One of the things that I've missed during my tenure here at Microsoft is speaking at some of the independent national conferences such as VSLive. But if you look through the speaker's list at VSLive Dallas you'll find a fellow named Josh Holmes... Woot!

I've actually got 4 talks and I'm sitting in on the ALT.NET panel on Tuesday night.

Definitely come out and see us - Register online or call 800-280-6218 using Priority Code SPHOL and receive $300 off the package of your choice.

DW10IronRuby and Silverlight, Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 1:45 p.m.
As the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) and IronRuby become more polished, it's time to start applying those technologies in new and interesting ways. One of my favorites is in a Rich Internet Application with a Silverlight front end. A perfect joining of two great technologies – IronRuby brings the dynamic abilities to your code that XAML gives your UI. From animations to logic to simple HTML DOM manipulation - it's all possible and a lot of fun. In this session, we will cover the basics of the DLR, a touch of Ruby and play with it all in the context of Silverlight.

DW16User Experience for Architects: No Longer Optional
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 3:15 p.m.
The user experience is a core part of new applications and those with the best user experience will prevail. When I say user experience, most people think of the graphics and the front end. This, however, is just the lipstick on the application and considered "small d" design. The "big D" Design starts well before the UI layer and can have profound implications on your application architecture. Is it a SaaS application? Or is that one of many front ends? How does that impact your services strategy? How does the information flow impact your database structure? These and hundred more questions are all ways that the user experience decisions can affect the architecture.
In this session, we will cover a primer on user experience for the architect and discuss the various ways that it will affect your application architecture.

DTH6Mashups from the Ground Up
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 9:45 a.m.
When building a Mashup, there are a lot of choices that come into play. Most people they with choosing the UI technologies that are going to be used, but they are wrong. They should be thinking about the information that is going to be used and how to get to that data. Mashups are about exposing new and interesting looks at data so the first thing that you have to do is figure out how to get to that data. Only after that do you start looking at the various front end technologies from AJAX to Silverlight to any number of other Rich Internet Platforms.
In this session, we will compare and contrast building out SOAP services verses REST services with ASMX, WCF and ADO.NET Data Services. We will demonstrate consuming those various services with AJAX, Live Maps, Silverlight and many more front end technologies.

DTH10Best and Worst Practices for Building Silverlight Applications
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 1:45 p.m.
Silverlight, as it's relatively new to much of the community, is putting people through some bumps and bruises as they create amazing experiences for their users. There are a lot of best and worst practices that are starting to emerge as the platform matures and more and more applications are being written. How and where to keep the state management? What networking stacks make the most sense? When does it make sense to use Silverlight or any Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform?
In this session, we will give a cursory overview of what it takes to build a RIA and dive deep into the best and worst practices with Silverlight.

VSLive! Dallas 2008

I'm giving a talk next week at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC). I happen to be in the fun position where I'm directly following the keynote. I've sat in on content reviews and keynote writing sessions so I know the messaging from that talk and the overlap that there will be with my session.

One of the services that they offer to their speakers is a speech coach. It's the first time that I've worked with one one on one. I sat through a class offered by a different conference a number of years back. It was fairly useless so I didn't have high hopes for another speaker coach. Boy was I wrong.

I met with Cathy Banks of Communication Power, Inc. I cockily told her that I have spoken at hundreds of conferences and typically get 8s or better on my evals. Turns out I'm not the only speaker out there that's had Cathy change the way that they speak - here's a post by Lee Lefever talking about his 10 lessons learned from his speaking coach.

I talked to her about the fact that it often takes me 3-4 times to really nail the ending on a talk. It's been a constant problem that I've had on how to end a talk. I often run over time because I'm rambling trying to figure out how to finish a session.

Cathy, to my surprise, insisted that we start on the opening. I'm not usually concerned about the opening. I have a fairly casual style that sets the audience at ease and gets their attention.

It was brutal. She had me do the opening, asked me how I thought it went. I was relatively pleased. Then asked me what the point of the talk was because she obviously didn't get it from my opening. I ran through the highlights of the talk and pointed out the top level message that I was targeting.

All of the sudden, I saw the issue with the opening that she was pointing out. I was rambling through the opening without clearly framing the overall message for the talk. My opening was entertaining, but really didn't succinctly tell the audience what they needed to get out of this session. That's the hook that gets the audience to listen for the rest of the session.

Then she asked me what I knew about the crowd. I felt good about this because I knew the target demographics pretty well and was able to talk to that. It's mostly going to be business level folk in the room. These are management, business-development folk, business owners and so on at this conference. But then she turns it on me asking how my overall message related to this crowd. My message was far to technical and this audience really doesn't care. I need to give them the couple of technical sound bytes but really hit on how they are going to make money from all of this.

With all of that in mind, I tried my opening again. It felt better but was still a little off.

She took a crack at an opening off the top of her head. And nailed it. As I parsed out what she had just said, I thought through my version of the opening. It was funny but was not nearly crisp enough. It wasn't well defined as an opening. It was talked to the crowd now but still didn't hit the 2-3 high level points that I was going to dive deep in for the rest of the session.

I tried it again. And again. And again. Somewhere in here, she started goading me on saying, "Come on Josh! How'd you get through those hundreds of conferences? Tell me that story. I know you're a story teller so tell me the story!". Yes it stung, but wow it worked.

Things started to crisp up. I started off my opening with a continuation of a story from the previous talk. I carry over some of the language from the keynote as well. This will help with continuity and really draw the connection between the keynote and my session. I hit the two points that I wanted to hit, gave a solid hook, did all that in a humorous manner and in less than a minute. WOW! I was thrilled. 

Now that I had my opening down, Cathy asked me to jump to the closing. The first one was a little rough. Then she asked me to run through the opening again and jump immediately to the closing. That was killer. I got a fairly solid closing on the second try. Two more refinement rounds and I was set. I carried the language through from the opening, tied off the ends on the two points that I wanted to get across in the session and had a solid call to action.

