Chris Koenig

Dallas TechFest is a multi-technology, multi-disciplinary developer conference held this year it was held on June 19^th 2009 at the beautiful Westin Stonebriar Resort in Frisco, TX.  Completely organized and run by members of the local community, this year over 400 developers and architects turned out for 8 tracks and 40 sessions covering advanced topics in .NET, RIA, Java, Flex, Cold Fusion and Ruby. Speakers and attendees were drawn mostly from the regional influencer pool around Texas, Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas, with the notable exceptions of a speaker from Boston, MA and a participant from Brazil!

This year’s conference was fantastic.  Not only was the content exceptional in all of our tracks, but it was a great chance to see and work with some of our friends in the Java and PHP communities as well as make some new friends in the Cold Fusion and Flex communities.  Although early challenges around securing sponsors caused us to have to delay the original start date, we were finally able to find some great sponsors, and raise enough money through ticket sales to bring the whole thing off.  All of the feedback I’ve gotten around the content was really, really positive.  Each track had fantastic speakers, and everyone was really happy with the results.  As this event is first and foremost about the content, I’m really proud of the feedback in this area.

Although nothing ever goes as well as planned, this year’s event had relatively few (and minor) glitches.  The biggest problems we had were around some confusion with ticket sales.  Our original tiered ticket price model wasn’t communicated very well, and people got confused when they went to register and the cost wasn’t what they’d expected.  Next year, we need to do a much better job of making sure that any ticket prices are communicated appropriately so that nobody get surprised.  The other big challenges we had was around food and Wi-Fi.  With the money we were able to raise, it was not feasible to pay for internet connections for everyone, so each person had to pay for their own.  Even at only $9 a day, it was still seen by many as an inconvenience to have to pay for Wi-Fi when so many of these types of events provide it for free.  Food was the same way.  Last year, we spent less on the venue and were able to purchase a boxed lunch for everyone.  With the 2009 venue, it was a much nicer place to meet, but they didn’t allow us to bring food in, and their cost for catering was far beyond our budget.

One question we did get quite often was around ticket prices:  “why did you guys charge money this year?  It’s always been free before…” Simple answer? We needed the money.  Between the cost of the venue, and what happened last year, it was critical to us that we get a relatively predictable number of attendees.  Now that we know this works, it will be easier for us to plan to feed people next year without fears of a repeat of 2008.  What happened last year, you ask?  650 people registered for Dallas TechFest least year, but only 255 actually came out.  We had to give away about 250 boxed lunches that would otherwise have gone to waste.  having a small amount to charge people ($25 in most cases) was a great incentive for people to actually come if they did indeed register.  Hopefully, we’ll have additional sponsors earlier in the planning cycle next time, and can make some better plans around a cost structure, but I don’t see this becoming a completely free event next year unless the economy turns around by then…

Next year, we’re going to look at solving the food and internet problems without sacrificing too much around the quality of the venue.  We will also probably charge again next year, but might consider doing a 2 day event so that people who can not attend on one day (due to work, or family time) can attend on the other day.  We can monkey around with the price to include in internet and food, but I would rather not charge any more than I absolutely have to.

Before I sign off, I wanted to make sure and thank all the folks that worked so hard to make this event successful.  From our Sponsors (Microsoft, Odyssey, GeneXus, DeKlarit, Credera and GenuTec)  all of our organizers and volunteers (Tim Rayburn, Erik Weibust, Omar Villarreal, Dave Shuck, Jonathan Campos, Teresa Burger, Adam Keys, Geoff Dagley, Tim Stiles and Jason Ragsdale) as well as the nearly 40 speakers at the event.  It would not have been possible without all your help and support of the Dallas developer community.  Thanks for all you do!

Join SharePoint architects, developers, and other professionals that work with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for the first ever SharePoint Saturday Dallas.  SharePoint Saturday is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions from respected SharePoint professionals & MVPs, covering a wide variety of SharePoint-orientated topics.  SharePoint Saturday is FREE, open to the public and is your local chance to immerse yourself in SharePoint. 

The agenda is broken into 3 tracks (Business, IT Pro, and Developer).  Everyone from end users to administrators to developers will find something of interest for them at this special event.  There will be lots of prize giveaways, and lunch will be provided.

To register: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/dallas

One of my favorite speakers, and all around great guy Tim Rayburn will be speaking at the next installment of DevCares on one of the hottest topics around - Parallelism in .NET 4.0.  If you haven’t seen Tim present on this topic, then I’d make every effort to get myself over to TekFocus on Friday, June 26th at 8:30 AM.  Special thanks to Miguel, Kory and Ken for keeping the fires burning on DevCares…

I’ve been to one of these before and they are FANTASTIC events.  Lots of great SharePoint Content delivered by excellent speakers who really know SharePoint.  SharePoint is one of the hottest technologies around today – I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked about SharePoint developers and administrator by my customers - this is a great opportunity for those of you looking for the next big thing to fine-tune your SharePoint skills.

