dougturn's WebLog : Community

.NET University - Video Recordings of .NET 3.0 presentations are now available

dougturn — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:40:00 GMT

Many thanks to Todd Fine (WPF recording), Mark Dunn (WF recording), and Brian Hitney (CardSpace recording). Yours Truly did the WCF recording.

All material is freely downloadable, and may be used as presentation material throughout the software community. Please feel free to learn, or re-present, the material, which is available at .NET University. It's a great way to get started learning .NET 3.0.

MSDN Roadshow is coming to Montgomery on August 30th

dougturn — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:28:00 GMT

Are you interested in learning more about the next generation of web-oriented technologies? If so, please join us for a half-day seminar on the new and improved suite of tools and technologies from Microsoft that will better empower you to design and develop Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). This road show will highlight how Microsoft is putting the final touches on a new suite of services and technologies that will help you build visually stunning, yet amazingly lightweight applications designed for the web. You’ll also see how web technologies like AJAX, Virtual Earth, and Web Services can all be easily leveraged by all developers, from hobbyist to Enterprise. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn how you can put Microsoft technology to work for you!

8:30AM	Arrival and Registration
8:45AM	Announcements and Introduction
9:00 – 10:30AM	The Designer/Developer Experience with Silverlight With the introduction of Silverlight and Expression Studio, Microsoft offers a whole new way for Designers and Developers to collaborate on a single project. In this session we will explore this new collaborative environment as well as the capabilities of Silverlight version. Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight 1.0 supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows. Silverlight 1.1 offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.
10:45-11:00AM	Break
11:00-11:45AM	Next Generation Web Technologies Silverlight is not the only technology making news at Microsoft these days. In our second session, we’ll take a look at the next generation of services and technologies that will help you build visually stunning and amazingly lightweight applications designed for the web. Technologies like AJAX, Virtual Earth, and Web Services can all be easily leveraged by everyone from hobbyists to Enterprise developers. This session will give you a taste of several technologies that can quickly and substantially enhance your web applications.
11:45AM-12:00PM	Evaluations
12:00PM	Giveaways and Feedback

Where: Alabama Center for Commerce (ACC)
401 Adams Avenue, Suite 740
August 30^th , 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM

How: Please registered for this event using the following link:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032350475&Culture=en-US

Many thanks to Microsoft MVP extraordinaire Bruce Thomas of Simplify for helping us set this event up.

Finding some of the more popular bloggers in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi

dougturn — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:45:00 GMT

My territory as a Developer Evangelist is within the Southeastern US, specifically Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. A recent conversation got me thinking about our most influential bloggers down here. While this is not a scientific survey, I asked several of my friends and peers - who are the bloggers in this area that you read most often?

One side note - and probably a statement about the web itself. Many people said that they don't know where several of their favorite bloggers reside. So, given that there could be some geo-anonymous (is that a word?) bloggers in this area tha we missed, here is the list of bloggers mentioned by the people I asked.

It's not a comprehensive list. It's more about just seeing who others listed as their favorite *local* blogs.

(Oh BTW - I left out the Microsoft employees in the top list, as I was more interested in seeing who in the community is blogging. The MS list is at the bottom)

Shawn Wildermuth – http://www.adoguy.com

Jim Wooley – http://www.devauthority.com/blogs/jwooley

Todd Miranda - http://www.nxtdimension.com/blog/

Keith Elder - http://keithelder.net/blog/default.aspx

Keith Rome - http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog

Dan Attis - http://devcow.com/blogs/jdattis/default.aspx

Jeff Barnes - http://jeffbarnes.net/portal/blogs/

Brendon Schwartz and Matt Ranlett - http://devcow.com/blogs/default.aspx

Robert Cain – http://www.arcanecode.com

Sean Gerety - http://ideakitchn.com/blogs/sean/default.aspx

Eric Marvets - http://marvets.com/blog/

Paul Wilson - http://weblogs.asp.net/pwilson/

James Shaw - http://coveryourasp.net/default.aspx

Greg Young – www.codebetter.com/blogs/gregyoung

Mickey Gousset - http://teamsystemrocks.com/default.aspx

Barry Ralston - http://sqlbi.blogspot.com/

In addition, there was also some interest in finding out calendars of eventing in these states. So far, I've seen 3 calendars that appear to be kept current. I listed them below.

Some local event Calendars:

Atlanta - http://www.devcow.com

Birmingham - http://www.itsbits.com/mocalendar/

Huntsville - http://www.huntug.org/DesktopDefault.aspx

Finally, here are some of the Microsoft bloggers in the 3-state area (active blogs only):

Doug Turnure (you're reading it now :-) ) http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn

Glen Gordon - http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon

Chad Brooks - http://blogs.msdn.com/chabrook

Lewis Curtis - http://blogs.msdn.com/lcurtis

David Scruggs - http://blogs.msdn.com/dscruggs

Rob Cameron - http://blogs.msdn.com/robcamer

May have missed some folks, but I purposefully let other people send me the data for this, just to see who they mentioned.

