Tim Rayburn's Blog - Presentations for User Groups - Connected People make Connected Systems

My friend Chris Koenig recently put up a post called "Microsoft Central Region - Who (and where) are you?" in which he shared the above image which I thought was worth re-sharing here.  So what does this image show?  It shows the "sub areas" within Microsoft's Central Region where the Evangelism teams focus.  Chris, our Developer Evangelist from Dallas, covers Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.  Recently they've added some help for him in the geographically vast area via J Sawyer based in Houston.  Both Houston and Dallas are huge markets for Microsoft and as such having a DE based in each of these cities will help run Chris a little less ragged.

Now, many of my readers are based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and we're spoiled because we see Chris on a regular basis because he is based here.  But it is important to remember that he's just as responsible for the Little Rock, or Northwest Arkansas groups (not to mention Lubbock group) as he is for those in D/FW.

I was reviewing this map and realized that in the last several week's I've hit most of these areas, in fact all but the "Midwest Area".  I've covered:

• North Central
• Minneapolis BizTalk 2006 R2 Launch
• Heartland Developer Conference
• Heartland Area
• Memphis Day of .NET
• South Central
• Little Rock .NET User Group
• VSLive! Austin
• Houston BizTalk 2006 R2 Launch

Here is what I can tell you after all traveling:

• My favorite Marriott hotel chain is the Fairfield Inn chain.  Good breakfast (unlike Courtyards) and bright, happy rooms.
• My wife believes I've forgotten how to get home.
• My boss believes I've forgotten I'm a billable consultant.
• I believe that I'm seriously looking forward to vacation next week.

To complete my Arkansas trip, on July 3rd I spoke to the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group and presented my talk "Introduction to C# 3.0".  While there are not any downloads I can offer for that talk, it is all code made up on the spot in reaction to questions about the features, I would like to take a moment to thank them for having me out to speak.  Jay Smith, President of the NWADNUG, was an excellent host and I enjoyed both speaking and hanging out with many of the members at Applebee's after the meeting. If you find yourself in Fayetteville AR, or are ever invited to come speak to this group, you should definitely visit them. 

Furthermore Fayetteville itself is a very pretty town, the trip in up I-540 reminds me what I miss about living somewhere that elevation happens, and there are plenty of great little shops in the area including one of the better board games shops I've run into in a long while.

This evening was the .NET 3.0 Community Launch event at the Dallas .NET User Group.  With our trusted leader Omar away in Ft. Lauderdale, on business I'm assured, Keith handled everything wonderfully and things went very smoothly.  Four local developers took turns walking us through the new features of .NET 3.0, starting with Shane Holder doing a short introduction and Windows Workflow Foundation mention.  This was short on details but DDNUG had recently had a speaker on WF so there was a reason.

Second up to bat was Abraham Saldana talking about WCF, this was a good talk but short due to the launch event format and I look forward to next month when DDNUG will be graced with the presence of Sam Gentile to talk about WCF.

Third up, talking about the red headed step child of .NET 3.0, was Trent Nix on Windows CardSpace.  Trent doesn't realize this but for sheer "it got people talking" his presentation on WCS won the night hands down but more on that later.  It was an excellent overview of Card Space and it's strengths and shortcomings.

Finally came my bud Dave O'Hara talking about Windows Presentation Foundation.  This was a good talk, driven by several of the examples I had seen before but still very cool.  It got a lot of interest from the crowd, and he even put me on the spot at one point when pointing out the namespaces at the top of the XAML pages for the quote:

"If it doesn't have namespaces it's nothing more than angle bracket delimited files."

Which I believe it Scott Hanselman as butchered by Tim Rayburn.

After the launch event several of us, Caleb, Dave, Shane, Abraham, and some others went over to a place called "Hole in the Wall" over on Harry Hines and 635.  Burgers, Bikes and Blues rule the day here, but on the back patio that night, under the glaring lights of Caleb's camera we had a great discussion about lots of stuff but mostly Identity, CardSpace and OpenID.  It was a great time talking with some really bright guys about the pickle that is the Identity problem.  Caleb recorded nearly the entire time for CommunityCast.TV and yours truly even threw down a challenge to the community at large backed with dollars, but for those details you'll need to wait until Caleb gets the videos posted.

