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I am proud to announce that, with one week to go, the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 is almost upon us. 

I have been pretty swamped with Day of .NET organization tasks this year (as well as growing a small business and building out my own development team) and haven’t spent too much time blogging.  That said, I wanted to get this post out to share some great news about the conference.

For those of you who don’t know much about the conference, it is called the St. Louis Day of .NET 2010 conference and will be held at the Ameristar Casino Conference Center on Friday and Saturday, August 20th and 21st, 2010.  Registration is still open and more information can be found on our conference site at www.stldodn.com.

So how are things shaping up this year you ask?

First, we are very humbled that we have exceeded 600 attendees.  The venue can support over 1,000 so we aren’t too cramped for space but we are still scrambling to make sure all our logistics our worked out to make navigation as painless as possible.  If you are one of those 600, thank you for signing up and we look forward to seeing you at the event. 

Second, as I write this, we are sending out update emails to all 600 attendees with an announcement that our final session agenda is now posted and we are providing an online session builder where attendees can pick what they want to see and print their own customized session agenda in PDF format.  

We have 109 unique sessions planned for this year and they will be delivered by 56 great regional and national presenters.  The thing that I am the most proud of in being involved with these events is that these speakers travel from all over the country to speak at our event with no compensation other than knowing they are sharing their passion with others and for the camaraderie of other developers.  We couldn’t be happier with the content we are providing and we hope all attendees take the time to say thanks to these presenters for making something like this possible.

We are proud to host a Friday afternoon keynote by Brian Goldfarb, the Microsoft Director of Product Management for Developer Platforms.  Brian is coming to St. Louis to share information on a wide array of current and future technologies and will focus on Silverlight 4.0 and even discuss some of the mobile options with Silverlight.  We are excited to have Brian out and even more excited to get all our attendees into a single room (for the first time in our 3 years as a conference).

On Friday evening (August 20th), we are hosting a networking and social event at the HOME Nightclub at the Ameristar.   We are providing hors’devours and even some entertainment and encouraging all attendees to take the opportunity to mingle with their peers and expand their professional network.  This is always a fun event where we get to see a lot of familiar faces and to make some great new friends.

This year we are welcoming 12 sponsors to our vendor fair and we couldn’t be prouder of the response we received when asking for sponsorship support from our community.  We feel the vendor fair is an important part of the conference and it goes a long way in promoting our community and keeping key sponsors involved with developers from many different organizations.

Another new addition to this years event is the introduction of a Charity Book Fair (which is near and dear to my heart and something I’ve been trying to get going for a few years).  The ideas is that many developers have accumulated technical books over the years that are probably, for whatever reason, accumulating dust on their shelves.  These books might not have any more use to their owners but we believe they do have the possibility of being of value to someone.  For this reason we are asking developers to bring these old books to our conference and donate them to this great cause.  While at the event, developers can look through and purchase any of the donated books for $3.  All proceeds from this event are being donated to St. Louis United Way where it can be put to good use benefiting a wide array of local organizations.

That’s about all of the major updates I have for now regarding this event. I’m personally very excited to get things underway but, I must admit, I will also be a bit relieved when it is over and I can get back to my normal life and will hopefully have some more time to blog about all the great technology stuff I’ve had the opportunity to be doing.

Since everyone else is getting in their final thoughts…I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. For anyone who hasn’t been following me on Twitter or Facebook over the last week, I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to spend a week in Redmond, Washington at Microsoft’s yearly MVP Summit.  While “Twitterverse” (i.e. #mvp10) sometimes makes things sound like one big party it was actually a very fascinating week I was very proud to be involved with.  I had never before had the opportunity to visit Microsoft’s campus and, as a first year MVP, I was very much looking forward to the opportunity.  But, before getting to the summit itself, I know I’ve been asked a few times lately about the MVP program so I thought I’d give a brief overview of the program for the uninitiated (those MVP’s reading this can skip this).

So what is an MVP anyway?

The MVP program is essentially a vehicle in which Microsoft recognizes and supports a select group of individuals who are active in the software community and recognized experts with specific technologies.  Microsoft recognizes MVP’s in more than 90 countries and 40 languages. 

While the definition of “active” in the technical community varies, most MVP’s are authors, frequent presenters, or host conferences and/or user groups.  Nearly all MVP’s are frequent contributors to online forums, blogs, or other repositories of information regarding their specific focus.  All of this “activity” essentially equates to a group of people who are passionate about what they do and eager to share that knowledge with others.  They are loud voices amongst other developers or power users and care deeply about their technology and want to share that knowledge with others.

In terms of technology focus, the MVP program recognizes members within a specific technology area based on their expertise.  This area of focus allows individuals targeted access to Microsoft teams and support. 

