Dave Bost

 
The Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group is holding their first Code Camp on Nov. 8th, 2008 in Eau Claire, WI. I’m thrilled to be one of the presenters where I plan on dishing out all the goods from the PDC on Microsoft’s Cloud Computing initiatives. I’m really digging how Doug Rhoten and Dan Krueger (the CVCC planning committee) is putting together the agenda with a Microsoft Technologies track and an Agnostic/Cross-over track. With that, there will be sessions covering topics such as Cloud Computing, Rails, XNA, AJAX-enabled Websites with Java and NetBeans, F#, C++, Real World practices with WPF & Silverlight, Agile Development using Scrum and Team Foundation Server, TDD in .NET and building web applications with accessibility in mind.

Being this is the Chippewa Valley area, that means one thing – home of Leinenkugel’s Beer! I’m sure a side trip to the Leinie Lodge will be in order.

What: Chippewa Valley Code Camp

Where: Chippewa Valley Technical College, 620 West Clairemont Ave., Eau Claire, WI (map)

When: Saturday, Nov. 8th, 2008, 8AM – 5:30PM

My good friend, co-hort, and the best damn female evangelist in Central Region, Jennifer Marsman, is a huge proponent of Women In Technology. In honor of that, I wanted to point out a few side-events taking place at next week’s PDC.

WomenBuild Workshop, Sunday, Oct. 26th, 2008, 11:30AM – 4:30PM

All PDC attendees (men and women) are invited to participate in this free workshop where you will work in small groups to solve real-life business challenges through the magic of LEGO® Bricks. How cool is that?!? Each team member will serve a particular responsibility in the team dynamic, bringing their own unique perspective to the group while collectively solving the problem at hand.

This is a great event to exercise your creative brain while at the same time networking and building relationships leading into the week long PDC conference.This event is part of the LEGO® Serious Play Program (LSP) and sounds like a heck of a lot of fun. Channel9 will be on hand to capture all of the creative energy. We may also try to squeeze in a Thirsty Developer interview or two as well.

Register: If you’d be interested in participating, please e-mail the Registration Desk at pdc2008@ustechs.com to sign up for the session. Space is limited, so please reserve your spot ASAP. This is first come, first serve. 

Also, be sure to join the Facebook WomenBuild group to be notified of upcoming WomenBuild events taken place across the nation and hopefully the world!

Women in Technology Reception, Wednesday, Oct. 29th, 2008, 6:00PM – 7:30PM, West Lobby

The PDC2008 Women in Technology (WIT) Reception is your chance to meet and share stories with the powerful, insightful, and intelligent women attending PDC2008. Enjoy drinks and snacks—as well as have the chance to win great prizes—while celebrating and learning from each other’s experiences and successes.

This gives me an opportunity to plug a recent Podcast we did with Jennifer and a few other highly intelligent and highly technical (Double Plus!) female co-workers of ours including Beth Humphreys, Angela Binkowski, and Rachel McKane (SalesGeek) about Women in Technology.

The only other thing to say is… Girlz Rule!

Holy Cow! PDC’08 is next week and I’m just now coming to grips with all of the activities, both day and night, that will surely keep me from the beauty sleep I so desperately need.

I’ve laid out my PDC schedule below. As you can see, I’m basically nuts. Sure, I’m ambitious now in trying to hit as much as possible, but we know how a PDC week can catch up to you. If you’re looking for me, there’s a decent chance you’ll find me in any of the places listed below. Or there may even be a better chance of catching me plopped in a bean bag chair somewhere.

Not only am I going to try and squeeze in everything below, but I’ll also be spending a majority of my time in the Open Spaces area, the Partner Expo, the Product Pavilion, the Hands-on-Labs and squeezing in as many Thirsty Developer interviews as we can. Yes… I’M NUTS! If you’re as crazy as me, I’d recommend you reading Thomas Lewis’ The Devil’s Field Guide to the PDC for some tips and advice on how to enjoy (and survive) PDC.

