DotNetSurfers

I went to my first Barcamp today, held at Improving Enterprises in Dallas. It was a technology agnostic event, and It was good to see the cool things developers on other platforms are playing with. I also gave a condensed version of my BDD talk and it was pretty well received. The following topics were presented:

• Visual Studio Tips & Tricks by Zain Naboulsi: Zain covered some useful Visual Studio tips and tricks that he has been outlining on twitter and his blog lately. Of course, the most remarkable shortcut he showed (and nobody in the audience knew about) was that pressing F7 in a command prompt gives a dropdown of all previously executed commands .
• Delightful forms plug-in for Ruby On Rails: The speaker outlined his inspiration behind this forms plug-in, and the output looked very clean and user friendly.
• The CAP theorem by Michael Perry: Michael gave an overview of the CAP theorem (only 2 out of 3 features from the list of Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance can be achieved at one time for a distributed computer system).
• NoSQL/MongoDb 101.
• FolderTrack application overview.
• Less CSS: allows use of variables, mixins and nested rules in CSS.
• Windows Phone 7 overview by Chris Koenig.
• SEO optimization and hacks: This was my favorite session for the day and the presenter showed very impressive hacks and examples for manipulating SEO.
• Targeting Mobile CSS media.
• Overview of DallasMakerSpace community: Another cool presentation about the hackerspace community in Dallas.
• My BDD talk.

A big thanks to the organizers for putting this up and I look forward to attending this next year.

I am sitting at the Cleveland airport right now, waiting for my flight back to Dallas. I spent the last 3 days at the CodeMash conference held at the Kalahari resorts in Sandusky, Ohio. This was the biggest (and longest) conference that I have been to. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by and talk to such passionate developers. You could feel the high energy levels throughout the conference. Some of the highlights for me were:

• Bootstrapping your business session with Nate Kohari and James Avery: I have great respect for entrepreneurs, and more so for those with a coding background. Nate and James shared things that worked for them in their ventures, and a lot of things that didn’t. The session was very interactive, and a great start to the conference for me.
• Ruby/IronRuby: One of my goals for going to CodeMash was to decide if I am going to spend any significant amount of time trying to learn Ruby/IronRuby this year. The passion that a lot of the developers (especially the EdgeCase folks)  had for Ruby was definitely contagious and hard to ignore. I ended up attending a couple of Ruby sessions and I hope to spend more time with it in the next couple of months. The best Ruby session for me was “Ruby and Rails for the .Net developer” by Matt Yoho.
• Meeting more geeks: I got to meet a bunch of great people I knew from twitter, and some more.
• Amazon Ninja puzzles: Amazon had the best vendor booth IMO. They had programming related puzzles for you to solve, and I found myself in front of the question board every few hours (even missed some sessions because of this . This is me hacking away in the halls with the Amazon Ninjas next to my laptop.
• Enter the Haggis concert: There was a live concert by Enter the Haggis on Thursday night, and they played some great fusion music. This was an awesome way to unwind.

There was plenty of food and caffeine at the conference, though the Wifi could have been better. Thanks to all the organizers for doing such a great job. I hope to be there again next year.

I just came back from the Big Design Conference held today in Dallas, and my brain is just flooded right now with all the information I picked up on different design and development topics. It was one of the most well organized conferences I have been to, with 4 parallel tracks (Social Media, Code Development, User Experience and Strategy) going on throughout the day. The hardest part was to pick a session out of the different choices to go to. I ended up attending Chris Koenig’s session on touch based apps, Stephen Anderson’s talk on seductive interactions, Caleb Jenkins’ Silverlight 3 talk and Todd Wilken’s session on saying No and learning. All sessions had great content and I even got to play with a Microsoft Surface Unit, which was again very impressive but is still very expensive (~$12K-15K) to own a personal unit.

There were lots of Macbooks (designer conference, duh) and netbooks being used in the audience, and the conference twitter stream was buzzing throughout the day with reviews and feedback from the attendees. The conference organizers even had the twitter stream displayed to the public in the hallway.

This just goes on to show the increasing importance of social media like twitter at such events. Overall, it was a great experience and I got to meet some really interesting people in the Dallas area as well as attend great presentations. A big thanks to the organizers for arranging this.

I was one of the participants last week at the We Are Microsoft Charity Challenge Weekend here in Dallas. The event was organized very well by Toi Wright with support from MS Developer Evangelist Chris Koening . The idea was to build or enhance a charity’s  Website (chosen by MS) within the weekend and give a 5 minute presentation on Sunday about the work done.
Our team was called 4 Devs, a Designer and a non-profit. The developers were Reza,  Tuan, Tim and  myself. We were lucky to work with Hillyer, a designer whose input really improved the look and feel of our work. And finally, the charity we worked for was The Child Abuse Prevention Center. Here’s a team picture minus Tuan who fell ill on the last day.

 
(L to R) Hillyer, Chris, Reza, myself and Tim

Our goal was to completely redo the Website to give it a Web 2.0 look and feel and add some new features such as users and membership roles as well as a calendar module on the side. The overall task seemed too big to manage within a weekend, but I think we did pretty OK. Here’s our final output that we demoed at the presentation.
We were pretty much feature complete on sunday, and had some really cool features going for us including built in multi-language support and  on the fly translation capabilities using Rick Strahl’s awesome Localization Resource Provider.
Even though we didn’t grab a place in the top 3 teams (there were a total of 20), I got to meet some great people, do some networking, eat great food and load up on caffeine. I also landed a Visual Studo 2008 Pro license as a door prize, and my teammate Tim nominated me for a cool "Coding Machine" award for staying up and coding through Saturday night. We still have some improvements to do on the site, and a lot of refactoring. We are going keep on working together till our client is happy with the output and gets all his features. If you get a chance to participate in an event like this, I highly recommend it. Check out http://givecamp.org/ for more information.

I just came back after attending the developer track at Dallas TechDays. It was a really good session. Zain Naboulsi was the main presenter, and man can this guy talk! He gave a 3 part presentation by himself that spanned to almost 4 hours. Here’s a picture I clicked with my cellphone during one of the breaks when he was answering audience queries.

Here’s a brief break up of his talk today -

• Sql Server 2008 New Features
  • Spatial Data
  • Table variables
  • MERGE clause
  • new DateTime Datatypes
  • Entity Framework (not exactly part of Sql Server 2008, but he covered this anyways)
• VSTO
  • Improvements in VSTO for VS2008
  • Sample Addins for Office 2007 using VSTO
• Silverlight
  • Improvements in Silverlight 2.0
  • Simple Animations using VS2008 and Blend simultaneously

It was a great interactive session, and everybody was impressed with Zain’s breadth of knowledge over the different technologies. Some people did want more coding in the Silverlight session, and he promised to follow up on his blog with that. The Dallas asp.net user group president Toi Wright also mentioned the Microsoft Charity Challenge weekend in January where you get to code for you favorite charity over a weekend (Jan16-18, 2009). I have already registered for that and looking forward to a fun filled weekend.

Also, all attendees today walked off with a free Windows Vista Ultimate, so that’s always good .

You can follow me here.

Registration for the “Heroes Happen Here” MSEvent has now begun.
You can find out more here.

Not only do you get to test drive the new products and meet the experts, but you also get free promotional versions of all 3 products. Its happening in Denver on March 20 at the Colorado Convention Center.

This is really cool, looking forward to this one!!! See you there.

-Latish Sehgal