From September through November, launch events for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Exchange 2010 are happening across the US.
Boston’s launch event will be on October 5th at the AMC Boston Common 19. (Other regional stops are NYC on October 20 and Philly on September 28.)
The event will feature content for developers and IT pros (click the tabs to switch events). Of course the content will be excellent, but as an added bonus, attendees will get a copy of Windows 7!
Windows 7 Track
Windows Server 2008 R2 Track
Exchange 2010 Track
Full details and registration are on the Boston event homepage.
A new user group has been formed to focus on practices for building web applications using ASP.NET and related technologies. Led by community veteran Dean Serrentino, the New England ASP.NET Professionals Group will have its first meeting on March 16th and the first speaker is the well respected technologist, speaker, and author Fritz Onion:
New England ASP.NET Professionals March 16th, 6:15-8:30 PM Microsoft, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA Fritz Onion, Pluralsight "The Changing Face of ASP.NET Development: Ajax, MVC, jQuery, DynamicData: Things you should know before you start your next ASP.NET project"
Note that this March 16th meeting isn’t on the group’s normal cycle, which will be the 4th Tuesday of each month, starting in April.
Thanks to Dean for taking the initiative to create this new group, and to Fritz for helping to kick things off!
-Chris
I recently gave an “Introduction to F#” session for the Cape Cod .NET User group and, with Talbott Crowell for the Boston MSDN Developer Conference.
(And for those of you in Maine, I’ll be delivering the session on February 19th with the Maine Bytes User Group in Portland.)
Here are some resources from the session along with others I hope you’ll find useful as you explore functional programming and F#.
And, for the curious, a few commercial products written in F#:
I hope you enjoy delving into F#!
A new site has just launched with details of the Microsoft New England Research & Development (aka “NERD”) center at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.
The site features details about the facility, plus events, jobs, and the teams that call NERD home.
Check it out at: MicrosoftCambridge.com. (Not to be confused with our friends across the pond at the Cambridge, England Research Center.)
It’s a beautiful facility, right along the Charles with amazing views of Cambridge and Boston, so take a look at the upcoming events and drop by for a visit!
Only a few more days until we pile in the car and begin cruising the roads of the great Northeast for our March 2009 Northeast Roadshow!
I need to share one update, however. We unfortunately need to cancel our March 11th stop in the Albany, NY area. (The ol’ “circumstances beyond our control” at work, I’m afraid.) Sincere apologies to folks hoping to partake of our “wit and wisdom”, but the good news is that we’re creating screencasts for each session and will post the slides and other content to our blogs. So keep an eye here and on Jim’s and Bob’s blogs for more.
In other news, we’re now planning a visit with the Vermont .NET User Group on March 9th at 6PM! Join us the evening before the Roadshow for “Stump the Chumps” as we face your Q&A on Microsoft, developer technologies, and anything else you’d like to throw at us (put those rocks away, that’s in a figurative sense!)
So, here’s our updated schedule:
There’s still room to register for these free all-day events for architects and developers, so register now and we’ll see you in the coming weeks!
The Winter Northeast Roadshow series has run its course! Jim and I traveled about 2,000 miles to deliver seven events for nearly 600 people across the Northeast, and had a great time bringing developer technology and practices to you.
As promised, we're posting the content and resources from each of our sessions.
Look for the content from Jim's sessions, "Windows Workflow Steals the Show" and "Adventures in Data with Silverlight, WCF REST, and ADO.NET Data Services" on his blog.
Thanks to everyone who invested the time to join us for these events. Special thanks to the each of the following companies and organizations who helped us along the way:
We couldn't have delivered the Roadshow without your fantastic support!
We're going into hibernation for a little while to reacquaint ourselves with family and friends, but early 2009 will see many events, including our Spring Roadshow, likely in the later February into March timeframe.
Keep an eye on our blogs and sign up for MSDN Flash to hear updates on that and other events as they emerge.
Thanks again, and we'll see you again on the road!
Adam Machanic, with the New England SQL Server Users Group and Southern New England SQL Server Users Group, has been working to create a data-focused event based on the Code Camp concept.
New England Data Camp v1.0 will be on January 24th from 8:15 AM to 5:30 PM at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA.
