Next Wednesday (November 5th, 2008) I’ll be heading down to College Station, TX for INETA to present at the Texas A&M University .NET User Group’s lunch time meeting.
I’ll either be presenting on "Developer Designer Zen – Bringing two worlds together" or "Dependency Injection with Silverlight (A Silverlight Tale of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and the Strategy Pattern) "
It looks like the User Group as a list server (dotnet@listserv.tamu.edu) set up so that you can participate in the User Group conversation.
VS Live, the largest independent professional developer conference on Microsoft technologies, is coming to Dallas December 8th - 11, 2008!. I’ve been given a special registration code that I can offer to you that will save you $300 off of your registration at the next VS Live Dallas.
First, follow the virtual event going on this week on Twitter, Live Meeting and other various virtual platforms. Get all of the updates at http://notatpdc.com/ (like the schedule and presenters) drop them a line if you have a topic that you’d like to speak on this week. Just think.. you could be a presenter at NotAtPDC2008!
As a side note: I love community driven events like this! the .NET community literally, andnearlyspontaneously launched NOT AT PDC Sunday night, and it looks live and active by Monday morning. Great work every one! (especially @RachelAppel and @ChrisLove)
OK, so now anyone "attending" NotAtPDC can also check out the other PDC’s keynote this morning as it will be streamed over the Internet too. (thanks for participating Microsoft! )
Other upcoming events that you should sign up for
The AgileDotNet Conference is a 1 day conference being put on by Microsoft, Improving Enterprises and the Dallas C# SIG dealing with bringing agile methodologies to .NET developers and especially dealing with the challenges of implementing an agile process in an enterprise environment. It’s gonna be awesome. Check out this video, then go sign up! (oh yeah, did I mention that it’s free!)
This one will cost you$100 USD, but this content looks like it’ll will be well worth it! Microsoft is putting on a "traveling road show" covering a lot of the topics that are coming out of "the other PDC" this week. Check out their tour schedule and you’ll see that there is probably one coming to a city near you!
After the Tulsa TechFest this year we went around and asked several attendees and speakers what Agile Development was to them… then we asked some of the non-attendees that happened to be in the area. Here are some of the responses.
Awesome! I’ve been working with Todd, and the team from Improving and from Microsoft to do some of the initial planning and web site work. I’m very excited about this 1 day conference. If you’ve been struggling to embrace a more agile methodology with your team, or if you thought that being agile meant that you had to use Java and only open source tools, then the AgileDotNet Conference is for you!
an exciting one-day event to bring together the world of Microsoft .NET development with the world of Agile methods. Designed for both those experienced with Agile techniques and for those new to them, attendees can expect interesting presentations based on real-world experience
Last week I mentioned that I was asked to give a 30 minute high level talk on being a technical presenter in the .NET community for the first Presenter Mentor meeting in Dallas. This was a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to seeing this group grow! Although I was speaking to a .NET centric crowd, the principals and concepts that I went in to briefly should be helpful to anyone thinking about doing a lot of presenting.
It seems that every year the Tulsa Tech Fest gets bigger AND better. This year was no exception. I’ve been to three Tulsa Tech Fest’s now, and each was has been simply amazing to me. Amazing that they can fit so much in to two days, amazing that the crew in Tulsa can pull so many big name and high quality speakers together, and amazing that each year they run the event so smoothly that it truly feels like a MUCH LARGER conference.
The first year over 450 people attended, last year it was moved to a 2 day event that over 700 people went to, and this year… over 1,000 attendees between two days. This year the cost of entry was 2 cans of food or $2. They raised 469 pounds of food (that’s 360 meals) for local Tulsa food banks. Awesome!
What is a Tech Fest? It’s sort of like a Code Camp, but where Code Camps are usually smaller with 1 or two tracks and usually only focus only on .NET. A TechFest is usually much larger, with some as many as 20 tracks at a time, and they usually include a larger range of technologies and topics. (.NET, PHP, AJAX, SOA, JAVA, Designers/UX, Business Development and Process, ALM)
This year’s TulsaTechFest was definitely a huge success! My favorite moment?
The closing keynote was the highlight for me. What a great way to finish of the event. Jef Newsom held everyone’s attention talking about "improving". Some of which was highlighted by CommunityCast.tv (I blogged about that here)
Jef’s talk was on Improving. Not Improving, the company, but on improving in general… or more specifically, improving yourself, improving your code, improving your team and your company. You know, Kaizen.
Jef did a hilarious "Improving the Movie Preview" that grabbed everyone’s attention (staring Jef Newsom as Darrel Hannon impersonating Sean Connery as "the Professor"; also staring Jef Newsom impersonating Seth Meyers impersonating Matthew McConway as "the Level 2 Support Guy") and then went in to some real practical steps that people can take.
Refactoring User Stories
Work on one thing at a time
Time Box yourself and your work
Retrospectives (pluses and deltas)
Dealing with positive and negative feedback
Be willing to stop the line
Conflicts and Compromises
Responsibility Redefined
Other great moments?
