The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is one of my favorite conferences. But it is an investment, especially when you factor in the cost of airfare and a week in a downtown LA hotel, in addition to the cost of the conference. In today’s unstable economy, some people missed out on a lot of cool technical content. But, the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) is bringing the PDC to you! The MDC » read more.
Conference
I did a joint session with James Ward from Adobe at the JAOO conference. As you know I’m an evangelist for Microsoft focusing on RIA and UX. James is one of the Flex evangelists for Adobe. This is a talk that James and I have been talking about trying to pull off for quite a while and I was thrilled that we actually got to do it. James and I » read more.
As an Architect, you should be more than just a technical guy. Your job is to be the liaison between the technical side of the world and the business side of the world. You need to be able to effectively communicate with all sides and understand the motivations of the different parts of the business. To that end, this quarter’s ArcReady is here to help you. This quarter, your local » read more.
I’m sitting here at the second Enterprise Ruby Conference (eRubyCon). There’s a couple of fun and interesting things that have happened this year. One of them that’s exciting for me is that the whole event is being hosted at the Microsoft facilities in Columbus, OH. Joe O’Brien was looking for a facility so I offered up the office since we can get that for free. There are some minor facility » read more.
I love community! This weekend I have the pleasure to participate in a very unique event called RIAPalooza. From the web site:“Join your fellow RIA professionals for RIApalooza, a invaluable two day event aimed at exploring and promoting the development of Rich Internet Applications. RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is » read more.
This is a conference that I’m not going to miss this year. At MIX08, Ray Ozzie laid out early glimpses of what we’re going to see the rest of the year leading up to PDC. Not long after, the Live Mesh Community Technical Preview was released. It’s the beginnings of the realization of Ray’s S+S vision and the future direction of Microsoft. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg » read more.
I was an honored to speak at the West Michigan Day of .NET (WMDoDN) last weekend. I did two new talks, even though only one of them was scheduled. Brian Prince had been doing a great “Soft Skills, Not Just for Humans” talk for a lot of different user groups and Day of .NETs. It’s a talk that’s been met with great success and acclaim. It’s point is to help » read more.
I love it when the community steps up and really shows me something new. This past weekend I attended Central Ohio Day of .NET. This was one of the first events in a while that I’ve been to where I was just a participant. It was refreshing. As always, they did a fantastic job putting on the event and pulling together top notch speakers and content to really put together » read more.
John Hopkins (who needs to blog more) wrote a fantastic article on how to run a community based conference. John is speaking from experience as he’s successfully run the Day of .NET two years in a row and he’s been on the board at CodeMash. I was on the organizing committee for both of these as well and can tell you that what John speaks is gospel. I’m not going » read more.
Ray Ozzie kicked off the MIX keynote by talking about the fantastic new things that have happened at Microsoft in the past year that are really re-engineering the DNA at Microsft from the acquisition of Aquantitive to the fantastic internal work with Silverlight 2.0 and IE8. As an employee in the trenches, it’s often hard to keep focus on that big picture and remember that the company is aggressively self » read more.
