Clark Sell - MIX

Where’s Waldo This April

Clark Sell — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:31:08 GMT

On thing I promise this blog will never become is an event calendar. Unfortunately, until I can give my site a major overhaul things will a bit screwy. This month ( April ) is a very VERY busy month and there are some cool things going on. What? Ask no longer. ~~Unf~~ortunately for you, I am pretty much speaking at all of this…

April 10th – Windows Phone 7 Dev Camp

from Dave Bost’s Blog….

With the excitement over the Windows Phone 7 Series, developers are chomping at the bit to start building apps. Although were a few months away from releasing Windows Phone 7 Series to the world, now is a good time as any to start ramping up our developer muscle to build amazing applications targeting the new Windows Phone.

This DevCamp will start the day off by providing a walk through of the the development tools including Visual Studio and Expression Blend. From there, attendees will break off into groups to hash out their phone applications. At the end of the day, each team will be given an opportunity to showcase their ideas.

Who: Developers, Designers, Mobile Enthusiasts and Entrepreneurs

When: Saturday, April 10, 2010 @ 8:30am – ? (map)

Where: ITA, 200 S. Wacker, Chicago, IL.

Register Here

April 13th – Wisconsin .NET Users Group Meeting

Re-MIX, MIX redux. or just plain MIXed Up

Did you miss the Microsoft MIX 2010 conference? Well let’s have a fun chat about MIX. With so much stuff covered in those 72 hours, it’s just impossible to try and cover it all in less than 2 hours. If you’re looking for slides then this isn’t the session for you. We are going to take a technology tour for a few of the technologies that were making all the buzz on the floors of the MIX conference.

Introduction to MEF

ASP.NET MVC

OData

Silverlight 4

Windows Phone 7 ~~Series~~

IE9

As if that wasn’t good enough, I have a Zune HD to give away.

When: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 from 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM (CT)

Where: Direct Supply - 6663 N Industrial Road, Milwaukee, WI 53223

Register Here

April 19th – McHenry Cloud Users Group Meeting

“Hello World” on the Microsoft Azure Platform.

When: Monday, April 19, 2010 from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (CT)

Where: Panera Bread - Crystal Lake - Private Meeting Room, 6000 Northwest HWY, Crystal Lake IL, 60014

Register Here

April 22nd – LCNUG Meeting

Re-MIX, MIX redux. or just plain MIXed Up

Did you miss the Microsoft MIX 2010 conference? Well let’s have a fun chat about MIX. With so much stuff covered in those 72 hours, it’s just impossible to try and cover it all in less than 2 hours. If you’re looking for slides then this isn’t the session for you. We are going to take a technology tour for a few of the technologies that were making all the buzz on the floors of the MIX conference.

Introduction to MEF

ASP.NET MVC

OData

Silverlight 4

Windows Phone 7 ~~Series~~

IE9

As if that wasn’t good enough, I have a Zune HD to give away.

When: Thursday, April 22, 2010 from 6:45 PM - 8:45 PM (CT)

Where: College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois

Register Here

April 27th – Pewaukee Users Group Meeting

If your from the area this should look a bit odd. Why? Well there is no such user group. We had a great opportunity to provide our community the ability to spend some time with Group Program Manger Jay Schmelzer.

Jay Schmelzer is a Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for the Visual Studio design-time tools and runtime components used to build applications that leverage Microsoft Office client and server products, many of the Visual Studio features vital to end-to-end application development experience including Data Design-time, building and consuming WCF services and Deployment, as well as the application programmability and extensibility available in Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. Jay has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at application development conferences.

Jay will be coving the following topics:

· Overview of SharePoint 2010, a developers perspective – SharePoint 2010 includes many new developer-oriented capabilities. Developers can build collaboration applications leveraging the new platform capabilities, more easily deploy their solutions taking advantage of the more flexible deployment model SharePoint 2010 provides and monitor the behavior of their applications using built in monitoring capabilities in SharePoint 2010.

