Every year Microsoft hosts an event they refer to as the MVP Global Summit in the Seattle area.  This event is invitation only event where those who have been recognized as Microsoft MVPs get to meet with their product groups, discuss strategy, impart real-world scenarios, and learn what is coming down the pipe.  The event is simply wonderful, where else can you get a chance to interact with the people directly responsible for parts of the Microsoft eco-system you care about most deeply.  Of course, such openness does not come without restriction.  The MVPs are all under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) which means that for 90%+ of what we are told, we cannot discuss it with other people.

You can’t discuss it?  Why go then?!

A fair question, with at least four answers. So let’s go through them.

First – I can’t discuss things, but I still know them.

When thinking about the trip to the Summit you must remember that you’re learning things far before the public will, but that does not mean that the public will never learn these things.  Much of what is discussed will eventually become public information, and once it is those who have been to the Summit will have had the most time to internalize and strategize on the information, often meaning they will be able to act on that information more quickly.  Also just because I can’t share my knowledge does not mean I can’t share my judgment.  I can use the information I have received to inform the choices I make for my own personal work and what I do for my clients.

Second – Meet the Team

Every Summit is a chance to meet new people within Microsoft who are working on your area of expertise and interest, to put a face with a name, and to collect business cards or email aliases.  This can be wonderful later on if you want to provide feedback or ask a short question during the 99% of the year that isn’t the MVP Summit.

Third – Bond with your Local MVPs

When you travel to the MVP Summit you get a chance to spend time strengthening your relationships with the MVPs in your area.  Your local MVPs are the backbone of your community, and getting to know them better will help you help your community better.  You’ve got time during the Summit to discuss plans for future events, eat, drink and be merry.

Fourth – Meet MVPs from around the world…

This may seem like a repeat of the entry above, but meeting MVPs from outside your local area has a different purpose.  Your making connections that open up an exchange of ideas.  You’re putting names with faces from Twitter, Facebook, StackOverflow and other sites.  You never know when a passing conversation about your interest with some technology might not result in you being able to help a company half way around the world make a wiser technical decision.  Absolutely key.  Again, eat, drink and be merry.

Conclusion

Rather obviously a lot of what the MVP Summit is about is networking, but you’re and MVP right?  You network, help people, organize meetings, answer questions, in general you are a community leader, and influencer.  And so are ALL of those other MVPs.  Even if every MVP touched merely as many people as a small user group, say 50/month people, then the 1400 MVPs who just left the Summit in 2010 represent 840,000 developer touches.  And those numbers are low.  From blog posts, to conferences, and more an MVP has huge reach … which is why we were invited to begin with.

Thank you to Microsoft, the Product Groups, the Developer Evangelists, and the incredible MVP Leads for making this Summit a smashing success!

I’m thrilled to announce that Dallas TechFest 2010 has set a date of July 30th, 2010 and is currently engaged in a Call For Speakers looking for those in all sorts of technology areas who wish to speak.  If you’ve got expertise in .NET, Java, Ruby, PHP, ColdFusion, Python, Flex or anything else then send in an abstract and see if you can secure a speaking slot at Dallas TechFest 2010.

Sometime in March we will be opening registration, but in the meantime mark the date on your calendar, and get ready for our registration drive.  Like in previous years, if you recommend people to register you will be entered to win a great prize.  What prize? Hmmm….  Well it’s got a touch screen, a 3G modem, and a huge app store.

I’m working on a side-project right now that is using Gravatars and found the wonderful article by Ryan Lanciaux on creating an HtmlHelper extension.  His extension was good, but did not use integrate with the FluentHtml model of MvcContrib, so I refactored his original into the following class, which does the same thing, but allows for fluent building of all the options.  Someone will undoubtedly point out that this could have used a couple of Enumerations, and their right, but I decided the API was static enough that I’d just create the methods. Anyway, I hope someone else gets some use out of this.