Huntsville NT User Group meeting on Monday - New Vista Deployment tools

dougturn — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:18:00 GMT

Join HUNTUG on Monday August 20th, 2007, beginning at 6:00 PM at the Intergraph Corporation Building 15b Auditorium. Rhonda Layfield will present -'New Vista Deployment Tools -The Good, The Bad and the Undocumented.' As usual, there will be free pizza, soft drinks, and some very special door prizes. This meeting is sponsored by Telerik.

With the launch of Vista comes the arrival of new deployment tools that will make rolling out Vista (and other OSes) easier than ever before. The good news is the deployment tools are free, flexible to fit the needs of any environment and incredibly powerful. The bad news is they are not very intuitive, in fact at first glance they can be quite overwhelming. Let Rhonda give you your first look at how simple it is to create a custom Windows PE and a .XML answer file using Windows System Image Manager (WSIM). Learn what ImageX can do for you. And lastly the Windows Deployment Service (WDS) (WDS replaces RIS) is quick and easy to setup -- if you know a few undocumented steps. In this session you will get the benefit of learning what not to do so you don't make simple mistakes in your setup that can cause days of frustration.

Rhonda Layfield has been in the IT community for over 25 years. She began her IT career in the US Navy as a communications specialist holding a top secret clearance. She is now an independent consultant and trainer who develops and teaches her own curriculum on Various Microsoft and VMWare Technologies. Rhonda has a passion for learning products at the packet level and sharing that knowledge in her classes with some of the most prestigious organizations and corporations around the world. Some of which include Dow Jones, the US Airforce, the US Army, IBM, Bank of America, Wachovia, Bell Atlantic and EDS. She is currently an NT/2000/2003 MCSE and MCT. Along with teaching she enjoys presenting at national conferences (Techmentor, Windows Connections and Technet Europe) and contributing articles to Redmond and Windows ITPro magazines and is also a co-author of Mastering Windows Server 2003 Upgrade Edition for SP1 & R2.

For directions to the meeting, visit http://www.huntug.org/map.

Birmingham Code Camp is coming October 6th - mark your calendars

dougturn — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 17:06:00 GMT

http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/

Stay tuned for more details - lots of things in the works...

Huntsville VS.NET UG has Wally coming down to speak - should be a good session

dougturn — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:08:00 GMT

Join the Visual Studio .NET User Group on Tuesday, August 14th,2007, beginning at 6:00 PM at the Intergraph Corporation Building 15b Auditorium. Wally McClure will present 'Visual Studio .NET 2008 (Orcas)'. As usual, there will be free pizza, soft drinks, and very special door prizes. This meeting is sponsored by INETA.

Wally will present an overview of Visual Studio 2008, with an emphasis on ASP.NET. The new controls and language features in VS.NET 2008(Orcas). The items that he cover include:

Data binding with the new ListView Control.

Paging data with the new DataPager Control.

Language enhancements.

More Intellisense in the IDE.

Javascript support in the IDE. This will include:

Intellisense.

Debugging.

Using VS.NET 2008 Beta2 today.

Upgrading.

How to get this to work today.

His personal experiences doing this.

New apps.

He will be adding other things to this list mostly what he is currently working on.

BIO:

Wallace B. McClure graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He continued his education there, receiving a Master's degree in the same field in late 1991. Since that time, McClure has done consulting and development for such companies as Coca-Cola, Bechtel National, Magnatron, and Lucent Technologies, among others. He is the founder and president of McClure Development. McClure Development also got its start in 1995. A software solutions company, McClure Development utilized various technologies over a span of nearly eight years. Products and services have included work with ASP, ADO, XML, and SQL Server, as well as numerous applications in the Microsoft .NET Framework. McClure Development had a proven client track record with a diversity of applications, from inventory systems development to web-based search engines. Wally McClure is also author of several books on ASP.NET and ADO.NET.

For directions to the meeting, visit http://www.huntug.org/map. Hope to see you there.

