Bring your A game, do your best, leave it all on the field. That’s how I roll… until last night. Last night I presented on MVVM in Silverlight at the North Dallas .NET Users Group. It was a great turn out with a lot of interaction and excellent questions. Huge thanks to the organizers for having me, and to every one that turned out for it!

OK, I learned two big lessons last night. First, don’t prep your demo’s with a source control system that you are not 100% comfortable with yet.. second, don’t keep your speaking engagements when you’ve been taking care of sick people all week.

Don’t get sick

This week, my family got hit bad with Rotavirus. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this was a bad week in the Jenkins home. We had to deal with this bug once before when our oldest son was a baby… it was bad then, now times that by five. My wife, son, and 3 daughters have had a rough week to put it mildly. Fortunately, I work for a great company that let me work from home this week so that I could help take care of them. I’m also fortunate that I’ve been fine this whole week… until last night.

Right in the middle of my talk it hit me, whoa.. light headed… oh no, I might need that trash can… ugh. I’ve never gotten sick in the middle of a talk before – not fun.

Fortunately I was able to take a 5 minute break, get some fresh air, and then finish my talk. I came home with a fever and have been laying in bed since. I’m grateful for the awesome vitamins that we take (especially the pro-biotics) because here I am – just over 12 hours later – feeling much better.

The last time that I was scheduled to speak at the NDDNUG I got a chest cold leading up to it, fortunately my friend Aaron Erickson was in town and filled in with a great talk on Dynamic Languages and the DLR. Note to self: If you could be sick (it’s hard because I really don’t get sick that often) find a replacement presenter.

Using GIT

It’s all David’s fault. Well, Dave and TekPub.
My friend Dave (@davidmohara) is constantly pulling out and showing off the cool shiny toys. He’s the one that got me to start using CodeRush (no seriously, he’s a CodeRush ninja), he’s the one that got me to look at ASP.NET MVC completely differently, and then recently he’s become the unofficial GIT guide to several of us at the MVP Summit. So, Dave, combined with a 1 month subscription to TekPub that I won at the last Community for MVC.NET group got me interested in using GIT.

By the way… TekPub is awesome, I’ll talk more about them for another time, for now, go check out the preview to using GIT.

The nice thing about GIT is that you can quickly and easily create local branches and commits without standing up a server anywhere. It sounded like a great way to fork out my demos so that I could work in a single directly and just take snapshots (branches) along the way while I was prepping the talk. I still think I’ll end up using GIT for that, but last night in the middle of my talk I couldn’t remember how to roll back changes to one branch in order to switch to a different branch. You can’t leave a branch that has uncommitted changes, you either have to commit them or roll out of them. For anyone interested – the command that I was looking for was “git reset –hard [name of branch]” – would have come in handy last night.

So my own stumbling over git combined with a mid-talk fever made for an interesting night! Again, a big thanks to the organizers and attendees, and my  apologies for giving you my C game.

Hopefully, Lesson learned.

What is an MVP?  From the official site:

“MVPs are a select group of experts representing technology’s best and brightest people who share a commitment to community. While MVPs come from many backgrounds and a wide range of technical communities, they share a passion for technology and a demonstrated willingness to help others”

So without further ado… let me introduce the 6 Microsoft MVPs from Improving :

Chris Tullier  – Visual Studio Team System MVP

 Chris joined Improving this year as a Principal consultant and was awarded with the Team System MVP April 1st (congrats Chris!). He works directly with Microsoft and many engagements and is a VSTS / TFS rock star. Seriously, he get the nuts and bolts of the tooling, but also grasp the business side of software engineering in ways that I’ve never really thought of before. “What’s your branching / release strategy?” “How are you managing your migration?” Huh? Chris has it covered. He’s the co-founder of the Dallas Team System User Group and in also the founder of the weekly online VSTS chat sessions over at http://www.teamsystemlive.com.

Tim Rayburn – Microsoft BizTalk MVP

Tim is our newest Principal consultant. Tim has been a recipient of the exclusive BizTalk MVP award for the last two consecutive years. Tim is also a member of Microsoft’s BizTalk Virtual Technical Specialist team, which is the closest that you can get to working for Microsoft with out actually moving to Redmond .  Not only is Tim at total BizTalk Ninja, he’s also one of the leading authorities on C# development (total CodeRush Samurai), application architecture, as well as all things Work Flow and WCF related (he’s the president of the Dallas Connected Systems User Group). Tim is also a national speaker for INETA, he travels all over North America investing in others and delivering his top notch – information packed – presentations.

David O’Hara – ASP.NET MVP

Dave is another CodeRush Ninja. He’s worked almost exclusively in ASP.NET MVC since joining Improving, he’s a frequent presenter at various .NET User Groups and conferences and currently helps run the local Presenter Mentor group. You’ll often find Dave sitting with his Mac, participating in an Alt.NET conference and showing others how they can be code ninjas too!