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;
using MvcContrib.FluentHtml.Elements;
using System;
using System.Web;

public class Gravatar : Element
{
    private string _email;
    private string _default;
    private string _rating;
    private int _size;
    private string _alt;

    public Gravatar(string email) : base("img")
    {
        _email = email;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToUrl(string url)
    {
        _default = url;
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToIdenticon()
    {
        _default = "identicon";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToMonsterId()
    {
        _default = "monsterid";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultToWavatar()
    {
        _default = "wavatar";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar DefaultTo404()
    {
        _default = "404";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar Size(int size)
    {
        if (size < 1 || size > 512) throw new ArgumentException("Gravatars can only be between 1 and 512 in size.", "size");
        _size = size;
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar GRated()
    {
        _rating = "g";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar PGRated()
    {
        _rating = "pg";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar RRated()
    {
        _rating = "r";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar XRated()
    {
        _rating = "x";
        return this;
    }

    public Gravatar AlternateText(string alt)
    {
        _alt = alt;
        return this;
    }

    protected override TagRenderMode TagRenderMode
    {
        get
        {
            return TagRenderMode.SelfClosing;
        }
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        var src = string.Format("http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/{0}?", EncryptMD5(_email));

        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(_rating)) src += string.Format("r={0}&", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(_rating));
        if (_size != 0) src += string.Format("s={0}&", _size);
        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(_default)) src += string.Format("d={0}&", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(_default));

        base.builder.MergeAttribute("src", src);
        base.Attr("alt", _alt ?? "Gravatar");

        return base.ToString();
    }

    private static string EncryptMD5(string Value)
    {
        using(var md5 = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider())
        {
            byte[] valueArray = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(Value);
            valueArray = md5.ComputeHash(valueArray);
            string encrypted = "";
            for (int i = 0; i < valueArray.Length; i++)
                encrypted += valueArray[i].ToString("x2").ToLower();
            return encrypted;
        }
    }
}

public static class GravatarHtmlHelper
{
    public static Gravatar Gravatar(this HtmlHelper html, string email)
    {
        return new Gravatar(email);
    }
}

A couple of days late, but I’m thrilled to announce that Microsoft has recognized me as a Most Valuable Professional again for 2009.  I’m always immensely honored to be counted among this incredible group of technologists.  MVPs are known around the world as passionate experts in their field, and I can only hope to live up to that ongoing recognition.

For those of you who follow my blog for technical reasons, you’ll be pleased to know I continue to be recognized as a Connected Systems Development MVP, and that you should see a lot of interesting content regarding Code Contracts, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Workflow Foundation all in .NET 4 in the coming weeks.

Starting Monday morning I will be starting a new project for a client of my employer Improving Enterprises.  I’ve spent a good deal of time talking with my new teammates about what technologies we will be using for the project, and I thought that work might be of interest to others, so here are some of the highlights.

Technology Stack : VS2010, .NET 4, C#

The first thing that was decided, during the initial scoping phase of the project, was that this project was a nearly ideal candidate for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.  How did we come to that decision?  The desired architecture for the project is such that certain features of WCF 4.0 and Entity Framework 4.0 would help with the implementation, and the timeline of the project is such that we have a no concerns over the current lack of the a “Go Live” license.  For language it was decided we will primarily be working in C#. With that decided, we get to the far more interesting pieces.

Inversion of Control : StructureMap

Obviously we are going to need an IoC container for the project, and we have settled on StructureMap for that.  The competition in this regard was Castle Windsor as Improving has the benefit of employing Craig Neuwirt, we knew we had an expert.  The final decision to go with StructureMap instead hinged on two related things, complexity and learning curve.  While we were quite certain we could pick up Castle quickly enough (2 of the 3 did not know it already), we were not as certain how easy it would be for those who follow us.  StructureMap had a single well defined scope (IoC), versus the larger bite that the Castle Project would be for those who follow.  We recognize we could have just done Windsor, but we found no compelling reasons to do that versus StructureMap.