As Cathly pointed out to me VERY clearly, the reason that I couldn't close a session crisply was that I didn't have a good opening. With a good opening comes a good closing.

All that's left is the stuffing in the middle.

Keys to a good opening

Understand the audience. This helps you target the content at the right level.

Understand the message. I put this second because there are a lot of messages that don't apply to all audiences. But this is a critical part of the talk. Many talks that I see don't really have a "message". They just want to demo a technique or something. The best talks had a solid call to action and are trying to motivate people to do something.

Set up the language for the rest of the talk.

Write it out. Apollo Ideas has a post called Prepare yourself that discusses the different levels of preparation you can have for a great presentation. I talked about it a little in my post Prepare Yourself To Give a Great Talk. This is especially true for the opening and closing of your session. These are the times that you are in the most control of your session.

Don't worry about establishing credibility. Because you're onstage, you already have the credibility that you need. The conference has given you that. It's your credibility to lose, not gain. Nobody cares how smart you think you are. They care what you're going to be talking about and the points that you're goign to be making. Chris Bernard usually does his whole opening and then gives people his contact information. I'm going to steal this idea.

Have fun. If you're not having fun, the audience won't either.

More reading

Kathy Sierra: Better Beginnings: How to Start a Presentation, Book, Article

John Kinde: Winning Your Speech At the Starting Line

*Update*
I forgot to put this in the original post. Cathy did all of this over live meeting from a conference room in Seattle on a speaker phone. The mics for the speaker phone were actually in the ceiling so at some points of the hour long session, Cathy was standing on top of the table so that I could hear her better. It was awesome.

As I've started writing about public speaking, I have started getting great questions that lead to more blog posts - keep those coming! I was talking to a fellow speaker (who can identify himself in the comments if he so chooses) and they brought up the fact that it's hard for them to prepare a demo. I can tell you that this is an art form that I still struggle with after 9 years speaking at conferences, user groups and training. Demos are hard because you've got two, sometimes competing, motivations behind every demo. First, you have to show someone how to accomplish a given technique and second you have to be able to show someone why that technique applies to them in a given circumstance.

There are two extremes that you can go to. You can either demo just a particular technique in isolation or you can demo a full application/solution.

Demo a technique in isolation
Sometimes this is the easiest thing to do. It requires a lot less code and it's very easy to walk through. The issue here is that it's like solving a numeric math problem on the chalkboard. It's sometimes hard for the audience to connect the dots and place that technique in their own circumstances and leverage it to solve their own problems.

Demo an Application
This is tough. There are two major issues. First of all, you have to have a competed application to walk through. Secondly, and the bigger problem honestly, it's very hard to walk through just the relevant parts of the application without getting bogged down in the full details of the application. The tendency is for people to spend a lot of time scrolling through code rather than focusing in on the code that's relevant to the current discussion.

The right answer
The reality is that the answer is somewhere in between. It's much better to have a well componentized application where people can see the technique in the context of a larger application but you can demo the technique without getting bogged down in the minutia of the application. I've not seen a lot of demos that actually do that, which is a shame because it works extraordinarily well when someone does do it.

Building the perfect demo application
At one point in time (many moons ago when I was doing a ton of ASP.NET talks at conferences), I had a built a relatively full featured ASP.NET 2.0 demo application that I used for all of my ASP.NET talks for about a year. It was based loosely on a portal application that I had built for a client. It used themes and skins, user profile information, a little AJAX, user controls, custom controls, login in controls, databinding and much more. But it was built in such as way that it could be demoed feature by feature.

The secret sauce was that I had just enough examples of each technique and it was broken out into many small and manageable projects and files. I could show each of these small files and projects in relative isolation but then show it running in the overall context. My user control demo, for example, was a very simple "Hello World" style button and label but it showed how to build user controls. My personalization demo stored 3 fields and used them in two places. Why two places? Because we needed to see what refresh was like and so on. Why three fields? One was set in a custom step in the login control (because I needed to demo that). The second was to show a technique around defaulting values. The third was used to show how to move a value from an anonymous profile to a full fledged one when someone registered and/or signed in.

This was not an easy demo application to build but it was a great one because it struck the right balance of isolation and in situ so it was easy to walk through and still showed the context of where and how to use it.

This is even harder when trying to build for a technology that you're not comfortable with. In a previous post, Prepare Yourself To Give a Great Talk, I mentioned that people can stretch themselves and give a talk on a topic that they don't have completely mastered. This is always going to be the case with emerging technologies (Such as technologies that are in CTP or early Beta), but it can even be true with existing technologies if you haven't spent a lot of time with them. Actually, I think this is a great way to force yourself to learn a new topic.

Two examples of a stretch goal paying off
Jeff Hunsaker recently did a talk on Entity Framework at Central Ohio Day of .NET. He learned a ton about the topic and gave a good talk. He's been very critical of himself since then, but all reports I have heard was that he was fantastic. That's a technology that's in CTP and there are VERY few people well versed in it at this point. It's hard to even get help. I didn't see his demo, so I can't really comment on it but he did tell me that this was a tough thing to pull together.
When I got a speaking slot at eRubyCon, which I hope to see you all at this year, I was thrilled and panicked at the same time. I knew Silverlight, which is what my talk was going to be in, but I wanted do my talk with Silverlight running on Rails so I had to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails and put together a talk. I set about writing a demo application to learn the technologies and that helped me write my talk. I wrote a simple motorcycle sales showroom application in Rails and front ended it with Silverlight. It was a fun demo to do and it showed just enough Rails and Silverlight integration that everyone knew that I hadn't faked it. Little did they know that I had only been playing with Rails for about 2 weeks.

I'm working on building that comprehensive of a demo for Silverlight 2, WPF, WCF, Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, ASP.NET MVC Framework and more. Already you can see part of the issue. There's too many technologies to demo so we end up trying to isolate each of the technologies in a small demo so that we can explain it easier. The issue there is that people lose sight of the integration and the workflow of the different technologies.