From the Data Camp registration page:
It's all about the data! Today's applications are increasing data-dependent and whether you're a developer, DBA, or BI professional, you need to know how to work a variety of data across a range of products. This free, full-day Code Camp-style event will feature three concurrent tracks throughout the day to satisfy any tech professional who is interested in the latest and greatest tips and techniques for working with SQL Server 2005 and 2008, the Microsoft BI toolset, and all of the new .NET data access technologies--including LINQ and the Entity Framework.
Interested in helping? Data Camp is made better by multiple perspectives, so please consider giving a session! The Call for Speakers is open and available at:
http://www.thedevcommunity.org/CodeCamps
Here's how to add yourself and a session (excerpted from my Code Camp 10 post):
I believe it's been a few years since we've had a dedicated data-oriented community event of this scale, so this is a nice thing to see. Whether you're a dev, DBA, or IT pro, this is a solid opportunity for networking and learning.
Registration is now open, so sign up today and I'll see you there!
Breaking news! We've been able to arrange a visit to New Hampshire for the Winter Northeast Roadshow! We'll be spending the day at Daniel Webster College on December 18th, talking about jQuery & ASP.NET, Workflow, WPF, Silverlight, WCF, and a bunch more:
Register here!
Northeast Roadshow, December 18th
Daniel Webster College Collings Auditorium 20 University Place Nashua, NH 03063
Jim and I ask that if you're switching to NH from another location, please cancel your other registration (via the My Events page). Thanks!
Many thanks to Genevieve Baudin and Daniel Webster College for arranging to host us! We're looking forward to adding New Hampshire into the Roadshow tour!
Next Tuesday, January 13th, I'll be visiting Plymouth, MA to give a session on F# programming with the Cape Cod .NET User Group.
From the group's site:
An Introduction to Microsoft F# Tuesday, January 13, 6:30-8:30 PM Speaker: Chris Bowen, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Location: Plymouth Public Library, Main Branch, Board Room (second floor) 132 South Street, Plymouth, MA Directions In this session, we’ll take an introductory look at Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework that also features Visual Studio integration. F# can make challenging tasks easier by combining functional programming with imperative and dynamic concepts all with the runtime, libraries, tools, and object model of .NET. We’ll also see how F# can tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET. Come and see what this new “first class” .NET language (available as a CTP now and to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010) can offer your development projects.
An Introduction to Microsoft F# Tuesday, January 13, 6:30-8:30 PM Speaker: Chris Bowen, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Location: Plymouth Public Library, Main Branch, Board Room (second floor) 132 South Street, Plymouth, MA Directions
In this session, we’ll take an introductory look at Microsoft's new language, F#, a typed functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework that also features Visual Studio integration. F# can make challenging tasks easier by combining functional programming with imperative and dynamic concepts all with the runtime, libraries, tools, and object model of .NET. We’ll also see how F# can tame the complexity of parallel and asynchronous I/O programming in conjunction with tools such as Parallel Extensions for .NET. Come and see what this new “first class” .NET language (available as a CTP now and to ship as part of Visual Studio 2010) can offer your development projects.
Thanks to Marcia McLean and Khamla Sananikone for their great work with the Cape Cod group!
See you there!
Are you an IT pro looking for the latest on the Windows roadmap including details on Windows 7? My colleague Blain Barton, from the much warmer state of Florida, has posted details of the free IT Pro Tiki Hut Tour, spanning the eastern US this spring:
Get ready for Spring and join our local TechNet Events team to discuss the Windows Client OS Roadmap - Why Windows Vista is an important foundation for Windows 7. We’ll discuss security and application compatibility, as well as look at the new features of the Windows 7 Beta, presentations and demos delivered live by experienced IT Pros.
Each stop features three sessions:
The tour makes 10 stops from April to June, and is coming to Waltham, MA on April 28th from 6-9 PM, and you can register here.
This Thursday, at the TechNet / MSDN event held in Boston, John Ross and Ron Thibeau were recognized for their outstanding support of both the IT pro and developer communities in the northeast with the first Community Super Hero Award.
