This week I was honored by being named a Microsoft Regional Director. Break out the champagne, strike up the band, queue the fireworks! Woohoo! I am extremely excited to be joining this incredible group of people, and it is going to be a thrill to get to know my fellow Regional Directors.

Of course that news doesn’t mean much if you’re not familiar with the Regional Director (RD) program. The RD program is composed of 120 people worldwide, compared to the Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program which has some 4,100 awardees. While MVPs are recognized for their expertise in a product or technology, the RDs advocate for solutions that span the Microsoft stack, so they must be experts in a number of complementary topics. They are typically CTOs, chief architects, principal consultants or primaries in a business or ISV. Quoting the Microsoft Regional Directors website:

Regional Directors are members of an elite, worldwide group of technology thought-leaders known for their national and international speaking tours, their authorship of books, articles and blogs, and their business acumen. Regional Directors are well-versed on the totality of the software industry. They are recognized for their achievements in communicating the benefits of emerging technologies.

Portland’s last Regional Director was my friend and former colleague, Scott Hanselman, who had to step down from the program when he joined Microsoft in mid 2007. Those are some pretty big footsteps to be following. I am definitely looking forward to helping people and companies succeed and thrive on the Microsoft platform.

Holy cow, I won the Windows Server 2008 R2 Haiku contest! See my earlier post for details about my haiku and the contest. A huge thank you to all my friends who voted, you made it happen! Woohoo!

The prize is a sweet home entertainment system, and, yes, we’re going to have to plan several movie nights to invite you all over. Stay tuned. But first we’ve got to figure out where we’re going to put it. This is going to take some major rearranging! Nice problem to have to deal with!

(Note to self: winning a contest is not necessarily conducive to meeting today’s deadline. Sending out for extra midnight oil to burn later tonight.)

If you’re in the greater San Francisco Bay area, come out and hear me talk on Modeling with SQL Server Modeling Services (née “Oslo”) on Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at the Bay.NET User Group which meets on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View. Social networking starts at 6:00 PM, and my presentation is at 6:30 PM. This is a free event, but registration is required.

First, please don’t get thrown by the SQL Server part of SQL Server Modeling Services. This modeling technology is for developers, architects, database developers and, in the fullness of time, most aspects of the application lifecycle management.

I will explain what’s in the November 2009 CTP of SQL Server Modeling Services, where the technology is going, and why you should be interested in it today. I’ll demonstrate the “M” modeling language using the new Intellipad editor, and graphical modeling in “Quadrant”. Bring your questions, and I will see you there.

I entered a contest for haiku about the release of Window Server 2008 R2 in November. Today I was informed that I am one of nine finalists. I have passed the judges’ round. Now it is time for the voting Internet public to select the winner. With your vote, I could be that winner! Needless to say, that would be awesome!

If you are reading this, you are a denizen of the Internet, and that more than qualifies you to vote me the winner. It’s easy, just go to https://www.r2haiku.com/Haikus/Finalists and click the Vote button on the haiku by poet “vstuart”.

When you vote, you’ll need to provide your identity (so they know you aren’t voting twice) using a Twitter account or Live ID account.

Check this out. If you use your Twitter account, your browser is redirected to Twitter (you can verify that by the URL in the address bar) which asks if you want to allow or deny Twitter to vouch for your identity. This is federated security: you are not creating a new identity for the contest site, and you are not providing your Twitter credentials to any site other than Twitter. More of the online world needs to use federated security.

The contest prize is a really nice home entertainment center. If I win, you’re all invited over for movie night at my house. Seriously. I am taking nominations of what movies we should watch.

How about the haiku? Here’s my entry.

Managed code on Core
My web server takes a step
A small footprint remains

Some of my not-so-technical friends have asked for an explanation. Windows Server 2008 comes in multiple editions, each one suitable for specific uses. Windows Server Core is an edition that has the absolute bare bones of a server operating system: no bells and whistles. In the original release of Windows Server 2008, the Core edition did not have the ability to run software built on the .NET Framework: .NET-based software is also known as managed code. The second release of Windows Server 2008, called R2, extends the Core edition so that it can run managed code. That means that Windows Server 2008 R2 Core is an excellent choice for hosting software such as web applications built on ASP.NET or Silverlight. Over the first release of Windows Server Core, that is a real step forward. The amount of memory and other resources used by an application or a machine are referred to as it’s footprint. Being able to host web applications with a no-frills Core operating system means that the web servers used for these kinds of application are much smaller, easier to maintain, and have a smaller “attack surface”. That, in turn, means that if the web server is a virtual machine, you can get more virtual web servers on a single physical server, resulting in more users getting served on the same physical hardware. That saves time and money.

A few words on haiku are also in order. My dad loved Japanese culture, including the poetry forms of haiku and renga. In high school and college I took up an interest in Japanese poetry as well. I still have my father’s copy of Buson’s poems on my shelf. Haiku is a considerably more than the 17 syllable format, and originally they were written by two poets working together. As I was writing my haiku, I wanted to have that element of surprise created by a turn of a phrase, revealing something which was previously understood as one thing to become something else. And so taking a step forward with web server technology becomes a reflection looking backwards at the footprint – both literal and metaphysical – that is left behind.

There are more aspects of traditional haiku, such as references to nature, which are missing in my modest effort. I don’t pretend to creating art, but I do admit to having fun going through the exercise of paring my thoughts down to the correct structure while leaving something for the reader to appreciate and reflect upon. This is a familiar path with modern subjects: consider this anonymous twentieth century haiku that I learned as a child.

Schizophrenia.
I thought I was really sick!
I’m beside myself.

My distant recollection of a traditional Japanese poetry aside, I must acknowledge the inspiration I drew from the modern day Laughing Buddhas, Tom and Ray Magliozzi, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, the provocateurs of National Public Radio’s Car Talk. Some time ago they presented a series of automotive haiku on their show. This one instantly caught my imagination.

Four-wheel drive pickup
I remember his last words
”Hold my beer. Watch this.”

I hope that my humble three-line poem expressed some of the joy and playfulness found in this haiku, which turns the commonplace truck and driver into a series of moments for consideration, wonder and surprise.

Now that you understand what it means, my sources of inspiration, and all that… please vote for my haiku! Tell all of your friends to vote for me, poet vstuart, too. Voting closes Friday, January 29, 2010 at midnight Pacific time.

Updated 10 December 2009, new contact info.

Vertigo’s CEO, Scott Stanfield, chose last night’s Portland Silverlight User Group meeting to publicly announce that Vertigo is opening an office in Portland. The Richmond Point, California-based company is a leader in developing rich Internet applications (RIA) for some very high profile customers. Their projects include NBC Winter Olympics 2010, NBC Sunday Night Football, the 2008 Democratic National Convention, CBS 2009 Presidential Inauguration, and Hard Rock Cafe’s Memorabilia site. These RIA applications are built on the Microsoft technology stack and typically feature streaming HD video or high resolution imagery, combined with a high degree of user interaction, and exacting business requirements.

Stanfield introduced Cori Taratoot, general manager for Portland, as well as other staff from Vertigo, and explained his goal of having a team of ten developers and graphic designers in the Portland office by mid 2010. For more information on employment opportunities with Vertigo contact Jobs-Portland@vertigo.com.

Thanks for a great presentation at PSLUG last night, and welcome to the neighborhood!

