If you are familiar with scrum – then I recommend that you give the scrum guide a read. This documents the scrum framework and is maintained by Scrum’s creators, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. While reading through the latest revision of it (on page 6) it has a section that specifies the characteristics of the development team. One sentence that stood out was the following “Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the...
Now that 2011 has come to a close I wanted to take a few minutes to review the year and the goals I had set at the beginning of the year (click here to see those goals). I’ll follow up with new goals for new 2012 year soon. Year in Review 2011 was a big year in many ways. This year included a change in employers, buying a condo, my oldest brother getting married, starting a new relationship with my girlfriend Sarah. helping plan 2 conferences, writing two chapters of a book, and numerous other activities....
What could you build with the XBox Kinect? Well we want to know! Connect your Kinect to your PC and build an application using your favorite .NET language. Kinect for Developers is a 2-day workshop for developers, artists and technicians interested in Kinect hacking or 3D scanning. This hands on workshop will teach you the basics of programming for Kinect and the potentials for developing on video and depth sensor cameras. Expect live demonstrations, presentations, food, and lots of hacking. You...
I am not the fastest typist… I know it. Up till about a year ago I was a two finger typist and my two fingers could fly over the keyboard doing all sorts of acrobatics getting me up to a whopping 30 odd words per minute. Not bad for two fingers but barely close to some of my friends who speed away at 90+ words a minute using both hands. So it bugged me…. I mean I would like to consider myself a professional developer and feel that if I will be typing most of days then I should at least be doing it...
PrairieDevCon is a great conference hosted in Canada a few times a year. For the first time it’s coming to Calgary in March and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve participated as a speaker in every PrDC to date (2 in Regina, 1 in Winnipeg), and that streak will continue into Calgary. In addition to the 2 conference sessions I’ll be doing: Why do we Suck at Estimating? And How to Get Better Evolve Your Code: Fundamental Design Principles I’m also doing a full day Pre-Con Workshop on TFS Build. I plan...
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 communications software and its client software, such as Microsoft Lync 2010, enable your users to connect in new ways and to stay connected, regardless of their physical location. Lync 2010 and Lync Server 2010 bring together the different ways that people communicate in a single client interface, are deployed as a unified platform, and are administered through a single management infrastructure. Workload Description IM and presence Instant messaging (IM) and presence...
There’s been a lot of discussion around Scott Hanselman’s recent blog post around profanity in presentations. He discusses whether the use of profanity is appropriate in conference presentations, and the feedback through comments and the Twitterverse are varied. Some say its ok, others say it isn’t. Everyone seems to be discussing about the presentation itself, the “artistic license” that presenters are granted when creating their presentation. I wanted to give a different take on the subject – the...
Next month is Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg. This is the first time the conference has come to Winnipeg and I'm really excited to be a part of it again. I've spoken at both of the previous PrDC's in Regina, and have 2 slots at the Winnipeg conference. The conference is Nov 21-22 and there are still registrations available, so if you haven't registered yet I encourage you to do so: http://www.prairiedevcon.com/ Here's some details on the 2 sessions I'm hosting: Evolve Your Code: Fundamental Design Principles...
Today TechEd Africa 2011 ended. It was a great conference and the first time I have ever had the opportunity to present an hour long topic – I had the joy of presenting two sessions at this conference, one session based on a topic which I should have been able to cover easily and one with a topic that I battled with and felt totally out of my depth. In retrospect, there are a few bits of advice that I would like to give other people that are thinking of presenting at a conference like this for the...
This would be the first in the series of posts I plan to do for HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers The first thing that everyone would have experienced is the HTML5 header tag. The regular header tag that Visual Studio creates for ASP.NET Webforms is <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml... This would be the header tag present in the Master Page or the actual ASPX Page when you don’t inherit from a Master Page. Till HTML5 specifications...
On October the 15th, the Montreal .NET User Group will hold a special event... a full day of conferences and workshops on Azure ! The speakers for the special event will be our very own Guy Barrette, Azure MVP, Sébastien Warin also and Azure MVP and Cory Fowler who just happens to be yet another Azure MVP ! Ain't that just amazing to see how many of them Azure MVPs we managed to pack in the same room for you to learn from? All this for one low price... 10$.... and you have to be a registered and...
