Joseph Guadagno

Phoenix Community Evangelists United

At Desert Code Camp this past Saturday, a bunch of community evangelists and community members got together (about 20) to talk about ways to improve the Arizona technology community. Here is a synopsis of what we talked about.

Desert Code Camp

For future Desert Code Camps, it would be nice to have a central place for the PowerPoint® slides and code samples.  There are too many locations to get the content.  In most cases, you will not know where to get the content unless you show up to the session.

In addition, at future code camps, attendees should receive a flyer or handout about the different users groups in the area plus upcoming events.

Meeting and Events

Announcements

One of the biggest problems we seem to have is getting the word out for meetings or events. There are a few reasons for this, multiple calendars, multiple technologies, and community evangelists that do not know other community evangelists outside of their discipline.  There were three decisions that way made to hopefully alleviate this issue.

1. The Google calendar at AZGroups.org would be used to display all technology / business events in the state. If you do not have access to this calendar contact Scott Cate or myself to arrange access.
2. All event organizers will forward event information to at least 3 other community evangelist who will in turn forward the event information to 3 other community evangelist.
3. We will look into the way the Arizona Tech Council handles this, they send out monthly emails.
4. We will look into getting our events listed on the AZIPA mailing list.

Locations

We talked about possible locations of potential bigger future events and user group meetings.  The following places were brought up as candidates.

For conferences, the Desert Willow Conference center (near the Buttes in Tempe).  This also could potentially serve as a future location of Desert Code Camp.

For user group meetings, Boulders on Broadway was mentioned as good place for small user groups meetings (if you do not mind the occasional noise).

Increase Attendance

We talked about ways to increase attendance at user group meetings and events. Most of the attendees said we need to get quality speakers but could not come up with a way to attract quality speakers. We also talked about looking into ways of getting talented speakers to speaker at more events / meetings and share their vast knowledge.

As a side note, some one brought up recording events to make them available to people who are not able to attend.  Most though that by having the events recorded would decrease the attendance.

Action Items

Although no one person was handed out any action items from the open forum there are a few action items that need to be done by all to keep the Arizona technology community growing.

1. Constant communication between the community evangelists.  I suggest a mailing of the community evangelist, or potentially a monthly or quarterly meeting of community evangelist like we had a Desert Code Camp.
2. Evangelize you own events and the events of others.
3. Potentially create a site that list the user groups (of all technologies in Arizona) that can be searched.
4. Look into having “Unconferences” in between the Desert Code Camps, one quarter we have a code camp, the next quarter we have an unconference, the a code camp, etc.

Closing

In closing, I would like to thank the wide variety of attendees from a wide array of technologies and disciplines that attended. I also would like to commend everyone one that participated and shared their thoughts in an open, honest and respectably way.

If you have any comments and/or suggestions feel free to leave a comment or send me an email via the contact me page.

Phoenix AZ Community Leaders Unite

This Saturday, June 13th, 2009, is the next Desert Code Camp. While I am co teaching on session on “Write your first desktop .net app (or, Write you own Twitter Client for .net)” with Saul Mora, I am heading up two community based sessions. the first session is open to the “general public” and is titled “Open forum with Community Leaders”. The intend of this session is to provide an open forum between the community members of Phoenix and the community leaders of Phoenix. So if you are a community leader, or are attending Desert Code Camp, stop by the session and share you thoughts and feedback on the technology community in Phoenix.  The second session is a “private invite only” session for the community leaders of ALL TECHNOLOGIES in the Phoenix area.  In this session, I want to get the community leaders together to talk about ways we can improve the technology community in Phoenix.  If you are interested in this session, please contact me jguadagno [ at ] sevdnug.org, I will forward you the room and time information once it is scheduled.

Tech Lunch South (July 09)

Eat... Talk... Network... Learn
Meet up with other technologies professionals for lunch. Lunch begins at 11:30am and you are responsible for your own lunch.  Here is the June schedule.

Twitter up the event with the hash tag of #TechLunchSouth

A list of all Tech Lunch South’s can be found at http://sevdnug.org/Events/TechLunchSouth.aspx

Tech Lunch South (June 09)

Eat... Talk... Network... Learn
Meet up with other technologies professionals for lunch. Lunch begins at 11:30am and you are responsible for your own lunch.  Here is the June schedule.

Twitter up the event with the hash tag of #TechLunchSouth

A list of all Tech Lunch South’s can be found at http://sevdnug.org/Events/TechLunchSouth.aspx

My 2000th Tweet

I almost let the milestone of my 2000th tweet go by without saying anything profound other than ‘yea 2000…’’. I thought I would make a more productive tweet and that is the purpose of this post.

