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.
I will be presenting An Introduction to Agile Software Development at the February 10, 2009 Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group meeting.
Recently at work we have been looking at the viability of Agile Practices and their ability a help project be more successful. The Team I have worked on has adopted Agile/Extreme Programming for our development team. We are currently into our second release and things are going very well.
This presentation is an updated version one the one I gave my management team to get them grounded on how Agile work flows in a team. I have also presented this topic to our internal Business Analysis community.
If you are already doing Agile you will probably not hear anything new, but if you have been hearing about it and wondered how it all fits together this presentation is for you.
My good friend Rob Tennyson will be presenting Advanced LINQ in the Lightening Round and you know that will be good. Rob is a great speaker and had a great understanding of LINQ, you won’t want to miss this.
Be sure you add it to your calendar and note this is now on the 2nd Tuesday of the month. Find out more about the meeting at http://nwadnug.org/tabid/54/ModuleID/370/ItemID/37/mctl/EventDetails/Default.aspx.
I hope to see you there.
February 5th, 2008 I had the opportunity to present at the University of Arkansas .NET User Group. I presented a Lap Around Visual Studio 2008 to about 15 member so the group. It was a great experience and I would like to thank Eddie Mahar for the opportunity and thanks to the group that showed up it was a great discussion. Some Major Points from the Presentation:
- Visual Studio multi-targeting allows you to easily move up to Visual Studio 2008
- LINQ simplifies data access through language extensions for C# & Visual Basic
- WF & WCF make it easier to build rich, connected applications using a variety of types of services
- WPF Designer provides design-time support for building WPF applications and a streamlined workflow between developers and designers
- VSTO enables developers to build Office Business Applications for Office on the client or server
- NetCF 3.5 brings major .NET Framework enhancements to mobile devices
If you haven't made the jump to Visual Studio 2008 and would like to, check out my earlier post on how you can try it for free.