Blankenthoughts

Tonight at the Columbus .NET Developers Group (CONDG), they are having 8 lightning talks as their presentation. Lightning talks are basically 10-15 minute presentations that go one after another, with 1 minute breaks for setup/teardown.

Here are the subjects that were presented:

Steve Horn - ADO.NET
Matt Casto - Silverlight (consuming ADO.NET)
Amanda Laucher/James Bender - F#
Steve Harman - Rhino Mocks
Brian Sherwin - Log4Net
Jon Kruger - LINQ to SQL
John Vottero - PowerShell 4 Devs

These presentations were also videotaped, and will be made available on the CONDG website.

Also, in the early housekeeping, there were two major announcements made:

1) Brian Prince has accepted the Architect Evangelist role with Microsoft. He'll be working alongside me in the Heartland.

2) Carey Payette was elected the new president of CONDG. Congratulations Carey.

Labels: ado.net, CONDG, F#, jeff blankenburg, lightning talks, linq, log4net, microsoft, powershell, rhino mocks, Silverlight, sql

CONDG is having their last meeting of the year on Thursday, December 6th. Though their site is experiencing "technical difficulties," it contains all of the information about their meetings. Since it's down, I'll post the information here as well:

CONDG Meeting
http://www.condg.org
12/6/2007 6:00 PM
Microsoft Building
8800 Lyra Ave
Columbus, OH 43240

The reason I am promoting this is severalfold.

1) I think it's important that developers participate as a community. There is so much to learn from your fellow developers that you would be hard-pressed to figure out on your own. Much like Wikipedia, it only truly works when everyone is participating.

2) It's going to be a fun night. We'll have a speaker talking about Visual Studio 2008 and the 3.5 framework. We'll have XBoxes with Guitar Hero III and Halo set up. We'll have food to eat and beverages to consume. And a room full of developers with the smarts to teach you something you didn't know before you got there.

3) I'm going to be giving away copies of Visual Studio. Everyone that comes to the meeting will get a copy of a 90-day trial of Visual Studio 2008 Professional. Everyone that REGISTERS AND ATTENDS will be given a code to redeem for a full license of Visual Studio 2008 Pro when it is available.

So the next question you may have is...HOW DO I REGISTER? Well, readers, here's how. Click on the link below to be taken to the registration site. That's all.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032361590&Culture=en-US

Also, don't be discouraged if you find out the registration is closed. I will also have a waitlist, because it's certain that some of the folks that register won't be able to attend. We'll take names at the door of those individuals that were unable to register, and those will go on a first-come, first-served basis.

I look forward to seeing all of you at the event. It's going to be a fun night.

Labels: CONDG, orcas, visual studio

I had an opportunity to speak at the October CONDG meeting last night, and had a great crowd. It was a great talk on Silverlight and some of the other cool things that Microsoft is up to, including Popfly, Surface, and Photosynth.

We also cleaned out the "swag closet," giving away a total of 16 items. This included some rubberized, roll-up keyboards (for typing in the bathtub), some 32MB flash drives, some 128MB flash drives, a few books, and a copy of Vista (congrats to Aaron Ponzani!).

Included in this post are links to the slide decks and demos that I used during the presentation.

Thanks to everyone that attended!

Silverlight 301 Deck & Demos

Innovative Microsoft Stuff Slide Deck

Labels: CONDG, microsoft, photosynth, popfly, Silverlight, surface