Hats off to my colleague Dan Stolts, (please see Dan's post on the award and presentation) who did the heavy lifting on this one. He recognized that John and Ron were due recognition, arranged the gifts, and produced framed certificates signed by Dan, Blain Barton, Jim O'Neil, and myself. [See the picture - Ron on the left, John on right.]
Having known John and Ron for several years before I joined Microsoft, I have seen that they epitomize the volunteer ideal. They are always ready to lend a hand and do so without having expectations in return.
From running the very helpful Boston User Groups site (which has a great calendar of upcoming events!), helping with countless user group meetings, coming in on weekends to help set up wiring for C# Days, to being a constant source of help for Code Camps, they deserve to be recognized and thanked.
So, thank you to John and Ron! It's people like you that make our technology community one of the best anywhere!
An update to my earlier post, the schedule has been set for The Architect Factory event coming to NERD on June 2nd. IASA New England, {Code Right}, Microsoft, and O’Reilly are sponsoring this half day multi-track event for senior developers and aspiring architects. Hear from seasoned architects on what you need to know to become an architect.
There will be a keynote by Rob Daigneau followed by 9 sessions organized into 3 tracks (Architecture in Action, Leadership, and Head in the Clouds). Sessions will cover practical techniques, current methodologies, patterns, cloud computing, security, how to work with IT stakeholders.
Register at arcfactory.eventbrite.com
This event will be held at the Microsoft New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, MA from 1:00 - 7:15 PM with dinner afterward. So come join your peers and network with some of the most influential architects here in the northeast!
1:00 – 1:30 - Arrive, Meet and Greet
1:30 - 2:45 - Keynote: “Becoming An Architect”, Rob Daigneau
2:45 – 3:00 - Break
3:30 - 4:15 – Sessions ”The Dangers of Over Architecting Solutions” - Bryan Tuttle “The IT Architect and Technology Leadership – where are we and what next?” - David Leonard “How the Cloud Pattern is Changing Enterprise Architecture” - Todd Bremner
4:15 - 4:30 - Break
4:30 - 5:45 – Sessions “Establishing Developer Practices” - Dennis Perlot “Working with Business Stakeholders” - Ian Dicker “The Architect and the New Identity Paradigm” - Curt Devlin
5:45 – 6:00 - Break
6:00 - 7:15 – Sessions “Architecture of Collaboration Systems” - SB Chatterjee “Using LAAAM to Make Good Architectural Decisions, Fast!” - Jeromy Carriere “Application Patterns for the Cloud” - Igor Moochnick
7:15 -8:30 - Evening Dinner Event
O’Reilly Media has generously donated copies of 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, and we’ll raffle off a copy or two in each session.
On an earlier Roadshow (winter 2008), I gave a preview of a great environment from Microsoft Research for making game programming friendly and accessible to a wider audience, and especially children. At the time it was called “Boku”, but was since renamed “Kodu”.
As of yesterday, Kodu is now available on XBOX Live Marketplace as a free trial or purchase for 400 points (about $5) and lets you create games using only the XBOX controller (though the chatpad is useful, too.)
I’ll be downloading it soon and showing our daughters. I just might even let them have a turn!
P.S. Other useful links:
Our Summer 2009 Northeast MSDN Roadshow is done and was an absolute blast! Bob, Jim, and I returned to many (oh so many) miles of open road to bring six sessions to five northeastern cities in June.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to attend in each city!
As promised, we’ve posted the materials from each of the sessions on the Northeast Roadshow Code Gallery, but here are quick links to each:
We’re also working on recording screencasts for each of the sessions, which we’ll post to the Northeast Channel 9 Site in the coming weeks.
We’re already hard at work on the next set of events! Things are shaping up for a September/October series, and we’re hoping to mix things up a bit this time (I’ll be purposefully vague here), so keep an eye on our blogs for news.
This time, we had extra help with our (very large!) Waltham event. Thanks to both Sybase and Burntsand for providing the food for the show!
Special thanks to the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the State of Maine Office of the Fire Marshal for again generously donating use of their facilities for our stops in Rochester, NY and Augusta, ME respectively.
Sincere thanks to coffee and chocolate-covered espresso beans (which melt in a car surprisingly quickly) for keeping us (or at least Bob who was the driver) awake for our travels.
