Tag Archives: .Net

New Month, New User Group Meetings

It's the first of the month, do you know which user group meetings you're going to yet?  Here are some to choose from.

I believe that tonight is the Ruby MI user group meeting, but their website doesn't seem to be responding, so I can't check for sure.

You may recall that the Java User Group is moving its meeting to later in the month to avoid the first week, when so many meetings get our attention.  Keep an eye on their website for an announcement (and here, too).  Instead, hit High Tech Tuesday at SPARK, where Scott Johnston (product manager for JotSpot) will talk about the future of Google apps.  That event costs $25 for non-members and is held at Ann Arbor SPARK, 330 E. Liberty (lower level).  More information and registration at http://annarboritzone.org/eventlist.asp?EventID=1227.

Wednesday is the Ann Arbor Computer Society, where we will once again here a "non-Microsoft related talk".  For those of you who thought the group was Microsoft-centric, pay attention!  Now that there is a .NET developer group in Ann Arbor, many of the Microsoft talks are featured there and Jay Wren has been working hard to attract speakers from other languages, platforms, technologies.  This month (Wednesday) features "Experiences in  Wireless and Network Access Control @ Oakland University", by Chris Chamberlain of Oakland University.  November's talk is from John Hickey (of Apple) on the Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard release, what is new, what is old, and general mac desktop AND server things.  And December's talk is on Ubuntu Linux, the new release, what is new, what is old and general linux desktop things, presented by Kevin DuBois.  See, no Microsoft in sight!

Thursday's Michigan Python User Group (MichiPUG) meeting brings out Jay Wren, talking about the Boo programming language.  Boo, in case you don't know, is a statically typed language built with Python-like syntax (for .NET). 

The following Wednesday (October 10) is where you will find Microsoft content at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer group meeting (AADND).  Martin Shoemaker is going to talk about "Dee Jay: A Voice-Controlled Juke Box for Windows Vista".  Sounds interesting, but that's NEXT week.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society, MichiPUG, and Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group meetings are all at SRT's offices.  That's at 206 S. Fifth Avenue, Suite 200.  It's at the corner of Fifth and Washington in downtown Ann Arbor, across the street from the Blue Nile and directly above the Linux Box.  Entrance is from Fifth, take elevator to 2R or stairs to floor 2. 

 

Julie Lerman tonight in Lansing

In case you missed her in Southfield …

INETA Speaker Julie Lerman is still in the area, speaking on ADO.NET Entity Framework at GLUGNet tonight in Lansing.

Bill went out to Southfield to hear her talk last night, and I am still hoping to make it to Lansing tonight.  Since I don't think my 2 and 4 year old would get much out of the meeting (or earn me any good will), my presence is uncertain and totally dependent on the other working spouse in the family finishing up his work on time today.  Crossing fingers!

GLUGNet

We’re hiring

Interested?

Bill just posted about our 3 open positions.  We seem to be building up steam these days and we really need some good resources.

I like Bill's post about what we're looking for.  To go even further, we want people who are PASSIONATE about software development.  We're looking for the curious, the interested, the "I can't sleep right now because I have this cool thing on my mind" type of people.  Yes, we sleep and so should you, but you know what I mean.

Anyhow, I know we've talked to some of our blog readers at user group meetings, but when we've contacted people directly they've said, "Yeah, I was thinking about talking to you guys", but hadn't actually done it.  So, do it.  Even if we don't have something that you're interested in now, our local software economy seems to be revving up, so maybe we will have something soon.  Yes, most of the jobs right now are .NET, but we may have some "alternate technology" stuff coming up soon.

Our very own Patrick Steele joins Compuware Speakers at Technical Seminar Series

May 17, 2007 at 5:30 pm

SRT Solutions' consultant Patrick Steele joins Brian Cassista and James Brown to speak at Compuware.  Compuware is holding an evening networking/technical seminar event on May 17 starting at 5:30 pm.  I would love to attend Patrick's talk, "Taking Advantage of Generics in .NET", but I think that I will be headed over to James' talk on Dependency Injection and Spring instead.  If neither of those suits your fancy, then the Brian's talk on Project Management and Continuous Integration also sounds great.  I just wish I could be in three places at one time!