The Seattle Silverlight User Group holds its first meeting tomorrow, Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7PM. The meeting is on the Microsoft Redmond campus in the Building 40/41 cafeteria (map). The speaker will be John Stockton, senior RIA developer for Ascentium and  Microsoft Silverlight MVP, speaking on What’s New in Silverlight 4.

Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo, plans to be there. How about you?

Here’s the extra nudge you might need to attend the Portland Silverlight User Group’s inaugural meeting tonight, Tuesday, December 8, 2009. Pizza and networking at 6PM, Vertigo CEO Scott Stanfield speaking at 6:30PM. Fiserv Cafe, 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR 97214.

Rich Interactive Beer to follow at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

The Portland Silverlight User Group is hosting its first meeting on Tuesday, December 8, 2009, and they are starting off with a big splash. Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software, will be the speaker for the inaugural meeting. If you are not familiar with Vertigo, they designed the Silverlight-powered websites for the Hard Rock Cafe, the 2010 Winter Olympics for NBC, the 2009 Presidential Inauguration for CBS, and Sunday Night Football for NBC. Scott is also a Microsoft Regional Director, very cool.

The user group meeting is at the Fiserv Cafe (formerly the Corillian Cafe), 3400 NW John Olsen Place, Hillsboro, OR, 97214. The evening starts with pizza and networking at 6:00 PM, with the presentation at 6:30 PM. Afterwards there will be socializing at the Cornelius Pass Roadhouse.

Congratulations to Erik Mork and Kelly White for starting the Portland Silverlight User Group. See you there.

A number of years back, Jeffrey Palermo had an idea for people arriving early in town for a Microsoft conference to meet up in a hotel bar the evening before the conference. The idea is to have a beer, catch up with old friends, make new ones, and generally get psyched for the conference to come. From that humble origin, Party with Palermo was born.

If you’re headed to Los Angeles next week for PDC09 and you’re going to be there Monday night, November 16, then head over to http://pdc09.partywithpalermo.com/ and RSVP for this free party. The PDC09 edition will be at The Mayan, 1038 South Hill St., Los Angeles, CA 90015, from 7 to 10 PM. I will see you there!

Josh Phillips from Microsoft’s Parallel Programming with .NET team has posted titles and abstracts for four parallelism talks at PDC09. Exciting stuff: patterns of parallel programming, PLINQ, the state of parallel programming, and F# for parallel and asynchronous programming. Richard Orr wondered if they are all going to happen at the same time. Nice.

I have a lot of books on my shelves that I have come to depend on from both Microsoft Press and O’Reilly Media, so I was interested to learn that these two publishers have announced that they will be partners starting November 30, 2009. In the partnership, O’Reilly will become the distributor for Microsoft Press in North America, and both Microsoft and O’Reilly will develop titles for Microsoft Press.

In another aspect of this partnership, O’Reilly is launching a new ebook initiative, an area where they are already active. Quoting their statement (emphasis added):

"There are more than 40 million people walking around the world with a mobile phone or digital device which essentially gives them a bookstore in their pocket. That's an enormous opportunity for publishers today," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly and an influential leader in the Open Source and Web 2.0 communities who has over one million Twitter followers. "We are no longer a print publisher that happens to sell digital books too. We're a digital publisher that also sells print books. All publishing is now digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the web. Books must behave like the web they're now a part of."

"We will apply the lessons we've learned and the knowledge we've gained about digital publishing," added O'Reilly. "And we will remain true to our own values. All the derivative content from each Microsoft Press title--whether it's an ebook, app, webcast or an interactive video--will be issued DRM-free, because that's what we believe in doing."

Their joint press release makes a good case for the strengths that each partner brings to the deal and I wish the partnership great success. I met Tim O’Reilly when he spoke at the Portland Area .NET User Group several years ago, and back then my conversation with him at the get together afterwards was about the challenges of an information age that is rooted in print and struggling to adapt to fickle forces of the digital, online world of consumers.

I am concerned about the decline of print media in general that we’ve been witnessing for a few years. As organizations like newspapers and publishers scale back their organizations, there will be types of activities, like maintaining foreign bureaus in the case of news industry, that fundamentally can’t be supported by smaller organizations. It takes an enormous amount of work to amass, assimilate, organize, and present a book’s worth of technical material. The publisher plays several crucial roles that allow that to occur. As publishers find tough challenges in the digital information age and a poor economy, it is the audience, we the readers, who stand to lose a lot if they don’t meet those challenges. I have read and heard Tim O’Reilly over many years, seen where he comes from, what he stands for, and what he makes happen in the professional community. I can’t think of a better person to get it right for the authors, the editors, the technology developers, and the reading public.

You can meet Tim yourself in the short collection of his writings titled, naturally enough, Tim O’Reilly in a Nutshell.

The Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) team for PDC09 has had a flurry of proposals for sessions on Agile methodologies. Too many for us to select them all. So we’re seeking your comments on what areas you’d like to discuss over on the PDC BOF blog.

[Disclaimer: Geek content = 0. Fun content = 100. This is a really great show that I produce once a year. -Stuart]

The Portland Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza is the annual show of the Portland Juggling Festival, featuring the festival’s special guests, and it is always an amazing evening of talent, laughs and entertainment. This year’s show is going to be INCREDIBLE, so please tell all your friends, family, colleagues, everyone to come to the show. We depend on your word of mouth to get the message out and people to the show, so please spread the word!

Juggling & Vaudeville Extravaganza
7:00 PM, Saturday, September 26, 2009
Benson Auditorium, 546 NE 12th Ave, Portland, OR

$16 General, $10 Student with ID, $8 Child (12 & under) and Senior

Tickets available at:
Brown Paper Tickets: 800-838-3006 or click here.
And at the door, day of the show (cash or check only)

Facebook Friends! If you are on Facebook, it is easy to tell your friends about the show. Simply follow this link to the event page, add yourself to the event, and click on “Invite People to Come” under the logo. It is quick, it is easy, and it will make a big difference to the success of our show!

Okay, what about those performers? I’m glad you asked!

This year we are extremely excited to have Sean Blue from New York City headlining the show. Sean is an artist, juggler and teacher, a creative force whom the famed Bill Irwin called a “master juggler.” Sean received the Award of Innovation from the International Jugglers’ Association in 2007. His versatile and technical juggling skills will astound you.

We are fortunate to have not one, but two of the world’s leading women unicyclists in the show. First, Kaori Matsuzawa, Japanese Women’s Unicycle Champion, returns to the Extravaganza this year. She was a huge hit at last year’s festival and show, and we just had to have her back! Last year she brilliantly transformed unicycling into modern dance on our stage, performing in a long flowing dress. Yes, you read that correctly, unicycling in a dress. Kaori has an all-new routine for us this year!

Second, Becky Banning is the reigning North American Women’s Freestyle Champion, having successfully defended her title from last year, and won 5 gold medals in artistic unicycling in the process. At 17 years old, she has competed in seven North American Championships and two International Championships, and is the leader of the Panther Pride Unicycle Team in North Bend, Washington. We are honored to have two highly talented unicyclists on the same stage, showing two wonderfully different approaches to riding on a single wheel.

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Beth Clarke to Portland. Beth is a rope walker (or funambulist if you’d like a fancy word to impress your friends) who will perform a slack rope act like none you’ve ever seen. Well, I suppose that is unless you’ve seen Beth perform as a member of the highly acclaimed Sweet Can Circus from San Francisco. She has studied and performed all over the world, and I bet the end of her performance will surprise you!

