Jay Smith

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.

Tags: Speaking, Events

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…

Tags: Speaking, User Group

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.

Tags: Speaking, User Group