This week I’m at the Microsoft Build/Windows conference. Now I’ve been to many conferences throughout the years and this is the first conference where I literally knew nothing about including the agenda. When I signed up for my badge on arrival we got a conference guide with all the hours of the session but no sessions. Very secret, very cloak and dagger. This created a huge buzz but also upped the expectation quite a bit… So with the tabled laid out and the expectation high I sat down and waited...
As an MCT it is always exciting when I travel to conferences because it becomes a reunion. Well, one more chance this year to make it so, but this time (unlike the last MCT Summit) I am also presenting. Thanks to Chris Harrison (@GeekTrainer) for the gentle nudge! Follow @MCTSummitNA too! The topics I will be presenting are (at least the ones I got confirmation on): Requirements Management: From Vision to Mission to Success Session Level: 300 Team Foundation Server and SharePoint Technologies have...
2011 has been a very exciting year for me so far. I was awarded the Microsoft Silverlight MVP. I was renewed as the DZone MVB. I was awarded as a GeeksWithBlog Influencer. I won the CodeProject Windows Phone 7 Competition. I’ve been invited to speak about Silverlight at UserGroups as well as several major conferences such as SSWUG, CodeStock and devLINK. My first e-Book on Producing and Consuming Silverlight in an OData application was published. I’ve been asked to be a technical editor for two Silverlight...
I have several conferences coming up where I’ll be talking about jQuery and best practices around deployment, maintenance, and performance tuning in SharePoint and I find that I never have enough time to talk about everything I’d like. So I thought I’d write a few blogs about the subject from a complete beginners standpoint. After all, we were all beginners once and nothing frustrates me more than finding a solution to a problem, but then having no idea how to implement it. Also, in subsequent blogs...
Last week I was at the Microsoft WPC conference in Los Angeles. I’ve been to other Microsoft developer conferences like Tech Ed and PDC before, but this was my first WPC and it was a great experience. For one thing, the target audience is blatantly business, sales, and marketing. It was a weird feeling attending a Microsoft conference and not knowing *anybody* (although some familiar faces were found). I have links below to notes I made for the individual days of the conference, but I wanted to point...
So, there are a few large SharePoint events coming up including SPSNYC, SPSTC, and the pinnacle of SharePoint conferences The Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Anaheim, CA. As these events approach it becomes more and more important that we label each other effectively. We need to know who is cool and who to avoid. Should I walk up and shake your hand when I see you or quickly cross to the other side of the room?? These are important questions! Are you a SharePoint Rock Star with legions of adoring...
I'm down in Los Angeles this week for my first ever Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference! This is the biggest industry conference I've ever attended, with more than 15000 people from around the world! It's also a bit different too because I don't know *anybody* here. WPC is more of a business/sales/marketing type of conference, not so much technical. As a result, its an entirely different crowd than the usual suspects at TechEd, PDC, etc. That's not a bad thing though! I'm meeting some great people...
I was included in a very happy group of developers that yesterday was awarded (or re-awarded -- is that a word?) Microsoft MVP in their area of expertise. In my case, it was a re-award. My first was in 2007, so this is my 4th re-award. I'd like to take space in my blog to personally thank my Lead, Allen Li, and the folks on the Silverlight team for once again including me in the list with the cool kids. Also the Silverlight team for their steadfast support of the MVPs by keeping us in the loop. Re-awards...
A while back I decided to get back to speaking engagements and such. For the most part I had kept that to some local User Groups and some conferences like TechEd. I decided to sign up for the INETA Speaker program. Well my first gig came through. I will be speaking at the SharePoint Users of Ft. Wayne, Indiana meeting on July 14th. The topic is on Building Solutions for SharePoint using Visual Studio LightSwitch...
I have had the chance to talk at many conferences these past few years, and came up with a way to prepare them which works really well for me. Most importantly, it would make it quite easy to overcome an emergency (for example if my laptop would suddenly lose data). The whole code as well as the slides and other documents are in the cloud. I also use source control for my demos, so that I always have the latest and the greatest, but also a history of changes I made to my demos. Finally I have a system...