And again, thanks to you for attending and investing your time with us!
September seems a long time from these warm days of July, but we’ve set the dates and locations for the next Northeast MSDN Roadshow and wanted to tell you about it now!
Join Jim O’Neil and me for one of our stops of the Fall 2009 series as we bring developer goodness to a town near you, including our first Roadshow stop in Rhode Island*.
*Update – 7/31: Sorry for the inconvenience, but we couldn’t get the timing to work in Warwick, RI. Signs are excellent that we’ll make a stop there for our Winter series, though!
Update 8/31: Thanks to the Beantown .NET User Group and the Microsoft New England R&D Center, we’ve just added a new stop on September 28th in Cambridge, MA!
But there’s something else new as well - four of our events will be in partnership with morning TechNet IT Pro events! (The TechNet events are separate events you’ll need to additionally register for if you wish to attend both.)
Please note of the times of each event, because they’re not all the same and not the usual times of previous Roadshows.
For those of you in Burlington, VT, while won’t have a Roadshow there this time, we will be in town on September 12th as part of the VT Code Camp and hope to see you there!
Here’s our agenda, the humor of which will provide you countless minutes of enjoyment:
The Fall 2009 Northeast MSDN Roadshow: Food for Thoughts Tour
After a long summer, you’re probably hungry for more tools and techniques to feed your development efforts. Touring the northeast this fall for the tenth Roadshow, road and code warriors Jim O’Neil and Chris Bowen have cooked up a select menu of sessions that are sure to please the heartiest of appetites. From current tools and technologies to practical insights, there is plenty to digest!
Reservations are required, so register today for a seating at these free and relaxed technology events.
You’ll see how Chris and Jim handle the heat of the demo kitchen, dish out knowledge, and pepper guests with half-baked humor, all the while being grilled by audience questions.
The Agenda – A Four Course Meal for the Mind:
1:00 - Essential Patterns, Practically Served
Design patterns, they’re important but often presented with unappetizing formality, like getting only the oat bits from a box of marshmallow cereal. We’ll sample a small set of key patterns, but also show you how free frameworks and tools (such as Enterprise Library, Prism, Unity, Velocity, and others) put each of those patterns directly into practice – so you can too. You’ll leave with a mind full of practical technology and a healthy understanding of how to turn underlying patterns into recipes for success.
2:15 - 7-Up(grade) Your Applications
Refresh your existing applications by pouring in some the new features of Windows 7 via the managed-code Windows API Code Pack. We’ll quench your thirst for how to incorporate the Taskbar, jumplists, and Libraries by taking the cap off an existing Windows Forms application and adding new capabilities, all the while retaining compatibility for your XP and Vista users. We’ll have you bubbling with excitement, able to give your applications that extra pop.
3:30 - Silverlight Snacks that Satisfy
There’s a generous amount of delicious ingredients in Silverlight 3 and we’re going to focus deeply on some of the most enriching. We’re going beyond the standard fare in this code-heavy session to create an application that leverages the new out-of-browser and offline execution features, local and remote connections, local data storage, and more. You’ll see that Silverlight 3 applications can be fortified with features so they can go well beyond being eye candy.
4:45 - Chips off the .NET Block
As seasoned developers, we know there’s a mix of options on the trail to implementing requirements. From staples like value types vs. reference types, interfaces vs. classes, Strings vs. StringBuilder, to other more exotic ingredients you may have yet tried, this session will dip into ways to leverage .NET, offering a taste of the impact they have on code execution, performance, and extensibility.
5:50 – “Check Please!” – We’ll box any leftovers, collect your comment cards, and distribute an array of giveaways.
Register today and we’ll see you on the road!
Code Camps are a great (and free) way to spend a day learning and connecting with area developers, and the second Hartford, CT area camp is coming on June 13th from 9 AM to 5:30 PM in Bloomfield, CT.
The CTDOTNET Hartford Code Camp 2 already has a wide variety of sessions planned by about 30 speakers, and the day will also feature a Career Fair, with mini-sessions on career related topics.
Registration Now Open
Register today (it’s free) by visiting http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=138288.
You Can Help!
Code Camps rely on volunteer speakers as well as contributions from supporting companies, and the Call for Speakers and Call for Sponsors are both still open.