Lower Alabama .NET User Group meets tomorrow night

dougturn — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:28:00 GMT

Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at 6:00P CDT

Speaker: Barry Ralston, ComFrame

Topic: Data Mining with SQL Server 2005

Location: SouthEast Technical Solutions, 273 Azalea Rd, Three Office Park, Suite 200, Mobile, AL 36609 (map)

Sponsor: ComFrame Software

Our next meeting will be on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 at SouthEast Technical Solutions. Our speaker will be Barry Ralston from ComFrame. Barry was one of the presenters at the Code Camp in April and did a great job on Agile Database Techniques in .NET. Barry is a Senior Architect with ComFrame Software, a Birmingham-based provider of innovative software solutions to business problems. In addition to presenting at local and regional user groups, Barry has delivered presentations on business intelligence, OLAP and mobile development at the Oracle Developer Tools User Group, The International Oracle User’s Group – Americas, and JavaOne. If your applications use data, you won’t want to miss this session.

LANUG will also have some great door prizes and other SWAG. As usual, refreshments will start at 6:00P and the presentation will begin at 6:30P. Please RSVP to Doug Greene(dgreene@middlebay.com) or Matthew Hughes (mat_hues@hotmail.com) if you plan to attend.

Congrats to the new MVPs in our area!

dougturn — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:01:00 GMT

(and if I left you off, ping me so I can add you to the list)

Dan Attis - Atlanta, GA - Sharepoint

Todd Miranda - Birmingham, AL - Visual Developer (aka WPF/Silverlight)

Lori McKinney - Huntsville, AL - Windows Server (Customer Experience)

Keith Rome - Atlanta, GA - Visual C#

Congrats to all of our newest MVPs....

Whose slide is it anyway?

dougturn — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:30:00 GMT

A group of DEs showed up at the Greenville, SC .NET User Group last night. We had a great time answering questions, and the legendary Keith Brown did a security talk. To top (or maybe bottom) it all off, we did an improv show for them that we called *whose slide is it anyway*. Credit to Brian Hitney, who came up with most of the material, and Glen Gordon and Keith Brown, who are the only two folks with any improv experience.

It was a great time, and Brian blogged the details here:

http://www.structuretoobig.com/home/show.aspx?bid=276

Peter Laudati also mentions the event:

http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/archive/2007/05/16/improv-at-the-greenville-sc-user-group.aspx

.NET Universities to be run in Charlotte, NC (5-12-2007) and Fayetteville, AR (6-23-07)

dougturn — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:22:00 GMT

Microsoft MVP and Charlotte Developers Guild UG leader Bill Jones is up to his usual community magic, hosting the 2007 Charlotte Code Camp at CPCC in Charlotte. Carolinas Developer Evangelist Brian Hitney is helping coordinate a .NET University there (actually, they are running 3 simultaneous .NET Us, nice job guys). The event is this Saturday, but since they've opened up a third run of the content, it looks like there are a few seats still open.

Additionally, Jeremy Sharp from the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group is running a .NET U in late June up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Zain Naboulsi is the Developer Evangelist for that area, and will be helping out as well.

Thanks to both Jeremy and Bill for contributing to the education of your developer communities!

Mobile Code Camp - Well done, guys!

dougturn — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 20:41:15 GMT

I have to tip my hat to Doug Greene and Matthew Hughes of the Lower Alabama .NET User Group for doing such an excellent job with this Code Camp. You would have never known it was their first time to organize one, as things went off amazingly well. Good call on the ice cream, too, Doug. I could never find that place again, but it will always hold a special place in my heart ;-)

It was great to see three DEs come support the event, including Joe Healy, Brian Hitney, and some other DE. Joe wowed the crowd (as usual) with a great overview of Orcas, and Brian gave an outstanding drilldown into Vista’s architecture.

We also had a load of great speakers there, and I’m sure to forget someone and offend them if I try to list them all. The full list is here.

I will say that I did enjoy Robert Cain’s SQL talk and Bruce Thomas’s mobile apps talk (note that is mobile and in mobility, not as in the city J ). Robert Cain gets credit for the world’s smallest font on his site J

And I have to mention a few guys that I met in person for the first time. Tony Lombardo of Infragistics made the long haul from New Jersey, and we enjoyed hanging out. I also was able to resolve my Keith Elder pointer to an actual object. I’ve met Keith, and emailed Keith, but did not realize they were the same guy.

Wally McClure held an impromptu roundtable, and hopefully we didn’t make too big a mess of it J. Wally also took some pics of the code camp.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t compliment Todd Miranda on surviving his pyro-maniacal childhood. I had no idea you could blow that much stuff up and make it to adult-hood.

