For those of you who've seen Brian Prince's "Soft Skillz" talks, you'll know that politics is one of those topics that shouldn't be talked about among certain audiences. However, Jeff Blankenburg has decided to hold a contest that deals with politics.

MSNBC has a neat WPF app that you can use to make predictions for this year's election. Jeff is holding a contest to see who'll have the closest predictions. You could win a Zune, Visual Studio 2008, or even Vista Ultimate. If you want to know more about his contest, check out his blog post on it!

Labels: Brian H. Prince, Jeff Blankenburg, MSNBC, politics, WPF

As I mentioned in my Ann Arbor Day of .NET 2008 recap, I was given a marker and was told to write down what people were saying during Brian Prince's "How to Be an Architect" talk. Is that really a good idea? We'll let you decide...

First of all, an architect is...



One of the things that Brian mentioned was ArcReady:



He mentioned that architects have one foot in the technology arena and one foot in the business aspect of things:



He mentioned that they should not be architects of the ivory tower or that the tower would burn:



He mentioned something about stalking out business on a golf course:



But he said that although architects should still write code, it shouldn't be put into production.



There also was some recommended reading:



The whiteboard in the end looked like this:



The end.

Side note: Have no fear. I'm not quitting my day job and going into whiteboard note taking. And by my drawings, I hope you guys realize that I'm a developer but nowhere near a designer.

Labels: Brian H. Prince, graphics, How to be an Architect, whiteboard

This weekend, I was up in Ann Arbor for Ann Arbor Day of .NET. I arrived there on Friday, where I hung out with a group of friends for a bit before having to head back to the hotel to finish my presentation. Saturday morning, I was up early to look at my presentation one last time, as I had a 9am time slot.

When I arrived, I saw Todd from Domino's and Chris Roland working the registration table. Once I checked in, I went to find out where my talk was so that I could setup my laptop. I found Dan Rigsby, and since I knew his talk was right after mine, I figured that he was in the right room. We ran into a room assignment problem, but once we got the right room assignment, Dan and I worked on getting the projector setup for our room.

My talk was on the new data types in SQL Server 2008, which was based on a talk that I had given in September at the Ohio North SQL Server SIG. I briefly covered the datetime data types, as I wanted to focus more on hierarchyid, geography, geometry, and filestream. Since Jason Follas was giving his spatial talk, I sent people to see his talk for more detail so that I would have more time to get into hierarchyid and filestream. My slide deck and scripts will probably be made available by the end of this week.

After my talk, I took some pictures of the event and talked with some of the sponsors. From there, I joined a few people downstairs for lunch, where we had an impromptu women in technology discussion.



After lunch, I had to confirm rumors that Dave Redding photoshopped a picture of me from Cleveland Day of .NET into his presentation. Sure enough, I made it into the last production of the "C# Variety Show" (albeit someone needs to learn to photoshop things a bit more proportionately). Now if you haven't seen Dave's presentation before, let's just say that it isn't for the sensitive audience. It's quite sexist and can easily be seen as offensive, but that's just Dave. Honestly, as bad as it sounds, I really liked how he explained programming concepts in a way that others could relate to it easily. Poor Dave, though, had a tough crowd - quiet food coma after lunch probably didn't help, but I think more of us were afraid to be heckled. None of us use delegates... none of us use event handlers... and we got Dave mad enough to swear when he asked how many of us clicked a button in Visual Studio. Oops!

The last session I caught was Brian Prince's "How to Be an Architect". He had me help him pass out swag - yay for green Microsoft stress balls! The stupid move though was giving me a marker for the white board and telling me to write down what they were saying. I've got pictures from that session, and I will make a separate blogpost specifically for that. If you haven't seen Brian's talks before, I'd definitely recommend checking them out. I'm a developer that has to think like an architect every now and then, but I'm better as a dev than an architect. I liked how Brian explained what an architect is and just what it is that they do. His slides in this presentation are in the same style as his "Soft Skillz" talk, which really bring a point across without killing the audience with bullet points.

There were so many sessions there that I'd have loved to have seen. But I haven't successfully cloned myself to be in multiple places at once, so I will have to attend more events and maybe catch a few more sessions. However, the main reason why I go to these events is to see the people again, and I met a lot of new people and saw a lot of my friends who I've met on Twitter and at the various events I've attended this year. This was definitely a great event -- thanks to all who made it happen!

Labels: Ann Arbor Day of .NET, Brian H. Prince, Chris Roland, Dan Rigsby, Dave Redding, Jason Follas, SQL 2008 data types

As I listen to the .NET Rocks! recorded at devLink, I realized that I haven't recapped my experience. So here we go...

Over August 21-24th, I was down in Tennessee, networking with many developers while attending devLink. This was definitely an interesting experience.

I joined a lot of my Twitter friends on the devLink bus ride down, leaving late Wednesday night. It was great to be running with them again - I love hanging out with them. Unfortunately, the bus we took was meant more for short day trips rather than the long trip from (in my case) Toledo to Nashville. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not get much sleep.