There are currently around 90 technology areas recognized by this program including such things as:

• C#
• VB.NET
• SilverLight
• Client App Dev (which covers WPF)
• SQL Server
• Visual Studio.NET Team Foundation Server
• XBox
• Zune
• Access
• Office
• Help
• IronRuby (there is one MVP for IronRuby which I met over beers)
• FoxPro
• Windows
• And many, many more…

The MVP program runs on a per-year basis and accepts nominations for new members and membership renewal from both the general community or Microsoft employees.  After a vetting and review process, new or renewed members to the MVP program are provided with a unique level of access into Microsoft that includes such things as direct access to product teams, MSDN subscriptions, access to early builds of new software, an invitation to the Summit, and access to many other remote product presentations usually held via teleconference or live meeting. 

All in all, the MVP program is a win-win relationship between Microsoft and some of their key supporters amongst the end-user and developer communities.  By providing these individuals a high level of support and visibility within Microsoft they foster a relationship that culminates in these individuals helping raise the quality of Microsoft products through candid input and feedback and with the MVP’s supporting the growth and adoption of these new technologies within the Microsoft consumer ecosystem.

If you would like to learn more about the program, would like to search for an MVP near you, or would like to submit someone you know to the program as a potential MVP, you can do all of these things here: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/

MVP Summit 2010

A well known MVP perk is the ability to attend the yearly MVP Summit. The 2010 Summit was held in both Bellevue, Washington and at Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond.   This year’s Summit was attended by over 1300 MVP’s from over 70 countries.  The idea behind the Summit is to bring these experts together in Redmond to interact closely with the Microsoft product teams and allow these product teams to let MVP’s see all the work and strategic direction going into future products and releases while soliciting feedback from the MVP’s on product features, quality, usage, etc.  Obviously, such an open collaboration comes with the necessary NDA agreements which serve to protect Microsoft’s intellectual property and financial interests but allows the product teams to be very candid with the MVP’s and opens the door for very open and honest discussion regarding product quality and direction.  To this end, this year’s summit included over 700 sessions put on by hundreds of Microsoft product team members across dozens of products.

So that is what it was…but what did I think?

My Impressions of MVP Summit 2010

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to attend many regional and national conferences including Tech-Ed’s, PDC’s, and Mix’s.  Between these conferences and my own involvement in various groups and events I went into my first MVP Summit already able to call many fellow MVP’s my good friends.  In addition to those whom I already thought of as friends, I was familiar with many other MVP’s with whom I regularly interact at other events.  The St. Louis area now boasts 7 MVP’s that I’m aware of and 5 of us were able to attend this year’s Summit.

That said, out of all of the previous conferences or events I’ve been able to attend, I found the 2010 MVP Summit to be the most fascinating, educational, and fulfilling technology event I’ve ever attended.  Obviously, the bigger conferences like PDC and Tech-Ed have a much larger attendance but these conference pull a mix between passionate and outspoken technologists and those people who just had enough money left in their budget to attend a conference.  At the MVP Summit EVERYONE I interacted with was extremely knowledgeable and passionate about their technology area (and technology in general) and everyone was open and excited about talking tech with their peers.  Anyone who knows me knows that I love to talk and love to talk about technology even more.  What made this event so special was the fact that everyone else felt the same way. It was like going to computer camp with 1000 people with the exact same interests and passion. 

Microsoft was the most gracious of hosts and every member of every product team I talked to was excited to show off what they’ve been doing and took the time to answer every question and explain every decision.  They went out to dinners and evening parties with MVP’s and didn’t miss a single opportunity all week to make the event both memorable and useful in terms of accomplishing the goals of soliciting honest feedback and building a strong relationship.

Each of the sessions I attended was well put together and to the point.  Not much “fluff” was included as the general assumption could be made that they were talking to a room of people who knew the “marketing line” on any given technology.  I found that, during these sessions and when talking about a product or feature, most MVP’s fell into one of two camps:  those who immediately saw potential and countless possibilities with a technology or those who immediately pointed out design or implementation flaws and always wanted more.   That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing and it led to some great debates that usually spilled over to happy hour discussions over beers.

The use of Twitter during this event was also extraordinary as the “collective consciousness” of the attendees was constantly visible via the #mvp10 Twitter feed.  The camaraderie of all attendees was evident as lunches, dinners, happy hours, and evening parties were scheduled globally on Twitter and anyone and everyone showed up to attend.  Whether sitting in a hotel lobby waiting for a shuttle or at breakfast with a table full of strangers, the discussion was always great.  Everyone was open and excited to learn what everyone else was up to and you always felt comfortable and as if you were in a room amongst friends.