Catching up with Shawn Wildermuth

dougturn — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 21:16:00 GMT

I spoke with Shawn Wildermuth the other day, and got caught up on some of the stuff he's up to these days. He is fairly well known both in the ADO.NET world and now in the WPF space. With all the stuff that he's up to, I thought I would mention some of it here. For starters, he's doing a bunch of speaking these days, including these (left the Atlanta one on here, even though it already happened):

3/26/2007: Atlanta .NET UG - WPF Custom Controls

4/10/2007: Huntsville .NET Users Group - Entity Framework

5/7/2007: Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET - Messenger Addins

5/22/2007: Capital Area .Net Users Group - WPF/E

6/4/2007: Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET - Data Design

He's also done a few books recently. I told him I was going to blog about some of his books, whether he wanted me to or not :-). Some of his current books include:

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation

MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-547): Designing and Developing Web-Based Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-548): Designing and Developing Windows -Based Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework

MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-549): Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework (Certification Series)

And of course, I have to mention this book (Shawn did the appendix):

Programming WPF: Rough Cuts Version, Second Edition

Nice work, Shawn. Thanks for all the contributions you make to our community.

Alabama Code Camp 4 - registration is open!

dougturn — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:42:00 GMT

It's time for another Code Camp in Alabama! This time we'll be in Mobile, on April 14th, from 8:00AM until 5:00PM. Check out www.alabamacodecamp.com for all the details. We have several of the South's top speakers coming in for this event, including several MVPs, RDs and industry experts. We have 3 Developer Evangelists (myself, Brian Hitney, and Joe Healy) showing up. Not sure if that's a plus or a minus :-). But at least you'll have someone to raise a glass with on Saturday night.

Many thanks to Matthew Hughes and Doug Greene, who run the Lower Alabama .NET User Group for pulling this event together. And thanks to The University of South Alabama for graciously hosting the event.

Hope to see you there!

Jeff Prosise in Charlotte

dougturn — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:42:00 GMT

Jeff Prosise is going to be in Charlotte, NC on Tuesday, March 13, for an after work social/networking event. If you would like to swing by, details are at Brian Hitney's blog.

http://www.structuretoobig.com/home/show.aspx?bid=255

If you live within 50 miles of this, you should go. It's a great chance to meet some of the local developer talent, as well as hang out with ASP.NET/AJAX/WPFE guru Jeff Prosise.

Oh, and if you go, ask Brian why his blog is called StructureTooBig....

User Groups in Atlanta, GA

dougturn — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 22:59:00 GMT

Jim Wooley, Brendon Schwartz, and Matt Ranlett did a great job pulling together the Atlanta user groups into one place. We wanted to have this available at the Vista launch in Atlanta, but couldn't get it printed in time. So I figured I would at least blog it. Nice job with this, guys:

With so many places to be, find the .NET User Group that is right for you!

Atlanta .NET User Group	The Atlanta .NET User Group is an independent user group formed by developers for developers. We are a founding member of INETA. We meet on the 4th Monday of each month except May and December. http://www.atlantadotnet.org/
Atlanta VB.NET Study Group	The Visual Basic Study Group is a group of Microsoft Visual Basic developers who meet to discuss VB programming topics and look at way cool code. We have short presentations, as well as working on projects, tutorials and code-related problems we may encounter. We meet the third Wednesday of each month. http://www.avbsg.net/
Atlanta Cutting Edge	No fluff. No sales pitches. Just high-quality advanced topic presentations by local .NET experts, and informal technical “show and tell” style discussions. We meet on the 1st Monday of every month to push the limits of .NET. http://www.atlantace.com/
Atlanta SQL Server Group (AtlantaMDF)	Welcome to the Atlanta Microsoft Database Forum! Our purpose is to provide a forum for the SQL users of Atlanta to network, communicate and educate one another. Our user group is open to both technical and business-minded professionals. We meet on the 2nd Monday of each month. http://www.atlantamdf.com/
Atlanta Microsoft Professionals	The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals were founded to allow a community based group to concentrate on professional level software packages and platforms such as Microsoft’s SharePoint technologies, Customer Relationship Manager, ASP.Net 2.0 portal development, BizTalk, and more. We typically meet for special series events. Check our website for future meetings. http://www.atlantamspros.com/
Atlanta FoxPro User Group	All FoxPro and Visual FoxPro developers and users of all experience levels are welcome. AFUG is committed to increasing the knowledge level and skills of our members in a fun, informative, and social environment. Atlanta FoxPro Users Group meets the third Thursday of each month. http://www.afug.com/
Middle GA .Net Focus Group	Fostering exchange of information about and for .Net technologies, languages and add-on products in the mid state area (Warner Robins). http://www.midgadotnet.org/

Not sure you can keep up with all of these groups and remember where they are? Don’t worry the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys have a calendar with all of the events; you can even add a calendar to outlook.

So check out http://www.devcow.com/calendar for a calendar of events in the Atlanta area.

Outside Georgia, search for user groups in your area at http://www.ineta.org.

Do you show up for 2 or more events a month? You can be one of the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys too. Check out the website for more information as it comes.

I hope to see you there!