· SharePoint development with Visual Studio 2010 – Visual Studio 2010 provides first class support for professional developers targeting SharePoint. Visual Studio 2010 provides the continuum from collaboration with SharePoint Designer, to an integrated and familiar developer experience in Visual Studio to integration with the ALM capabilities of Visual Studio Ultimate and TFS.

Food will be served.

Where: Microsoft Office – Waukesha, N19 W24133 Riverwood Dr. Suite 150, Waukesha Wisconsin 53188

When: Tuesday, April 27th, 2010, 6pm – 9pm

Register Here

April 28th – Jay Schmelzer at the Centare offices

SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010: What are the Possibilities?

In this session you will discover why SharePoint 2010 maintains a positive user experience when it works together with Office 2010 and more. With functionalities such as reviewing documents on a team site or work on presentations while offline, SharePoint 2010 users can stay productive and innovative as they go about their tasks, maintaining the rich user experience they are accustomed to.

As organizations introduce new tools to help their end users be more productive and innovative, some employees may wonder how they would have time to jump between the different products.

Overview of SharePoint 2010, a developers perspective

SharePoint 2010 includes many new developer-oriented capabilities. Developers can build collaboration applications leveraging the new platform capabilities, more easily deploy their solutions taking advantage of the more flexible deployment model SharePoint 2010 provides and monitor the behavior of their applications using built in monitoring capabilities in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint development with Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 provides first class support for professional developers targeting SharePoint. Visual Studio 2010 provides the continuum from collaboration with SharePoint Designer, to an integrated and familiar developer experience in Visual Studio to integration with the ALM capabilities of Visual Studio Ultimate and TFS.

Agenda
8:15am – 8:45am – Welcome, continental breakfast and registration
8:45am – 9:00am - Introductions
9:00am – 11:00am - SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010: What are the Possibilities?
11:00am - 11:30am – Wrap-Up and Q&A

Why you should register...

As organizations introduce new tools to help their end users be more productive and innovative, some employees may wonder how they would have time to jump between the different products.

About the Presenter:

Jay Schmelzer is a Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for the Visual Studio design-time tools and runtime components used to build applications that leverage Microsoft Office client and server products, many of the Visual Studio features vital to end-to-end application development experience including Data Design-time, building and consuming WCF services and Deployment, as well as the application programmability and extensibility available in Visual Studio Tools for Applications.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. Jay has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at application development conferences.

Where: Centare Group, Ltd. 125 N. Executive Drive Brookfield, WI 53005

When: Wednesday, April 28th, 2010, 8:40am – 12:00pm

Register Here

April 29th – 2010 Launch

Visual Studio 2010 will ship on April 12th. We will be celebrating this HUGE release with a number of LIVE launch events taking place around the US as well as the World. The theme for this launch event is “Life Runs on Code”. We will have sessions covering Application Lifecycle Management, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 development, Windows, Web as well as the recently announced Windows Phone 7 development all with Visual Studio 2010.

One of the first launch events will be taking place in Chicago on April 29th. I will be presenting the Web and Windows Phone 7 sessions in Chicago. We hope to see you there!

What: Visual Studio 2010 Launch (Chicago)

Where: Chicago Marriott Oak Brook, 1401 W. 22nd Street, Oak Brook, IL (map)

When: Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Register Here

These events are happening all over the US, for other cities, visit the Launch site. We are also hosting a number of smaller launch events. You can find a city near you by visiting MSDN Events.

April 30th – Jay Schmelzer at Clarity Consulting

Exclusive opportunity to meet with a Visual Studio Group Program Manager

Jay Schmelzer is a Group Program Manager on the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft. Jay and his team are responsible for the Visual Studio design-time tools and runtime components used to build applications that leverage Microsoft Office client and server products, many of the Visual Studio features vital to end-to-end application development experience including Data Design-time, building and consuming WCF services and Deployment, as well as the application programmability and extensibility available in Visual Studio Tools for Applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Jay was a partner with a leading consulting firm and specialized in the design and development of enterprise applications. Jay has authored several articles and books on application development and is a frequent speaker at application development conferences.

