Thanks to a number of a really motivated folks in the Colorado community we have a fantastic event coming up in February – the Rocky Mountain Trifecta.  There will be tracks dedicated to .NET development, SQL Server, and Windows Server. 

There are some amazing speakers that will be coming – see Julie Yack’s post on the event.  Go register and pass along the information to your friends that might be interested.

My colleague, Rob Bagby, has announced the dates for his next series of MSDN Events this January.  This series of events focuses on a number of topics from the Professional Developer’s Conference which took place last October.  As I always tell people, Rob is one of the best presenters around and his sessions are always fun and informative.  He does a great job of walking through complex topics in a manner that anyone can understand.  In this series, Rob will be covering:

• What to expect with C# 4.0
• The Silverlight Control Toolkit
• REST with WCF and the WCF REST Starter Kit
• Overview of Windows Azure (“The Cloud OS”) and Azure Services

The following is the schedule for these events (click on the city to register):

• 1/12: Albuquerque
• 1/15: Salt Lake City (morning), Salt Lake City (afternoon repeat)
• 1/26: Colorado Springs
• 1/27: Englewood
• 1/29: Fort Collins

Hope to see you at one of the events.

At TechEd US 2008, I hosted a panel discussion with Michael Stiefel, Denny Boynton, Miha Kralj, and Patrick Weikle.  We discussed what an architect is and how to develop the skills of an architect.  It ended up being a very lively discussion with some very fun banter about our different opinions on the topic.  You can check it out here on Channel 9.

My colleague Rob Bagby has an event coming up in November which looks to be very good.  If you have ever seen Rob speak, you know that he always puts on a great show in addition to having fantastic content.

Here are the details…

Build it better with MSDN Events.

Join MSDN Events for the latest tips, tools and technical information you need to build powerful applications and engaging user experiences. Topics include:

• What’s New in SQL Server 2008 for Developers
• Power up your Office applications with VSTO
• Build next generation applications with Silverlight 2

If you haven’t yet registered or for up-to-date event information, please visit: www.msdnevents.com

Grand Hyatt Denver Downtown

1750 Welton Street
Denver Colorado 80202
United States

Language(s):	English.
Product(s):	Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, Security, Windows and Windows Vista.
Audience(s):	Architect, Developer, Education, Government and IT Professional.

Event Overview

MSDN Event
Join us for a 4 hour MSDN Event where we will cover 3 seperate sessions focusing on Silverlight 2.0, VSTO and SQL Server 2008.

Session #1: What’s New in SQL Server 2008 for Developers

SQL Server 2008 adds numerous new capabilities for developers – from support for Spatial Data types to a storage mechanism for SQL BLOB data using the NTFS file system, and much more. The new release also delivers several improvements to development-related areas, from T-SQL to SQLCLR to XML. This session will provide a technical dive into the latest and greatest features you’ll find in SQL Server 2008, while offering insight into how to effectively apply them to your upcoming development projects.

Session #2: Power up your Office applications with VSTO

In this session, we’ll focus on the power and productivity of Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) – a .NET Smart Client technology. We’ll give you tips and tricks for designing and building smart client applications with VSTO, which allows you to create managed code applications with .NET languages including Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C#. VSTO also makes it simple to manifest the functionality of those applications in the rich user interfaces of Microsoft Office Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook and others from the Office stack. VSTO addresses some of the biggest challenges that Office solution developers are facing today, including separation of data and view elements, server-side and offline scenarios, seamless integration with the Visual Studio tools, deployment and updating. Join us for this eye-opening session and learn just how easy it is to build and deploy powerful applications with VSTO.

Session #3: Build next generation applications with Silverlight 2.0

Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this session, we’ll take a look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate how to build a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET. We’ll explore how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to create applications, and how to create UI using XAML markup and code, controls, and File I/O. We’ll also discuss networking, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and various other aspects of building Silverlight applications.

If you watch MSNBC, you probably have seen the Microsoft Surface application used by Chuck Todd to predict the electoral votes.  You can download this application to your home computer and play with it if you want to make your own predictions.  See more details here at John Pelak’s blog.  I know that I will be playing with it on election night to see how the models change.

A couple of years ago I ended up working with one of the brightest minds I had ever met – Peter Provost.  Not only did we work together, but we ended up becoming good friends.  Over time we both ended up at Microsoft and Peter became as a Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio team – in particular on the Visual Studio Team System for Architects team.  In talking with him, I realized that they were building out some cool things that were very useful from an architect’s perspective. 

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Peter to discuss the upcoming release of Visual Studio and recorded it as a webcast that went up on ARCast.TV today.  Enjoy.

Thanks to everyone that turned out for my presentation on Monday night.  It was definitely a good time and I was impressed with the number of people that are either doing Office based development or are considering it.

A couple of notes from the presentation:

• Most of my demos and source code can be found from a blog posting I did a while back for the launch event in Denver/Phoenix.  If you want to get the code I would recommend reviewing this post.
• If you are interested in Server Side Generation of documents see this MSDN article which is excellent.
• I showed how to integrate SharePoint columns within the documents in that library and have posted about it in the past.
• At the end of the presentation I showed a little bit about how you can use the new Open XML SDK to read/write document in a much easier fashion.  If you have interest in the Open XML file formats you can see a lot of information at http://www.openxmldeveloper.org.
• At the beginning of the presentation, we talked briefly about Photosynth, Mesh, and Live Family Safety. 

