It is time for the Tulsa Techfes! Woo Hooo!
This time around I will be leading a Community Leadership Town Hall the night before and presenting two sessions. This has always been an awesome event and I am sure this year will not be much different.
Session Info:
Developer Productivity Tips: How to Get Things Done
This session is a collection of tips and strategies I have learned that has helped me be a more productive person. Topics will range from better ways to handle the onslaught of incoming email to being more productive with you development tools.
Topics in this session:
- Going Mouse-less
- Customize your world
- Developer Tools
- Inbox Zero
- 5 Sentences or less
- Clean Workspace
The Creamy Goodness of NuGet
NuGet has quickly become one of my favorite extensions for Visual Studio. Not only has it made it easy to add commonly used OSS libraries to your projects it has made them discoverable.
About NuGet: NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.
There are a large number of useful 3rd party open source libraries out there for the .NET platform, but for those not familiar with the OSS ecosystem, it can be a pain to pull these libraries into a project. NuGet automates most of this and makes it easy to add libraries for common task.
Here is what you will learn:
What is NuGet?
- How to add packages to your project
- How to update packages in your project
- How to host your own package repository
- How to create and publish your own packages
You have been hearing a lot about the new Window Phone 7 lately. Did you miss the bubble with iPhone development because you didn’t want to learn a whole new language and framework? Then you're invited to a hands-on event for Windows Phone 7.
Get some help getting your Windows Phone 7 app into the marketplace. You’ll receive everything you need to develop an app—including some good community fun, sample code and templates. You can work individually or collaborate with others as a team.
Chris Koenig, Senior Developer Evangelist with Microsoft will be joining me for this fun, fact filled, dare I say Lab filled event.
Attendees will also receive a special entry card for a chance to win a Windows Phone 7, after your app has been submitted to the marketplace.
Be there!
Get started
- Download the Toolkit
- Register at the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace
- Download the Windows Phone Mobile Advertising SDK to monetize their app
Date: March, 8th, 2011
Time: 6:00 P.M. – 9:00 P.M.
Place:
Technology 101
105 SE 22nd St, Suite #7
Bentonville, AR 72712
Please RSVP: nwadnug032011.eventbrite.com
The TechFest experience comes to Northwest Arkansas on July 8th, 2010. This will be the first Northwest Arkansas TechFest organized by David Walker
What is the Northwest Arkansas TechFest?
The Northwest Arkansas TechFest is a technical conference primarily focused on providing training/teaching sessions that are immediately beneficial to the broadest range of IT Professionals. The event is also organized in such a way that you can learn and give back to the community. This non-profit event is organized by local volunteers and even though this is a free event you are encouraged to bring two cans of food or two bucks. All canned food will be donated to the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank and all proceeds will be donated to The Jones Center
Speakers
Myself and several other local speakers will be presenting at this event, as well as, several well known speakers from around the country.
Here is information about the sessions I will be presenting.
Visual Studio 2010: Config file transformations
In any development environment we have to code local, publish to test, and then have the tested code published to the production environment. The process has built in gates to ensure that bad code doesn’t make it into production, but it causes a huge issue with keeping up with service and database connections in your configuration files. Visual Studio 2010 introduces Web.config transformations as a way to solve this problem. In this session we will look at the age old problems, discuss some solutions in use today and take a look at how Visual Studio 2010 has solved this problem for us today.
Estimate Your Requirements With Planning Poker
Planning Poker is a consensus-based estimation technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of tasks in software development . It is a variation of the Wideband Delphi method. In this session you will learn not only what planning poker is but how to facilitate it with your team. Using Planning Poker to estimate task on your project is not only accurate its fun.
When:
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
Where:
Center for Nonprofirts @ St. Mary’s
1200 West Walnut Street
Rogers, AR 72756 [MAP]
Registration:
You can pre-register or register the day of the event. Pre-registering will save you a lot of time. This is a free event, however you are encouraged to bring TWO CANS or TWO BUCKS. All canned food will be donated to the NWA Food Bank and all proceeds will be donated to The Jones Center.
I will be speaking at SharePoint Saturday Ozarks in Harrison on June 12, 2010. This is an awesome event full of SharePoint and .NET goodness right in our own back yard. Mark Rackley, The SharePoint Hillbilly, did a great job organizing the event last year and I am sure this year will be even more awesome. In fact I know it is since he has organized a float trip on the 13th.
I am sure there will be a SharePint at the Hotel Seville after the sessions since that is where everyone will be staying. I haven’t decided if I will drive over that morning or go early and stay the night.
If you haven’t registered go here, now, I’ll wait, it opens in a new page, go register and then come back, go now, go, go.
Ok, now that you are registered we can talk about the sessions. There are going to be some awesome SharePoint sessions and a few .NET sessions as well. Mark, thanks for throwing us none SharePointer’s a bone. I hope to hit a lot of the SharePoint sessions as I will be working on a project soon to port over an old application to SharePoint.
Check out all of the sessions to start planning your day and check out Mark’s blog for updates. He has some great post regarding the event, and some awesome pictures from last year too.
Here are the two session I will be presenting.
Make Deployment Easier with VS2010 Config File Transformations
In any development environment we have to code local, publish to test, and then have the tested code published to the production environment. The process has built in gates to ensure that bad code doesn’t make it into production, but it causes a huge issue with keeping up with service and database connections in your configuration files. Visual Studio 2010 introduces Web.config transformations as a way to solve this problem. In this session we will look at the age old problems, discuss some solutions in use today and take a look at how Visual Studio 2010 has solved this problem for us today.
Planning Poker: Play Estimate, Plan
Planning Poker is a fun way to gather estimates for project task that levels experience, and helps document assumptions where everyone on the team has input. In this session we will look at Planning Poker and then we are going to estimate some task using the techniques we have learned. This session is educational as well as fun. Yes, estimating can be fun.
Hope to see you there…
I will be speaking at the Ozark .NET User Group in Harrison this week. Here is the info about the session. I have attended a few of their meetings but this will be the first time to speak to their group. I look forward to it, it is going to be a fun time.
Topic:
Introduction to Agile Software Development
Description:
In today's world of software development the challenge of delivering quality value added software quickly and often have brought rise to a new approach in software development. Agile software development is becoming a widely proven and accepted alternative to heavy up front software development. There are many misconceptions with the processes and practices of Agile software development. This sessions is designed to give you a grounding on concepts that are used in many forms of Agile development including Scrum and Extreme Programming.
Where:
1515 pioneer Dr.
Harrison, AR [MAP]
Once you get there, here's how to find the rooms...
1. Turn right onto Pioneer Drive
2. Turn left into the first parking lot (Parking Lot H) which is in front of the John Paul Hammerschmidt Building on the north side
3. Go up the flight of stairs and take the door on the left into the John Paul Hammerschmidt Building
4. From 6:00 PM to 6:45 PM, we will be meeting in room 304 (Bennie Ellis conference room) for social networking, pizza and soda
5. From 6:45 PM to 8:30 PM, we will be meeting in room 208 (computer lab) for the main presentation
Check out the Ozark .NET User Group site for more info about the group.