A few weeks ago I did my first ever TechNet webcast on some of the new UX enhancements in Windows 7.  It is a free session that you can view online, you just need to register on the site to get access to the video. For those of you just now getting your hands on the Windows 7 Release Candidate (and if you haven’t get over there and get it RIGHT NOW), this webcast is a great intro to all the new ways to interact with the best Microsoft operating system yet!

TechNet Webcast: A Tour of Windows 7 (Level 100)

Here are a couple more resources for Windows 7 that you might also find valuable:

• Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications | pdc2008 | Channel 9
• Is This Thing On - Developing on Microsoft Windows 7 Demo Scripts
• Try running your Windows XP applications using Virtual PC
• Have questions? Need answers? Visit our Windows 7 Forums

For all you Surface Fans, my colleague Jennifer Marsman has written a series of blog posts about developing on Microsoft Surface:

• Surface Development Part 1: What is the Microsoft Surface?
• Surface Development Part 2: Surface Controls
• Surface Development Part 3: ScatterView
• Surface Development Part 4: Reacting to Physical Objects
• Surface Development Part 5: Futures and Resources

For those that don’t know what Surface is, there are a lot of great learning resources on the web about our incredibly cool an innovative Touch Computing system and its Natural User Interface (NUI).  Just check out http://delicious.com/chriskoenig/surface, or visit the Surface homepage.

I’ll be one of the panelists at the upcoming TekFocus DevCares event – join us tomorrow morning for some fun discussion around .NET!

DEV CARES SERIES

Dev Cares: .NET Smackdown!

Click here to register.

Session:

Speaker: Ken Byrd

Logistics:

To register, please call 214.800.5611 or visit www.clicktoattend.com

Congratulations to SCD Community Champions Tim Tyrrell, Brandon King, Ben Sheirman and Becky Isserman!

The Community Champion Award program is an excellent way to recognize the movers and shakers in your local community.  They give you a place to record your community contributions (blog posts, articles, events, etc.) and they’ll make awards every quarter based on your participation.  It’s a great program, and you can even win some prizes!

If you know someone in your community that really goes above and beyond every month to make the lives of developers better, make sure to refer them to the Community Champions web site and help them get recognized by INETA!

As computers get more powerful, disk space and memory prices continue to drop and tool require more and more power, getting a handle on how you can use virtualization to aid your development across multiple environment and multiple toolsets.  To help out, one of my new teammates, Keith Combs, has put together a great article and webcast dispelling the mysteries around how to Dual Boot from VHD Using Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.  I highly recommend you check it out.

For those of you that want to get a better handle on using XAML to build the next generation of Windows and Web Applications, and prefer to do it from the comfort of your own desktop, then XAMLFESTOnline is for you!  Based on the wildly popular XAMLFEST events run in cities all across the US, XAMLFESTOnline takes the awesome content from the in-person events and presents them over a series of 5 days using a combination of live and recorded content.  If you’re interested in making more out of your XAML development, head over to the XAMLFESTOnline site and get signed up today!

I haven’t link blogged in a long time, so hopefully you’ll forgive me.  Saw on Anand’s blog today that the Azure team is “launching ‘new CloudApp()’ a US-based developer challenge to promote applications running on the Azure Services Platform.”  If you are interested in a chance to win a $5,000 gift card merely by writing some .NET or PHP code, then check out the contest by reading the FAQ.

The Azure Services Platform Challenge – new CloudApp() - Anand Iyer

My friend Kirk Evans has been doing an incredible video series called “SharePoint for Developers” out on Channel 9.  There are 5 episodes so far, and they’re all very well done.  The segments are short enough to get everything on the first viewing, but solid enough to bookmark for reference later.

Here’s a listing of what’s available today:

SharePoint for Developers Part 1- Introducing VSeWSS 1.3

SharePoint for Developers Part 2- Working with Features

SharePoint for Developers Part 3 - Expression Blend and Silverlight

SharePoint for Developers Part 4 - Calling SharePoint Web Services from Silverlight

SharePoint for Developers Part 5 - Custom content types, fields, and lists

Whether you’re just learning about SharePoint development, or an experienced SharePoint dev interested in some new stuff, you should all check out Kirk’s Video Sessions on Channel 9!

