Community Blogs

This month marks the launch of a new site we’ve been working on to help recognize and support a number of influential bloggers in the .NET developer community. Please help me welcome the initial members of the DevMavens ! These bloggers have been invited to be a part of this small but hopefully growing group based on their influence in the community, and the DevMavens site has been set up (using ASP.NET MVC , no less) specifically to provide a portal to reach these influentials. It aggregates and displays their most recent blog and twitter entries, and will hopefully provide a useful, easily accessible view of these influentials for the community. We’re very excited to launch the site, which we only began developing in April and inviting members...

Well, Canada turns 141 years old today and as we all know, 141 is the Conference anniversary. So in keeping with that, registration is now open for the alt.net Canada Open Spaces Extravaganza . Get your requests in early because only the first 100 will be allowed in and at the time of writing, over 10% of those are filled already. After that, you'll have to do what all Canadians do and try to cozy up to the bouncer . I will personally guarantee satisfaction at *any* cost for all who attend so don't delay. It will be held in the future capital of West Canada: Calgary, Alberta at the University of Calgary. Full details on the site. Organizing, and in attendance, will be a gaggle of good Canucks, including (in alphabetical order by first...

Many thanks to Sebastian Lambla for inviting me to the alt.net London beers this past Tuesday evening. It was a fun evening and if you are in the London area, I'd recommend checking out future meetings. This was the second night out and they have plans to run it every month in the second or third week. You can watch for it on the alt.net list but if, like me, you're stepping back from the list, Sebastian's blog is probably your best bet. He's a good resource to have in your blogroll in any case. As it was only the second one, the format is still in flux but I like what I heard. Future meetings will including a period of tech talk on a pre-determined topic followed by much socializing. And in my experience, few places on earth...

I'll be presenting at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group this evening at 6pm. The talk will be a slightly modified version of my Black Belt ASP.NET Performance talk that I gave earlier this month at Tech Ed in Orlando. According to their web site, the user group will also be giving away a Zune to one of the attendees of tonight's meeting (and I have a book and some shirts, too...), so if nothing else, you can come for the free stuff. The main topics covered in this talk are performance testing with load testing tools, caching, and asynchronous programming. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Read More...

Last week I co-hosted a birds-of-a-feather session with Julia Lerman on Going Solo. Julie and I did a similar BOF session a couple of years ago at another TechEd and both times we've gotten a pretty good crowd. In an effort to continue the conversation and help people learn about the challenges of running your own business (be it consulting, ISV, or whatever), we are pointing anyone interested at the Business Management mailing list on AspAdvice.com . So, whether you made it to the BOF session or not, if you're interested in learning more about tips and pitfalls of life as an entrepreneur, come join the discussion on the list . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Read More...

Need to be more on the ball with announcing community events that I'm hosting. The Bahamas .NET User Group had its second meeting on May 28 and it was another success. Running a user group is an odd kind of thing. There is more work than you imagined when you had the initial idea and you often get to the point where you wonder if it's worth it. Then the meeting starts and goes by in a blur and when you're driving home, you're wishing you could meet every week instead of monthly. It's a rush that is almost as good as...well, let's not get carried away. It's a good feeling is all. The group was seven strong, not including me. That's one more than last time, and that includes six newcomers. The topic was Building...

Pedro Félix is blogging about WCF . Read More...

Typemock has updated its Developers Community Site with new sections. Besides the forums , there's a new add-ons page where anyone can share her/his tools or snippets (I guess I'll have to brush up my Typemock Snippets For Visual Studio to add there) and an experts page (guess who's there). Read More...

Have been waiting for Derik to announce this for a while and it's finally happened. He's launched a new service called DimeCasts.NET . The site will be a repository for screencasts he's done/doing on various .NET topics. He's seeded it with a few already on unit testing and I believe there are many more on the way. There are two reasons I'm excited about this: He's mandated a maximum length of ten minutes for each length. In fact, it's built right into the name. So there are no excuses for skipping any episodes. I've worked on projects where the build process takes longer. He's starting at the very beginning. Episode one shows how to set up NUnit in your project. The second point means that I may not exactly...

I was invited to speak at the Florida Tweener weekend which is the weekend 'twixt the two TechEd weeks in Orlando. The schedule is up and I had no idea what the scale of this thing would be! Not only is there a full day .NET code camp but also over a dozen other activities. The ones I'm excited about are the Day of Agile, the Day of Silverlight, the Open Space, and the Mickey Mouse Club.NET session. The last one's not on the schedule yet but I have high hopes. For my part, I'll be presenting on Brownfield applications, mostly because I have the presentation ready (well, actually Donald Belcham has the presentation ready). Luckily, I'm the first session in the morning on Saturday which leaves the rest of the weekend to drink...