Among the topics Jay can cover include:

Overview of SharePoint 2010, a developers perspective – SharePoint 2010 includes many new developer-oriented capabilities. Developers can build collaboration applications leveraging the new platform capabilities, more easily deploy their solutions taking advantage of the more flexible deployment model SharePoint 2010 provides and monitor the behavior of their applications using built in monitoring capabilities in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint development with Visual Studio 2010 – Visual Studio 2010 provides first class support for professional developers targeting SharePoint. Visual Studio 2010 provides the continuum from collaboration with SharePoint Designer, to an integrated and familiar developer experience in Visual Studio to integration with the ALM capabilities of Visual Studio Ultimate and TFS.

Agenda:

8:15am – 8:45am – Welcome, continental breakfast and registration

8:45am – 9:00am - Introductions

9:00am – 11:00am - SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010: What are the Possibilities?

11:00am - 11:30am – Wrap-Up and Q&A

Where: Clarity Consulting, 1 N Franklin St, Suite 3400 Chicago Illinois 60606-4425

When: Thursday, April 29th, 2010

Register Here

May 1st - Chicago Code Camp

"The Code Camp Manifesto" declares a simple idea to bring developers from disparate platforms and languages together into one software community.

By and For the Developer Community

Always Free

Community Developed Material

No Fluff only Code

Never occur during work hours

Where: IIT- Stuart Building, 10 West 31st Chicago, IL 60616

When: Saturday, May 1st, 2010

Register Here

We do have a number of special Guests coming by. We are a stop on the DotNetRocks Road Trip. Carl and Richard will partying with us at the Chicago Code Camp.

Developer Smackdown Musing #20

Clark Sell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:15:00 GMT

MIX10 - Live from MIX day 3 (official day 2)

Today the quick update turned into a group discussion with Lance Larson, Travis Feirtag and Aaron Hoffman about what we all saw and heard at MIX10.

Listen here –> Play Now

Show Notes

Keynote

Today's show includes several guests. Many thanks to Lance Larson, Travis Feirtag and Aaron Hoffman for joining us in what was going to be a quick recap of the day but turned into a really interesting conversation about what we all got out of the day at MIX10.

The keynote this morning was awesome again, quite a few presentations and demos around things to come and some that are already here.

Internet Explorer 9 (a current work in progress) - you can install the testdrive version now. Following HTML5 standards was the first point. The ultimate goal is to display the same output across all browsers. Performance demonstrations were also shown and very impressive.

Scott Guthrie highlighted several new features in Visual Studio 2010

OData - Open Data Protocol which is a standard way to provide data feeds that open up huge possibilities of using web/intranet data

Because of the taste of OData, we went to a few specific sessions. The first was "OData: There's a Feed for That" (Pablo Castro) and he talked about where the OData protocol evolved from and their goals. After that he showed how to access the data through the feeds. Good discussion for consumers of web data and how OData improves the capabilities.

After getting a taste of that we needed to know how to publish so we went to OData: How to Create a Feed for That by Mike Flasko. He demonstrated how to publish OData feeds in a .NET service environment.

There's a lot more in here. Too much to list.

Resources

Internet Explorer 9 - Testdrive
OData.org - tools, SDK, articles, examples
Open Data Protocol Visualizer
PowerPivot
Project Gustov - if you are a digital artist, take a look at this
OData Example: http://api.visitmix.com/odata.svc/Sessions

Developer Smackdown Musing #19

Clark Sell — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:11:00 GMT

MIX10 - Live from MIX day 2 (official day 1)

Today we got to hear an amazing keynote at MIX10 about Silverlight 4.0 and Windows Phone 7 Series. Saw some really impressive demos of applications for the phone that were created in only 3 weeks. Then, went to some sessions talking about the phone, MVVM, app development and more.

Listen here –> Play Now

Show Notes

Notes from some sessions we saw today:

From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform - Scott Hanselman

Scott used the NerdDinner.com site and code to demonstrate some conveniences that you can build into your web site to promote social activities. You've seen this done on a lot of web sites and Scott pointed out some specific ideas.

