Resources:

• Download the Windows Phone SDK and Tools
• Register for the AppHub
• Get Started with the Starter Kits: WordPress, School, Augmented Reality
• Delve into the Key Resources

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.

I don’t typically throw a job posting up on my blog. This a first and will *certainly* be the last. There are better sites and resources to help connect developers will employers, however this one is a special case.

An old friend of mine (well, he’s not old, we just go way back) is part owner of an exiting and fast-growing startup seeking some highly skilled .NET developers with a penchant for leadership. You can find all of the details on each position below. If you fit the job requirements to a tee, I’d suggest getting your resume in to the fold as quickly as possible. I don’t suspect these positions will be open long.  Good luck!

Job Openings:

• Director of Application Development
• Manager of Application Development

Every couple of weeks, we supply some notes, thoughts or announcements around the happenings in the developer community which is than posted as part of the “From the Editor” section of the MSDN Flash newsletters. Recently our “From the Editor” section was buried behind a link. For that reason, I will cross-post that entry here. I want to make sure you all have the information on what’s happening in the developer community. Enjoy.

.NET Communities in the Virtual World

Here in the Midwest, we have a great offering of .NET user group communities. However, there are still developers spread throughout the area that can’t find a user group within a reasonable driving distance of their home and work. Fear not, geographically-challenged developers, as there are a number of user group communities popping up on several social sites on the Web.

For those of you looking for a truly virtual experience you can join up with the Second Life .NET Developers User Group. I’ve had the privilege of presenting a couple of sessions for SLDNUG (see Virtual CodeFest Wrap-up), and it was truly a great experience. There’s a little bit of a learning curve in navigating the Second Life waters, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a great opportunity to join fellow developers in the virtual world.

Also on tap in the social space for .NET developers is the Linked .NET Developers Group on LinkedIn, where they have over 21,000 members! Coming up on April 30th, the Linked group has Brian Harry, the father of Team Foundation Server, scheduled to discuss what’s coming in TFS 2010 ("Rosario").

Let’s not leave out Facebook. The .NET Programmers Group on Facebook has a number of events on schedule, including Virtual User Groups and Cloudism, Coding4Fun: Building a Video Game with XNA Game Studio 3.0, and Using Templates in Silverlight to Change the Look and Feel of Controls.

As you can see, there are plenty of opportunities to participate in the .NET community no matter where you pull up your keyboard.

Event Season Kicks into Gear
Spring is in the air, and the community conference season is kicking into high gear. We have a number of great events coming to the area for you to learn all the latest in the Microsoft platform world.

We start off with XAMLFest, coming to Chicago on April 29 – 30. XAMLFest is a two-day interactive event where you’ll learn about the platforms, tools and processes used to deliver differentiated user experiences. It’s a chance for you to mingle with user experience-minded Microsoft folks and industry leading design firms and design integrators. Discussions will revolve around technologies such as WPF and Silverlight, along with tools such as Expression Blend. To register send an e-mail to xamlfest-chicago@live.com with your name and e-mail address. Registration is limited, so register early. We do ask that you register only if you know that you can attend both days of the event. More information about XAMLFest is available on John Pelak’s blog.

Next up, we have RIApalooza Two coming to Chicago for its 2nd year. RIApalooza promises a platform-agnostic and PowerPoint-free zone where you can join fellow RIA enthusiasts to discuss the current state and the future of RIA technologies. It is for designers, developers, and just about anyone interested in learning about the platforms, technologies, and techniques used to build RIAs. It takes place in downtown Chicago on May 8. Head over to riapalooza.com for the latest information and registration information.

There are also a couple of code camps and a Day of .NET on the calendar for May. First, the Fox Valley .NET Users Group is holding a Day of .NET on May 9th in Appleton, WI.

Next, we have the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association, who are sponsoring another code camp for the developer community in (where else?) Indianapolis on May 16th. Find all of the details at indycodecamp.com.

Rounding out the event announcements, the Chicago ALT.NET group is hosting a code camp for the Chicagoland area on May 30th in Grayslake, IL. This is a great location to bring in developers from both the Chicagoland area as well as our friends up around Milwaukee. These code camps are not limited to the .NET community; they’re for the larger developer community as a whole. The organizers are looking for speakers who can bring their skill sets from the Java, Ruby, Python communities, and more. To submit a session and to register for the event, head over to chicagocodecamp.com.