I'm not going to lie and say that this is ever going to be cake, but I will say that it becomes easier as time goes on. Creating decks, demos, preparing, movement on stage, delivery and all the aspects of becoming a great speaker take work and practice. Like the guy juggling, the more you practice, the easier it becomes. However, this is juxtaposed with the desire to do harder hitting, meatier talks and demos.

Preparation is key in giving a great presentation. Apollo Ideas has a great blog post about the speech spectrum. There are basically 4 ways that you can give a talk.

*Warning - gross generalizations ahead*

1. Completely written out word for word and read of the script. For this, you can think about your basic graduation speech.
2. Just outlined but not rehearsed. I see these too often. This is where someone has had an idea for a talk but is not able to prepare properly. Or someone got a deck from someone else and presents it cold without really making their own. In this category, there are a lot of sales decks and user group talks done. It's a shame because they could be so much better.
3. Outlined and well rehearsed. This is where the majority of the good conference talks lie.
4. Completely written out and well rehearsed. In this category, you can put the better political speeches or talks from really high end conferences such as TED. Think JFK's Inaugural Address, Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech or any other political speech that motivated a nation.

I've heard the argument that you don't want to sound "too rehearsed". However, the real danger is coming off as unprepared or reading from the script. Either of these are monumentally bad compared to over-preparing. Really the "too rehearsed" script is the one that you're not willing to deviate from when there's a good question or unexpected audience reaction. I'm striving for that right blend of well prepared and rehearsed contrasted with the ability and willingness to improvise.

You can also equate these with musical performances. Singing in church, while often beautiful, is often far from a professional band. But if you look at Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Great Big Sea, Harry Connick, Jr. or any number of other groups that put on an amazing show. That show is completely scripted and rehearsed until people are ready to drop to prepare for getting on stage. Yet, nobody complains that they are "too rehearsed".

I know that I've gotten lazy in the past and have neglected this preparation in the past.

How to Prepare

Know your subject. First and foremost, you have to know what you're talking about. Or at least know what you don't know. Honestly, one of my favorite talks was at the first Day of .NET. I was on a call with Jason Follas who was coordinating speakers and he asked me what I was talking on and I said "Something cool and ASP.NET". So that became the talk. I had no slides, no code, no preparation. I just got on stage and asked the audience to ask me questions. I loosely organized that into an outline and started talking. It was great but I could only get away with it because I knew my topic, ASP.NET, as well as I did. I had been doing leading 5 day training sessions on ASP.NET for several years so I knew the ins and outs of the technology extraordinarily well.

On the other hand, I've seen speakers get up and say that they are an enthusiast verses an expert (nod to Alan Stevens and Michael Eaton) and I think that's awesome. They are stepping up and stretching themselves. But, they are not getting up blind and pretending to be an expert. They state very clearly what they know and don't know. 

Know your audience. I tell very different jokes and even use a different cadence depending on who is in my audience. If I'm talking to 100% technical people, I can tell jokes about management or process or self deprecating humor about geeks. If I'm talking to people in the south, I relate to the cooking, fishing, hunting and other cultural things that I grew up with in Arkansas. If I'm in Ohio, I don't mention Michigan if I can help it and vice versa. :) Know the team rivalries, local economy and other hot buttons. For example, in Michigan, I don't mention unions. In Houston, I don't even pretend to know anything about aeronautics or say anything about gas prices.

How receptive will your audience be to your message?
Are they "ready for action"? If so, they just need to be motivated into action. You can bring out the big brass marching band and getting everyone singing the fight song and stomping their feet. It's a lot of fun to give these speeches.
Are they supportive? If so, then you need to clearly lay out the arguments and call to action.
Are they neutral? If so, then you need to persuade them to your side. This is accomplished through solid information and personalizing the message to the audience in front of you.
Are they hostile? Here you need to understand the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). This is a tough thing to do because the balance of dispelling the FUD and not attacking is a fine line.

As a Microsoft Evangelist, I'm VERY often in the situation where I'm speaking to a non-Microsoft friendly crowd. It's not often overly hostile, just not friendly.

Give your talk out loud. Two weeks ago, in preparation for the West Michigan Day of .NET, I was writing a new talk. I knew roughly what I was going to say. I had the deck pretty close to finished and was just polishing things up. But I had dinner with Dan Hibbits and decided on a lark to run through my deck once with him. He didn't even have to say anything but as I went through my pitch I realized that major parts of the talk didn't work. I immediately restructured the talk and gave a much better talk the next day. I would have realized that about 15 minutes into my talk if I had not practiced it out loud with Dan the night before. Practice in front of the mirror, or run through your talk in your head as you're on the airplane or in the car on the way to the venue.

The call to action here is simple. Set yourself up for success by preparing to give a great talk. The better prepared you are, the better the chances are that you'll get your message across and really knock it out of the park.

* Update - Thanks to Bill Wagner for pointing out a clerical error or two on my part... Fixed now *

Mel Grubb read my post on Public Speaking and Movement onstage and inspired me to write this post with his comments.

"I think a good background in stagecraft could benefit a lot of public speakers. Simple things like basic blocking, "cheating" your face toward the audience, finding and eliminating your particular "tics" or problem words, etc. Speakers who say "basically" more than once every five minutes drive me up a wall.  'Essentially' is even worse." - Mel Grubb in comments and email.

He struck another of my nerves. I was on a conference call just yesterday with people that will go unnamed partly because I don't want to call out anyone (don't worry it's no one local) and partly because I can't remember who was talking or what they were talking about because I was so distracted. I IMed with Larry Clarkin about it and this is a snip of the conversation.

Josh Holmes‎‎:
I'm really hoping that he'll really use the word really to really make a really good point soon.

‎‎Larry Clarkin‎‎:
really?

