Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew » events

Thoughts on MSDN Developer Conference (Jan. 16th in Reston, VA)

Alvin Ashcraft — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:44:37 +0000

The MSDN Developer Conference series has been making its way around the country over the last several weeks. The conference takes the best of PDC08 and boils it down to a one day event at a reasonable price – $99. On Friday, Washington, DC area developers got their opportunity to experience the event in Reston, VA. Since there is no Philadelphia event, I decided to drive south to Reston rather than north to New York City.

There was a Developer Dinner the evening before the conference featuring a Silverlight line-of-business presentation by Marc Schweigert and Pete Brown. Marc showed some tricks for data retrieval with the current feature set available in Silverlight, and then Pete took over and showed how future improvements in Silverlight are going to streamline the code necessary to perform data access. Pete and Marc did a great job, and the pizza wasn’t bad either.

I was really looking forward to the conference, and I must say it did not disappoint. My biggest problem was deciding which sessions to sit in on. There were interesting topics and engaging speakers throughout the day. Ultimately, I decided on a language futures session with Kevin Hazzard, a Windows Azure session with G. Andrew Duthie, a VSTS 2010 session with Steve Andrews and an ASP.NET 4.0 session with Rachel Appel.

After lunch, I sat down and chatted with Kevin Hazzard about how he approached his talk, which was a meld of three PDC sessions on the .NET languages. I agree with his observation that when watching Anders Hejlsberg’s session on The Future of C#, you could feel his passion for the language. Kevin wanted to harness that energy in his talk, and I think he did a very good job of it. I also learned that he is working on a book about scripting languages & .NET due out later this year. Stay tuned for more details…

I was able to finally meet some other bloggers & tweeters like Jeff Fritz, Justin Etheredge and Christopher Steen. It’s nice to associate an actual face with the tiny icons in the interwebs.

I want to give special thanks to Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown, Kevin Hazzard, Bob Familiar, Rob Keiser, John McClelland (founder of Partner Huddle on Facebook), and many others for all their efforts. They all had their hands full with this event and also took some time during the day to chat with me a bit. I had a great time on Friday and picked up a few tips and tricks along the way.

Technorati Tags: msdndevconf,twitter,facebook,mvp,silverlight,windows 7,asp.net,windows azure

Microsoft PDC 2008: Day 3 Wrap-Up

Alvin Ashcraft — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:59:00 +0000

My wrap-up of Day 3 at Microsoft PDC 2008 is now live on DZone.com’s .NET Zone here.

PDC 2008 – Day 2 Wrap-Up on DZone

Alvin Ashcraft — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:43:46 +0000

My wrap-up of Day 2 at Microsoft PDC 2008 just went live on DZone.com’s .NET Zone here.

PDC 2008 – Day 1 Wrap-Up on DZone

Alvin Ashcraft — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 21:58:57 +0000

My wrap-up of Day 1 at Microsoft PDC 2008 just went live on DZone.com’s .NET Zone. Check it out!

Technorati Tags: pdc08,dzone,windows azure

Where You Can Find Me at PDC 2008

Alvin Ashcraft — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:45:01 +0000

UPDATED: 10/24 @ 12:50PM – Added specific times when I can be found at the DZone booth.

I’ll be arriving in Los Angeles for PDC08 in two days. Be sure to catch my daily PDC articles on DZone’s .NET Zone next week! On a related note, if you’re a .NET blogger, and you’re interested in contributing on the .NET Zone as a writer, Zone Leader, or by writing some .NET-related RefCardz, please stop by the DZone booth next week. If you can’t make it to PDC, drop me a line, and I’ll be sure to get you in contact with the right people. The folks at DZone have been an invaluable resource to the Java community for some time, and they are committed to delivering that same kind of value to the .NET community.

Here are some of the places/sessions where you can find me next week. Track me down if you want to say hello, chat, etc… I will keep this post updated as things morph and solidify over the next couple of days.

Sunday

11:58AM – Arrive at LAX
7:00PM-10:00PM – Party with Palermo

Monday

8:30AM-10:30AM – Keynote
12:45PM-1:30PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
1:45PM-3:00PM – The Future of C# (Petree Hall CD)
6:30PM-9:00PM – Partner Expo Reception

Tuesday

8:30AM-12:30PM – Keynotes
1:45PM-3:00PM – A Lap Around “Oslo” (Petree Hall CD)
3:30PM-4:45PM – “Oslo”: The Language (151)
4:00PM-5:30PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
7:00PM-11:00PM – Attendee Party – Universal Studios

Wednesday

8:30AM-10:00AM – Keynote
12:00PM-12:45PM – Microsoft XNA Game Studio: An Overview (501B)
1:15PM-2:30PM – “Oslo”: Customizing and Extending the Visual Design Experience (151)
3:00PM-4:00PM – DZone Booth 1201 @ Partner Expo
6:00PM-2:00AM – The Underground (I’m not the waitlist. So, I may be there if I get invited and have time.)

Thursday

8:30AM-9:45AM – Research: Contract Checking and Automated Test Generation with Pex (403AB) (If I have time before heading back to LAX.)
12:50PM – Depart LAX

See you there!

(BTW – Is anyone else staying at Omni Los Angeles Hotel at California Plaza?)