There are many more acts in the show, including Poetic Motion Machine (2009 IJA Team medalists), Stanford Juggling Research Institute (2004 IJA Team medalists), Circus Conspiracy, and local favorites including Rhys Thomas, Charlie Brown, Curt Carlyle, and more!

You can see that this is going to be one incredible evening of live entertainment without equal anywhere! It only happens once a year, so plan to join us and bring all of your friends!

The Portland Silverlight User Group has launched with the unveiling of their website www.portlandsilverlight.net. The group is a special interest group of the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG) and shares the PADNUG mailing list — a good choice IMHO.

The meetings will be on the second Tuesday each month, starting on Tuesday, 8 December 2009. Keep an eye on the website for details.

Erik Mork (consultant, trainer, and Microsoft MVP on Silverlight) and Kelly White (web technologist and self-styled part-time Silverlight zealot) are the masterminds behind this user group.

There’s never been a better time for Portlanders to get started or be excited about Silverlight, so mark your calendar now and plan to attend the kickoff meeting.

I am co-chairing the Birds-of-a-Feather track for PDC09, 17-19 November 2009 in Los Angeles, California. This is the seventh Microsoft conference that I’ve had the honor of working on behalf of INETA to organize the community-driven Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions.

A BOF session is a conversation among a community of peers around a topic about which the participants are passionate. There may be some participants who are more knowledgeable than others, or have more experience; some who have less. Some folks will be well known, some will not. Some folks may want to just listen.

The point of a BOF session is to bring together people who share an interest in the topic so they can express their ideas and experiences, questions and insights, and hear what others have to say. It’s not a presentation, there are no projectors; it’s about having a timely discussion together.

BOF sessions begin with you proposing a discussion on a subject that matters to you. If your session is chosen, you will host the session at the conference, getting the conversation started and keeping it moving forward.

Proposing a BOF session is fast and easy. Just copy and paste this simple form into an email message, fill in the title, description, some information about you, and send it to us at 2009@pdcbof.com. BOF proposals are considered on a first-come, first-considered basis, which means that submitting your session proposal early increases the chances for it to be selected.

Hosting a BOF session is a great way to network with people who are interested in the topic, and to share your experience and expertise with your fellow software developers and architects. And it is an easy way for you to give back and enrich our professional community.

What else can you do? Subscribe to the PDC BOF blog, follow the PDC BOF on Twitter, and join the PDC09 BOF event on Facebook. And, of course, attend the BOFs at PDC09!

The word on the street is that there is a rise of Windows computer systems infected due to the Win32/Conficker.B (a.k.a. “Downadup”) worm. Microsoft addressed this issue (MS08-067) in October 2008, as did other anti-virus vendors, but there are quite a number of unpatched, vulnerable systems in the wild.

This vulnerability affects Windows 2000, XP, and Vista; and Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Attacked systems may lock out users, disable update services, and block access to security related websites. That’s a serious matter. Don’t become a victim!

What you should do.

Earlier this month, Microsoft updated their Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) to help remove variants of Win32/Conficker. Download and run this tool.

If you regularly update your Windows system, either with Automatic Updates or manually applying Windows Updates, chances are you are fine. Run the most recent MSRT anyway, for your own peace of mind.

If you run Windows operating systems, turn on the Automatic Updates. You can control if updates are applied automatically or prompt to be run. If you are inside an IT-savvy organization, they may push these updates out to your machine already. If you absolutely can’t live with automatic download of updates, then add a recurring task to your calendar to check for and apply updates manually. I’d suggest doing it once a week.

Run a commercial-grade anti-virus product, and keep its malware definitions up to date.

If you want more information about this specific threat, including manual steps to remove it from your system, read this Microsoft Knowledge Base article: Virus alert about the Win32/Conficker.B worm.

After nearly four years with Corillian (now part of CheckFree (now part of Fiserv)), I have accepted a position with Aivea as chief software architect. I will be starting later this month. My initial focus will be on their Aivea Commerce Server product. Aivea is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and their commerce server is build on the latest Microsoft technologies: WCF, WF, ASP.NET 3.5, LINQ, SQL Server 2008… you get the picture. This is a very cool opportunity, and I am excited about the product’s and the company’s potential.

I’m hoping for a seamless transition that looks something like this. : )

using ( TransactionScope scope = new TransactionScope() )
{
  var me = Identity.StuartCelarier;
  Fiserv.CheckFree.Corillian -= me;
  Aivea += me;
  scope.Complete();
}

Aivea is located in Beaverton, Oregon, just west of Portland. Folks who don’t live here sometimes have a hard time understanding that Portland is the world’s largest small town. You always run into people you know. (Note to Noobs: do not burn bridges.) At Aivea, one of my new colleagues will be Rich Claussen, president of the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG). Rich and I have worked on a number of local activities including Portland Code Camp and being judges at last year’s TechStart Oregon Game Project Challenge.

I’ve had a great run with “CoriFreeServ,” working with really talented people, working on the Voyager architecture and exploring online banking domain, being involved in incredibly interesting projects, and even facing the challenges of two iterations of corporate acquisition in six months. But, at the end of the day, I simply couldn’t pass up this position with Aivea.

My 2009 is certainly shaping up to be one wild ride. I can’t wait!

Staying in touch. Around the middle of January, my old corporate email addresses at the corillian.com, checkfree.com or fiserv.com domains will become obsolete. You can reach me through my blog (under About Visual Stuart select the E-mail link) as well as my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

I received word today that I’ve been chosen as a speaker for the INETA North America Speakers Bureau. What a cool New Year’s present! Thanks to the selection committee and INETA for this opportunity.

INETA is the world-wide association of .NET user groups, and I have volunteered with INETA for several years on their membership and activities committees, and it is through the auspices of INETA that I co-chair the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd and PDC conferences.

The INETA Speakers Bureau provides speakers to member .NET user groups. I believe that I’ll also be called on to contribute a webcast to INETA Live. I will be getting details on the program in the next few weeks, and I’ll let you know when local user groups can start requesting me to speak.

My friend, colleague, and fellow alumnus, Kilong Ung is featured in an article titled "Fearless, Now" in the Reed College magazine. Kilong is a Cambodian refugee who survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and escaped through the infamous Killing Fields. From a refugee camp in Thailand, he eventually came to live in Portland as a high school student, and later graduated from Reed College in mathematics.

I worked with Kilong at Corillian for about half a year before we figured out we are both Reedies, both in mathematics, albeit at different times. Kilong is a relentless civic activist and motivational speaker, and he is working on a memoir, Golden Leaf, to be published in 2009. I encourage you read the article about Kilong and be inspired by his story.

Sara Ford has posted Visual Studio Tip of the Day #382 as the final tip in her popular 17 month series. From its introduction to yesterday's graceful exit, Sara has brought Visual Studio into sharp focus for a vast number of developers. Each post begins with a personable "Did you know..." and no matter how much I thought I knew about Visual Studio, often, no, I didn't know that.

Did you know... that the popular tips series was a labor of love (translation: not what she gets paid for), a gift to the developer community?

Mining her blog, Sara brought these golden nuggets out in book form this fall,  Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity (Microsoft Press, 2008).