5:30-6:30 is for networking and hors d'oeuvres, compliments of Compuware.  The 3 parallel sessions will start at about 6:30 and go for an hour, with an hour of questions and answers following.

The event is free, and you can sign up (by May 14) by emailing Mary Johnson or calling (313) 227-7729.  More information can be found at Compuware.

I think it's going to be a great event.  I'm really looking forward to it.

More event info

Bill Wagner on DotNetRocks

Check out Bill Wagner’s latest appearance on DotNetRocks, Show #223. For anyone who doesn’t know, Bill is my business partner and author of Effective C#, The C# Little Black Book, and various articles. I haven’t listened to his DNR podcast yet, but I plan to listen to it on the way home from Redmond tomorrow.

Bill on Dot Net Rocks

CodeMash 2007

Well, the CodeMash conference has come and gone. Ah, all of that planning and now it’s over. How will I spend my days if I don’t have to help plan and publicize this event? Maybe I’ll actually get some work done (and see my kids)!

The conference was very cool. One problem in helping to arrange the event is that I had a lot of input into which talks were accepted. That meant that in every time slot, there were multiple talks that I wanted to attend! Ugh! So I moved in and out of the talks, sampling each. Sometimes, I got captivated with a talk and stayed until the end. Other times, some conference organization thing came up and I had to step out. But all in all, people seemed thrilled with the talks, the keynotes, and the venue. And I had lively conversations with attendees and speakers alike, WAY past my bedtime. The 6:30 am organizer scrum came very early on Thursday morning (since I had barely gotten to sleep, it seems). I dashed off without so much as washing my hair (eek, I had to be on stage to introduce Bruce Eckel’s keynote and there would certainly be photos!). Sigh. I had planned to get more sleep on Thursday night, but instead, I found myself talking to speakers and other attendees, including both Mark Ramm and Mike Levin (who I hear continued the conversation even later!) until 1:30 am. Friday night, much of the same. Oh well, maybe I can catch up on my sleep this week.

We kicked off the conference with an “Expert Panel on Languages”, which was moderated by Bruce Eckel and panelists included: Neal Ford, David Stanek, Bill Wagner, James Ward, and Jay Pipes. Many thanks to both Jay and James who stepped in at the last minute to round out the panel!

In addition to the scheduled talks, I attended (and convened) some Open Spaces talks. These are interactive conversations, decided by the makeup of the group. I was introduced to Open Spaces by Bruce Eckel at several conferences in Crested Butte (the next of which is the Java Posse Roundup in March). As he warned often happens, Open Spaces conferences have really spoiled me for eyes-forward talks. Sure, sitting in a lecture and listening to someone talk about something is often an effective way to learn. But I LOVE the interaction of Open Spaces, where every participant is actively involved in the conversation, sitting on the edge of their chairs, engaged. Not falling asleep.

Ah, anyhow, since Bruce was at CodeMash, we had him introduce the concept of Open Spaces and provided a board where people could post talks. His conferences are ALL open spaces, while this one had open spaces “on the side”. I think that we could have done things better in this regard, but I saw some engaging open spaces talks, including some convened by Bruce Eckel (for questions after his keynote) and Mary Poppendieck (for questions after her talk on Lean Software Development).

Other Open Spaces sessions that I attended …

Social Networking for Nerds (Versions 1 and 2):

One of the scheduled talks, for example, was “Networking for Nerds” (hardware stuff), but a few of us were thinking that a “social” networking for nerds might be a good thing to do, so we convened an open spaces session, “Social Networking for Nerds”. But as we were about to begin, there were rumblings about hitting the water park (CodeMash was at the Kalahari Resort and Indoor Water Park in Sandusky). So, we simply moved the “social networking” open spaces TO the water park. “Meet at the Lazy River!” And we did. A bunch of geeks in swimsuits … hmm, that knocks down some social barriers. As I explained to Josh Holmes later, “Once you’ve floated down the Lazy River in a raft, or raced down a water slide side by side with another conference participant, you don’t really feel too shy about asking if you can sit next to him at lunch!”.