‎‎Josh Holmes‎‎:
Really really...

My wife actually reminded me of a story from a class that she took where the professor used Um and Ah non-stop. There was at least one lecture where they focused on counting the number of Um and Ah's that he used rather than listening to the presentation.

The primary reason that speakers fall back on these type of words is that they are used to fill the air while the speaker is constructing the next sentence in their head. Even though most speakers are terrified of it, Silence is still ok. Some call it Golden. There's a huge difference between dead air and silence. Dead air is when nobody is saying or thinking anything. Silence is when it's quiet.

In addition to my background in theatre, I was a member of a ToastMasters International for 4 years. In fact, I was president of my chapter for a year. As an organization, they have a great curriculum for teaching people the basics of speaking. While we, including me, have been obsessed with the format of the slide deck, they have been continuing to educate great speakers by focusing on delivery and real speech writing. There's a series of talks that you have to give. Some of these are using props. Some are very serious and dramatic. Others are humorous speeches. Side note - I actually took second in a regional humorous speech competition with a speech about the plight of the thumbless in America.

One of the components of a Toastmaster meeting is an "Ah Counter". This is a person who sits in the back of the room and listens for filler or crutch words. When they hear these, they take a note and they ring a bell. It's the most aggravating thing in the world! The first talk that I did there, despite my background in theatre, sounded like a parade.

"Um, ah, so it's like, um, well, you know a thing that you, ah, might basically find in, um, your, ah, backyard" - Josh Holmes in one of his first public speeches.

You might think I'm joking but you've done it too! There were more filler words in my talk than content. When I realized that it was astounding. After a while, you start consciously weeding out those filler words. You will be at lunch somewhere and be ringing that bell yourself inside your head. At some point later, you have eliminated most of them from your vocabulary. Unfortunately, I've slipped in the 9 years that I've been away from ToastMasters International. I've started noticing that I'll start repeating words in my speech pattern. I've started answering questions with "Sooo, the answer to that question is...". I have got to stop! It's annoying me. I can't imagine what it's doing to you listening to me.

I hope that you'll take this to heart and start listening to yourself speak. First, look for a ToastMasters' club near you with their handy meeting locator. There are 10 clubs within 20 miles of my house and I live in the sticks. If you can't get to ToastMasters, or really even if you can, you should tape your sessions and review them. Watch for movement, speech and more. Make notes and practice with those notes in hand.

This will help you be a better speaker. Even if it's not obvious to you, two things will happen. First, you'll be able to say more in less time and second, people will focus on your message rather than your quirks.

Movement when speaking is very important.

"Acting is, therefore, the process of illustrating the dramatic action - through activity. Activity is the how; action is the what" - Play Directing by Frances Hodges

For those of you who don't know, I was a theatre major in college. Specifically, I studied directing. I was a decent actor but directing was what I really enjoyed from light design to directing actors and the full blown play. For a ton of reasons, I ended up with an English degree with a minor in Drama and a minor in Communications.

Recently, I was asked to critique a talk by a friend of mine. One of the pieces of feedback that I gave him was that he wanders while speaking. I expressed it as it drove me nuts, but I didn't really go into detail so I'm going to do that here.

I chose the word wanders for a reason. I started thinking about how I would have directed the talk if it were a play and I was directing him. The blocking (movement that the director lays out for the actor) is very important as it emphasizes the meaning of what's being said (or not said) at the moment. One of the many exercises that actors and directors go through when preparing with a script is to tear apart the script line by line, sentence by sentence and assign verbs to those lines. Every line in the script has a verb and action.

"If you can sense the action, the verb will come easily to you" - Play Directing by Frances Hodges

Thinking about the first quote - if the action is the what, the action is what you are trying to get the other person (in public speaking this is the audience) to do or feel. The activity (movement) is how you conveying that to the audience. When you are giving a talk, you are typically trying to convince the audience of your ideas and thoughts around the given topic. To do that, you have to be careful about how you convey your thoughts on stage. Think carefully about each thing that you are saying and what you are trying to get the audience to do or feel with that and what verb and activity should go with that. Are you going to threaten the audience? Retreat from the audience? Are you going to ignore, shame, beg, torment, entrance, lead, relax, motivate, berate the audience? These are verbs and you should think about everything that you say in a talk as conveying some verb. Once you understand the Action and Verb, the Activity, read walking or gesture or other visible motion, that you make on stage will become obvious. Each and every activity is there to illustrate the verb to the audience. It's extraordinarily difficult to motivate an audience while sitting. On the other hand, if you are leaning back against the front of the table, it becomes easier to relax the audience.

The reality is that it's the same in public speaking. It kills me to see someone walking backwards or sideways or heading back to the podium when they are making a big point. What this says (yells, screams...) to the audience is that they don't believe in this point because they are retreating from the audience. As this poor soul gets to the podium and finish the point as they get there - right when they put a large obstacle between themselves and the audience. These are not things that the typical audience member will consciously pick up on, but they will on a subconscious level. If they didn't, directors could go home and actors would wonder aimlessly all over the set. When someone is pacing aimlessly back and forth on stage, they are wandering or lost in thought and pontificating so the audience will automatically start to wander in their thought train as well.

The solution is to block out your session. In other words, choreograph your talk so that your movements match the verbs that you're trying to convey. I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. Especially since many talks have a decent amount of improvisation in them. The trick is to figure out what your big points are and make sure that you nail those.

One way to get started is to pick two spots that you are allowed to be at in the room. Call them home and away. Home will be placed somewhere in the middle of the stage with easy access to your laptop and your water. Away will be closer to the audience and slightly to the right or left of center of the stage. While you are at home - pretend that you a playing basketball and you have to keep one foot planted. You can move your upper body all that you want to but the lower body has to stay still. Only after you have decided to really make a point will you start moving and it will always be movement the the away spot and it's the build up to a point. While making your point, plant on the away spot with both feet square to the audience, shoulders back and speak clearly in a loud firm voice. Hold that position for as long as you need to for the point to really sink in. I'll often make a point and then wait 10 or more seconds for it to sink in. Maybe I'll even wander back to "home" and take a drink while letting it sink in. And then you slide back home to reset before your next point.