In reality this post should be labeled “What I have learned from Twitter”

I have learned that Twitter can:

1. May you more productive and at the same time less productive (Gotta close TweetDeck once in a while)
2. Can help find you find new friends or colleagues and the same time you can make new enemies. Sometimes you have to be careful what you Tweet
3. You can learn stuff. There are tons of people that post blog entries, articles and news stories.
4. You can get support for products, there are companies like Telerik, DevExpress, and others on Twitter
5. You can find out about local events, crime and more in your area.
6. You can even get Spammed (in case you missed the spam from your email)
7. OH, and you can even get “free laptops" for following people :)

Overall, I think, if used properly, Twitter can be an effective tool for networking, marketing and learning.

Some Twitter Lingo

RT: ReTweet, give credit where credit is due

DM: Direct Message

D: Used to direct message someone

@<username> : indicates the tweet is for or about a person

#<hashtag> : a hash tag is used to group items together for easier searching an stuff. Like #TechLunchSouth or #MVP09.

Follow me on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/jgudagno

May Technology Events in Arizona

In my prior post, I mentioned all of the weekly and monthly events happening in the Phoenix, AZ area.  This post, I want to highlight some of the events that are happening in May.

May 7th

VSTS Big Event

Steve Lange, Rob Bagby and Microsoft are hosting a FREE event which will help you discover how people, process and technology are key to helping your organization succeed in today’s environment.

This all day seminar includes several sessions within Architecture, Development & Testing and Application Lifecycle Management tracks.

Dan Weinmann and Brendon Birdoes of Neudesic and I will be delivering content on each of the tracks along with members of the Microsoft Technical Specialist teamand other area VSTS MVPs and ALM practitioners.

Here is a list of available sessions:

• Test Driven Development: Improving .NET Application Performance & Scalability
  • This session will demonstrate how to leverage Test Driven Development in Team System. We’ll highlight both writing unit tests up front as well as creating test stubs for existing code.
• "It Works on My Machine!" Closing the Loop Between Development & Testing
  • In this session, we will examine the traditional barriers between the developer and tester; and how Team System can help remove those walls.
• Treating Databases as First-Class Citizens in Development
  • Team System Database Edition elevates database development to the same level as code development. See how Database Edition enables database change management, automation, comparison, and deployment.
• Architecture without Big Design Up Front
  • Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. See how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of your code. Learn how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.
• Development Best Practices & How Microsoft Helps
  • Sometimes development teams get too bogged down with the details. Take a deep breath, step back, and re-acquaint yourself with a review of current development best practice trends, including continuous integration, automation, and requirements analysis; and see how Microsoft tools map to those practices.
• "Bang for Your Buck" Getting the Most out of Team Foundation Server
  • Today’s IT budgets are forcing teams to do as much as they can with as little as possible. Why not leverage Team Foundation Server to its full potential? In this session we’ll highlight some capabilities of TFS that you may or may not already know about to help you maximize productivity.

This event will not only provide you with best practices around development and testing, but will demonstrate key capabilities of both Visual Studio Team System 2008 and the upcoming 2010 release that you won't want to miss. It’s a day that promises to have something for everyone!

Click here to register with invitation code: 90BC47

For more information: http://rickgaribay.net/archive/2009/04/13/phoenix-visual-studio-team-system-big-event-is-coming-to.aspx

May 18th

MSDN Unleashed Presents: The Best of MIX

What’s New in Silverlight 3?

Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?  Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard?  Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline?  Then this session is for you.  We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

· Support for perspective 3D

· Offline Support

· .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure

This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX.  We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up.  We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms

Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC  framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms?  Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data.  In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

For more information: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413168&Culture=en-US

May 26th

Scott Guthrie 2009

Scott Guthrie, Glenn Block and Jaime Rodriguez are coming to Arizona to talk about Silverlight, Microsoft Extension Framework, ASP.NET MVC, and WPF. 

For more information: http://weblogs.asp.net/jguadagno/archive/2009/04/20/scott-guthrie-2009-in-phoenix-arizona.aspx

Scott Guthrie 2009 in Phoenix Arizona

Please join us on Tuesday, May 26th, in welcoming Scott Guthrie back to the valley of the sun.  Scott, along with Glenn Block and Jaime Rodriguez, will demonstrate some of the latest technologies available from Microsoft.

This is a FREE all day event where lunch and beverages will be provided. 

The location has not been finalized but will be in either Scottsdale, AZ or downtown Phoenix, AZ.

This event requires registration.  Please register at: http://scottgu2009.eventbrite.com/.

Sessions

ASP.NET MVC

Presented By Scott Guthrie (ScottGu)

We’ll walkthrough building an application from scratch using the recent ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release.  You’ll learn what ASP.NET MVC is, the design decisions behind it, and how to build a real application with it.  We’ll cover topics ranging from the basics of application creation through to concepts like unit testing and dependency injection.