Later, we did convene a second session, “Social Networking for Nerds 2”, in a more traditional venue … in the Nia Conference Center midday on Friday. It was well-attended as well. I think about 20 people showed up. I voiced my one regret in my career as not having kept in touch with people from prior jobs in my 20 years as a professional developer. One guy said that he keeps birthdays in Outlook and emails people yearly! He doesn’t feel like he’s “using” another person when he has a question for them later. Good idea (and it was his birthday as well, so we all wished him a happy birthday). Another guy (Barry Hawkins, who I first met in Crested Butte), indicated that his first Java User Group meeting was an eye-opener for him. He realized that people went and heard the presentation, but didn’t interact otherwise. So he announced a “pre-event” meeting where he would be at a local restaurant beforehand, and he gets a great turnout for that. Like our “social networking” session, it’s self-selecting. Those who are interested in networking, go! And while geeks have a bad reputation for being antisocial, I think that those who attend conferences perhaps have a bit more interest in socializing than the standard geek. The consensus seemed to be that most of us feel socially awkward at one point or another, but we push on and do it anyhow. And so we get better at it, just like software development!

Building a TurboGears Widget with Flex:

James Ward, Flex evangelist from Adobe, and Kevin Dangoor, the creator of TurboGears, paired to build a widget in TurboGears that embodied a Flex component. They built a DisplayShelf widget and deployed it to the Python Cheese Shop in under an hour. In a nice demonstration of pair programming, it actually worked the FIRST TIME. Phenomenal. About a dozen people sat around and watched the two at work, and later went to work themselves, grabbing the widget from the cheese shop and quickstarting a TurboGears app and using it themselves. When I got home from the conference and explained this to my husband, he insisted that I do the same. I easy_installed the widget and had it working in about 16 minutes (including copying images to use), in spite of me NOT wearing my glasses. Impressive.

Women in Software:

We brainstormed a bit on why there are so few women in software development these days. Mary Poppendieck explained that when she first got into software, about 40% of the developers were women. She thinks that companies were afraid to hire men because they might be drafted for Vietnam, and so it was “safer” to hire women. And women did it. Another attendee landed in software development from a secretarial field because of an awesome role model and mentor in her (female) boss. Another woman who attended came from a mechanical engineering background. Several men attended as well. We tried to work out some differences, and the one thing that kept coming up was … what drives us. Several of the women in attendance were really drawn by fulfilling customer’s (or company’s) needs. HELPING people. As a generalization, the men seemed more drawn by “building cool things”. Interesting. So maybe when we talk to girls about computer science, we need to talk to them about the human interaction component? That’s a thought. Mary Poppendieck brought up an interesting point as well. She doesn’t think that we need to reach young girls to convince them to go into computer science. She thinks we need to reach their PARENTS. Ah, interesting, especially since many of us indicated that our parents were guiding influences in our choice of professions. So we didn’t come up with “a solution” but that wasn’t really the goal. We have some insight and that’s a start.

User Stories: Reaping the Benefits of Agile Software Development:

Barry Hawkins convened an Open Spaces session on User Stories. A few of us gathered and described why user stories are so critical to the success of agile development. We delved into the representation of personas and we all really feel that these are key to user stories. It’s not all that productive to talk about “the user” as if my 67 year old retired dad and my 23 year old neighbor with a college degree see and use software in the same way. Should we just ban the words “THE USER” in our discussions? OK, maybe not, but building up personas really does help us keep in mind how people use software differently. And building stories for what the components are in software is a great way to help management define not only the complexity of a task but also how essential it is. Ah, now that we all clearly SEE what we’ve been talking about, maybe we can live without it. Or maybe it’s even more critical and needs to be elevated in priority. User stories really help that.

There have been a lot of blogs about CodeMash, since the conference ended. Those that say that they’re glad that they attended and that they would come again, or that they would recommend the conference to their colleagues, make me feel like I didn’t spend the last few months planning this conference for nothing. The real benefit in community-organized events is, however, in letting people know what you would like done differently next time. We’re not a bunch of conference organizers. We’re developers. As I said several times at the conference, this is the conference (and content) that WE wanted to attend. If others in the development community pitch in with ideas and speakers and keynoters and what to do differently, it can be even MORE awesome next time. Did I say “next time”? EEK! Don’t tell my family …. But do join the CodeMash google group and provide feedback, suggestions, etc.!