And did you know... that all of the author's proceeds from the book go to help send Hurricane Katrina survivors to college?

Now Sara will be turning her attention to other ways to engage with the community, including her day job on CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting website. I cannot wait to see what's next.

We stand on the sandy shore and wave a fond farewell to the Visual Studio Tip of the Day series as it slips over the horizon. Adieu!

So long, and thanks for the all the tips!

I wasn't able to attend last weekend's WhereCampPDX, an unconference on all things geographical. I find the current Stuart v1.0's inability to be in two places at the same time to be overly restrictive. I'll have to work on a time-travel upgrade or cloning technology or something.

That meant that I missed real-life Pac Man on the streets of Portland. What a concept! It turns out that some grad students in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications program started the idea with Pac Manhattan, running through the streets around Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Each real-life player (Pac Man and the ghosts) is paired with a controller back in a game room, and players and controllers are in constant contact via cell phone communicating location and status.

WhereCampPDX transported the game to Portland's Park Blocks. Now you can watch the video of Jason Mauer in interview and in action as the Pac Man. Wild, man!

Get your party self down to Party with Palermo on Sunday night before PDC08. Join your affable host, Jeffrey Palermo, for great company and conversation, free food and drink, swag and more from 7:00 to 10:00 PM at Casey's Irish Bar & Grill in Los Angeles. The price of admission is one business card.

Don't throw an exception! RSVP so that Jeff knows you're coming.

Seattle Code Camp v4.0 is coming up on the weekend of November 15–16, 2008 at the prestigious DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington. Register now and make your plans to be there.

Code Camps are community-driven events, un-conferences really, with everything that's good about a conference (like great content) and none of the bad (like costing money). Code Camp is free, it happens on weekends, there's no marketing fluff or sponsor agenda to push. Its all about coders talking to coders about writing code. And it is absolutely not limited to Microsoft technology. Recent code camps have been picking up a broad range of topics — basically if it involves code then it's "game on." Contribute to the community by submitting a session today.

Code Camp is a great opportunity to sample tools and technologies that you might not be exposed to in your day job, or to dive deep on a topic with someone who knows where you are coming from. Code Camp is also one of the best opportunities to get started with talking tech in public. It's a warm, friendly crowd of people who share your passion about coding.

I'll be giving a Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0, looking at all the features introduced since C# 1.0 that change the way you program. It's a fast-paced Lessig-style talk, whipping through 300 slides (okay, some of them only have one word on them : ) and a demo in an hour plus change. I may present another topic as well, but I thought I'd wait and give other people a turn to sign up as well.

I'll be giving a presentation on "Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0 — The New Programming Model" at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, Washington on at 7:00 PM, Thursday, 9 October 2008. The user group meeting is at the Olympia Center, 222 Columbia St NW in Olympia. The meeting is free and open to the public.

This talk is Lawrence Lessig-style romp that is guaranteed to inform and entertain. Here's the abstract.

From its beginning, Microsoft has been working to change how we write and think about code. Many C# developers today continue to use only the original C# 1.0 features, frequently unaware of the features introduced in C# 2.0 and 3.0, or unsure about how or when to use them. This fast-paced session examines every new feature of C# which changes the way we write code. The effect of this whirlwind tour is to appreciate the evolution of a modern programming language, understanding where we came from and how and why we got here. The tour culminates with the dramatic introduction of a new declarative, data manipulation feature, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), but there's a lot to see along the way. Fasten your seatbelts and don't blink: we're going for a wild ride!

This is going to be my third time presenting to the South Sound .NET User Group, and I am looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

Anyone interested in grabbing a bite before the meeting? Leave me a comment.

Heck, yeah: I am going to PDC2008. I've been getting psyched about this conference for a number of months now, but I had to coordinate with wife, life, and the job scene. It is truly amazing how much you can do with WS-Coordination. Now all is coordinated: LA here I come.

The keynotes. Okay, I have to get this one little thing off my chest. I have immense respect for Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie. But I have seen him deliver keynote addresses three times (twice live, once by webcast) and I have yet to be inspired. Sure, it is hard to compete with the explosive dynamism of, say, Steve "Developers! Developers!!" Ballmer, and I firmly believe everyone needs to find his or her authentic and individual style. But Ray — uh, you are reading my blog, aren't you, Ray? — my recommendation is you work at connecting, I mean really connecting at a visceral level, with the developers at the PDC. Make it relevant. Make us care. Make us scream and shout. Make it a cathartic experience, with the young folk passing out in the aisles. Don't go overboard, but aim high.

There are three other keynote addressers in the line up. Rick Rashid, Senior VP of Microsoft Research, is in the plum position of telling us about cool and groovy things coming down the pike from the Research Labs. I enjoyed his similar talk at PDC03, so I am waiting to see what Rick has to show us another five years along the technology arc.

Then there is the dynamic duo of Don Box and Chris Anderson, each of them Batman to the other's Boy Wonder. It would be hard for me to hide my admiration for these two big brains. Both of them think big, make it real for the developers, and can go deep without making your head explode. Expect the Chris and Don Show to deliver the goods on the main attraction: The Oslo Story.

Open your mind with Open Space. I have chaired the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at a number Microsoft conferences. There is always a lot of work leading up to and at the conference. It's incredibly rewarding work, both exhilarating and exhausting. We obsess over how to keep the BoFs fresh, exciting, and compelling. From my personal vantage point, I am absolutely delighted to see Microsoft experimenting with new forms for attendee interaction.

The Open Space concept has been around since 1985, and it's been enjoying a rapidly expanding mindshare in the last few years. Microsoft held Open Space sessions at MIX08 and the 2008 MVP Summit. Building on those experiences, PDC2008 will feature Open Space sessions each day of the conference as part of the UnSessions. Think of them as a more spontaneous form of BoF sessions, and you'll be on the right track.

Sessions, sessions, sessions. The list of announced sessions continues to grow, featuring some very interesting topics. Oslo, Cloud Services, Mesh, Zermatt, Rosario, F#, .NET 4.0, Windows 7... it is all so exciting it will be hard to pick and choose which breakout sessions to go to.

Are you going to PDC2008? If so, see you in October.

My Tech·Ed 2008 North America DVD set arrived in my mailbox this morning! I am like a kid in a candy shop. Because I got busy during the conference with co-chairing Birds-of-a-Feather sessions, side meetings, and some quality time in the architecture lounge with the Ask The Experts, I didn't get to all of the breakout sessions I had scheduled. And I was only at the Developers week: there were some IT Professionals sessions that sounded pretty interesting. Now I can explore 650 sessions from both Tech·Ed weeks from the comfort of my laptop. I am jazzed.

Handy tip: the Developers sessions are on discs 1 through 5, the IT Pro sessions are on discs 6 through 9. The labeling or insert could have made that clear. But don't worry, it's all there.

If you didn't attend Tech·Ed 2008 North America, you can will be able to purchase the DVD set from the Microsoft Event DVD Store. (Yeah, I just learned that such a thing existed. Nice to know.) The Tech·Ed 2008 set is listed as "coming soon." Since I just received my set in the mail, I assume that means really soon now.

There is also a good deal of content available at TechEd Online including the conference keynotes and Tech·Talks.

Next year Tech·Ed moves to Los Angeles, California, and it moves up a month: May 12-15, 2009 for Developers, and May 19-22, 2009 for IT Professionals.