Technorati Tags: pdc08,dzone,party with palermo

Ballmer’s “Cloud OS” == Live Mesh?

Alvin Ashcraft — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:03:17 +0000

It certainly sounds to me like David Treadwell is equating Live Mesh to Windows in the cloud. Listen carefully and let me know what you think.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

PDC 2008 Keynote in 3 weeks. We’ll know soon enough.

Technorati Tags: live mesh,pdc08,microsoft cloud os

Philly .NET Code Camp 2008.3 – Registration Is Now Open

Alvin Ashcraft — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:56:39 +0000

You can now register for Philly .NET Code Camp 2008.3 which will be held Saturday, October 11, 2008. Get all the details and register here.

I will be there, presenting a beginner session on TDD as part of the ALT.NET track. It looks like I’ve got some solid competition in my time slot, including the likes of Rachel Appel, Steve Andrews and Travis Laborde. We’ll see if the rookie can fill the seats with eager developers while seasoned vets like that are vying for them. I will need to come up with some great prizes or something. See you there!

Here is the tentative agenda, room assignments and times are subject to change:

8:00 Registration, continental breakfast

Alt.NET – 141

8:30 Brian Donahue – Fundamentals: Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection
10:00 Alvin Ashcraft – Getting started with Test Driven Development
12:30 Erik Peterson – TDD w/Webforms
2:00 JP Toto – What does an ALT.NET Project Look Like
3:30 Steve Eichert – IronRuby: Ruby Love on the .NET Framework

Architecture – 104

8:30 Mitch Ruebush – Patterns for Building Rich Internet Applications
10:00 Jon Graves – Building Maintainable WPF Apps
12:30 Jason Ipock – Beginning Architectural Patterns: Overview and Application
2:00 Edwin Ames – Understanding DotNet Coding to Design Systems
3:30 Sam Gentile – REST programming with WCF 3.5
3:30 Max Zilberman – Using Software plus Services

Business Intelligence – 109

8:30 Kevin Goff – Using MDX with SQL Server Reporting Services and PerformancePoint Server 2007
10:00 Joe Toscano – SQL 2005 Data Mining
12:30 Melissa Demcsak – SQL Server 2005 Integration Services: A Beginner’s Primer on Loading Data Marts
2:00 Dan Hartshorn – PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics Deep Dive

MIX – 111

8:30 Jim Bonnie – Boldly going where some DNN modules have gone before
10:00 Rachel Appel – Creating Responsive UI’s with ASP.NET AJAX
12:30 Tony Lombardo – Introduction to the WebDataGrid
2:00 Bill Wolff – Building Silverlight 2.0 Applications
3:30 Jess Chadwick – Building Rich Web Interfaces with ASP.NET MVC and JavaScript
2:00 Todd F. Snyder – Distributed Silverlight development (WCF, JSON, Etc…)
3:30 Kevin Hazzard – Stupid Python Tricks

Framework – 105

10:00 Steve Andrews – TBD
10:00 John Baird – Beginning Compact Framework Development
12:30 Andy Schwam – LINQ to Success
2:00 Jason Gaylord – Talk: MVC from Start to Blog
3:30 Chris Rolon – LINQ to Entities

SharePoint – 113

8:30 David Mann – SharePoint 101 – Getting Started on the right foot with SharePoint development
10:00 Tony Testa – SharePoint Search
12:30 Bob Fox – Server Farm Topologies
2:00 Michael Mukalian – SharePoint Features and Solutions
3:30 Panel – Ask the Experts panel discussion

SQL Database – 108

8:30 Sharon Dooley – New SQL Server 2008 DBA Toys: Part 2
10:00 Barry Young – The Top Ten Reasons You Aren’t Already Using Service Broker
12:30 David Penton – Increasing Developer Productivity With SQL Server
2:00 Hilary Cotter – SQL Server Performance Tuning
3:30 Joshua Lynn – Practical XML for SQL Server

Toolbox – 106

8:30 Ben Greenberg – Building Deployment Packages with WiX
10:00 Travis Laborde – TBD
10:00 Jason Meckley – Intro to the Rhino Tools stack
12:30 Steve Presley – Offline Mobile social apps
2:00 Jonathan Newell – Amazon S3/ASP.NET/URL writing
3:30 Derek R. Flickinger + Ray Gabriel – Windows Media Center development

Enterprise Management

8:30 Sathish TK – Building and Maintaining a High Availability Infrastructure
10:00 Doug Henry – System Center Configuration Manager
12:30 Conor Wentz – System Center Operations Manager
2:00 Jim Garrity – Implementing Microsoft Hyper-V with Virtual Machine Manager
3:30 Jim Garrity – Implementing VMware ESX Server with Virtual Center

IT Infrastructure

8:30 Paul Begley – Exchange 2007
10:00 Rob Keiser – Hyper-V and SCVMM
12:30 Laura Hunter – Active Directory
2:00 Tim Wilson – Office Communication Server 2007
3:30 Terry Yarnall – SharePoint 2007

11:30 Social networking in the break room, Primo hoagies, drinks and snacks

5:00 evals, lots of raffle prizes

Technorati: user groups, code camp, philly .net, developer community