I loved the UX Track. Although I ran out of time on my session on Databinding and Templating in Silverlight (too much databinding… not enough templating)
Rob Howard’s Day 1 Keynote on Enterprise 2.0 really showed how companies across the corporation spectrum are embracing social media concepts from within to connect their people and help them find the resources and answers that they need to be productive. Something that his company Telligent, Microsoft, and many others are now starting to enable and embrace.
Prizes. I’ve never been to a community event before that gave away so much. Including a 50" Widescreen Plasma TV (each day), a Laptop (each day), a fully loaded work horse desktop(each day), MSDN Team Suit Premium (each day), a couple of Zunes and XBoxes(each day). Plus a TON of XBox games, books, software, Incredible Pizza giftcards, etc.. etc.. etc.. truly amazing.
I got to catch up with old friends as well as meet a TON of incredible peoplefrom all over the US the flew out to this event (to speak and to attend). I shot a ton of "bumber" video that we will probably use at the Agile.NET conference in Dallas in November. Buddy Lindsey and I went around one of the after conference meet ups (at Dirty’s Tavern) with a video camera and asked people about Agile development. We didn’t just stop at TTF attendees… we asked everyone. As you can imagine, we got some creative answers from the tavern patrons!
Improvements?
A couple things that I hope David and company will consider changing for next year:
The speaker’s dinner was awesome, but there were a TON of amazing people at the dinner that nobody knew (at least I didn’t know them) and most people (or just me) are probably too lazy to look them up on the web site… a quick intro around the room would have been nice.
Attendee party. Last year we all went to the Tulsa October Fest one of the nights. That was a lot of fun with everyone, this year we played Rock Band and ate Subway in one of the conference rooms. Rock Band was fun and all (epic moment: Seeing Tim Rayburn beat our Claudio’s 99% score on drums with a 100% win on vocals. Epic!) but I think that we’d get more participation and interactions if we bring back the October Fest next year(it is Tulsa Tech Fest after all)
All in all… a great time and I’m looking forward to next year!
Hey, if you aren’t already followingCommunityCast.tv - you should Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just posted a new clip over there. It’s about 3 minutes from Jef Newsom’s closing key note at the TulsaTechFest… which was awesome! I’ll post more on that later. For now, here’s the clip:
I’m speaking at the XAMLFest in Houston today and there have been several questions around how we did our automatic dependency injection in our Silverlight applications and the tools other tools that I recommend.
We use Ninject for DI in Silverlight. Here’s a great blog post from Jonas Follesoe (a Microsoft Regional Director from Norway) on using Ninject to do Dependency Injection in Silverlight.
I really like Jonas’ writing style, especially the way that he comments his code examples
also… be sure to check out the very cool Expression Kolur plug in that he wrote. Awesome!
I had the honor of speaking at the Dallas C# SIG last Thursday. I was asked by a couple of people if my slides were posted anywhere… so here they are on Slideshare. Enjoy!
Here’s the summary of my talk from the C# web page:
This is going to be one of the most unique talks on Silverlight that we’ve ever done. We have no agenda, just a ton of topics, experience and information on Silverlight, UX, and designing amazing user applications. Bring your questions, experience and let’s have a great time discussing all of these topics! We’ll overview Silverlight 1 and 2, the tools, features and abilities of Silverlight as well as walkthrough common scenarios, uses and pitfalls of practical Silverlight development in the field as well as highlighting some of the new and exciting Silverlight 2 features: DeepZoom, Isolated Storage, Data and Visual Templates. Silverlight 2 opens a whole new world of possibilities and options to .NET developers in the Rich Internet Application space. Combining the best of web application deployments with traditional Windows development, this best of breed application platform is changing the world of on-line as well as line-of-business applications. The most significant part of being a successful Silverlight developer is your ability to work well with data, and the ability to work well with designers.
Each year this event get’s bigger AND better. Last year included a sponsored night out to the Tulsa OctoberFest that was a lot of fun. Big props go to David Walker and the Tulsa Developers.NET group for putting this whole thing together.
I received an email from a friend recently that said something like
Saw you were doing a talk on loose coupling at TTF. Same time as [another talk]. I’m not sure which to pick.
Are you going to lay down the typical Caleb awesomeness, making your session the right choice?
Emphasis added. My response
Well when you put it that way… no, I’m only planning on doing a boring, lame presentation.
This is one of my favorite talks… I’m telling the story Dependency Injection and IoC through allegory “The Heroic Tale of DI and IoC”. Then showing some high level code examples of Ninject in Silverlight, Castle in WinForms and …
So yeah… come to my session.
(but I can guarantee none of this so called "awesomeness" that was spoken of… my sessions will probably be dull and boring ;)
Next Wednesday (November 5th, 2008) I’ll be heading down to College Station, TX for INETA to present at the Texas A&M University .NET User Group’s lunch time meeting.
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Just wanted to let you know that we’ve just 
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