Tags: Expression Blend, MOSS, Office, Sharepoint, Silverlight, Silverlight 2, VSeWSS, Web Services

Viacom/MTV announced a web based Digital Asset Management Workflow application completely built in Silverlight 3 (of course using the beta bits for now) and .Net 3.5. This is very cool, not just because it is an early adoption of Silverlight 3, but because :

• It is a great proof point that Silverlight is not just for consumer facing scenarios on the web, but is equally suited for more rigorous applications in broadcast media workflow.
  
• It is one of the first production applications to use the h.264 playback capabilities being enabled in Silverlight 3. MTV creates all their proxies as QuickTime .mov files, with the essence encoded using h.264 compression, either in SD or in HD resolutions. Since QT is essentially a variant of the MP4 container structure, and SL 3 supports parsing MP4 and decoding h.264 natively, we could playback all of MTV’s QT content natively in SL3, without any further transcoding. This was a huge win-win for all involved both from a time and cost perspective.

You can read more about the general press release from Viacom CIO Joe Simon here and about the specific case study here.

If you have a MSDN subscription, you can now download the FULL VERSION of Microsoft Robotics Studio and the CCR & DSS Toolkit!

Microsoft Robotics Studio is a development and virtual simulation environment for creating robotics applications for a wide variety of robotics platforms.  Perhaps you saw us demonstrating Robotics Studio at Maker Faire Austin last year - it’s a great environment for learning about robots, and a uniquely cool environment for getting kids plugged into programming.  Using the visual programming language it’s easy to assemble new robotics applications that can run against a targeted set of robots.  Don’t have a robot alread?  You can use the simulation environment to work with a number of different “virtual” robots including a $250 LEGO Mindstorms kit all the way to some $10,000 advanced sensor robots.  If you’re working with your kids on this, you can use the simulation environment to gauge their interest, and only upgrade to one of the “real” robots when you’re satisfied that the interest is really there.  Visit http://microsoft.com/robotics for some tutorials, “getting started” help and links to online resources.

The CCD/DSS Toolkit is a managed code library for dealing with highly-observable, loosely coupled, multi-core and concurrent applications.  Originally delivered as part of the Robotics Studio, the CCR & DSS toolkit is now available as a separate, stand-alone download for you to use in your non-Robotics applications.  The CCR/DSS web site does a much better job than I could about explaining what it is, so I’ll defer to them:

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) provides a highly concurrent programming model based on message-passing with powerful orchestration primitives enabling coordination of data and work without the use of manual threading, locks, semaphores, etc. CCR addresses the need of multi-core and concurrent applications by providing a programming model that facilitates managing asynchronous operations, dealing with concurrency, exploiting parallel hardware and handling partial failure.

Decentralized Software Services (DSS) provides a lightweight, state-oriented service model that combines representational state transfer (REST) with a formalized composition and event notification architecture enabling a system-level approach to building applications. In DSS, services are exposed as resources which are accessible both programmatically and for UI manipulation. By integrating service composition, structured state manipulation, and event notification with data isolation, DSS provides a uniform model for writing highly observable, loosely coupled applications running on a single node or across the network.

With just about every computer produced today having either multiple processors, or multiple cores, learning to work in a multi-threaded concurrent environment is getting more and more important.  Head over to the Robotics web site ad get yourself some help on learning this cool technology!

Zach Young, President of the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group, has posted a great article on Setting Up Livemeeting for a User Group.  I had the privilege of speaking at their UG meeting last month and experienced his setup first hand.  Not only is it completely painless (always a good thing) it didn’t create any extra hassle on the speaker’s part.  If you’re used to working with Live Meeting, then you’d barely notice that you were being recorded.

I would add a couple of points to User Groups and speakers that are thinking bout using Live Meeting as part of their UG meetings.  These “tips” may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how often even the most experienced speakers forget them when presenting over the internet:

1. Don’t point at things – I’m very used to standing in front of the screen and using either my finger, or a laser pointer to call out specific parts of the display.  That won’t work over LM for obvious reasons.  Instead, try using a tool like ZoomIt where you can focus the attention
2. Avoid Build Slides – they’re cool, and all that, but they don’t translate well lower connection speeds
3. Repeat questions that get asked – just because you can hear them in the room, that doesn’t mean people on the LM can hear them
4. Save questions till the end – some might disagree with me here, but I’m thinking about the recording aspect of the presentation.  I will personally skip to the end of some session recordings just to hear the questions that get asked
5. Don’t forget about the folks on the LM – they might have questions too!  Make sure you either actively monitor the Q&A, or have someone monitor it for you and feed you questions at the appropriate time.

I’m sure you know of some other tips, and I’m sure I'll think of some later on today that I wish I’d added.  Post them as comments here so that I can get this posting updated.  Also let me know if you put your user group out on the interweb and start recording your meetings.  I think someone I know is building a registry of online user groups, so we will want to get that information over to them.