Windows 7 App Compatibility Lab
The ISV Evangelism team invites all ISVs to attend the upcoming Windows 7 App Compatibility Lab in Chicago taking place from April 20th to April 24th. The purpose of these half-day, complimentary labs is to assist ISVs in verifying that their applications will perform on Windows 7, and to provide feedback to the Windows product group as issues arise. As an attendee, you will have the opportunity to work with Microsoft technology architects while gaining an understanding of how to manage and optimize your product in a Windows 7 environment.

Christian Heilmann, Yahoo Web Evangelist, pretty much wraps up the work we all do in 181 slides.

Bonus points to those of you who can find the Zen garden or count all of the bugs.

As promised, I said I’d provide you a few additional nuggets of information and pointers to a number of resources we discussed (and more!).

You can find the decks and demo code on the MSDN Events Resource Site. Here are the additional links…

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

• WPF Screencasts on http://windowsclient.net
• Channel9: WPF Week
• WPF Boot Camp 2008
• Bill Steele’s WPF Soup to Nuts Series
• Virtual Lab: Developing a WPF Application
• MIX08: Bring your Data to Life with WPF

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

• Download and Install Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Channel9: Not Your Grandmother’s Service Pack
• ADO.NET Entity Framework Developer Center
• MSDN Webcast: Programming LINQ and the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• Julie Lerman’s Entity Framework Tutorials
• ASP.NET Routing Docs
• From IIS.NET: ASP.NET Routing, Request Filtering and URL Rewriting
• Rob Bagby, a fellow DE out of Denver, presented a couple of webcasts on ADO.NET Data Services, Part 1 and Part 2
• Project Astoria (ADO.NET Data Services) team blog.
• Mike Taulty provides us with a few screencasts on ADO.NET Data Services.
• MIX08: RESTful real world applications using ADO.NET Data Services
• Scott Hanselman shows us what Dynamic Data is all about in this 7-series screencast.

You’ll also find a lot of helpful dialog on various subjects around the Microsoft Platform in the MSDN Forums.

I loaded up the kin folk into the family truckster, pointed the compass due west to the mountain "Vistas" of Colorado, and during our rest and relaxation time before the young’ins start school, so many noteworthy items transpired in my absence. This is my cheap attempt at catching up…

Silverlight Shows it Stuff for the Olympics

Old news, but certainly noteworthy. Silverlight had a coming out party of sorts during the 2008 Olympics. NBC Sports made the decision some time ago to utilize Silverlight for its interactive experience on NBCOlympics.com. NBC certainly set the bar high for future sporting event coverage. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of live and on-demand coverage for the 2008 Olympics. For the first time, I could choose which events I wanted to watch (Trampoline anyone? How about Handball?), when I wanted to watch it and not be set to what the NBC producers decided to show and which of their on-air channels. This worked surprisingly well for us on our vacation. For one, we were without our DVR to record what we wanted to see. Secondly, we weren’t going to be hanging around our condo during our entire vacation to watch the Olympics. For us, we were able to pull up whatever highlight of the day we wanted to see or just set it on the Equestrian events for my oldest who is just getting into horseback riding and can’t get enough of horses. All in all, this years Olympics were outstanding and for me and my family that was mainly due to the NBCOlympics.com website.

Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Ships

Yes… while I was doing my best Julie Andrews impression and running through the mountain tops of Colorado singing "The Hills are Alive", the DevDiv team goes out and ships Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. I know quite a few of you have been waiting for this one. This is no simple service pack. There is actually some new features to be found in here. Brad Abrams threw together a comprehensive list back when the service pack hit beta. More detailed posts coming soon around these enhancements.

Codeapalooza Registration Opens Up

Since the early days of .NET, the Chicago .NET User Group has held a (mostly) yearly event called Day of .NET. Its been a while since the last one, but that’s because they were working on plans for something bigger, better and more agnostic. Codeapalooza comes to IIT Wheaton Campus on Saturday, September 6th and registration is now open. There are 6 tracks with a minimum of 5 sessions each throughout the day. The session themes range from Data Layers, Sharepoint, Process to Potpourri 1 & 2. We’re also trying to secure room to hold an Open Space session throughout the day. I will be presenting a couple of sessions at Codeapalooza (Building WPF Applications and a Tour of CodePlex) but I’m sure I can ramp up a few Open Space discussions as well. What topics would you be interested in seeing at the Open Space? With the breadth of this event and the great speakers on tap, this event is surely to sell out. Be sure to register soon.

