WOW...Florida is putting on a speaking contest like no other. If you think you are a good speaker and you have a passionate topic, we need you. To be more specific, JaxDUG needs you to represent because we anticipate winning this event. UserGroups within different regions all over Florida will be competing in this event. Our goal is to win regionals, however whomever wins regionals gets to compete in the finals.

The first phase is where User Groups and other recognized organizations focusing on the Microsoft platform hold events and nominate a speaker to participate in the Regional competition.  We are hopeful that each User Group will nominate a speaker to send to the Regional competition.

The Regional competition is the second phase in the competition and will be held at a location convenient to the User Groups assigned to this region.  Each region will select, in a regional competition, a regional Speaker Idol and a runner up.  During this phase we will need volunteers to serve as regional coordinators and help drive participation.  Microsoft is offering a $200 pre-paid credit card to be given to (confirmed) regional winners so that they might travel to the finals.  If the winner is unable to attend the finals, this credit card is to be given to the runner up. 

The final phase of the competition is to be held in Lakeland Florida in March of 2010.  Each finalist is allotted approximately 10 minutes (depending on individual event rules) to deliver their message and compete against others in their competition. 

All Regional finalists will be recorded on digital video and published on the Channel 9 Tool Shed Shows website (http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/toolshed).  The top contestant will be honored and given the distinction of being the winner of Florida’s Microsoft Community Speaker Idol Competition.   Speaker Waivers will need to be signed before the event begins.  Those in attendance at the finals will also need to sign a waiver as the will be in crowd reaction shots.

If you are interested or have more questions please contact me

Last Thursday we had our Windows7 Release Party and a couple of friends came out to help celebrate the event.

Here are a couple of photos from the event...

My pal Sayed is giving a live presentation on MSDeploy as a part of the MVP TV program this Wednesday, October 14, 2009.

Register here

Abstract

Deploying ASP.NET Websites has always been a challenge and different teams have used different approaches to overcoming those challenges. Microsoft has offered some support for making deployment easier in the past. For instance they first introduced Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2005, and also have a version for 2008. Web Deployment Projects do greatly simplify the process of calling the aspnet_compiler and aspnet_merge tool but even though their title states "Deployment" they had no support for physically deploying the site. Now Microsoft has introduced the Web Deployment Tool, also known as MSDeploy. MSDeploy will bridge the gap between taking a web site and physically deploying it to its destination. With MSDeploy you can easily and very effectively perform tasks such as pushing an ASP.NET site (Web site, Web Application Project, ASP.NET, etc) from one machine to several other machines. This is achieved by the target machines having the MSDeploy Remote Agent Service installed and running. You can sync two different Web Sites that are hosted in IIS, you can create a web package (simply a .zip file) and use that as your source, you can sync two different folders, and many other options. Another compelling feature of MSDeploy is that it will be integrated into Visual Studio 2010. From Visual Studio 2010 you can compile your ASP.NET Web Application Project and then create the Web Package which contains all your content files plus IIS settings. This one file will full describe your web.

Game development using Mono, Unity3d and Blender

Unity3D leverages Mono, an open source implementation of C#, to build out to multiple platforms including Apple's OSX (including IPhone and Itouch), Microsoft's Windows and Nintendo's Wii. This presentation will provide a framework of facts and definitions used in the process of game development along with illustrations from Blender and Unity. I will also demonstrate Unity's C# scripting as it relates to Prefabs used within the engine and how this helps with game play performance cod reuse.

10/7/2009
Bank Of America, Building 500
9000 Southside Blvd. Jacksonville, Fl. 32256
Room: Sea Oats, 6pm-8pm

Please register so we know how much pizza to order. You can register by becoming a member of JaxDUG. Let me know if you have problems!

MSDN Tiki Hut Roadshow - Fall 2009 Run - Blend3 / Silverlight 3/ Opening the Tacklebox on Win7 Dev 

Joe healy and Russ Fustino will be sharing their knowledge next month, October 15, 2009...Here are the sessions that will be covered!