I'm back from some much needed time off, and here's an interesting idea that was sitting in my inbox on my return.

Check out the .NET Developer Virtual Conference, October 28 - 30, 2008, online everywhere. The conference is a very reasonable $100 for three days of content, with more than 30 how-to sessions. Julie Yack is the conference chair, and she got the idea after being very impressed with a SQL virtual conference she attended.

The speaker roster includes Ani Babaian, Rob Bagby, Kathleen Dollard, Scott Golightly, Tim Heuer, Ben Hoelting, Tim Huckaby, Dr. Neil Roodyn, Chris Sutton, and David Yack. That's quite some line-up.

Julie also volunteers with INETA, so if you are a member of an INETA user group, ask your user group president to contact Julie for a special discount.

Graham Watson, senior marketing manager at Microsoft has announced that Culminis will be transitioning to a volunteer-based organization, similar to INETA. Culminis is the association of Microsoft IT Pro user groups, sister organization to INETA which is the association of .NET user groups. I have been working with Culminis members for the last several years co-chairing the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd conferences.

As I understand it, Culminis has been receiving funding for staff as well as programs from Microsoft. On the other hand INETA's funding covers programs and minimal paid staff who support volunteers. Graham takes care to point out that Microsoft values user groups highly, and that there are pros and cons to each funding model. That said, Microsoft and Culminis will be working together to move their organization closer to the INETA model. My very best wishes to the Culminis crew through the upcoming transition period.

"The core services will be available to the new volunteer Culminis community and INETA as well as other associations such as PASS," writes Graham. "We think this is particularly advantageous to the community as a whole, as it ensures that Microsoft support is available to all User Groups and not just IT Pro groups."

Got a comment? Graham is really interested in your feedback.

Last week I gave a Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) presentation at the Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG). I figured it's summer, a couple of days ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, I should be prepared to have six people in attendance. But, in truth, it was around to 30. Not bad considering the competition. And it was great group for breaking in my new WF talk with several excellent questions and comments from the audience. And there was general beer drinking and WF merriment at Gustav's afterwards.

A PDF of the slides is available for you to download and enjoy.

Increase and decrease font size from the keyboard. I got tied up in traffic on the way to the talk, which discombobulated me slightly, and I forgot to bump up the font sizes in Visual Studio the way I always do. Thankfully, someone called the small fonts to my attention. As if on queue, Rich Claussen talked me through Sara Ford's Visual Studio Tip #242: "Did you know… You can bind macros to keyboard shortcuts (or how to quickly increase / decrease your text editor font size)?" That totally rocks. Thanks, Rich. Thanks, Sara.

Change font and size of IntelliSense. While I was looking that tip, I ran across an equally awesome tip for presenters on Sara's blog, "How to change the font and font size for Intellisense: Statement Completion, Parameter Info, and Quick Tips." I can see this one will be really handy for presentations where I am using IntelliSense to discover and explore some kind of object model. Nice.

Our story so far... Michael Eaton started it and tagged Sarah Dutkiewicz who in turn tagged Jeff Blankenburg and he turned around and tagged Josh Holms who did the tag thing to Larry Clarkin who so totally tagged Dan Rigby who put the tag on Chad Campbell who played his tagster card on Pete Brown who taggerized Shawn Wildermuth and he tagulated Julie Lerman who tagified Camey Combs and she tagged me. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

How old were you when you first started programming? I was 12 years old and access to computers were damn hard to come by in 1972. There was a PDP-8e in the basement of the math department building at Oregon State University where my father was earning his PhD. As children of a grad student, my brother and then I were allowed to use it. There was also a student-built 60-bit glass storage computer down there, much larger and far less useful as far as I could see.

How did you get started in programming? I played around with both of those computers for a few months, poking my way around some basic concepts of assembly language. Then I got a used copy of the textbook for Basic programming, and a small student account for the CDC-6600 in the new computer center.

What was your first language? I dinked aroudn with the PDP-8e assembly language, but didn't master it, so that doesn't count. That means good old Basic was my first language. Dad finished his PhD and we moved to Bellevue, Washington. After some searching around, my brother and I got a Xerox educational grant for a study group of junior- and senior-high school students to buy Fortran textbooks and some time on Xerox Sigma 9s to hone our skills. Hey, man, don't horde all the Hollerith constants, okay?

What was the first real program you wrote? The first program that I got paid for, if that makes it real, was in college. I wrote a pretty large simulation of the effects of Saturn's moons on its rings for a physics professor. That was in C.

What languages have you used since you started programming? Basic, Fortran, C, Pascal, C++, Forth, IA (x86) assembler, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and XSLT. I've experimented with a dozen others, stuff like Cω, Haskell, and F#.

What was your first professional programming gig? I took a year off from college in 1979 and landed a job with a small time-sharing firm, doing custom programming as well as operating a few PDP-11/70s. I remember working on several small projects, one of them was tracking oil well shareholders and productions. Another was running statistics on horse races.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely yes. Without a moment's hesitation.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Cultivate a passion for learning. Everything in software development changes all the time. If you don't love learning new stuff all the time, you are in for a rough ride.

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming? Gosh, that is a tough one. Once I wrote a call-graph profiler for a language that didn't have one, and used it to analyze and boost performance about eight-fold. The combination of writing the tool and applying it was totally cool.

Who are you calling out?  Friends, please forgive me: Scott Hanselman, Sam Gentile, Adam Kinney, Jesus Rodriguez, and Pat Helland.

This week Microsoft named my employer, Fiserv, as winner of the Global ISV Line of Business Partner of the Year for 2008. According to Microsoft's press release, the awards "honor Microsoft Registered, Microsoft Certified and Microsoft Gold Certified partners that delivered exemplary solutions for their customers during the past year."

Allison L. Watson, corporate vice president of the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft said, "The Partner of the Year Awards recognize the incredible innovation and value that Microsoft partners are delivering to our customers. The winners and finalists [...] have helped raise the standard for delivery of customer solutions and support. It is a privilege to recognize their work in designing and deploying exemplary customer solutions built on Microsoft technologies."

Fiserv's press release observes that our company is the only financial services partner to win this award. President and CEO, Jeffrey Yabuki, stated "We are honored to have been chosen by Microsoft as the first financial services partner to receive this global award. t is our mission to deliver differentiated technology solutions which help our clients achieve best-in-class results. We will continue to find innovative ways to extend our partnership with Microsoft to deliver value to Fiserv's clients today, and into the future."

Examples cited of these solutions led off with "Fiserv's next generation of the Voyager online banking product from Corillian, [which] leverages Web 2.0 features, including Microsoft .NET 3.5 ASP.NET, and enables banks to offer a differentiated and improved user experience to grow their online customer base and improve customer satisfaction." In case you lost your scorecard, Corillian was acquired by CheckFree in June 2007, and they, in turn, were acquired by Fiserv in December 2007.

Thanks to everyone at Fiserv and Microsoft who helped make this award possible!

Winners and finalists will be honored at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston, July 7 - 10, 2008. (Houston in July?) The guest speaker at the conference is 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of Garmeen Bank, banker to the poor.

I've been a fan of Edward Tufte since I first pulled his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information down off the shelf at Powell's Books and peered inside. Tufte has been termed by The New York Times "the Leonardo da Vinci of data," and four beautiful and powerful books have won 40 awards. A professor emeritus at Yale, he taught statistical evidence, information design, and interface design.