Use Geo-Location to do things like display information relative to the user's current location. So using services you can use the client IP address and find where the user is "calling from". With that you can show maps, do more contextual lookups, etc.
Implement hooks into social connections like Twitter and Facebook. Though user click permission, post what the user is currently doing, or planning or reading about, etc.
Use approaches like Open Search to create more standardized search results within your site
Use MicroFormats which is additional markup attributes to provide metadata for information displayed in your site pages to promote better searching, crawling, etc.
Provide flexibility in the way users are authenticated through multiple login services (OpenID, YahooID, etc.) possibly in addition to standard forms authentication
Provide for RSS feeds on your content

Overview of Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform - Charlie Kindle

This session was packed! Charlie showed the concepts and goals that went into the development of the application platform for WP7 and demonstrated how all of it became a reality.

Integrated Experience - "Hubs" and the "3 Screens" (People, Office, Pictures, Music/Video, Marketplace and Games)
Hardware
- Consistent capabilities across all phones
- 1 resolution at launch (800x480)
- 2nd added later (480x320)
- Same touch capabilities
- Consistent CPU
- Consistent RAM
- Optional physical keyboard
Experience = People + Standards + Server Code + Client Code (Demo: MIX Scheduler on the phone)
Users need to be able to customize the phone
Developers need the ability to be profitable
Enable all this through the cloud
2 types of applications
- "Apps" - Silverlight
- Games - XNA
Useable sandbox
Service-based application deployment
Emulator has to be realistic (Phone OS compiled for x86 in a VM)

Build Your Own MVVM Framework - Rob Eisenberg

He is the creator of Caliburn which is a very popular MVVM framework. In this session he showed a Caliburn influenced very lightweight MVVM framework.

Resources

Developer Smackdown Musing #18

Clark Sell — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:02:00 GMT

MIX10 - Live from MIX day 1

Today is the pre-conference sessions and we talk about the new Silverlight 4.0 capabilities and a little about ASP.Net MVC 2.0.

Listen here –> Play Now

Show Notes

Silverlight 4, New Features

This is a non-comprehensive but still big list of new features coming with Silverlight 4

Out of browser: Version 3 provides this capability BUT you were in a very restricted sandbox. In V4 you now have access to much more of the system resources which means you are in an elevated trust mode.
- Native Integration: means you can do COM interops. For example, from Silverlight, you could launch Excel, control it, pass data into it and retrieve data from it.
- Full Keyboard in full screen mode: Useful in kiosk applications
- File Access: Read/write to the file system
- Full File Path on Open/Save dialogs
- Cross Domain Capable: For example, if you want to interact with
  Twitter. In the past, you would have to do work arounds like creating intermediate services that you would interact with. Now you can go directly to Twitter and call the API's.
Enhanced bound data validation: You can declaratively set up individual field validations as well as cross-field validations. There's a new ValidatesOnDataErrors property within a bound data entity that tells the framework to initiate a notify event when there's a validation error.
More out of the box controls - too many to list here
More out of the box media capabilities
Socket-level programming
- UDP Multicasting
- TCP Streaming Sockets
- TCP WCF Capability using net.tcp protocol giving you WCF programming model and great performance
Right-click: you can program against the right-mouse down and right-mouse up events so you can do things like context-menus instead of just getting the Silverlight configuration dialog
Drop targets: you can build a Silverlight app to be a drop target so drag pictures from your file system into the app is possible
MEF integration: You will be able to compose applications at runtime with the Managed Extensibility Framework

There's more but even this list has a lot of great stuff.

ASP.Net MVC 2.0

As mentioned previously, ASP.Net MVC 2.0 has been RTM'd. So, you can go get it from the official web site here. I sat in on a boot-camp session today but had to leave. The presenter was just not hitting on all cylinders and it got a little painful to watch. I came away with a couple tips before I had to bail though:

Go download and install the RTM release. You can get it here.
The old ASP.Net syntax of <%= Html.Encode(item.Title) %> has been deprecated. The new syntax is <%: item.Title %>. Not a huge change but definitely simpler.
Use ViewModel's to interact with the data rather than straight up with the models themselves. This lets you provide only what is necessary to the view.
Especially when working with VS2010/.NET 4.0 and interacting with databases, use Entity Framework to create the models. EF 4.0 is a definite improvement and works well with MVC (that includes working through ViewModels from the point above).