As you get comfortable with that you can start getting fancier and start doing more and more.

This quarter's ArcReady is coming quickly. This quarter we are talking about Software + Services (S+S). This is Ray Ozzie's vision of the future of the industry. It's a vision that encapsulates SOA, SaaS and Web 2.0 and really takes it to the next level. SOA can be how you compose, govern and control your services but it doesn't talk enough about delivery of the software to the user. SaaS is a great way to deliver software if your users are willing to rent the software. It A: doesn't work for every user base and B: doesn't address multi-headed clients where you might want a desktop client, web client and a mobile client. Web 2.0 is in the same boat. Web 2.0 can define the user's experience with RIA, collaboration, collective knowledge and more. These tenants of Web 2.0 that we discussed in the last quarter (See the video of the session posted on the ReMix07 Boston site) are engaging on a number of levels but it doesn't really address some of the enterprise concerns of security, accountability and more.

Software + Services really builds on top of all three of these ideas. Come learn more in a city near you.

For the full abstract - see http://www.arcready.com.

*Columbus - 11/27/2007

*Cleveland - 11/28/2007

*Detroit - 11/29/2007

**Grand Rapids - 11/30/2007

*Nashville - 12/3/2007

*Cincinnati - 12/5/2007

*Indianapolis - 12/6/2007

**Louisville - 12/6/2007

Minneapolis - 12/11/2007

Milwaukee - 12/12/2007

Kansas City - 12/13/2007

Chicago - 12/14/2007

St Louis - 12/14/2007

Dallas - 12/17/2007

Houston - 12/18/2007

Austin - 12/19/2007

* means I'm speaking...
** means that we're actually doing a last quarter's Web 2.0 session followed by this quarter's Software + Services session. They go well together and I missed Louisville and Grand Rapids last quarter.

That's going to be a tough 2 weeks on the road there to be honest. 12/7 - come to my funeral as I die from Red Bull overdose. :)

Microsoft ArcReady - Downloads

I had a lot of fun with the Boston Remix session that I picked up. I did the Web 2.0 talk that we've did for the ArcReady sessions. It was an amazing operation to watch G. Andrew Duthie (aka DevHammer) and crew locked away in the media room working tirelessly to get the keynote and other select sessions on the web site. I'm honored to be one of the selected sessions that they put on the web site as there was a ton of great content at the conference.

The content was originally put together by Jon Rauschenberger, CTO of Clarity consulting. That being said - I have a very different delivery than Jon does so even if you saw him do it - take another look and see if you pick anything new. This is a discussion about what the tenants of Web 2.0 are and how they apply to your applications whether you are in the enterprise or consumer space.

It's cut up into 4 parts due to file size limitations on Channel9.

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 1

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 2

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 3

Web 2.0 and Beyond, Part 4

After watching my session, then I guess that you can check out the Brad Abrams keynote. :)

All of the REMIX07 VIDEOS

 This past weekend I was privileged to attend and speak at the third iteration of the Day of .NET. I was one of the original organizers of the Day of .NET along with John Hopkins and Jason Follas a year and a half ago. They have far surpassed the original vision which was to just do a cool event for South-Eastern Michigan. The Ann Arbor Day of .NET is now one of the staple events in SE Michigan and they have moved it up to an every 6 month cadence.It's even being exported to a number of other locations including Grand Rapids and Memphis.

The basic tenets are that:
A. Content is king. Over glitz and sponsors and everything else, this conference makes it's mark by delivering rock solid content year after year. There were talks about .NET 3.0, WCF, LINQ, Astoria, Story Driven Design and Fitness, the Dynamic Language Runtime (my talk :) - more on this topic coming soon), and even XNA. 20 sessions in all + 5 vendor driven half sessions. That's a lot of fantastic content.

B. See rule A. :)

C. Leverage sponsors to cover the costs of the venue, food, T-shirts and more. I know that there's been talk of requiring some type of registration fee of all the attendees. So far that's not happened. There are a lot of benefits to the fee based attendance. It means that the variable costs (food, T-shirts and the like0 are covered based on the number of attendees rather that coming out of the flat fees that the sponsors have put in. There's about 30-40% drop off from registration on free events. That's because the people registered don't have any skin in the game and decide that they don't feel like it or it's not a priority to show up. This is frustrating to all the organizers because it makes capacity planning really hard and it's a slap in the face with all of the hard work that they've done to make this event amazing.

D. Nobody makes any money off of this. At different points, we discussed paying for different speakers to come in but we keep getting such great speakers that we haven't ever resorted to that. I'm really hoping that we never have to. in the

E. Maintain your independence. While sponsored in part by Microsoft, there are many sponsors and none of them control the content or anything else - just get their name on the web site and other publicity. The independence of this conference and others like it is crucial. It means that they are able to take chances on "non-approved" content, maintain some level of credibility and attract an audience that would not be interested in a Microsoft or other sponsor driven marketing style event.

All of that being said - the community run aspect of this means a lot of work for the guys that are running the event and it really requires a good committee to do it right. John Hopkins and Jason Follas do a fabulous job year after year and should be proud of their work. I helped out the first year but was too busy with new job to help out last spring so Darrell Hawley stepped up, responsibilities were shifted and they pulled off an amazing event. This year Darrell Hawley was busy so they pulled in Patrick Steele, Chris Woodruff and Jeff McWherter to help out. At this point, there are parts of the event that were really hard that are on autopilot such as the registration system. The first two years were interesting because they didn't have a registration engine and had to scrounge for one. Now they have one written that is just flicking a switch on and off to control the registration. That's cool and needed. The web site was really hard the first year and now it's pretty much writing itself when they add in the speakers, sessions and assignments. The giveaways were really hard the first couple of years but there have been a lot of great strides making that as automated as possible. I'm really impressed by the organizational and leadership abilities demonstrated by John Hopkins and Jason Follas to really make this a repeatable and sustainable event.