Tufte presents a one-day course "Presenting Data and Information" in a number of cities throughout the world each year. Not only is his topic fascinating, and his content the very best, but his masterful presentation and delivery are spellbinding. I am fortunate to have taken his class twice: the second time I got even more out of it than the first. He is that good.

Tufte is presenting his class in Portland at the Portland Art Museum on Wednesday, July 16, 2008. Register early, his classes often fill up quickly

Other cities on his speaking schedule this year include Minneapolis, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

The day-long course includes all four of Tufte's books, and the class's overall structure guides you through some of the major topics in each book. That's makes the $380 fee a great value and worthwhile investment.

Expand your mind. Change how you think about, design, and present information.

My brother is looking to hire someone with a pilot's license (need not be current) and general purpose database and computer skills. He works at a large aerospace company in Seattle. Interested? Click the E-mail link and let me know.

My friend Patrick Cauldwell will be talking on The Code Is The Easy Part on June 12, 2008 at 7 PM at OGI in Portland. His talk addresses of continuous integration in theory and practice. The talk is free and open to the public, please register at the above link.

The Code Is The Easy Part
Patrick Cauldwell
Sponsored by Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN)
OGI School of Science and Engineering, Wilson Clark Center
6:00 PM networking and pizza, 7:00 PM seminar

Patrick is also the recent author of Code Leader: Using People, Tools, and Processes to Build Successful Software on Wrox Press. To get a sense of where the book goes, read Patrick's post This I believe... the developer edition. Scott Hanselman wrote the forward to Code Leader and blogged some comments on the book.

With the TechEd 2008 Developers conference next week, Microsoft has announced the agenda for PDC 2008 including sessions and unsessions (don't ask questions, just go there.) PDC 2008 happens October 27-30, 2008 in Los Angeles, California. There is an early-bird registration discount of $200 until August 15, off of the full conference price of $2,395 USD.

Start making plans now.

Microsoft DreamSpark is a program for students at accredited colleges and universities in 11 countries to get free copies of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Microsoft Expression Studio, Windows Server 2003 and the XNA Game Studio.

Get started with DreamSpark today and spark your own dream.

DreamSpark is hosted on Channel 8, Microsoft's site specifically for students. It is a sister to Channel 9 and Channel 10. There are some great resources, as well as serious fun to be had on these websites.

Here is a blog from a US student who is studying in Chengdu, China, the provincial capital city near the epicenter of the massive earthquake on May 12. He's in an exchange program between the University of Washington and Sichuan University. His first-hand accounts of what is happening there add an interesting perspective that complements what we hear in the news.

He has also helped create China Earthquake Aid (CEA) at chinaearthquakeaid.org for collecting donations to deliver aid to the communities most affected by the disaster. They are working through the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students, and the University of Washington Combined Fund Drive. Visit their website to find out how you can help.

This weekend I was one of the judges at the Oregon Game Project Challenge 1.0 (OGPC). This state-wide competition had teams of high school students presenting games they had created using GameMaker around this year's theme of energy. The competition was held at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, and sponsored by the TechStart Education Foundation in affiliation with the Oregon University System.

The range of work we saw was amazing, and some of it was simply astounding. The competition was arranged in five categories — programming, user experience, presentation, research and development, and teamwork — with trophies awarded to the top two teams in each category, plus first- and second-prize champion awards. The first-place champion award winner was PHRED (Philomath High Robotics Engineering Division) which scored very well across the categories. As their team name belies, they also competed in the Oregon regional FIRST Robotics Competition. They took home two awards from that competition, and a flier announcing the OGPC 1.0 competition. Way to go, Philomath!

The judges were divided into panels, with different panels judging the technical and presentation categories. With 21 teams attending (there were a few no-shows), each panel saw about one-third of the teams. After judging the teams, all of the judges gathered to deliberate. The challenge here, as head judge Chris Brooks put it, was to try to bring some objectivity into a highly subjective process. It was hard to level-set the judging, and absolutely fascinating listening to what the judges had to say about the teams they saw. We made some difficult decisions, and I was really satisfied with the final results.

Great job to all of the teams who took part, and to everyone who made OGPC 1.0 come together in a few short months. I am looking forward to seeing next year's competition.

If your TechEd 2008 plans include arriving the day before the conference, then there's a party with your name on it.

For the TechEd Developers 2008 conference, get down with Party With Palermo: TechEd 2008 Developers Edition on Monday, 2 June 2008. This is the pre-conference party that started it all, hosted by affable MVP Jeffrey Palermo. Visit the website and submit your name so they know you are coming. I'll be there.

For the TechEd IT Professionals 2008 conference, say hello to Party with the Pros: The IT Pro Party on Monday, 9 June 2008. Your sponsoring host is Doug Spindler of Pacific IT Pros, and independent nonprofit association. Visit the website and request a Golden Ticket if you want to get in.

Both parties will be held at the fabulous Glo Lounge, just blocks away from the conference venue.

And if you are with a corporation or organization that wants to be seen, there are sponsorship opportunities available for both of these high-profile, high-visibility shin-digs.

Time sure has a way of creeping up on you when you're not looking. This Friday, 2 May 2008, is the last change to save $200 on TechEd 2008 conference registration.

If you're just waking up and smelling the coffee, due to the popularity of this conference in recent years, this year TechEd is two separate conferences on two subsequent weeks. TechEd Developers 2008 is 3–6 June 2008, and TechEd IT Professionals 2008 is 10–13 June 2008, both in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I am looking forward to the new split-week format. The last few TechEds have so large it's been easy to feel lost in the vast sea of attendees. While I am certain that this year won't exactly be intimate, it will be more approachable and on the whole a better experience for all concerned.

Join in the fun at BarCamp Portland 2008 this weekend. It is a free developer event for people to share and learn from each other. The content is determined by the attendees at the event. Friday evening is a kickoff reception, session planning and networking. Saturday and Sunday are the real-deal BarCamp sessions.

All activities are at CubeSpace, 622 SE Grand, Portland, OR, 97214. Be sure to register at Upcoming.

The new, redesigned INETA website launched and it is well worth checking out. INETA is the world-wide association of .NET user groups, and the new website makes it even easier to find local user groups, locate speakers in the Speakers Bureau, watch INETA Live videos, and much more.

I have been involved in a number of ways with INETA since 2002. In fact, Bob Goodearl and I co-chair the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd Developers 2008 on behalf of the .NET community under the auspices of INETA. They are good folks.

Kudos to everyone who's devoted time and effort to the site redesign — ineta.org is looking good!

I attended the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle and Redmond, Washington last week. Great technology and it is always nice to mingle with 1,700 of my closest übernerd friends. Monday and Thursday we were all together in Seattle's WSCTC for keynotes, general meetings, and Open Spaces sessions. That formed the crunchy outer shell around the dense chewy inner nougat of breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday held at various locations on the Redmond campus.

I attended the Connected Systems Division (CSD) track, where the first session answered one question on everyone's mind, "can we blog/twitter/podcast/text/talk about the track sessions?" There were several answers: no, no, no, no, and no. Okay, we are allowed to say that we were at the MVP Summit in the CSD track, and that we talked about Oslo. And that's it. Here goes:

I went to the MVP Summit and attended the CSD track. We talked about Oslo. It was cool.

