocks of data center providers are performing well above the IT industry average.
On average, Akamai serves 1.5 million simultaneous media streams through its CDN network.
32-bit IP address space can address 4,294,967,295 possible combinations.
IANA Pool exhaustion: October 2011. RIR pool exhaustion: August 2012.
As of 2010, IPv6 readiness is not considered in most consumer purchasing decisions.
Today there are only 4 home routers on the market that are IPv6 ready.
The size of Internet was roughly 5 million terabytes of data. That was in 2009.
Every 2 months YouTube gets more content than all TV networks produced since 1950.
There are over 250 million unique daily visitors to Facebook.
Over 380 couples that met online get married or engaged every day.
Folding@home is the most powerful distributed computer, sustaining 6.3 petaflops.
Human brain processing speed is estimated between 100 teraflops and 100 petaflops.
Garry Kasparov can examine approximately three positions per second. Deep Blue can compare200 million pps.
Studies show that automation increases production up to million times with deterministic quality control.
87% of surveyed IT vendors declared that their solutions are ready for the cloud.
Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand.
Over 90% of young people have online access, up from 75% in 2000.
In only 4 days Fox Home Entertainment sold 6.7 million DVD and Blu-ray units of Avatar
Organic food market grows 18% per year, topping $30 billion in 2009.
More than 15 million American adults suffer from Social anxiety disorders.
Only 32% of Facebook users customize their privacy settings.
85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate.
Deep web (non-indexed web) is estimated to be 500 times bigger than visible web.
86% of technology professionals claim that they understand how encryption protects the data.
Human knowledge doubles every 3-4 years according to sociology research.
The term Knowledge Worker was first coined in 1959 by Peter Drucker.
There are over 130 years of recorded lectures available freely on the internet.
66% of 16,000 students from 31 top US universities admitted to have cheated at least once.
There are currently 1,116,967 lawyers practicing in the United States.
Over 22 million legal documents from various legislations are available online.
Average tuition for public medical school in US is $25,000 per each year of study.
Average age of medical doctor in US is 47 – that means they studied medicine at least 20 years ago.
MBA graduate is expected to get on average 17.5% higher salary than non-MBA manager.
Companies that used crowdsourcing shortened development for 14% and lowered the cost for 35%.
There are over 18.000 active offers of products and services for $5 on fiverr.com.
Nearly every aspect of our life is changing due to impact of Information Technology.
US kids spend on average no more than 2.5 h on week and 6.2 h on weekend with their father.
The national graduation rate in US is 71%; up to 85% of US population has high school diploma.
Top universities: Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, Cambridge, MIT, Caltech, Columbia, Princeton, Chicago, Oxford
Studies less than decade old: New Media, Biotech, Organic Agriculture, Homeland Security, e-Business, Nanotechnology.
95% of all songs downloaded in 2009 were not paid for.
Over 1,000,000 books are published this year; that’s over 114 books during this presentation.
In 2009, 42% of all hotel bookings were generated over the Internet.
In 2009 US travel sales booked online reached $135 billion.
In 2008 campaign Obama raised $55,000,000 in 29 days through online social networks.
More people play online games than are prepared to go out and vote.
Zopa was the first P2P money lending company, linking lenders and borrowers directly.
Since the economy collapse, small private investors are still shy to invest through large brokers.
Estimated 4.7 million Americans uses prescription drugs non-medically.
Up to 80% of CAT scans created in US are transferred in real-time to India for an expert opinion.
Research shows that genetic factors can significantly alter response to drugs.
Intelligence amplification refers to the effective use of information technology in augmenting human intelligence.
By 2014, over 40% of new spend, over 45% of new workloads and over 25% of total workloads will use the Cloud Computing.