Kentucky Day of .NET

Our friends down south, Chad Campbell and Jeremy Sublett, are throwing a hoe down themselves on the same day as Codeapalooza (so, unfortunately I won’t be able to make it). Kentucky Day of .NET will be taking place at Sullivan University in Louisville on September 6th. Check out all of the details at http://kydayof.net. Just think of all the geek goodness we could share between both events if we could somehow link them together. Anyone know of a good way to do this?

Live Search releases Webmaster Tools

The Live Search Webmaster tools team proves that you don’t have to live in beta on the web with the 1.0 release of the Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools provides reports on website crawling issues that Live Search encounters along with deep information about your backlinks. Essentially, these set of tools is a facility of Live Search to work with webmasters to make sure their content is available in a way that will take their sites to the top of the search result list, and at the same time provide Live Search with the necessary means to improve their core result relevance. If you’re a webmaster, check out the tools at http://webmaster.live.com.

Windows Mobile and Windows CE Monthly Chats

Rob Cameron shot me an email while I was away to inform me that the Windows Mobile and Windows CE app dev teams will be holding a series of monthly chats. If you have any questions on building applications on top of the Windows Mobile or Windows CE platform, this would be the group to ask. The list of upcoming chats has been posted here.

Phew! That was quite a list to catch up during my time away. It just goes to show you that the world still moves when you’re trying to slow it down.

I wasn’t up and running on 2.5 for more than a few days when I received another subtle message to upgrade to version 2.6. Screw it, I said. I’m not wasting my time upgrading again, it will have to wait. Not that upgrading is all that painful, but I use Filezilla to FTP the updates to my blog server. If you’ve ever used Filezilla, it’s what I like to call "crap shoot software". It will either work, or you’ll crap out trying. When uploading multiple files to my blog server, Filezilla will sometimes decide to stop working and just close the app all together. This happens on the Mac version as well as Windows. It makes FTP’ing multiple files an exercise in futility. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a better FTP client that someone is willing to give me for free. I don’t mind paying for good software. I just don’t FTP enough to justify the spend.

Back to WordPress…

Anyhow, I wanted to head over to FeedBurner to check on my RSS stats and noticed that for the past week or so, I have 0 (!) subscribers. Grant it, I don’t have a ton of subscribers but I have more than ZERO (note: if you’re not subscribed to this blog, what are you waiting for? Click here to add the feed to your favorite RSS reader). I couldn’t understand what was going on. FeedBurner would report an HTTP 500 error and my feed. The BIG DADDY of web application errors. If I browsed to the file that FeedBurner ends up re-directing to on my blog, I would get nothing. Notta. Zilch. Not even an empty XML tag.

Then I realized – Hey!, I just upgraded the WordPress engine; and – Hey! WordPress is letting me know that ANOTHER new version is available. Could this be the cause of my problems? So… I build up the gumption to fire up Filezilla and upload the new Wordress 2.6 engine to my server. Thankfully, Filezilla didn’t puke on me this time. I did have to do a directory-by-directory copy, but it worked. And now, I’m happy to say, my blog feed has returned from the dead.

I have to tell you. I’ve been having more and more problems with WordPress of late. It might be time to switch AGAIN. Another exercise I’m not willing take on just yet.

Shawn Wildermuth is swooping into town next week for one of his Silverlight Tour training events and we thought what better to do than to resurrect the old Geek Dinner. Come join us at The Real Time Sports Bar in Elk Grove Village, IL on Monday, July 14th at 6:30PM for some cocktails, food and geek fun.

What: Geek Dinner
Where: The Real Time Sports Bar, Elk Grove Village, IL (map)
When: Monday, July 14th, 2008 @ 6:30pm
Why: Why not?!? Because you’re a geek and you need to eat!

*note: We’re going dutch. Everyone is responsible for their own eats.