Here’s the schedule I’ve mustered up so far. It will change. I guarantee it. For any updates, changes or status checks, just follow me on Twitter.

We have so much time and so little to do. Strike that, reverse it. – Willy Wonka

Sunday, Oct. 26th

• Arrive at LAX around 11AM
• Sunday afternoon, a pre-conference networking event for some of our special guests where we’ll apparently get to play tourist or cowboy
• Sunday evening, where else but Party with Palermo

Monday, Oct. 27th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Amitabh Srivastava, Bob Muglia and David Thompson
• 11:00AM, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: A Lap Around VSTS 2010 (153)
• 12:15PM, (Available for Lunch, Let’s Meet!)
• 12:45PM, Microsoft Expression Blend: Tips & Tricks (408B)
• 1:45PM, ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap (153)
• 3:30PM, Team Foundation Server 2010: Cool New Features (151)
• 5:15PM, Too many to choose! (Web Dev Futures, Framework Design Guidelines, Hanselman’s talk, VSTS Database Edition, Agile w/VSTS, Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Service)
• 8:00PM, Private Customer function
• 9:00PM, Show Off
• After Party, the Lounge at Westin Bonneventure

Tuesday, Oct. 28th

• (Available for Breakfast, Let’s Meet!)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell
• 11:00AM, Keynote, Don Box and Chris Anderson
• 12:30PM, (Available for Lunch, Let’s Meet!)
• 12:45PM, Coding4Fun (403AB) or What I Learned Building my First Live Mesh Application (501B)
• 1:45PM, WPF Roadmap (515B)
• 3:30PM, Microsoft Silverlight Futures (153)

I have (4) tickets to a taping of “Rules of Engagement” at Sony Studios at 5PM. Tough choice between this and the attendee party. If you want the tickets or want to talk me into going, let me know. If I blow it off, than it’s…

• 5:15PM, ASP.NET and jQuery (403AB)
• 7:00PM, Attendee Party at Universal Studios
• 11:00PM, After Party at the Lounge at Westin Bonneventure

Wednesday, Oct. 29th

• (Available for Breakfast, Let’s Meet!)
• 8:30AM, Keynote, Rick Rashid
• 10:30AM, Parallel Programming (Petree Hall CD)
• 12:00PM (Lunch), Silverlight Controls Roadmap (404A) or XNA Game Studio (501B)
• 1:15PM, Programming Live Services using Non-Microsoft Technologies (501B)
• 3:00PM, A Day in the Life of a Could Service Developer (Petree Hall CD)
• 4:45PM, A Lap Around “Oslo” (502A)
• 7:00PM – 2:00AM, Customer Events + Underground@PDC

Thursday, Oct. 30th

• (Available for Breakfast)
• 8:30AM, Services Symposium Services (515B)
• 10:30AM, Silverlight 2 Control Model (Petree Hall CD)
• 12:00PM (Lunch), WPF: Data Centric Applications (408A) or Cloud Computing (Petree Hall CD)
• 1:45PM, ASP.NET Futures (Petree Hall CD)
• 3:00PM, Head home after an *exhausting* week at PDC!

We just ramped up our final MSDN Unleashed events for the Summer ‘08 season, and we’re moving right into our Fall ‘08 tour. I will post dates and topics here shortly. For now, here are the slides from the Summer ‘08 season that everyone has been asking me for. Don’t forget to check out the resource roundup from these events as well.

Thanks to everyone who came this go round. Please, if you have any comments or suggestions on how we can make these events better, please leave a comment.

Have you seen A Website Named Desire? This is a poster that depicts complex team structures found in many web development projects. From the management team to the creative team to the technical team to the client. There are many moving parts and many different taxonomies when it comes to pulling your web sites together. Now mind you, this isn’t the makeup of *ALL* web project teams. This is just trying to show the chaotic nature of the business and the people involved. It hopefully strikes up a conversation and an understanding around these taxonomies.

Bonus points to those of you who can find the Zen garden or count all of the bugs.