In this weeks MSDN Flash newsletter, I had a chance to interview Midwest community leader, Scott Seely, on his recent recognition as a Microsoft Regional Director. Check it out.

Two of our MVP’s and future MS Press authors, Andy Wigley and Rob Miles, will be presenting a 12-hour online course on Windows Phone development spread over two days. This course is organized into four virtual instructor-led sessions to give you the jump start needed to start building your phone applications.

• July 20 – 8am: Session One: Getting Started with Microsoft Windows Phone and Silverlight
• July 20 – 1pm: Session Two: Programming Game Applications with XNA
• July 22 – 8am: Session Three: Programming Applications with Silverlight
• July 22 – 1pm: Session Four: Review and Wrap up

All times are Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)

Get Registered!

Starting this Friday, July 9, the months of tireless work of a few of your peers in the Midwest developer community and led by my co-hort, Clark Sell, developers and charities will come together for a marathon coding event pitting the skills of geeks along with the needs of a few charities to produce something special. Many smaller charities don’t have access to people with the technical skills to drive the needs of the charity in today’s modern setting. Whether its maintaining an operations contact management system of volunteers and philanthropists to a simple website to help advertise the great work the charity provides. As developers, we code as part of our day job, we code when we get home, we code (or at least think about) when we’re on vacation; we’d code in our sleep if we could – and some of us can! (I have stories) GiveCamp brings the talents and the inherent desire to JUST CODE together with the needs of local charities to do something great and give back to the community.

The GiveCamp effort was dreamed up by my colleague down in Dallas, Chris Koenig, and with the help of his technical community in Dallas, they kicked off the GiveCamp concept and now we’re seeing GiveCamps pop up all over the US. We figured it was high time we brought one to Chicago.

As I said, with the tireless effort of a few of our peers in the Midwest technical community and through the leadership of Clark Sell, Midwest Give Camp will be taking place this weekend (July 9-11) at the Microsoft offices in Downers Grove. Some of the charities participating in the first Midwest GiveCamp include: Bear Necessities Pediatric Cancer Foundation, Sit Stay Read, Porchlight – Solutions to Homelessness, Dreams for Kids, The Caregiver Connection, and Bridges to Digital Excellence.

If you could set aside your summer for one weekend and give your skills to a charity who needs it, your simple effort would go a LONG way.

For more information and to register as a volunteer, please visit http://MidwestGiveCamp.org.

If you want to build games for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 like I do, learn everything you need to know from our very own Rob Cameron during the AT&T Developer Webcast, XNA Game Development for Windows Phone 7.

This webcast is designed to provide a developer overview of how to build games for Windows Phone 7 with Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4. Learn about the developer tools, the XNA Framework, and the resources available to build interactive, compelling, games with Windows Phone 7.

When: Thursday, July 15, 10-11 AM Pacific Time

Registration is required