Coincidentally, this year’s Summit fell during the first week of the Vancouver Winter Olympics and, with Seattle only 2 hours south of Vancouver, a few MVP’s made the trip up to the Olympics for a day or so.  Also, due to the geographic diversity of the attendees, many evenings were spent at the local pub cheering on your countries hero’s in Vancouver.  The Canadians wore their Maple Leaves especially proudly throughout the event. 

All in all, it was an experience unlike any I’ve had in my professional career and I have a stack of future blog posts queued up to discuss some key development areas I spent time covering at the Summit.  My NDA keeps me from providing too much content on new or undisclosed platforms or features but not everything we covered fell into this category and I spent a lot of time at sessions or in hotel lobbies discussing some great tools and platforms which are publicly available today and which I think deserve more focus in the projects we are currently building.

So, after a great week in Seattle, and a few hours home in St. Louis with my family, I now find myself in Minneapolis, Minnesota finishing this blog post and preparing for a morning presentation on Visual Studio.NET 2010 and TFS 2010 at Microsoft’s Minneapolis offices.  So I’ll close this post with a big THANK YOU to my wife and all the other MVP’s spouses who put up with the time away from home we spend doing what we love (and hanging out with other geeks ;)

And to all the MVP’s reading this…I hope to see you all in Redmond next year…

I wanted to share information on an upcoming development tour through the Midwest that I’m involved with.  It’s called the Drive Your Development with Visual Studio.NET 2010 tour and you can find more information on what it’s about and where it will be on Clint’s blog here: http://www.notsotrivial.net/blog/post/2010/01/05/Tour-Announcement-e28093-Drive-Your-Development-with-Visual-Studio-2010.aspx. 

I will be presenting alongside Clint Edmonson and Jeff Fattic who are both great presenters as well as experts in all things VS.NET and TFS related so it should be a lot of fun.

The sessions themselves are focused on discussing and demonstrating the great new features of VS.NET 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 and how they can be used effectively by development teams of any size. 

All events are free so register now for a location near you (as seating is limited).

If you have any questions about sessions themselves or the dates/venues don’t hesitate to let me know.

Microsoft recently held their Windows 7 Launch event in St. Louis where I was very fortunate to be able to deliver the Windows 7 introduction to developers track (opposite Mike Benkovich from BenkoTips.com).

This St. Louis event was held at the AMC Theater’s in Creve Coeur, Missouri and supposedly drew 1200 local IT resources (roughly 600 for the developer track and 600 for the IT pro track but I didn’t get an exact count from anyone).  I was involved with the developer track and in my auditorium I had roughly 250+ people who fell into one of two categories:  first, those who were software developers and interested in Win7 as a new platform for rich client development or, second, those who were interested in Win7 as a consumer tool and took advantage of the opportunity to learn a bit more about the OS (and possibly just to get the free copy given away at the launch event :)

For those of you who are .NET developers and interested in developing applications which take advantage of the great features of Windows 7, information can be found below. 

API CodePack

I would first start you out by pointing you to the Windows API CodePack for .NET.   This is a set of assemblies you can utilize from your .NET application to easily access all of the cool features of Windows 7.  Things such as:

“PhotoView” Sample Application

Another great Windows 7 resource for .NET developers is utilizing this sample application as a starting point.  It’s called XP2Win7 and is a sample photo viewer that demonstrates a clean way to have a single application which exposes the appropriate functionality depending on the OS it is running on.  It runs effectively in XP, Vista, and Win 7 while adding OS specific features based on it’s host.  On a Windows 7 machine it supports Jump Lists, MultiTouch, etc.  It’s definitely worth the look to see some cool Win 7 features in action.

Sessions

At this recent launch event, my three sessions were related to Windows 7 developer topics.  I covered the following topics:

Taking Your Application to the Next Level with Windows 7

Basically this talk covered common compatibility issues with moving legacy applications into Windows 7.  It also talked about a number of breaking changes in Windows 7 when compared to previous Windows OS platforms.  We also introduced newer concepts such as the Jump Lists, the new Task Bar, breaking changes when moving form XP to Vista, Troubleshooting Packs, etc.

My presentation can be found here: Presentation

Beyond Human Interaction with Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform

Here we talked about the new sensor platform and used a cool Freescale Sensor board for the demo’s.  We talked about the Win7 Ambient light sensor and used the board to demonstrate an accelerometer sensor.  The final part of this session discussed location sensors.  I had some pretty cool demo’s for this one including modification to the XNA Racing Starter Kit which allowed me to play the game with the board and the accelerometer and also use the ambient light sensor to affect the night/day aspect of the game.