Session 1: Opening the Tacklebox on Windows 7 Development
We'll riffle through the Win7 tackle box and teach you to rig up your Windows 7 development techniques. We'll explore the codepack APIs, sensor kit and APIs, the new desktop widget metaphors, multi-touch, virtualization strategies, and more. Expect a ton of short code snippets illustrating key points. This session will go long, and you’ll be able to reel in all the extras online.

Session 2: Expression Blend 3.0 … The game has changed
The Expression Blend 3.0 SketchFlow feature changes the game when it comes to both developers and designers becoming integrated on the development and design process. You’ll learn how to prototype WPF and Silverlight Applications with amazing speed, and provide review, feedback and documentation with ease. In addition to SketchFlow, you’ll be able to attach behaviors to visual elements in Expression Blend 3 to make them behave a certain way, such as drag and drop or physics. Did you know you can do a direct import of Photoshop and Illustrator? The answer is… yes you can! Learn how to import your Photoshop or Illustrator assets and preserve layer information as all is converted to XAML. You can then take a piece of imported XAML and easily convert it to a button or other element. You don’t want to miss this session.

For ITPro's - the ITPro Tiki Hut will be taking place during the am of each event.  Blain Barton will be leading up such topics as Migrating Windows XP to Windows 7, DirectAccess With Windows 7, and Optimizing Your Environment with Remote Desktop Services and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. To register for this event go to https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032421663&culture=en-US .

A personality only a Gildan Box can tolerate...Click on the white box to learn more!

I thought I posted this yesterday but for some reason I guess I did not...Anyway, we had a great code camp last Saturday. We had over 700 registered with 460 attending. We were also able to raise about 12.5K for Wolfson Children's Hospital

No, but now that I have you hater's and lover's of LINQ here I can share my frustrations, however they are not with LINQ. The reason I chose the title of this blog post was because I did think it was LINQ! Just like when I cannot find my keys at home as I am rushing to work, I will in my mind blame my 2 year old son and then discover I left them in my pants from the previous day. All of us like to put the blame on something when we are unsure and in our minds it makes sense to.

In this case I had three tables.

I used LINQ to grab the data, and a collection of Ordered Items was returned along with a collection of ProductGroups and finally Groups associated with that product. As I looped through my Ordered Items after the second OrderedItem I kept getting the following error...Object reference not set to an instance of an object. As I tracked the origin of the error within the WF Rules Engine ruleset being processed I was able to find the method that was throwing the error. Debugging through the code however did not help as the error was thrown each and every time at certain points where LINQ queries (for objects) were being processed. This is where I started blaming LINQ like the analogy I gave above about blaming my two year old son. I tried researching this still no clue. I spent hours trying to understand where my code was going wrong. This is where the problem really started frustrating me. I then started querying the database to find the ProductGroups and Groups that were being pulled and comparing them to what LINQ had in its collections during debug. Since the database had already been created, I knew that there was a history for tables not having relationships (FK's, PK, etc.) so I also verified them. The last time I ran my test and right after I got my pal John Bates to lend me a second pair of eyes, I noticed that the records that were being pulled by LINQ were different then the records I was pulling via SQL Server Studio by one. So I was actually missing a record. Now in LINQ I was actually querying conditions based on the fields within the Group table through the ProductGroups. Come to find out there were some groups that were not in the Group Table that had relationships within the ProductGroup. Through my experience in writing code, I have never experienced anything like this; hence this was what caused me to waste so much time.
So remember, in most cases it is better for experienced developers to anticipate that bugs are a result of their own code. Second, it is ok to question the database. Check the data integrity even though you have some snot nose telling you the data in production is correct and it is your fault with a face of smug. Third, don't blame LINQ...Instead relish all of the time you have forgotten it has saved you in past development efforts.