Silverlight 3

Presented By Scott Guthrie (ScottGu)

We’ll walkthrough building applications using the new Silverlight 3 release.  We’ll cover some of the power the new SL3 release provides, and then dive into how to program applications with it.  We’ll cover how to build data applications with it, build eye popping graphic solutions, and enable out of the browser applications with it.

Building openly extensible applications in .NET 4.0

Presented By Glenn Block

Are you tired of building monolithic style apps? Are you tired of hacking your app to bits to meet just one more requirement. Do youwant to enable third parties to provide add-on value to your apps?  If the answer to any of these is yes, then come learn about the new Managed Extensibility Framework which ships in .NET 4.0.  Applications built on MEF dynamically discover and compose available components at runtime. This makes MEF ideal for third-party extensibility scenarios, where the type and number of extensions are undefined. With MEF you can enable customers and third-parties to take your apps where no man has gone before. 

The Microsoft Client Continuum: Sharing code, skills and tools between WPF and Silverlight

Presented By Jaime Rodriguez

Are you wondering why Microsoft has both WPF and Silverlight?  Do they really need two technologies (given how similar they are)?  This session will walk you through the different scenarios that both Silverlight and WPF are addressing today, we will cover the similarities, and differences between the platforms, and share pragmatic advise for building applications that exploit both platforms.

Speakers

Scott Guthrie is corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, where he runs the development teams responsible for delivering Microsoft Visual Studio developer tools and Microsoft .NET Framework technologies for building client and Web applications.
A founding member of the .NET project, Guthrie has played a key role in the design and development of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework since 1999. Guthrie is also responsible for Microsoft's Web server platform and development tools teams. He has also more recently driven the development of Silverlight – a cross browser, cross platform plug-in for delivering next generation media experiences and rich internet applications for the Web.
Today, Guthrie directly manages the development teams that build the Common Language Runtime (CLR), ASP.NET, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), IIS, Commerce Server and the Visual Studio Tools for Web, Client and Silverlight development.
Guthrie graduated with a degree in computer science from Duke University.

Jaime Rodriguez is a Senior Technical Evangelist in Microsoft's Client Evangelism team. Jaime's current mission is to show customers how easy it is to accomplish both great software architecture and amazing user experiences using Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight. You can follow Jaime's musings at http://blogs.msdn.com/jaimer.

Glenn Block is an industry expert with broad enterprise software development experience including architecture and system design. Strong proficiency in designing software frameworks and infrastructure. Driver of technical strategy for small and large organizations. Professional speaker who has presented at both industry and community events.
Glenn Block’s Specialties:
Agile practices, Architecture, Design patterns, Driving Technical Strategy, Program Management, Product Planning

Technology Events in Arizona

One thing I have love about Arizona (other than the weather) is the tremendous community around technology and not just .NET technology but others as well. Hey, they even play nice together.  I though I would summarize all of the event that happen in Arizona for those of you that do not know.

All these events that will be listed can be found on one of two calendars: AzGroups and GangPlank. You can add the .ICS to your calendar so you don’t miss out on anything: AZGroups, GangPlank.

If I missed any please let me know and I will update the list.

Weekly Events

TechLunchSouth

Tuesdays bring us TechLunchSouth (#TechLunchSouth on Twitter) were a bunch of diverse technology professionals get together for lunch and chat about just about everything. Check out the AZ Groups calendar for the next meeting location.

TechTalkLunch

Wednesday’s bring us TechTalkLunch we a bunch a technology professionals talk about almost anything.  They meet on Wednesdays at Chipotle in Scottsdale. Check out the AZ Groups calendar for the meeting times and the exact location.

GangPlank Academy

Wednesday’s also brings us the Gangplank Academys.

Elementary, Middle School and High School educational institutions continue to slash budgets for the arts and sciences and focus more and more on standardized testing.  Universities continue this trend enforcing rote memory learning instead of inspiring students to succeed through exploration and failure.

Gangplank Academy exists to allow students to learn and explore with the freedom to fail.  Encouraging real world, hands on learning and discussion with people in the trenches cutting new paths for creative and technical fields.  GP Academy consists of regular brown bag lunch discussions, hands on workshops in a more formal environment and exploratory learning performing in real life situations.

For more details on the Gangplank academy’s, check out the Gangplank calendar.

Hacknight

Wednesday nights at Gangplank HQ are for Hacknight. Hacknight @Gangplank is for networking and community building around technology in Phoenix, Arizona. We gather every Wednesday to eat pizza and play Wii... oh, and hack on projects!

East Valley Food Network (#EVFN)

East Valley Friday Nights. Where all the cool kids and Twitter all-stars hang out after a long week. The venue moves each week.