Todd Girvin – C# MVP

Todd is one of the co-founder’s of Improving and also runs the Microsoft Practice here. He’s seriously one of the best people that you will ever have on your team. Not only does Todd get the business development side of running a Microsoft practice but is also one of the most efficient and lethal developers that you will ever meet. I once worked on a project with Todd where he mentored developer’s around the globe while simultaneously increased the performance of there application by over 36 times! (this was actually a really big deal; ask me about it sometime and I’ll give you the rest of the details. ) Todd is also a frequent presenter at various conferences and leads the Dallas C# User Group.

Jef Newsom – Architecture MVP

Jef is the other co-founder of Improving Enterprises and is the current CIO (Chief Instigation Officer – as he puts it). Jef’s really smart. Like wicked smart. If he were an X-Man he’d be Prof X… without that whole stuck in a wheel chair thing. Jef is one of the (less than) hundred or so Microsoft Certified Architects in the world. Jef is a frequent presenter at various events and is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.

Caleb Jenkins – ASP.NET MVP (Silverlight)

OK.. so I’m a little very humbled to be included in this group.  If you really want to know about me go check out my about page, mvp profile, look at the talks that I’ve given, or follow me on twitter. Over 2 years ago I left Microsoft to join the guys at Improving as employee number 7. Today we have over 50 full time employees… and 7 current or past MVPs!

Did you say 7? I thought there were 6? ah… keep reading my friend.

Peter Brunone – 7 time ASP.NET MVP

and I would be completely remiss if I didn’t mention Peter. Peter was one of the first ever Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET MVPs and won the award seven years in a row! Currently, Peter is our resident SharePoint samurai and is doing amazing things in SharePoint development for us. Peter blogs on Microsoft’s official asp.net site and also wrote the Easy List Box control. Go check it out!

Want to keep up with all of the bloggers at Improving? Go subscribe to the composite feed!

This week I will be at the Microsoft MVP Summit in Seattle, while I’m there I will take the time to present at the local .NET User Group. If you are in the area be sure to stop by. It’s going to be a “double feature” between my “Developing Loosely Coupled Applications” talk and my friend, and fellow MVP, Dennis Bottjer will be giving his amazing talk on SharePoint Performance. It’s gonna be awesome!

Side Note: I just realized that Jason updates his blog less than I update  CommunityCast.   – go follow his twitter instead

Tonight I’ll be talking about Microsoft Silverlight, specifically some of the Data Binding and Visual Template features. This is a fun talk, but there is a lot to cover! We’ll start with data binding to business objects and then move to creating visual templates with Microsoft Expression Blend. I’ll also bring my camera so be prepared to chat about what you are doing later in the night!

If you’re in the Dallas area, be sure to stop by and check it out!

Download my demo code from SkyDrive.

Enjoy!

Tomorrow night I’ll be presenting at the Ft. Lauderdale .NET User Group on Silverlight. Specifically, I’ll be covering the process and techniques for creating visual templates as well as some of the in’s and out’s of binding to data and creating data templates.

again… big thanks to INETA for sponsoring this event and for supporting .NET communities all over the world!

It should be a great night, if you’re in the area.. be sure to stop by and say hi!

That’s right, tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the Rockford .NET user group (about an hour outside of Chicago) telling the Heroic Tale of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and the Strategy Pattern. This is basically a modified and shortened version of one of the talks that I’ll be doing next month at VS Live! in Dallas.

Big thanks to INETA for supporting the local community and having great speakers (and me ) present all over the World!

If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by and say hi!

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.

I’m looking forward to meeting the .NET developers at Texas A&M and then afterwards I’m planning on meeting up with some friends from Always Creative, then it’s off to my first visit to the Improving Rural Sourcing Development Center that’s based in College Station.

If you’re in the area be sure to drop by!

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One of the great things about speaking for INETA is traveling to places that I’ve never been before. July is going to be a little different for me. I was born in Southern California and grew up just an hour north of San Diego in a town called Temecula. (Except for 3 years when I lived in Okinawa)

We moved from Murrieta to Tulsa in 2001 and I haven’t been back to California since then. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been 7 years! Aside from the people and family that are in California there are only 3 things that I really miss. So I’m really looking forward to meeting up with my Dad and having a good lunch while I’m there.

If you are going to be in the San Diego area in July… make sure to stop by the .NET User Group and say hi! We might even go grab a bite to eat afterwards… if I used to know you in Southern California… send me an email: blogger[at]calebjenkins[dot]com.

The topic is still TBD, but it will probably be one of these:

• ASP.NET AJAX with Visual Studio 2008
• Silverlight with Visual Studio 2008 + Expression Blend
• Developer Designer Zen (bringing two world’s together)
• Better Application Design with practical loose coupling

What would you want the topic to be?

This will be my first time in Spokane ever. I’m planning on driving over to see Lake Coeur D’Alene while I’m there too. I’ve heard so many nice thing about this area that I’m really looking forward to the couple of hours that I’ll be out there.

OK, I have to get up in 3 hours to make my *early* flight (a super, super early flight! ugh.. )

Anyways, if you’re in the area… stop by the User Group and say hi!