Thanks guys!

Day of .Net in Ann Arbor Fall 2007

Jeff Blankenburg already did a fantastic post on DevLink. John Kellar and his crew did a fantastic job pulling this conference together. In its second year - I was impressed with the whole event from the speaker’s dinner to the quality of speaker that this event was able to attract. There were 5 regional directors, 19 MVPs and some of the heavy hitters from Microsoft including Ron Jacobs and Brad Abrams. For some reason they let me speak too.
Have I mentioned that Brad Abrams is my new hero! I’m not belittling any of the other speakers because there were some amazing speakers and things that happened but I feel compelled to brag on Brad a little here.
I saw Brad at Boston Remix but I got to actually meet and spend some time with him at Devlink in Nashville, TN. This is a community conference, large for a community conference but a community conference none the less which is what makes this all the more special. First, someone on Brad’s level is actively engaging the community is very cool. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he was one of the original 5 on the CLR team. He has moved all the way up from writing the String class to his current position as the owner of the entire UI platform. That’s WPF, Silverlight and AJAX.  Between him and Scott Guthrie (his boss) – I can’t think of another company whose brass get out into the community the way these guys do.

Anyways, back to the story. Brad did the opening keynote where he did a fabulous job. He also did some other sessions with a lot fewer people in them. When he wasn’t talking, he was attending sessions like a normal attendee and between sessions and at lunches he was hanging out in the lobby and just talking to people. It was fun sitting in on a lot of those conversations as they ranged from Test Driven Development to the Dynamic Language Runtime to Kathleen Dollard and Billy Hollis taking him to task over complexity in the frameworks, timelines and more. At this point in the conference I’m really blown away by Brad and how approachable he is. He told me to call him and chat about some of the questions that I have around Silverlight road mapping. I know that he meant it and I’m going to take him up on it after we’ve both had a chance to recover from our travel this past couple of weeks.
Then I heard the about what he did on Saturday afternoon and was completely blown away. John Kellar, the main conference organizer, wrote me to tell me about it and I found Brad's post on it. Brad went to listen to a talk on AJAX but the speaker didn’t show. There were 30 people in the room that were, understandably, getting bent out of shape about it. So Brad steps up and asks – “Who wants to see me do some AJAX demos?” An hour fifteen later – the crowd was completely jazzed by the stuff Brad was showing off the cuff. That’s very cool of him and shows that he is truly invested in the community and still has the technical chops to backup any of his things he says.
It’s truly impressive and that’s why Brad Abrams is my new hero!

This is a gag video from 4 guys on the mobile team (Loke, Mike, James and Rob Tiffany) showing a lot of the worst practices for presentations. The really sad part is that it's histerical because it's true. I've seen multiple examples of the worst practices in multiple presentations over the course of time.

Link to Jason Langridge's WebLog - MR Mobile! : MEDC Video - Worst practice of presentations

Wow I've been swamped. There's so much to blog about in the past couple of weeks so I'm just going to catch some of the highlights.

Ann Arbor Day of .NET was on 5/5/2007. It was fantastic! It sold out at 250 people and of that there were 210 people show up. That's actually really good as most free events have a 40% droppoff and they had less than 20% droppoff. The only downside on the day was that with less than a 20% droppoff - pizza was a little short at lunch.

They are actually thinking about going to every 6 months instead of every 12 months. I think this would be fantastic!

I kicked off the day with a session on User Experience technologies at Microsoft. I borrowed from some of the materials that we are putting together for the upcoming ArcReady (Check the site for dates and times across the entire central region - Detroit on 5/25 in two weeks for all those that attended Day of .Net). We dipped into WPF, AJAX and Silverlight. My favorite demo is the Silverlight Airlines Demo. It shows a truly out of the box user experience that's not all glitz and glammor but a truly solid UI for a true business application. Many of the demos, while showing off the platform really well, are marketing apps that show lots of 3D and animation. My customers often look at the glitzy demos and say that they are not doing 3D so they don't look at the technologies. What they are missing is that there are real benifits here with enabling truly rich interfaces that go well beyond text and pictures.

I had two more 30 minute sessions. In both of those sessions the overwhelming requests were to have more Silverlight content. I had nothing prepared for these sessions but they went really well. In the first session, I pulled Don Burnett, who started Michigan Interactive Designers, out of the crowd and asked him to do a tour around Expression Blend and Silverlight. He got up, completely unscripted, and did a fantastic job! I will definitely be bringing him in to do more demos and presentations - especially when we have a designer based crowd. It turns out that he used to work with Bill Wagner (my former business partner when I was at SRT Solutions) on the Lion King Animated Storybook.

In the second session, I was on my own but I showed Top Banana, the DLRConsole (python and javascript version - IronRuby will be released as a CTP from CodePlex later this year) and talked about the .NET support in Silverlight 1.1 Alpha. Yes - I actually wrote some Python and did a simple overview for people at the conference. It was a fun day!

Here are some of the resources that we talked about during the three talks:

•Windows Forms @ .NET FX Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/windowsforms/

•WPF @ MSDN Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•.NET 3.0 (WPF, WCF, WF) Community Site
http://www.netfx3.com/

•Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

•ASP.NET AJAX @ ASP.NET Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx

•ASP.NET AJAX Community Site
http://ajax.asp.net/

•DirectX @ DirectX Development Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/

•Microsoft Visual Studio @ Visual Studio Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/

•Microsoft Expression
www.microsoft.com/expression

 

Day of .NET site

Link to Day of .Net in Ann Arbor 2007 - Home

Don Burnett's write-up of the event.