For more details and meet up location, please visit there Upcoming site.

Monthly Events

Silverlight User Group

Meets on the first Wednesday of the month.

Location: Interface Technical Training, Phoenix, AZ

URL: http://phoenixsilverlight.net/posts/welcome-to-the-phoenix-silverlight-user-group-site/

SQL Server User Group

Meets on the second Wednesday of the month.

Location: Microsoft Offices, 2929 N Central Su 1400, Phoenix

URL: http://arizona.sqlpass.org/

JUG User Group

Meets on the second Wednesday of the month.

Location: University of Advancing Computer Technology loc: 2625 West Baseline Road, Tempe, AZ 85283

URL: http://www.phxjug.org/

Phoenix Connected Systems User Group

Meets on the second Thursday of the month.

Location: Microsoft District Office - 2929 N. Central Avenue, Suite 1400, Phoenix, AZ

URL: http://pcsug.org/

Phoenix Ruby User Group

Meets on the second Monday of the month.

Location: Happy Camper Studios

URL: http://www.rubyaz.org

ASP.NET User Group

Meets on the second Tuesday of the month.

Location: 2929 N. Central Ave., Suite 1400, phoenix, az 85012

URL: http://www.azgroups.com

Tucson .NET User Group

Meets on the third Wednesday of the month.

Location: Pima Community College Community Campus at 401 N. Bonita Avenue, Room 112. Tucson, AZ

URL: http://www.tucsondotnet.org

Phoenix PC user Group (East Side)

Meets on third Wednesday the of the month.

Location: University of Advancing Technology , 2625 W Baseline Rd, Tempe

URL:http://www.phoenixpcug.org/

Phoenix PC User Group (Fountain Hills)

Meets on the third Thursday of the month.

Location: Fountain Hills Library, 12901 N La Montana Dr, Fountain Hills, AZ

URL:http://www.phoenixpcug.org/

Phoenix PC User Group (West Side)

Meets on the third Thursday of the month.

Location:CollegeAmerica. 6533 N. Black Canyon Highway in Phoenix

URL:http://www.phoenixpcug.org/

Phoenix PC User Group Digital Phone SIG

Meets on the fourth Wednesday of the month.

Location: CollegeAmerica. 6533 N. Black Canyon Highway in Phoenix

URL:http://www.phoenixpcug.org/

Southeast Valley .NET User Group (SEVDNUG)

Meets on the fourth Thursday of the month.

Location: Gangplank, 325 West Elliot, Chandler, AZ

URL: http://www.sevdnug.org

Refresh Phoenix

Meets on the second Tuesday of the month

Location: Gangplank, 325 West Elliot Road, Chandler, AZ

URL: http://www.refreshphoenix.org/

Tech Events in AZ this week

WOW , there are a lot of events happening this week in the Phoenix, AZ metro area.

Tuesday, March 10th

Wednesday, March 11th

Thursday, March 12th

Check out the calendar for future meetings at AZGroups.com.

Windows 7 Install Experience

On Friday, I downloaded Windows 7 beta, along with a million or so other people.  I must say the install experience was quite easy.  Here is what happens during the install.

For the first install I started with Virtual Box, I configured a machine with the following hardware:

• 12mb of video memory
• 1.2gb of memory
• 10gb of hard drive

I ended up changing lots of the hardware settings for virtual machine.  The final configuration was

• 128mb of video memory
• 1.5gb of memory
• 16gb hard drive

In the next couple of days, I will try and write about some of the new features of Windows 7 from a user perspective and development perspective.

The installation

Start: Installation started

10 minutes into it: 1st dialog. Configure your language, time, currency and keyboard layout.

11 minutes into it: 2nd dialog. Click install to start.

13 minutes into it: Windows Installing

39 minutes into it: First Restart

41 minutes into it: Completing the installation

51 minutes into it: Machine restarted. Windows 7 is available

55 minutes into it: Customization starts. Configure the user and computer name, password, product key, auto update settings

59 minutes into it: Finalizing Windows 7 setup

59 minutes into it: Preparing desktop

1 hour 2 minutes into it: Windows 7 Ready

VirtualBox Guest Additions for Windows 7

Since Windows 7 is in beta, as of this writing, they do not have a the Virtual Box guest additions available.  The Guest Additions let the guest operating system interact with the host operating system better. These interactions include better mouse support and sharing files.

You can install the guest additions with a little bit of work. 

• Mount the Guest Additions ISO, Windows 7 will should automatically prompt you to run the file.
• Choose open in Explorer.
• Navigate to VirtualBox Guest Additions
• Right click on the VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86
• Click on Compatibility
• Under Compatibility mode, select “Run this program in compatibility more” and select Windows Vista.
• Click Ok
• Run VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.