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EnergizeIT Goes to Kelowna

On Tuesday, Damir and I flew into Kelowna to do an EnergizeIT presentation for their software developers and IT Pro types. I must say that the Okanagan Valley, where Kelowna is situated, looks gorgeous from the air:

Okanagan Valley, as seen from my plane window

Okanagan Valley, as seen from my plane window

Okanagan Valley, as seen from my plane window

Okanagan Valley, as seen from my plane window

We landed, checked into our hotel, took a quick peek at the conference room where we’d be doing the presentation and then headed downtown for lunch. We ended up at a barbecue place called Memphis Blues, where we both had the “Big Daddy”, a sandwich combining pulled pork and brisket. It came with coleslaw and some really nice beans on the side, and we washed it down with Boylan’s diet root beer. Had we not had work to do, I would’ve gone for some “Lynchburg Lemonade” (Jack, lemonade and other stuff) and a shot of Bulleit (they have a decent selection of bourbons).

Pulled pork/brisket sandwich, coleslaw, beans and a bottle of Boylan's diet root beer

There wasn’t much time for sightseeing – we wouldn’t be in town even 24 hours – but I did manage to snap a couple of shots of the local scenery near the hotel, including the “Sails” fountain:

Kelowna's "Sails" fountain

And a view of the lake:

View of Okanagan Lake and boats

We went back to the hotel and started setting up for our “From the Client to the Cloud” presentation, a giant demo in which we present a grand tour of what’s possible with Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Azure. I do developer-y things, Damir does IT Pro-y things and we show you – with actual working code, data and infrastructure – the sort of system you can build to help you get things done. And by “get things done”, I mean a real, working, employ-real-people, provide-real-service kind of business (we like tell-the-world-where-your-cat-is-right-now applications as much as the next person, and you can build that sort of thing on the Microsoft platform too).

Here’s Damir doing the setup for the presentation on his machine (that’s my laptop in the foreground):

Damir setting up the EnergizeIT demo computers

And here’s a shot of the room about an hour before the session started:

Damir setting up the EnergizeIT demo computers

We played to a full house. And I’m not kidding when I say “play”: unlike many other tech presentations, there’s no PowerPoint in this one until the very end. Instead, the EnergizeIT session has me and Damir telling a story about starting our own online insurance company and building the applications and infrastructure right in front of the audience. It’s all storytelling, live demos, actual working code and data, and of course, jokes (including me telling Damir to “Dance, server monkey, dance!”).

The audience at the Kelowna EnergizeIT session

The feedback we got from the audience was great. Many said that they loved watching an all-demo presentation and were blown away by what Visual Studio 2010 could do. A couple of people said that watching the presentation made them want to delve into Visual Studio a little more, as we’d shown them many features and capabilities they didn’t know our IDE had. A number of people were also impressed by the breadth of the Microsoft platform and how easy it was to move applications from on-premises servers to the cloud.

With the presentation done, Damir decided to take it easy, while I went out with some of the attendees for burgers and beer at the nearby Tonics Pub. I had to make it a (relatively) early night, though: we were bound for Victoria the next day.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Flying to Kelowna

The view from my seat on the flight to VancouverThe view from my seat.

Today’s going to be a bit of a whirlwind, starting with a flight to Kelowna by way of Vancouver, with Damir and me doing an EnergizeIT presentation tonight running from 9:00 p.m. to midnight, at least as far as our “body clocks” are concerned. Break out the Jolt Cola!

Here’s Damir getting a little work done while we were hanging out in the Air Canada lounge at Vancouver airport, waiting for our connecting flight to Kelowna:

Damir Bersinic working on his laptop in an easy chair in Vancouver airport's Air Canada lounge

I’ve already been asked “Did you bring the accordion?” Of course I did. One of the reasons I picked a little Silvetta accordion is that it fits in the overhead bin of just about every plane:

Joey deVilla's red Silvetta accordion in the overhead bin above his airplane seat

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Interview on ASP.NET MVC and Open Source at Microsoft

I’m looking a tad sleep-deprived in this interview – I was quite busy around the end of February and the start of March — but I managed to stay conscious long enough at the Confoo conference to do an interview with CT Moore (back in early march) and talk about my presentation, which covered both ASP.NET MVC and Microsoft’s relationship with open source:

Should you not have two minutes free to watch the video, the take-away points from the interview are:

  • I really like ASP.NET MVC. It’s the way I choose to build web applications in .NET and it’s similar to other MVC frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django.
  • Microsoft’s attitude to open source is that’s it’s not a threat, but an opportunity. We compete with other companies, not software movements.
  • Sleep is good.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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This Week on “Ignite Your Coding”: Richard Campbell

Who’s On This Week?

Richard CampbellThe Ignite Your Coding live webcast returns this Thursday with Richard Campbell. If you’re from the .NET world, chances are that you’ve heard Richard on .NET Rocks! (the online talk show for .NET developers), on RunAs Radio (the online talk show for IT Professionals) or at his many speaking engagements, including those at TechDays. He’s both a Microsoft Regional Director and Most Valuable Professional thanks to his work supporting the Microsoft developer community. For more than 30 years, he’s been helping major organizations design and build applications: Barnes & Noble, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson Health Care Services, Reuters, Subaru/Isuzu and the U.S. Air Force.

John Bristowe and I will talk with Richard about how he got started in the world of software development, the projects he’s working on and how to deal with issues of scalability and performance. He’s applied that knowledge in building a network appliance that accelerates website performance at the company he co-founded, Strangeloop Networks, and we’ll pick his brain about how to make better, faster, scalable applications.

We’ll be chatting with Richard live this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific) online.

What’s Ignite Your Coding About?

Ignite Your Coding is a webcast series all about helping you, the software developer. We want to help you find ways to stay on top of the technological, economic and social changes that affect you and your work every day. We contacted some of the biggest thinkers and doers in our field and asked them if they’d like to chat about the industry, how they got started, where they see the opportunities are, how they deal with change and how to be generally awesome. We hope it informs and inspires you!

How Do I Catch the Live Webcast?

You’ll need:

How Do I Get the MP3 Recording of the Webcast?

It’ll be posted on this blog in about a week.

Who’s Coming Up on Ignite Your Coding?

We’ve got some great guests coming up:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.