Now if I ever have to run around sleep-deprived, this is the group that I'd prefer to be with. We tend to keep each other going. Since my Thursday was pretty well packed, I knew I had to run around with little chance of sleep. Thursday afternoon, I spent some time with some of the most influential devs in the region and had a great time networking with them. I'm definitely looking forward to the ideas that some of us tossed around, and I'm looking forward to working with these guys on various upcoming events.

Thursday evening, I attended the devLink VIP dinner. I had completed a survey on their site and won a spot from a drawing. It was neat to see so many people there. After the dinner, I floated between the poker gathering thrown by Jeff Blankenburg and the gathering in the hotel bar. My pictures from both of those gatherings can be seen in my devLink pics on Flickr.

Friday, I was still tired, but I wasn't going to let my unbalanced sleep state throw me off completely. After surviving the keynote, I decided to head to the opening circle of open spaces. On my way there, I saw Sirena Benefield - an ITT tech student that Brian Prince brought to the community - at the Microsoft booth. I was able to get her to come with me to the opening circle. Alan Stevens was the open spaces facilitator, and I think he did a great job of getting things rolling. Various topics came out - including community building, how comments are evil, Microsoft and open source, agile practices, Ruby, and even one on suggestions for a university and their computer program.



After the open spaces opening circle, it was lunch time. We had boxed lunches, and I sat with part of the tribe in the open spaces room. That's where I met Mac Fowler, one of the Michigan devLink bus riders. It was nice to enjoy lunch with this group - we get the most random topics whenever we're out.

Friday afternoon, I went to the one session that I wanted to catch that day - Jeff's presentation on Silverlight and some of the cool things that can be done. He covered the 2008 Olympics website, Line Rider, and his own information site.

After that, I took a session off to scope out the conference as a whole. I ended up getting pictures like this one of an open spaces session:



For the last session on Friday, I checked out the open spaces on community. It was great to talk community with this group, as many of them are involved in one form or another. The only thing I didn't like about this open space was that it was at the end of the day. I could see this going further if I hadn't gestured over to Mike Wood that we had to start wrapping it up (since many of us still had to meet the bus shortly after that).

Friday night, there was an attendee party at the hotel. They had Rock Band and Guitar Hero in the game room:



They also had karaoke going on in another room. Snacks included wings, sandwiches, and some other things. There were supposed to be contests going on, but I didn't stay for the whole thing. I ended up running around with a bunch of friends for awhile and then hung out in the lobby chatting for quite a bit afterwards.

I was torn about what I wanted to do on Saturday - the open spaces topics were tempting, but there were a couple talks that I wanted to catch as well. After talking with Jeff McWherter (he who got me my "VBA ALL THE WAY" shirt), I skipped his talk and went to Sara Ford's open space on Microsoft and open source. Having been exposed to open source and the image of the Evil Empire while in my linux days, I was curious to see how this open space would go. It definitely was interesting to see how people got into open source and why some do not. There's definitely a change in Microsoft in who they are now and where they are with open source than what it was in the late 90s, and it's good to see them going the way they are.

In the second slot, I could have seen Brian's Soft Skillz talk again - this time with cake! It was his birthday, so he celebrated with cake in his presentation. (No, the cake wasn't a lie.) However, I went to the other presentation that Brian was supposed to give at the same time - the presentation that he and Jeff Blankenburg did for the launch event. Now I had heard about this presentation plenty of times before, but the launches in my area conflicted with some of my go-live dates, so I missed it. I'm glad I caught this presentation - I learned a bit more with Visual Studio 2008. For example, did you know that if you had the Intellisense dropdown up but needed to see behind it, you could press the Ctrl key and the Intellisense dropdown would go transparent? It was nice to see the Apply Styles dialog, which shows just how the CSS class would look. Of course, the sexiness known as AJAX happened to get mentioned as well - who thought a cleaning agent would be labeled sexy? ;)

We had another day of boxed lunches, and after lunch, I ended up checking out James Bender's intro to WCF presentation. I work a little with web services, but I'd love to learn more about WCF, since that's the way web services are going. What I loved about this presentation is that James uses a simple example that everyone can relate to. He explains concepts using people in the audience as an example. This was a presentation where I actually didn't get lost and feel over my head in (as I usually end up feeling with WCF talks).

There must have been something with the 2:30pm sessions, as once again I took time off to take pictures of the conference and to call home and sing "Happy Birthday" to my mom. After that, I caught some of the closing circle of open spaces.

The last session of the conference was our closing keynote with Joe Stagner from Microsoft. After his talk, the devLink team did giveaways - and two of the bigger prizes were won by fellow devLink bus mates.

After the conference wrapped up, we headed back to the hotel to eat and then load the bus and head home. The bus ride home was okay - I managed to get some sleep (after hitting the point of being desperate for sleep) and was awoken by Mike Eaton on the ride home, who let me know that the bus blew a tire. We were about an hour away from Cincinnati and ended up having to wait 4 hours before we could get back on the road again. If ever I had to get stuck on the road with a group, I'd hope it'd be this group. We continued our random discussions and waited while they replaced the tire. The only other headache about getting home was our ride from Columbus to Toledo by way of Cleveland/Sandusky. Either we had the case of a lame GPS or the driver just wasn't paying attention... either way, we got back to Toledo-ish a bit later than usual.