Link to Don.NET's WPF Designers Blog: Eastern Michigan Day of Dot Net

 

Larry Clarin (one of my fellow Architect Evangelists) has a great write-up of the ArcReady tour and a bit about the new one coming.

Larry Clarkin on the upcoming ArcReady events

From the ArcReady site:

Architecting the next generation of software. The why, the what and the how.

Microsoft’s journey towards creating new technology strategies, platforms, tools and practices is to drive the next generation of software for consumers and the enterprise. It’s not without irony that one of the most neglected and challenging components of the software design process is understanding how to identify, design and implement the ‘experience’ that an individual will have with an interface. Learn how Microsoft is elevating ‘user experience’ to a first-class citizen in the software design and development process. Understand why ‘user experience’ may be one of the most important parts of an Architect’s job in creating new software that will matter.

Our next ArcReady program is called “Architecting for the User Experience.” Our guest speaker will be Chris Bernard, UX Evangelist for Microsoft. Together with the Central Region Architect Evangelists, we’ll discuss the role of the ‘user experience’ in architectural design and provide hands-on, practical guidance for getting better results in your own projects. We’ll discuss WPF, WPF/e, XAML and the new Expressions suite of products that allow designers, architects and developers to build great ‘user experiences’ using the same base technologies. More importantly, we will discuss how architects can work with software design professionals in new and innovative ways to create the next generation of ‘experiences’ and products that will be demanded by consumers and the enterprise.

Session 1: "Why the User Experience Matters in Architecture"

Session 2: "Architecting for the User Experience"

Join Us for This Free Event.

Show Cities and Dates

• Houston - 05/07/07
• Dallas - 05/08/07
• St Louis - 05/09/07
• Kansas City - 05/11/07
• Austin - 05/15/07
• Downers Grove - 05/15/07
• Minneapolis - 05/16/07
• Des Moines - 05/18/07
• + Nashville - 05/21/07
• + Louisville - 05/22/07
• + Cincinnati - 05/23/07
• Indianapolis - 05/24/07
• + Detroit - 05/25/07
• * Memphis - 06/11/07
• Milwaukee - 06/12/07
• * Cleveland - 06/13/07
• * Columbus - 06/14/07
• * Grand Rapids - 06/15/07

The ones with the + are where Chris and I will be speaking together and the ones with the * are were I will be speaking by myself or with a partner such as Jeff Blankenburg.

Link to Larry Clarkin - Architecture meets User Experience at upcoming ArcReady events

Registration for the next round of ArcReady events - http://www.arcready.com

 Were you at Day of .NET last year? Couldn't get enough? This year there will be two Day of .NET events in Michigan! That's right, you read it right - two Day of .NET events in Michigan! The first will be in Ann Arbor at the Washtinaw Community College on May 5th and the second will be in Grand Rapids at Davenport University on May 19th. These are two distinct events with different speakers and agendas. I'm fortunate enough to have been chosen to speak at both.

I'm talking about Architecting the User Experience and a joint session on Mobility with Dan Hibbitts in Ann Arbor. I'm repeating part of the ArcReady content on What do Architects Do Anyway and Architecture Assets - an Introduction to Patterns and Practices Group.

You should plan on coming to at least one of these events if not both!

Registration for the Ann Arbor Day of .NET

Registration for the Grand Rapids Day of .NET

The ArcReady slides have been posted in the ArcReady download area.

Thanks to all that came - feel free to follow up with me with any questions or comments.

Link to Microsoft ArcReady - Downloads

I had the great pleasure of being on .NET Rocks speaking about SQL Everywhere and a whole lot more! I really should have gotten them a better photo - but such is life.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=202

Download: GrokTalk-10DevToolsIn10Minutes.ppt

Last night’s Grok talks were a smashing hit! I was so happy with how everything went off. We had:

Jason Follas speaking on T-SQL Enhancements in Sql Server 2005 SQL CLR (Turns out Jason reads my blog and corrected me... :)). Jason is one of the local experts on SQL Server 2005 and ran through a quick preview of what his talk is going to be on at Day of .NET.

John Hopkins speaking on ADO.NET Table Adapters. He showed how much code you could save with careful use of the table adapters. It’s amazing how little control you are giving up for that much power.

Darrell Hawley speaking on role based authentication for web services. It was impressive that he got through that much code in that little time. He showed how to secure the web service with roles so that you could have no access, view access, edit access or add item access. All of this is very close to reality so it was, in addition to being entertaining, was very practical.

Bill Wagner talking about C# 3.0. As always, I learned something new when listening to Bill talk. He talked about the var keyword in C# 3.0 and explained how it’s actually a strongly type keyword, it’s just that the type is not known until compile time.

Aydin Akcasu talking about Kids Programming Language. This was a preview to his talk at Day of .NET. It was an exciting talk that got me excited about the possibilities that I could have with my son programming.

Martin Shoemaker talking about building speech and ink applications for the tablet. This was an interesting talk because Martin didn’t talk the whole time – his tablet did all the talking. While he didn’t show as much code as he might have in a traditional talk, he showed what was really possible.

Josh Holmes (me) talking about the ASP.NET 2.0 – Health Monitoring. I also MC’d the whole deal. That was fun! It was also a treat – I came in on time because I had a lot of people timing me that were under strict orders to pull the hook if I went over.

And finally

Carl Franklin of .NET Rocks talking about remote podcasting. This was fun because he was remote. He was tied into the PA system through a phone connection and VNC’d into Bill Wagner’s laptop so that he could do his presentation. There were a ton of moving parts, but it all went rather smoothly.

I’m hoping that we will repeat the Grok talk idea really soon. It was a ton of fun and the audience seemed to get a lot out of it.

 

ASP.NET 2.0 Security Features
April 26th 10:30 a.m.
ASP.NET 2.0 raises the bar on web application security. From the new ViewState encryption mechanisms, to the new auditing and logging support, to the partially encrypted web.config files and more, there are a lot of new features in ASP.NET 2.0. In this session, we will look at many of the new features and show how you can leverage these to make your applications more secure. 