If you want to use ASP.Net MVC 2.0 and need some training, there are several tutorials/videos out on the site.

Resources:

Mix 2010 conference agenda

Clark Sell — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:34:00 GMT

Musing #17 on DeveloperSmackdown.com Mark and I talked about a few techniques \ thoughts on how we handle conferences like Mix. We’re not pro’s, but over the years they seem to at least work for us.

Conferences are a great place to network with all kinds of people. I usually try to plan on both formal and informal visits with people. I like to start planning “formal like visits” as much as three months out. Now of course, that all depends on what type of event your going to. At this years MVP summit, I knew I would be going 3+ months out and since it was at the mother ship it was a great opportunity to meet with different members of the product groups.

As for this trip to Mix, I have the following lined up:

7 podcasts
1 tentative podcast
1 formal party
1 tentative dinner event
Pre-Conference day long training event

I guarantee this will change the minute I get off the plane. You have to be flexible at any event because things are always changing.

Ironically, I don’t pay to much attention to the conference sessions until about a week out. Honestly like everyone else, I have to many other things going on to try and worry about it. Things change so why waste the time. In fact things can change up to the minute. Given that about a week out I start to make my plan my schedule. I always plan 2 to 3 session per track. A session might end up to full or hell even miss leading. If you get in and it’s not what you want, CUT BAIT and LEAVE.

So what do my days look like ( FWIW my session picks are not stack ranked )?

Sunday – Travel and Pre-Conference

I am taking the first flight out. I have family matters to take care of on Saturday so I will be rushing to get out to Vegas. Once I land I will get checked in and head to my pre-conference session. I will be spending the entire day doing a little training. Things will end around dinner. At which point I am sure I hook up with a number of guys for dinner and drinks.

Monday – Conference Kick Off

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Tuesday – Sessions

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Wednesday – Sessions and Conference End

Session 1

Session 2

Session 3

Session 4

Deep Dive into Orchard Extensibility for CMS Developers

Session 5

Thursday – Travel Date

Basically a travel day. Once home I will try to spend a few minutes gathering my thoughts while things are fresh in my head. Then I will try to build out a plan of the stuff I either want to re-review or plan to see at some point.

Oh man, it’s going to be a busy week. I hope to see you at Mix

Developer Smackdown Musing #17

Clark Sell — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:31:00 GMT

Mix10 Smackdown – Were kicking off things.

In this musing Clark and Mark kick off their trip to the Microsoft Mix 2010 Conference in Vega$. We will explore some of the different techniques they use to navigate such a conference.

Listen here –> Play Now

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Show Notes:

DeveloperSmackdown.com got stickers. We would love to give you one. If yo

u see us, feel free to ask. If you’re not in the area just email the show and we will figure out how to get you one.

ASP.NET MVC2 Released!!! Now that makes us really happy!!

Some great Mix10 links:

Want to see Clark on This Week in Channel 9 show 98?

Have you missed the buzz that is Windows Phone 7 Series? I am sorry if you have. Make sure you check out both Mix and Charlie Kindel’s Blog for a ton of great information.

This week we announced Chicago Code Camp 2. While the site isn’t anything special yet, we are working on it. We would love to see you there, so go register at the Chicago Code Camp site.

Tips and Tricks:

Symbolic Links Defined per msdn.com

“A symbolic link is a file-system object that points to another file system object. The object being pointed to is called the target.”

Useful links

Rocket Dock. What is Rocket Dock, well this following was taken directly from RocketDock.com:

“RocketDock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock.

Now with added Taskbar support your minimized windows can appear as icons on the dock. This allows for better productivity and accessibility.”