As noted, we will be doing a good bit of WCF 4.0 on this project, so it naturally followed we would need to integrated StructureMap into the channel stack to let it handle the creation of our service instances.  Jimmy Bogard has an excellent post on this subject, and we followed that guidance closely, though we updated the StructureMapServiceHostFactory to use ObjectFactory.Initialize as was recommended by the excellent ObsoleteAttribute usage in the latest StructureMap.

Source Control : GIT

Even within a group of people as passionate about creating great technology as we have at Improving, there are certain debates that deeply divide us.  Source Control is definitely one of them.  We have a certain segment of the company that are passionate advocates for Team System, obviously including Chris Tullier our resident Team System MVP.  But there are others who are passionate believers in Subversion.  Still others are not happy with either of those options, and still seek the “better mouse trap” for Source Control.  We discussed the pros and cons of various solutions and decided in the end to try GIT, because of its distributed model, and see how we liked it in comparison to the others.  It is an experiment, and we shall see.

Logging : log4net

Really, is there another option?  The definitive logging library for .NET, it does what it needs to and does not bring along any additional baggage.  As we are also using StructureMap, we found this blog post by John Rudolf Lewis helpful in discussing how to inject log4net using StructureMap (or Ninject) without losing fidelity in the logs.

Conclusion

So there are a few of our technology decisions, things I’ll be learning on in the coming months more and more.

Dallas TechFest is behind me, and now it is time to look forward.  Forward to Visual Studio 2010, Forward to .NET 4.0.

Tomorrow (Friday, June 26th) I will be presenting at the Dallas DevCares event on Parallelism in .NET 4.0.  This talk is one I’ve given before, but two things will be different this time.  First, I will be presenting with the use of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, so you will see how this actually works on actual .NET 4.0 bits.  Second, I will be presenting for a somewhat longer time than my usual User Group talk, we will be have time to take lots of questions, and to cover some fundamentals that I might not normally cover at this talk.

I’d love to see any of my readers and followers there, so cruise over to their website and register.

No, you read that correctly.  If you follow the link below and register for Dallas TechFest 2009 between now and June 14th, 2009 you will be entered into a drawing to win a Mac Mini.  We've got lots of space around, so spread around the code to all your friends. Oh, and you'll also be getting $20 off the full ticket price on top of that.

Why tell your friends?  Because if your friends tell us on their registration that you referred them, then you get an entry into the drawing as well.  So spread the word on Twitter, your blog, your company's internal list, or anywhere else you think there are folks who would want to go to Dallas TechFest.

http://tinyurl.com/WinAMacMini

But wait ... you're telling me I'm losing out because I registered early?  Not at all!

Nope, we're giving away another Mac Mini as well, as a special thank you to all those who registered early.

At 3:30 today I’ll be speaking at the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp 2009 about Concurrency in .NET 4.0.  Not in NWA?  No worries.  These guys have all the rooms setup with LiveMeeting, and are going to be making the content available during the day. If you’d like to join, just enter the LiveMeeting associated with each room at the Code Camp, you can find the links to them here.

Come, join in the fun, ask questions, and learn something today!

I’m thrilled to announce that BizTalk Server 2009 has become available on MSDN, as of last Saturday.

The 2009 release includes many cool things, but I’d like to highlight the unit testing capabilities that have been added to the product.  With this release, there is now support for unit testing of Maps, Schemas and Pipelines.  While not perfect, these features are a great initial down payment on bringing BizTalk development in line with state of the art practices in other development areas.  I’m so thrilled that these features have been added that I will be doing a post series over the next several weeks on reducing the friction in unit testing these features, and you can look forward to the first installment shortly.

I'm in Arizona currently, specifically Phoenix, and last night I had the chance to speak at the AZ.NET User Group thanks to the wonderful folks at INETA.  I promised the folks there that the slides would be posted last night, so I'm only about 8 hours late.  The talk was an Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation, and the demos focused on showing a simple service being setup from nothing to running.

You can download the slides here, or the final code here.