Darryl Burling @ Work : women in technology

First Girl Geek Dinner

dburling — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 01:53:00 GMT

After Tech Ed, a number of technical women decided that they wanted to get together a little more regularly, and so they decided to build a community around girly geeks - the term used in the UK for similar events there.

I've had a bit of mail sitting in my inbox for a few weeks from Amanda that says the first girl geek dinner is kicking off in Auckland on the 22nd of November at the Komodo Rooms in Parnell.

These events are designed for women, but reading their rules, any guy can go along - as long as they are invited by a girl geek attending the dinner.

If you are interested in attending, you'll need to register. More details and the registration link are available at the Girk Geek website.

On a related note, I notice that Bronwen has launched the geekgirlblogs.com website out of Australia too!

Tech Ed WIT dinner kicks off Girl Geek Dinners

dburling — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 11:37:21 GMT

The Women in Technology evening at Tech Ed has generated quite a bit of discussion and even momentum.

Apart from the evening being the highest scoring session at Tech Ed, it has also inspired a number of women to start a girl geek dinner group in New Zealand.

If you are interested in keeping in touch with other women out there, sign up to the mailing list.

Bronwen is also building a blogroll of women who are blogging world-wide. If you are a female blogger - get in touch through her blog - Chan - that doesn't include you!

MSDN Flash - Daylight Saving and Tech Ed wrap up

dburling — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Tech Ed is done. It was a great event and before you forget I want to remind you of something you may have heard about at Tech Ed and if you didn’t its critical that you understand it.

One of the lunchtime sessions we had was around the changes to Daylight saving. This year we are changing when daylight saving starts and finishes – which is great for getting more time at the BBQ or in the pool – but also means we all need to check systems to make sure they are aware of the changes.

I remember when Australia changed their daylight saving schedule for the Commonwealth games – a certain NZ executive happened to be in Australia and their system was not updated and they missed their flight as a result. This is not the sort of executive exposure any one in the IT industry needs, but unless someone takes the time to look at and understand the issues for your organization, someone may be affected by this change.

We have a New Zealand web page dedicated to the daylight saving changes. This page will be getting updated frequently to ensure you have all the information you need, so book mark http://microsoft.co.nz/timezone and visit it periodically.

Back to Tech Ed... The inaugural Women in Technology event went well, and as a result a girly geek group is about to kick off in New Zealand – so keep an eye on http://girlgeekdinners.co.nz for more details (site should be live this week).

For more coverage of Tech Ed, check out http://techedlive.co.nz and the Tech Ed category on my blog. I also did a fairly exhaustive wrap up earlier with lots of links to other blogs and coverage.

If you are interested in downloading the powerpoint decks for the event, these will be available here in the next couple of days. I’ll also post some of your feedback from the event to my blog late this week/early next week...

I do want to say, however, that we enjoyed putting on Tech Ed this year, and we at Microsoft want to thank you for taking time out of work (and in many cases your life) to come along and make the event as great as it was!

Women in Technology - wow

dburling — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:31:04 GMT

The Women in Technology dinner went off really well. The team did a fantastic job and everyone was engaged as soon as they walked in the evening - and the chatter began.

The panelists did a fantastic job. Here's who they were and how they related to those in the room:

Eileen Brown: Exchange Server guru, Team lead for Developer and Platform Evangelism in the UK.
Helen Robinson: General Manager, Microsoft New Zealand
Hayley Smith: Developer and leader of .Net User Group in Hamilton
Sonia Yoshioka-Carroll: Communications and Marketing (PR Chick)
Terry Shubkin: Sales and Account Manager, Unisys New Zealand
Kathy Kam: Program Manager and Architect, Microsoft Corp, US

They did a great job of connecting with the audience and the w omen felt that they could get real answers rather than the more common cosmetic answers.

Here are some of the verbatim feedback given in the evaluatio ns:

"Excellent Evening, Very Inspirational. Need to have this next year."

"Again next year please!"

"Lets do it again next year!! Don't let the men in next time"

"Excellent ladies. A job well done. Very motivating for me"

"Please do this again"

"I really enjoyed being on of the few men that attended this dinner + feel that I can take a great deal back to the workplace. I hope to educate my fellow make colleagues"

"Excellent speakers and a great atmosphere for the exchange of ideas and meeting of other women in the industry - Thank you for this - Keep it up!"

"VERY AWESOME! DO IT AGAIN!"

For the first time event and with no budget we seemed to manage to pull off a great event.

There are some more photos up on Flikr here.

Thanks to all the ladies who came along and set up a buzzing atmosphere!

Women in Technology

dburling — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:19:22 GMT

As previously mentioned we are having a Women in Technology evening on Monday August 13 at Sky City in Auckland.

This event is being organized in conjunction with Tech Ed so if you have a ticket for Tech Ed - this is a free event. If you don't have a ticket but would love the opportunity to network with your female peers and listen to a talk that went down really well at Tech Ed in Orlando, then please register and come along - we'd love to see you there!

The goal of the evening is to bring women in the Technology industry together for an evening of dinner, discussion and networking. The evening will be hosted by Helen Robinson the General Manager of Microsoft New Zealand and our keynote Speaker will be Eileen Brown who has conducted research around Women in Technology which has been presented at Tech Ed in Orlando. After the keynote there will be a panel discussion which offers attendees the opportunity to ask questions and interact with the panel. This will be followed by discussion and networking for the remainder of the evening.