Hope everyone had a good time and we will see you in the near future.

During TechEd in Orlando I had the privilege to spend some time with Mario Cardinal discussing layer module injection and why you would use it.  We recorded the session and it is now available on ARCast as of today. 

Layer Module Injection is a new pattern to enforce separation of concerns between domain logic and infrastructure services. Mario Cardinal and Joe Shirey will explain why to use abstract classes and interfaces as a means to reduce dependency surface. Mario and Joe will discuss the techniques of dependency injection and inversion of control to reduce the coupling between classes. In the same way, they will discuss benefits to modularize and decouple with layers using namespaces. The goal is to explain a new approach to simplify managing dependencies between the modules which compose a program. At the end of this discussion you will understand why architects worry so much about coupling, cohesion and separation of concerns.

 

Mario Cardinal is a senior consultant specialized in software architecture. He is a member of .NET Expertise, a network of independent expert consultants specializing in Microsoft .NET technologies. He has almost twenty years of experience in designing large-scale information systems.

 

He speaks regularly at international conferences, including TechEd, Agile2008, DevTeach, and others. He lead the architecture user group at the Montreal .Net Community and He is the architecture track tech chair for DevTeach Conference. He is also a member of the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Advisory Council. Furthermore, since 2004, He has hosted the Visual Studio Talk Show, a podcast about software development with Microsoft .NET. Finally, for the fourth year in a row, He has received from Microsoft the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. MVP status is awarded to credible technology experts who are among the very best community members willing to share their experience to helping others realize their potential.

ARCast.TV - Mario Cardinal on Layer Module Injection

My team is putting on an event in a number of different cities in the coming months.  To register, click on the link for your city:

Here is the detailed information about the event:

Agile methods are a set of development processes intended to create software in a lighter, faster, more people-centric way. Many development teams have adopted "agile" methodologies to manage change and to improve software quality. These methodologies promote continuous integration as a practice to build and test software products incrementally as new features are included, bugs are fixed, and code is refactored.

This one-day seminar will walk provide an overview of Agile Software Development, its principles, methods and values; highlighting of the most widely used, and simplest to apply Agile method  known as "Scrum". 

Please join Microsoft and Neudesic, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for this one-day seminar.  Thank you, we look forward to seeing you there!

COURSE OVERVIEW

Introduction to Agile (What, Why)  |  Agile methods are fast becoming commonplace in software development practices for many organizations. However, they represent a significant paradigm shift in the way in which stakeholders and team members are engaged, projects are planned, manner in which the team reacts to change, and which teams work together.  The session will provide an overview of Agile Software Development, its principles, methods and values.  Participants will learn the reason why Agile Methods are gaining share in software projects and driving up ROI. 

Scrum Essentials  |  Several methodologies live within the space known as "Agile Software Development".  One of the most widely used, and simplest to apply Agile methods is known as "Scrum".  This session teaches the essentials of how to use "Scrum" on projects, focusing on the techniques and practices that development teams require while working on an Agile / Scrum project. The session will provide the required practices, roles and rules of Scrum, and answer specific questions about how to apply Agile Methods (via Scrum) to projects. Participants will review how a product backlog is used to plan a sprint, and learn how to read project status through a sprint backlog and burn down chart.

Agile Planning and Estimation  |  Session teaches how to plan the scope and schedule of a Scrum project, focusing on hands-on project planning techniques for Agile teams. Requires familiarity with Agile software development (or prior attendance to the above sessions).

The following areas are discussed -- how to:

• Set up a winning project "constraint profile"
• Manage customer / user scope expectations
• Create a release plan
• Create and prioritize a product backlog
• Use relative estimating
• Measure team velocity

Team Foundation Server |  See how Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server can support your team’s Scrum process to fully benefit from Scrum’s practices and rules.  In this session we’ll discuss how you can use TFS to leverage the Scrum essentials learned in the earlier session.

C-Level Speaker  |  In this final session, we will hear a “real-world” example of how Scrum is successfully being used today in a development organization.

AGENDA

Tuesday, September 23, 2008
8:30 AM-9:00 AM	Registration, Welcome & Breakfast
9:00 AM-10:30 AM	Introduction to Agile
10:30AM-10:45 AM	Break
10:45AM-11:45 AM	SCRUM Essentials, Part 1
11:45 PM-12:45 PM	Lunch
12: 45 PM-1:45 PM	SCRUM Essentials, Part 2
1:45 PM-2:45 PM	Agile Planning & Estimation
2:45 PM-3:00 PM	Break
3:00 PM-4:00 PM	Team Foundation Server
4:00 PM-5:00 PM	C Level Speaker

Hope to see you at one of the events.

Thanks to all who attended the Denver VSTS Event.  Mickey has posted a debrief from session on his blog including links to his slides.  I have uploaded my slides here.