For details on how you can help, see http://ctdotnet.org/codecamp2.aspx.
Thanks
Thanks to SB Chatterjee (MVP and leader of the CT .NET User Group) and other volunteers for doing a great job organizing what is shaping up to be another excellent camp in the Hartford area!
There will be a half-day partner briefing event at the Microsoft Waltham office on April 14th for Microsoft Partners with a competency in building custom development solutions, or those with an interest in expanding their practice in that direction.
The Field Evangelism Group will share with you the inner workings of their organization, the initiatives and big bets they are making this year - business and technology - and how they align with the greater worldwide Microsoft and Partner ecosystem.
Agenda:
Registration
Not in the New England area? This briefing is being held at other locations in the eastern U.S. as well.
The XNA team made two very big announcements at the Game Developers' Conference.
Cutting right to the chase, the biggest news is that the wait will be over for community XNA games on Xbox LIVE! Coming this holiday season, people will be able to share, peer review, and play user-created games!
From the announcement on the XNA Team Blog:
The Xbox LIVE community games brings to life the community-driven gaming vision we have talked about in the past. This offering gives the opportunity to share, peer review, download and play games created by the community, for the community. Starting with the beta launch of the service later this Spring, XNA Creators Club subscribers will be able to submit their own game creations for self-publishing through to Xbox LIVE Marketplace.
Read the post for the full details, and here for more, but another important note is that yes, this will lead to the ability to make money by writing XNA games for XBOX Live (details still to come)!
The second announcement is of one of the first new features coming with Game Studio v3.0 - the ability to create games for the Zune!
[...] This will let you write one game and deploy it to all three platforms that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support: the Xbox 360, Windows, and now the Zune. [...] That means that XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to the user's music - allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations at their discretion. In addition, the XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the ability to have multiple Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc gaming experience (think of the possibilities!)
[...] This will let you write one game and deploy it to all three platforms that XNA Game Studio 3.0 will support: the Xbox 360, Windows, and now the Zune. [...] That means that XNA Game Studio 3.0 integration includes discoverability/access to the user's music - allowing the user to customize background soundtracks or create real-time visualizations at their discretion.
In addition, the XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the ability to have multiple Zunes wirelessly engage in an ad-hoc gaming experience (think of the possibilities!)
Boston XNA Developers Group
Now, what better place to discuss these announcements than at the new Boston XNA Developers Group? The first meeting is on Wednesday of next week, February 27th at 6:00 in the Waltham Microsoft office. No game development experience required.
Details are on the Boston XNA Developers Group site.
After my Heroes Happen Here talk in Boston about web development with Visual Studio 2008, I got a few emails from people asking me how I was able to zoom in to areas of my screen during my demos.
There's a handy and free utility, ZoomIt, originally a SysInternals utility, that's available on TechNet at:
www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/ZoomIt.mspx
Put it in your startup folder and you'll always be a keystroke from it's features:
Enjoy!
The Boston XNA Developers Group is dedicated to learning and using XNA to create games for Windows and Xbox 360 (and later on, the Zune!) No game development experience is required!
Next Meeting
Our next meeting will be on April 24th, 6-8 PM at the Microsoft offices in Waltham. Note that this is a Thursday, not a Wednesday as we normally prefer.
Check out the Boston XNA Developers Group website for more details. (Great if you can join the site, but it's not required to attend.)
Michael Cummings and I will continue the survey of beginner-level game development topics. If you missed the first meeting, don't worry, we'll keep things heavy on explanation and reinforce the concepts from the first session so new people won't feel lost.
The Previous Meeting
The March meeting was our second official meeting, but the first time we looked at any code. We had a strong turnout of over 40 attendees, including a number of college and younger students as well!
Throughout the meeting, we created an thoroughly addictive game, okay, well - *a* game, well - Pong. It's actually a great place to start, slowly introducing the concepts of an XNA game and setting the conceptual foundation for what we'll build on in future meetings.
I've posted the completed sample game to my SkyDrive account, so please download it, run it, and even better - improve it!
More Information
For links to resources and some discussion threads, come to the Boston XNA Developers Group site, create an account, and join in the XNA and game chatting.