The agenda for the evening is:

7:30pm – registration and room opens – Entree’s on table with drinks
8:00pm - Evening Introduction – Helen Robinson
8:05pm – Keynote – Eileen Brown
8:25pm – dinner served
9:00pm - Panelist introductions
9:15pm – Q&A Hosted by Eileen
9:45pm – Drinks and networking
10:00pm - Official close (aka head over to Bar3 for further discussion)

There will be a wide variety of women at the event from deep technical to marketing and management. The evening is not intended to silo your career aspirations but to broaden your thinking about what is possible for women in the technology industry today.

I'm still confirming one panelist, but here are the panelists we do know about:

Hayley Smith - .Net User Group leader Hamilton
Eileen Brown - Messaging and Mobility Evangelist, Microsoft UK
Sonia Yoshioka-Carroll - Technology Marketing, Eloquent Communications
Helen Robinson - General Manager, Microsoft New Zealand
<one more - to be announced here soon>

These panelists represent lots of different areas of technology to work in from marketing to management and from developer to infrastructure. It should be a fantastic event, so I hope you'll register if this is of interest to you.

There are two ways to register (hopefully this isn't too confusing):

Registered Tech Ed Attendees: Go into Comnet and add the event to your schedule - thats it - you are registered!

Non Tech Ed Attendees: Phone 09 309 2440 or email teched@avenues.co.nz to register. Registration for non-attendees of Tech Ed is $80.

If you have any questions, put them in the comments or contact me directly and I'll answer them as I can.

MSDN Flash - What is in Windows Server for developers?

dburling — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 05:19:37 GMT

The last editorial I wrote about Visual Studio 2008's multi-targeting support, however as the Launch coming in February is about Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 I thought I might shed some light on what is coming in Windows Server for developers too. Specifically I want to focus on Web Developers and Internet Information Services 7.

One of the things you may already know about is that the configuration for IIS has been moved from the Metabase to a XML config file called ApplicationHost.config. This means that if you want to modify the config of a server, you just open the file in (say) notepad, edit it and close it again. You can also then copy this file across servers to ensure they all have the same configuration - which is great for web farms.

Given the file is in XML, you can easily write scripts and code to read or modify the server configuration based on some environmental dependencies your application or script may detect as it runs.

Of course, should you want to do this with the manager you can still do this, but having a file instead of the Metabase gives you much easier access to the config of the server(s) in your environment. For more details on this change and the implications, take a look at this overview of the ApplicationHost.config and these articles (1, 2) on compatibility with the metabase.

Another thing you can do is write your own extensions to IIS7. One example that you can take a look through online is replacing the Basic HTTP Authentication module with one that authenticates against an arbitrary authentication systems (such as ASP.Net Membership provider). Another scenario you could write a module to do things like remove hidden text or comments from an Open XML document being uploaded to a server. You'll have ideas for modules that might make sense to your solution, but the point is that this is a pretty cool feature that should allow you to make IIS7 do more than it does today - in fact I expect there will be a community around module development.

Modules can be written in either native code or in managed code by implementing the new System.Web.IHttpModule interface. You can get a walk through on how to build a module here. You can also build administration modules to manage your custom module, details here.

We've also done a lot of work on FastCGI to make PHP (and other languages) really fly under IIS7.

If you are interested in these features (and there are lots more), check out the IIS7 Developer Center or download beta 3 of Windows Server 2008. If you want to deploy IIS7 sooner rather than later, there is a go live license for IIS7 and we have customers in NZ already who are running IIS7 for production sites. In addition Microsoft.com is already running on Windows Server 2008. Let me know if you get into this stuff.

As previously reported, we are running a Women in Technology dinner at Tech Ed for the first time this year. I've had quite a bit of feedback to open this up to people not going to Tech Ed, and I'm pleased to be able to say that, we've responded to this feedback and opened it up.

So - if you are going to Tech Ed, simply put the Women in Technology session into your agenda. If you are not going to Tech Ed, but want to go along, you will need to register by either sending an email to teched@avenues.co.nz or by calling (09) 309 2440. Tickets cost $80, Tech Ed attendees are free. It should be a great event with representation from both technical and non technical women in technology. I'll blog more details in the next few days and more details will also go up on the Tech Ed website this week.

Finally, if you are looking at Silverlight (and it seems everyone is), we are close to RC and there are breaking changes from the Beta - check out the details and download a preview from Tim Sneath's blog.

Anyway, that is enough for one flash - have fun coding!

Tech Ed - Women in Technology

dburling — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:44:00 GMT

While I'm up to my neck in Tech Ed at the moment, I thought I'd drop you a couple of little tidbits...

Firstly we are over 30% sold in terms of total tickets sold, but we've already sold 60% of our early bird tickets (remember how it works this year?) - and we haven't even started advertising yet (look for the first ads next week).

Secondly - the big news this week is about silverlight and the DLR, well, we have some very cool content for both Silverlight and dynamic languages already booked, so if you are interested in this, get your ticket while you can!

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I'm thinking of running a women in technology evening for those females who come to Tech Ed (there were over 160 last year) with a special guest speaker.

But, before I go ahead and make it happen i'm keen to see what the females out there think of this idea. Is it something that appeals? (there are females reading this blog - right?). If you like this idea, please contact me or leave a comment and let me know!

Guys, please... you can't come along so dont ask :-)