CodeMash website

CodeMash google group

CodeMash early bird deadline

CodeMash, a developer conference organized by volunteer developers, is to be held January 18-19 in Sandusky, OH. Drawing from national talent as well as regional experts, this conference provides a unique opportunity for a diverse set of people to get to

CodeMash deadline is TODAY!

Today is the last day to get in on the $99 registration for CodeMash. Tomorrow, it goes up to $149 (still incredibly reasonable). CodeMash is January 18-19, 2007 at the Kalahari Resort (www.kalahariresort.com) in Sandusky, OH, and will bring together developers from all worlds … Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Ruby, TurboGears … you name it! We’ll all learn from one another in a cool and fun environment.

Engaging keynotes by Bruce Eckel, Scott Guthrie, and Neal Ford. Talks by Brian Goetz, Mary Poppendieck, Jay Pipes, David Stanek, Kevin Dangoor, Ted Neward and more!

Don’t miss out on early bird pricing. But even more importantly, don’t miss out … space is limited, so sign up soon!

I’m promoting CodeMash heavily because not only am I on the organizing committee, but also because this is a conference with a theme that I believe in, strongly. SRT Solutions, with diverse knowledge among its staff, definitely benefits from the cross-pollination of ideas. One friend asked me if I thought that the “generic developer” would get much out of this sort of a conference. My response? Any time you learn something, you’re benefiting. You may not use any more than one of these languages in your job, but knowing about the others, and their strengths and weaknesses, makes you a better developer.

CodeMash Registration

Digg story on CodeMash and other events

Kalahari Resort
Conference Venue

CodeMash Early Bird Deadline Coming Soon

CodeMash, a developer conference for programmers of all flavors, is scheduled for January 18-19 in Sandusky, OH. And the early bird deadline is coming up soon. Register by December 18 to get the early bird conference rate of $99. After December 18, the cost goes up to $149.

At any rate, it’s a great deal. With keynotes by Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford and Scott Guthrie … and talks on Python, Java, .NET, TurboGears, and more, I’m already looking forward to it.

Get more information and register now at www.codemash.org

Conference Location

CodeMash conference

CodeMash Organizer and CodeMash Speaker Mash it Up on Dot Net Rocks

Dianne Marsh, organizing committee member of the CodeMash Conference and CodeMash speaker, and Bill Wagner, CodeMash speaker, appeared on the Internet Talk Radio Show “Dot Net Rocks” today. Bill and Dianne, cofounders of SRT Solutions, a firm that specializes in mentoring developers, talked to hosts Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell about how broadening your horizons with different technology communities will help you become a better software development professional. At the end of the show, Carl and Richard gave away 2 free tickets to the CodeMash conference.

Topics discussed:

  • Objectives of CodeMash conference: bring together developers of different languages and platforms to learn from one another.
  • Lots about Python, including IronPython
  • How SRT best serves its clients with its multi-platform, multi-language approach

Our radio hosts

Developer Conference for ALL developers

TurboGears

CodeMash Speaker Evaluation Underway

CodeMash is a conference that will be held in Sandusky, OH January 18-19, 2007 at the Kalahari Resort. We’ve lined up some really great talks for CodeMash. Here is a small sampling:

·Dave Donaldson: Let NHibernate be Your Data Layer
·Joe Wirtley, Dan Hounshell: Real World Continuous Integration using NAnt, NUnit, NCover, FxCop, and More
·Owen Taylor: End of Tier Based Architecture
·Chris Judd: Scripting for Java
·Mary Poppendieck: Lean Software Development
·Ben Carey: Beyond TDD: Exploring the Benefits beyond Testing
·Bill Wagner: Curry Favor with Closures:  An Introduction to Functional Programming

And more …

We’re going to have a birds of a feather session with technical book writers. How could we resist, with some great authors at the conference, including Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, Bill Wagner, Jason Gilmore, and more.

And … we’re also going to have a language experts panel, moderated by Bruce Eckel.

And, of course, we have 3 really cool keynotes: Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford, and Scott Guthrie.

Get your reservation in early. Early bird prices ($99) end December 18.

CodeMash Conference