I've got several talks coming up in the next month, if your interested in learning more about any of these subjects I encourage you to check these out.

• Scott Colestock's BizTalk Deployment Framework - January 10th, 2006 - Dallas BizTalk User Group
  This talk will be an overview of Scott Colestock's excellent BizTalk Deployment Framework.  This is a tool for automating BizTalk deployments built in NAnt.  If you're working with BizTalk and don't have this tool, you're simply working to hard.
• Black Belt XML - January 11th, 2006 - Little Rock .NET User Group
  This will be the same talk I recently presented to the Dallas .NET User Group, but this time in for the great folks of Little Rock, AR.

I had the privilege tonight to speak at the Dallas .NET User Group.  While December meetings are normally lightly attended, we had a good crowd who was very engaged on the subject matter.  The talk reviewed XML namespaces, XPath syntax, and closed with a review of the XmlReader object in the .NET Framework.

I appreciate everyone giving me some of their time and I hope you learned something.

Lots of stuff has been happening lately, but I am long overdue in announcing that I will be speaking at the Tulsa Tech Fest on October 14th, 2006. This looks to be a fantastic event with the very best from around the US attending, including Carl Franklin from .NET Rocks, Ron Jacobs from Microsoft's Patterns and Practices Group, and many others.

Sogeti will be there in force, with Ed Kissinger and Ed Blankenship of EdSquared.com presenting two sessions on Team Foundation Server and VSTS.  I will be presenting two talks, one on Zero Cost .NET, a demonstration of how Microsoft's products can realistically compete with the LAMP offering, and a second presentation on NUnit Extensibility.

I'm particularly excited about the Zero Cost .NET presentation, which I've been working on gathering the resources for and which should have a block-buster closer demonstration.  I hope you can find time to come out and check out what Tulsa Tech Fest has to offer.

I would love to come to your user group and present on any of the following subjects.  If you would like to have me present, please feel free to contact me using the contact option above.

BizTalk Server 2004
This overview of BizTalk Server 2004 will work with more real-world examples than the standard Microsoft overview.  During this presentation the demonstrations will include creating schemas, maps and orchestrations.  Schemas will include creating a flat file schema to produce a simple X12 EDI.  The specific example covered in the presentation takes the non-existent Claims Corrector Medical Claims Clearinghouse (CCMCC).

Black Belt XML
This presentation covers high level XML tips which can have an immediate impact on how the attendees use the System.Xml namespace.  Including performance, caching, and object use tips this presentation.  Also included in this class is a hands-on demonstration of code profiling using the open source tool NProf.

Test Driven Development
This is an overview of the Test Driven Development methodology.  The presentation uses NUnit to show the basic concepts behind TDD and how it has grown out of the existing methodologies of software development.

COM+ Development in .NET
COM+ provides access to many options not otherwise easily available within the .NET Framework, most importantly the ability to perform distributed transactions.  This presentation will cover the basics of COM+ for those not familiar with it, and then show how to create COM+ component from within the .NET Framework.

Free Tools You Need To Know
This presentation is a tour of some of the most powerful open source and otherwise free, tools which are available for the developer toolkit.  Common tools to be included are NUnit, NCover, NProf, FxCop, and NAnt.  There is also an optional add on to this presentation which quickly covers three commercial tools that all developers should be aware of that can be added if your group does not mind the discussion of commercial utilities.

Code Generation
Using CodeSmith, produced by CodeSmith Tools LLC, this presentation covers how code generation can significantly reduce the amount of repetitive work required from developers.  This presentation will show how to use Code Generation for creating a Data Access Layer set of components.  It will also cover how this same technology can be used to ease the pains of not only data access woes, but presentation layer and XML problems as well.