Overall, I am glad I had the opportunity to go on this trip. I went with the goal to meet new people and maybe learn new things. I managed to do both, and now I have even more people that I can talk with. I'm definitely looking forward to devLink 2009!

Labels: Alan Stevens, Brian H. Prince, devLink, Heartland Open Spaces, James Bender, Jeff Blankenburg, Jeff McWherter, Mike Eaton, open source, open spaces, Sara Ford, Sirena Benefield

If any of you follow Amanda Laucher (pandamonial on Twitter), you may have seen her comment about meeting someone who didn't know about their MS evangelists. I have to admit - I had no idea of these people called evangelists until just this last December.

Living Under a Rock

When you work for a small company that really doesn't use new technologies nor hears about it, you never realize that you're outside the realm of influence. The only reason why I knew about C# was because my buddy G and I were talking about how we'd never need to know it as long as we were at that company. I remember the discussion clearly, and to this day, G's still there and not using much in the way of .NET (other than probably maintaining my small VB.NET app). Meanwhile, I moved on to a smaller company, bigger technical staff, and am using C# and having fun learning new technologies. There we were, the developers (yep, just the 2 of us) for a manufacturing company of 600+ people, not knowing of all the resources available to us.

Developer Evangelist?

I imagine that if my buddy Russ hadn't mentioned the .NET SIG, I wouldn't have thought to look to see what else is out there. Even so, going to the SIG meetings apparently wasn't enough, as I had been going to the meetings since May 2007, shortly after I started my current job, but still had no idea that there were these people called evangelists. I wouldn't hear about them until December 2007, when this guy Jeff Blankenburg came to the Bennett Adelson SIG and showed us some cool stuff from Microsoft (like Popfly). He mentioned that he is a developer evangelist for the region. At that point, I had to wonder what it was they did. After prodding Russ for more details, I learned that there was some other guy who would come along rarely but apparently not much else happened here in Cleveland. Still, there wasn't much that I could find out from Russ on what a developer evangelist did.

So, some of us lived under rocks or were just out of the realm of influence with the evangelists. (SIGs too far, no evangelists geared for the industry, etc.) If you know people who are left out, mention this post to them, as the Microsoft evangelists (at least those here in the Heartland District) are just an awesome team to meet!

So what do evangelists do?

Before I get into the "who", you need to know what they do.

Just as the title suggests, they evangelize! Seriously, though, they're developers, architects, and other tech-minded individuals who get to hear about the cool stuff ahead of time and make sure that we know about it. Tools and technologies, they're seeing just what the industry has in store, where things are going, and they tell us about it. Through presentations at user groups and events, blog entries, podcasts, videos, forums, and just being themselves and talking about the things they're passionate about, the evangelists get the word out.

Who are our evangelists?

Ohio is in the Heartland District, which happens to have quite active evangelists in the area. Since I'm a dev, I'm going to mention the developer evangelists first - Jeff Blankenburg and Jennifer Marsman. If you're a dev and reading my blog, you ought to read their blogs as well! Jeff's blog may be slow at the moment, as he's out until the end of May, but definitely stay tuned to his blog when he returns, as you never know what he'll blog about - from something about Silverlight to the after-party of a .NET event or a contest for swag at Codemash, his blog covers all sorts of things, some .NET related and some just regular blog entries. Jennifer just started her blog at the beginning of April and has returned to our region after a few months on leave. Something that Jennifer's doing in her blog is featuring women in technology on her Friday entries. Definitely check out her blog as well!

Then there are the architect evangelists. We used to have Josh Holmes as an architect evangelist for the Heartland District, but he recently was promoted to Central RIA evangelist. Josh is one of the guys from Code to Live, and although he has a bigger region now, he still comes around to the Heartland area events. Our new architect evangelist is Brian H. Prince. I can't comment on the architect coverage, as I'm not an architect, but I definitely recommend checking out Brian's blog even if you aren't an architect. He talks of cool technologies like LiveMesh, robots, and even these things known as "soft skills".

There are other evangelists in the area, but I've met the 4 that I mentioned, and I can definitely tell you that these guys (and Jennifer!) are passionate about technology and getting the word out to the community. Sometimes, I think part of their job is to promote the "unity" in "community".

Don't know who your evangelists are? Want to know who the others are in the Heartland area? Meet your local Microsoft Evangelists!

I've sent this info on to my buddy G, so that he's no longer just another dev out of the realm of influence. But there are other devs out there who don't know about these great contacts. So pass this word on and get the word out there, so that they know that there are awesome resources out there for us in the field.

And a shout out to the PA evangelists, especially John McClelland, for getting the word out to their PA followers on Cleveland Day of .NET! Thanks for spreading the word! :)

Labels: Brian H. Prince, evangelism, Jeff Blankenburg, Jennifer Marsman, Microsoft, pandamonial, Twitter