If you are interested in the board I used for the demo you can buy the exact board here.  The cost is ~$30 according to their site.

My presentation can be found here: Presentation

Building next Generation UI with Multitouch and Windows Ribbon in Windows 7

The final talk I gave related to the new Windows Ribbon and the Multitouch capabilities in Windows 7.  I was using an HP TouchSmart Notebook with a 64-bit version of Windows 7 and the full TouchPack loaded on it.  The demonstrations were pretty cool and I got to play some games on the big screen. 

Many people came up to me after the show and asked where they could find info on this laptop and here you go: Laptop Info.

I definitely foresee a day where all laptops have these same capabilities.

My presentation can be found here: Presentation

Resources

In addition to sharing the presentation, the links below will definitely help any .NET developer learn to take advantage of the great new developer oriented features of the Windows 7 platform:

Compatibility Resources

Windows Application Compatibility Center

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/aa904987.aspx

Application Compatibility on TechNet

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/aa905066.aspx

Application Compatibility Online Remediation

http://readyset7.com/workshops

Application Compatibility in Windows 7 Training Kit

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1c333f06-fadb-4d93-9c80-402621c600e7

API and Other Dev Resources

Windows Developer Center on MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd433113.aspx

Windows Application Compatibility Developer Center

http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/aa904987.aspx

Windows 7 Remediation Labs

http://www.readyset7.com/workshops

Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9681321

“PhotoView” Reference Application (XP2Win7Project)

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/XP2Win7

Windows 7 Blog for Developers

www.windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers.aspx

Windows 7 on Channel 9

http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/Windows+7

This last weekend I had the opportunity to head up to Des Moines, Iowa and give a presentation at the a regional developer event called the Iowa Code Camp.  Due to a bunch of recent travel and speaking commitments (including the Windows 7 Launch event in St. Louis and spending next week in LA for PDC) I decided a weekend in Des Moines would make a very nice little trip for the family.  During my time at the conference my wife and three little girls took the opportunity to hit the local zoo and the malls and other local attractions. 

In the essence of full disclosure, this was my first significant trip to Iowa.  I’d never been to Des Moines (or too many other places in Iowa) although I did grow up in neighboring Nebraska.  My trip didn’t do much for Iowa football as both (previously undefeated) Iowa and Iowa State lost on the Saturday of my presentation (although Nebraska beat Oklahoma that night which was pretty impressive to watch from enemy territory).  My first impressions of Iowa were fantastic.  The West Des Moines area (where this conference was held) was a nice or nicer than most other places I’ve had the opportunity to visit. 

The conference itself was held at the Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC) and this was one of the most impressive community colleges I’ve ever been to.  It was by no means exceptionally big but it was a great venue for this type of event and had more technology devoted to learning than any other community college I’ve ever seen.  The hallways literally had museum exhibits devoted to the evolution of the PC.  I found a Macintosh exhibit with an Imagewriter printer like I had when I was a kid.  They even had an old Altair with basic code on “tape”.  From talking to conference organizers this community college is a big supporter of the local community and it sounded like meetings and other events are frequently held there so kudos to them.

Being from rural Nebraska I know that too often these smaller markets get overlooked for national conferences or marketing attention.  Talented developers come from all areas of our country whether urban or rural and Iowa seems to have more than most areas traditionally considered rural.  This means its ultimately up to these local developers and other community members to take the initiative to step up and host these things themselves with whatever support and resources they can get.  Not only does it take the initiative of the community, but it takes sponsors and other local organizations like the DMACC to recognize the value of community based knowledge sharing and for these organizations to step forward with donations of prizes and money so that the events themselves are possible.  The guys in Iowa not only had over 200 attendees (I’m not exactly sure of their final count) but their conference was as well organized as anything I’ve attended (and they obviously learned a bit from our mistakes up here St. Louis ;) Not only was it well organized but it appeared that they had some great and involved sponsors which says a lot for the local community. 

I want to tip my hat to the following organizers (and any I forgot but were involved).  I realize how much time and work go into an event like this well before and after the day of the event itself (which is actually the easy part).  These guys hit a home run and were truly champions for their region.  Congrats guys!

Tim Barcz

Javier Lozano

Levi Rosol

Greg Sohl

Chris Missal

Greg Wilson (who proudly hosts his blog on SharePoint :)

Nick Parker

Chris Sutton

Keith Dahlby

(Check out their blogs by clicking on the links above)

As far as my trip, I had a great time at the conference and in Iowa in general and, from the buzz on Twitter and elsewhere, it looks like many others did too.  I wish the organizers the best of luck in the future and I hope they can continue to host such an event and learn and grow (and I’ll gladly be back if the opportunity arises).

Thanks again,

-Kevin