Managed Code in SQL
April 26th 2 p.m.
SQL Server 2005 will change the way that you architect your databases. Among the many enhancements to SQL Server for the 2005 version, one of the most anticipated and exciting features is the ability to run managed code within the SQL Server process. But how do you as a developer leverage this ability? There are many ways for you to leverage this new functionality from writing your triggers to writing your business logic in C# or VB.NET or even creating UDT (User Defined Types). Some of these features are more useful and practical than others. As the adage says, just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. It applies here because there are times that you should not use .NET to solve a problem that T-SQL solves better and vice-versa. In this session, we discuss how, why and (very importantly) when you would want to write managed code for SQL Server 2005. 

Thousands of Users, Personalized Service – Portals and Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0
April 27th 11:45 a.m.
If you’ve used http://my.msn.com, you’ve wondered “How’d they do that?” Now you can do that too, through personalization with user controls and custom Web parts. This level of personal service and response has been the realm of a lot of custom code or SharePoint until now. The personalization is managed through a WebPartManager which controls any number of zones on the page. In your controls that reside in these zones, through the proper use of properties and attributes, you can have global settings, role-based settings and user-based settings or some combination of all three. Obviously, this could complicate your testing scenarios greatly so careful design and implementation are a necessity. In this session, we will create several custom Web parts, put them into a portal site and show how easily this site can be customized. In addition, we will look at some of the potential disasters and how you can avoid them.

ASP.NET DataBinding
April 27th  2 p.m.
Data Binding is an extremely useful feature of ASP.NET. While it has been around since the beginning of ASP.NET, it has received a lot of attention in ASP.NET 2.0. The DataGrid, yes – that control that we all know and love, has given way to new controls such as the GridView, DetailsView and FormView. There are many new sources to bind to including XML based data sources and more. Between the new data controls, the new functionality on data bound controls and the new declarative data controls; we can reduce the amount of code in your standard web applications tremendously while improving performance and stability. In this talk, we will investigate the new features of data binding and show how it can impact your development.

Jim Holmes posted pictures of the code camp last week.

It was a lot of fun to be involved in. In fact, it was enough fun that we are going to be doing a one day conference similar to it here in the Ann Arbor area later this spring.

Stay tuned for more details coming soon. If you would be interested in speaking at that - let me know.

Rockford has a great group. It's a young but enthusiastic group. They had just outgrown their old venue and moved to Hamilton Sundstrand. It was a good location, but we had to sign in at security and there was a list that you had to be on to get in. Other than that, I really liked the facility.

They are working out some of the logistics of growing. We spent quite a bit of time after the meeting hanging out and talking about best practices on running a .NET group.

I'll post some of the thoughts that I shared with them in the upcoming days.

The Dayton-Cincinnati CodeCamp was a lot of fun. Jim Holmes organized the whole event. He posts about the event here - http://frazzleddad.blogspot.com/2006/01/dayton-cincinnati-code-camp-big.html.

I did three talks:

ASP.NET Security Whiteboard

This was interesting because I did a hour ten about ASP.NET security and didn’t talk about cross site scripting, sql injection attacks or any of the usual suspects. I just answered questions for an hour plus. Most people talking about security immediately jump to those items, but many of these people just needed to know what a role was and how it applied in ASP.NET and so on.

Roadworthy ASP.NET

In this talk, I talked about ASP.NET for mobile devices. Smaller crowd, but it was a blast.

True Mobility

In this talk, I gave my definition of Mobility which is not just mobile devices. It’s letting your customer/user leverage their data wherever they happen to be. That could be in the car, but a lot of times, it’s at their desk or at a coffee shop where it makes more sense to have a desktop app or web page. All of the different front ends have their strengths and weaknesses so you might have to write more than one UI. Therefore, architect your application so that it can accept multiple UIs.

There were a ton of good speakers at the event – here’s a short list in no real order:

James Avery

Nino Benvenuti

Dave Donaldson

Greg Huber and Jason Follas

Drew Robbins

Craig Utley

Rob Keefer

There were some others that I’ve forgotten or didn’t meet and I apologize to those folks.

I have to say that the event pumped me up to do one here in the Ann Arbor area. I have been wanting to, but this really gave me a lot of good ideas on the scope and such. I think that this is definitely doable. Stay posted here for more information coming soon on the Ann Arbor Day of .NET.

Join me tomorrow at the Northwest Ohio .NET Users Group at 333 N Summit St, Toledo, OH 43604 at 6:00 to hear about Data Binding and Caching in ASP.NET 2.0.

If you attend the VS.NET Launch in November you’ll get a free copy of VS.NET 2005 and a free copy of SQL Server 2005!

 

Oh yeah – and you’ll get some great content on how to use those two products.

I’m honored to be in INETA Speaker Bureau with such influential developers as Martin L. Shoemaker, Michele Leroux Bustamante, Rocky Lhotka and Juval Lowy, just to name a few. INETA helped get the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group (GANG) off the ground by supplying great speakers, such as Richard Hale Shaw, Chris Kinsman and Tom Barnaby (Now with Microsoft and I can't find his new blog), as well as advice on logistical setup of the meetings and the user group leaders forums. My goal is to help other user groups as much as these great speakers have helped my group.

There were 9 of us added at the same time:

John Alexander
Miguel Castro
Bill Evjen
Julie Lerman
Chris Menegay
Ted Pattison
Les Pinter
Bill Vaughn
Me

It gets better as I've already been scheduled to speak through INETA at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group on October 25th.

I'll be speaking the Dayton .NET Developers Group on 8/24/2005 about WSE 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0.

I was invited my Jim Holmes. He's no relation to me - just a good friend.

John Hopkins will also be speaking there on the Dotfuscator and what it's capabilities are.

	Dayton .NE Developers Group
	.NET Users Group in Dayton Ohio
	http://www.daytondevgroup.net/