Now what else can I talk about? Great Party with Palermo on Sunday evening. On Monday, Sean O'Driscoll, who will be leaving Microsoft shortly, gave a great speech about community. I liked the Open Spaces sessions on Monday afternoon, they were fairly similar in nature to Birds-of-a-Feather sessions that I help run at TechEd and PDC, so I was right at home. Michelle Laroux Bustamante led a WCF discussion, and Roman Kiss talked about his WCF null channel on Code Project. It was great to catch up with Roman on several issues during the Summit. Monday evening I I geeked it up with Sam Gentile and other folks from Neudesic, and then I ducked out of the reception to work on the TechEd BOF sessions.

At Tuesday night's CSD dinner I had the pleasure of dining with Don Box, and then discussing deployment woes and aspirations with Sasha. I was so engrossed in the conversation I didn't realized everyone else had left the restaurant, and sprinted back to the shuttle bus just in time. Wednesday night was the attendee party at the EMP, where I had some fun sharing around my new light-up juggling balls. Lots of geeks juggle.

Thursday we heard keynote sessions and Q&A with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzy and Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. Ozzy's keynote was interesting, but I personally felt it missed the mark on being inspiring. In fairness, MVPs are a tough crowd.  Ballmer, by contrast, is a dynamic character on and off the stage, and had some good answers to tough questions. Thursday afternoon I was back on campus for some follow-up CSD sessions about some very exciting technology.

Thursday evening I met up with Australian Regional Director Adam Cogan and we had dinner and discussed versioning for services. Adam was asking all the right questions. How come we don't have any of the right answers? And why aren't they baked into the platform?

Friday the Summit was over, but I had some meetings on campus. While waiting for a public transit bus from Seattle to Redmond, I got an added bonus to my trip: Pat Helland walked up an introduced himself. As luck would have it, that's his daily commute bus. We had a great conversation on the ride in.

All in all, it was a great geek week.

I will be presenting a talk at PDX WebFoot this Saturday, April 12, 2008 that covers virtually every feature introduced in C# 2.0 and 3.0.

Whirlwind Tour of C# 2.0 and 3.0
Stuart Celarier — 2:30 – 3:30 pm 

Microsoft has been working hard on changing how we write and think about code for years. Many .NET developers today still work with C# 1.0 — or use newer versions but don't use many of the new features. C# 3.0 has been released, so let's look at what's changed. In this lightning fast session we'll cover virtually every new feature of C# added since 2003. That way you can make smart decisions about which technologies to pursue without getting lost or overwhelmed. Fasten your seatbelts, we're going for a ride!

PDX WebFoot is part of The Code Trip. It is free and open to the public. Please register through Upcoming.

The event runs from 1:00 pm to 7:00 pm, including dinner, and is located at OGI's Wilson Clark Center, 20000 NW Walker Road, Beaverton, Oregon. Other presenters include Adam Kinney, Walt Ritscher, Eric Mork, Kelly White, and the Code Trip Crew. They will be presenting and drilling into a load insanely great Silverlight goodness from the MIX08 Conference.

I hope to see some of you there!

The InnoTech 2008 conference is here in Portland, Oregon, April 16 – 17, 2008, at the Oregon Convention Center. There are a lot of events included in the conference or associated with it. You may be particularly interested in two of those events.

The Developers track runs on Wednesday, April 16, and Thursday, April 17, and features ten sessions. A number of my friends and colleagues are presenting:

• Erik Mork, Silverlight 2: How Web Applications will be Made
• Andrew Hay, Understanding LINQ
• Patrick Cauldwell, The Code Is the Easy Part
• Michael Lynch, Patterns for Separating UI Code from Business Logic
• Travis Illig, Unit Testing with TypeMock

And the other sessions look great, too. A big hand to my fellow SAO Development SIG committee member, Mark Lawler, for putting the track together.

The Open Source Summit runs on Thursday, April 17. One of the many things that I really respect about the open source community is their creativity when it comes to presentations and conferences. The Open In Oregon Lightning Talks session features seven snapshot 'lightning talks' by an outstanding panel of presenters. Nice.

InnoTech 2008 is presented by the Software Association of Oregon and EasyStreet Online Services.

I am delighted and honored to receive Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2008 Award for Connected System Developer. This is my third consecutive year receiving the MVP award. Thank you to the folks in Microsoft's MVP program and Connected Systems Division for this award.

Microsoft's Connected Systems Division owns the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), CardSpace, and BizTalk Server (BTS) technologies. BTS gains a new focus and considerable prominence in Project Oslo.

Thanks so much, I really appreciate this award.

If you are ever attending a BOF session and the moderator is pitching a product or delivering a presentation, call him or her on it...

Hunter in Roanoke, Virginia, has a few blog posts about Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) sessions at the TechEd 2008 conferences. I love the humorously title of his post "Birds of a Vendor?" where he asks a great question:

A quick look through the Birds of a Feather voting area (for the IT Pro Conference) shows a lot of sessions that appear to be sponsored by vendors. I wonder if they will turn into a sustained marketing pitch.

Absolutely not!

I posted a reply in the comments. Here's one part that I want to share with everyone attending BOF:

I absolutely agree with you, and we have heard loud and clear from past conferences, that BOFs are not appropriate for marketing products or services. Nor are they presentations or lectures. We communicate that to all of our moderators. Okay, sometimes those old presentation and marketing habits are hard to break, and that’s where you, the good old community, come in. If you are ever attending a BOF session and the moderator is pitching a product or delivering a presentation, call him or her on it. Be polite, but be firm. You can say that all of you came to discuss the subject together, and you’d like to hear what other people in the room think about the subject. [More...]

And a minor technical correction: vendors don't sponsor the BOF sessions they moderate. They volunteer just like the rest of the moderators and hosts.

Proposals for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions are accepted through Wednesday, April 2, and voting continues through Monday, April 7, 2008. Use these links to propose a BOF session for TechEd Developer 2008 or TechEd IT Professional 2008.

I keep getting asked this question, so I bet others are asking as well.

Yes, the dates for PDC08 have been announced: 27 – 30 October 2008 in Los Angeles, California. Save the date, and clear the time with your boss, spouse, entourage coordinator, indoor Ultimate Frisbee league, and anyone else who normally has a lock on your coordinates.

No, no other details have been announced yet. I think that Microsoft focused on  TechEd 2008 at the moment.

But you can subscribe to the PDC event RSS feed so that updates are delivered straight to you.

Get your hands on slides, code samples, and whatnots from the Boise Code Camp 2008 sessions. My session just points back to posts on this blog: no surprises there. That is all.

The Portland Adobe Developer User Group is hosting Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services Evangelist, on Thursday, 20 March 2008 at 6:00 PM, speaking on "What's Possible in a Post-Web 2.0 World?" at PCC Sylvania, Library Room 112. Networking begins at 5:30 PM.

Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new ideas built on Web Services. You will also learn how others, empowered by technology advances—known as “Web Scale Computing”—created businesses that weren’t practical until recently... (More...)

Amazon has done phenomenal things with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so this ought to be great.

See the Upcoming Meetings for the Portland Adobe Developer User Group for additional details.

Slides are now available from the talk I gave with Jason Mauer, The (Re-)emergence of Declarative Programming, at Software Association of Oregon Development SIG on February 21, 2008.

The session explored declarative programming and its history, then examined recent interest in declarative styles of programming, particularly on Microsoft platforms, and what forces are driving the resurgence of declarative programming.

Join the SAO Social Network site (if you're not already a member), and go to the DevSIG group to access the slides.

Proposals have been coming in for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions at TechEd Developer 2008. Take a look at the ones we've received so far, and vote for your favorites.

And now is the time to submit a BOF proposal of your own. As I've said, this is a great way to get involved in the professional development community and connect with people who share your passion about some aspect of technology, community, or careers. I hear that moderating a BOF session also looks good on resumes.

Do it today so other people can vote for your session!

Well it's eight o'clock in Boise, Idaho.
I'll find my limo driver. Mister, take us to the show.
— What's Your Name, Lynyrd Skynyrd

Flying in to Boise means getting to see the beautiful surrounding mountains from the air. Boise is situated in a valley basin with mountains all around it. With the winter snow on them they are simply stunning. And the view from the ground isn't bad either.

I got in Friday in time for the presenter party with food, drink, familiar faces, and an agile exercise of replacing the schedule in the attendee packs. Scott Hanselman was in the house, fresh in from MIX08, with his laptop out on the bar evangelizing to the bartender. It was a nice, warm welcome to town.

Boise Code Camp had all appearances of a great success. Scuttlebutt has it that the final attendance at the door was around 375. Hokey smokes, Bullwinkle! Boise has just raised the bar for code camps in the northwest. You guys rock.

My talk, The New Programming Model — C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5, was well received. I had 300 slides and a ten minute demo in 60 minutes, and not a single bullet point anywhere. Okay, some slides only had one or three words on them. I got some great feedback on the talk, thanks campers!

I am not going to post my slides since the format leans so heavily on the delivery. And even compressed that is a pretty hefty download. Instead, I am announcing here that I'll be working with a friend at Microsoft to record the session as a series of short videos for your nerd viewing pleasure. We plan to get the first ones in the can this week, and we may need another week or two on production and working out hosting. Watch the blog for details.

In the meantime, here are some great starting points for digging deeper into C# 2.0 and 3.0 features.

• What’s New in the C# 2.0 Language and Compiler, MSDN Library
• Overview of C# 3.0, MSDN Library
• Create Elegant Code With Anonymous Methods, Iterators, And Partial Classes, Juval Löwy, MSDN Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 3

Inspiration for the presentation format came from Dick Hardt's keynote address at OSCON 2005 on Identity 2.0; and he, in turn, was inspired by the lectures of law prof  Lawrence Lessig.

I enjoyed the other sessions that I went to at camp. I am only disappointed that the laws of physics prevented me from being in two sessions at the same time. Mark Miller of Devexpress got crazy passionate about creating great UX for two solid hours, but I had to duck out after the first one to go give my talk.

The afters party was a nice affair, and we toured the fabled and swank Code Trip bus. So that's how rock stars tour! I'll be meeting up with the Code Trip crew again when they hit Portland on April 10 for the PADNUG MIX-A-LOT, and then as they make wind up their tour in Seattle for the Microsoft MVP Summit.

A great big note of appreciation goes to this year's camp director, David Starr, and to his personal support team and lovely wife, Eleanor Starr. Thanks also to Chris Brandsma, chief session wrangler, and Richard Hundhausen for fine hospitality. Congratulations to everyone on a superlative code camp!

If you're going to TechEd Developer 2008, June 3–6, then the time is now to propose a Birds-of-a-Feather session for the conference.

Get involved

I volunteer with INETA as co-chair of the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd Developers 2008, and I encourage you to get involved and give back to the professional community by leading a Birds-of-a-Feather session. "Birds of a what?" I hear you ask.

Okay, imagine you're at a conference with, say, about 10,000 of your closest geek buddies. And you know that somewhere among the teaming multitudes there must be two or three dozen people who share your passion about that special topic that is near and dear to your heart. How do you find each other, connect, and exchange ideas? You hold a Birds-of-a-Feather session, that's how.

A Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) session is an open discussion, not a presentation or lecture. No slides or demos allowed. Let's just sit down and talk. And after many hours of conference breakout sessions with talking heads in darkened rooms, it is truly refreshing to turn the lights on and talk together as peers.

BOF sessions are community driven. The topics are proposed by you, selected by you, moderated by you, and attended by you — you the conference attendees, you the professional community. BOFs are about what you want to discuss, separate from the conference agenda and sponsors.

This is your chance to facilitate a discussion with others at the conference who share your passion about your topic. You don't need to be a recognized expert or rock star, just have an understanding and keen interest in the topic, and be willing to moderate a session. Moderating a BOF is also a great way to get your name out in the community.

Critical acclaim

Over the past several years, INETA, Culminis (our sister organization on the IT Professional side of the house), and the entire community have stepped forward to make the BOF sessions a valuable and vital part of TechEd. And Microsoft has matched our enthusiasm with their commitment. BoF sessions now run concurrent with the conference breakout sessions throughout the day. Microsoft hosts an All-BOF evening catered with food and drink and plenty of BOF sessions. And BOF sessions have been integrated in the conference materials and online scheduling system. Last year, hundreds of people participated in the BOFs. Together we have achieved great things.

Jon Flanders of Pluralsight rates Birds-of-a-Feather sessions among the three best things at TechEd last year.

Get involved now!

These essential conversations cannot happen without you proposing and leading BOFs that are important to you.

Please propose a Birds-of-a-Feather session for TechEd Developers 2008. We are seeking your BoF proposals by March 19, 2008.

Yes, there are two TechEd North America 2008 conferences

If you haven't heard, Microsoft is dividing the immensely popular TechEd into two separate conferences — TechEd Developers , June 3–6, 2008, and TechEd IT Professionals, June 10–13, 2008 — in Orlando, Florida. Here are some links to help you find your way to the BOFs in each conference

TechEd Developer, June 3–6, 2008 — Conference home | TechEd Community Page | BOF Proposals | BOF Community Sponsor is INETA

TechEd IT Professional, June 10–13, 2008 — Conference home | TechEd Community Page | BOF Proposals | BOF Community Sponsor is Culminis

I've got my tickets in hand and I am heading to beautiful Idaho this Saturday, 8 March 2008, for Boise Code Camp 2008. I attended last year's edition, and it was a first-class event all the way. This year there will be 63 sessions (including mine) and 46 presenters, along with lunch and dinner packed in a day. And like code camps everywhere, it is always free. If you are anywhere near the area, it is not too late to register to attend.

My session, a Lawrence Lessig-style romp through everything new in C#, is at 3:30 PM.

The New Programming Model — C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5

Microsoft has been working hard on changing how we write and think about code for years. Many .NET developers today still work with C# 1.0 on .NET 1.1 — or use newer versions but don't know about or use many of the new features. C# 3.0 and .NET 3.5 have been released, so let's look at what's changed. In this lightning-fast session we'll cover virtually every new feature of C# and the CLR added since 2003. That way you can make smart decisions about which technologies to pursue without getting lost or feeling overwhelmed. Fasten your seatbelts, we're going for a ride!

The day concludes with a party with the Code Trip crew. I met Jason last night for microbrews and he was filling my head with all the cool stuff they've got going on with the trip and the bus. They're picking up the bus in Las Vegas tomorrow, winging through Salt Lake City, and will be in Boise on Saturday. I want a stem to stern tour of this magic bus.