So, lots of tweets going on today about an article over at CMS Wire : The SharePoint Community: What it is, Why It's Important and Microsoft's Role. Now, aside from the fact that the CMS web site is a php web site, this article got me thinking… It’s well written and authoritative, with comments from the experts, and is spot on… but couldn’t it basically have been written verbatim two years ago? And if it could have been written two years ago, how has the SharePoint Community changed in those two...
You’ve all seen this team, maybe you’ve even been on this team. I certainly know that I have! What kind of team, you might ask? It’s the team that is simply dysfunctional. Many reasons can exist for a team that isn’t working, and team dysfunction is a complex thing that can’t necessarily be isolated into a simple formula that will always work to make people function well on a team. Cynefin Recently, I attended RallyOn in Boulder with Rally Software Development. This was one of the best user conferences...
So, I had the honor of speaking at the SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTechCon) for the fourth time on June 3rd. I must admit that this conference is just getting bigger and better every time BZMedia puts it together. For those of you not familiar with SPTechCon (http://www.sptechcon.com), they do the conference twice a year. Once in San Francisco at the beginning of the year and again in Boston in the middle of the year. They get the best speakers (and me) to show up from all over the world...
Like I’ve said over and over and in many of my sessions, SharePoint is like a big AA Support Group. “Hi… My name is Mark, and I use SharePoint”… “Hi Mark…” We’ve all had the same pains, frustrations, and struggles. WHY am I getting this error? WHY isn’t this working the way it’s supposed to? WHY did this work yesterday and not today? WHY can’t I find the answer to my problem? This should be so simple, WHY can’t I get it to work?? This is what makes the SharePoint Community so strong IMO. We’ve been...
Last night I gave a talk at the St. Louis .NET User Group regarding .NET Reactive Extensions (Rx) and their basic use. While Rx has been around for a number of years and I’ve seen a number of presentations at various conferences and industry events I still feel it isn’t as widely understood or adopted to the level I feel it’s capable of. My recent interest in Rx has been due to my heavy involvement with some very complex Silverlight and RIA Services applications. In these environments (especially...
Last weekend I went up to Iowa Code Camp in Cedar Rapids and had the opportunity to do two presentations, one on NuGet and one known as the Automation Tools Roundup. ICC is one of my favorite conferences every year. It is twice a year and I try to make it to at least one of them. The people that attend this conference really make it worth the money you spend in travel expenses. Definitely recommended. Automation Tools Roundup This is my favorite session to give because it requires crowd participation...
I have stepped it up a notch and am speaking at numerous user groups and technical conferences in the South East in the coming months. These include .NET & SharePoint user groups as well as SQL Saturday and SharePoint Saturday all day conferences. I will also be submitting to a couple of more regional events that I’m considering including Houston TechFest. If you are in the area, I’d love to have you come by to check out these events. Also, if you are interested in having me present at your event,...
Now that Mix11 is over, Microsoft’s next big conference is Tech-Ed 2011, which happens May 16th through May 19th in Atlanta, GA. Each of Microsoft’s conferences have a theme; Mix is about the Web, PDC is about new and upcoming technologies, and there are many more. The focus of Tech-Ed is on current Microsoft technologies. In other words, you would go there to learn about the software that you can use today to get your work done. If you haven’t been there yet, Atlanta is a nice city and the surrounding...
Singapore .NET User Group - April UG Meeting UG Meeting will be held on 18th April 2011 on next Monday, at Level 21 Auditorium from 1900hrs – late. Light refreshments will be served before the session. From the trenches: Lessons learnt working on Azure Mahesh Krishnan, Principal Consultant, Readify 1900 hrs – 2000 hrs Mahesh Krishnan, from Melbourne, Australia speaks about the lessons learnt working on one of the largest Azure projects in Australia. The application which is set to go live soon uses...
It appears that my work in the community and the nominations received from others has secured my status as an MVP for a second year. Thank you all for the award and thank you everyone (including Microsoft) for valuing my contributions to the community. I noticed last year I did quite a bit of travelling and talks. I’m going to need to work hard to keep that up this year. I’m also hoping to gear up for the v1 release of RoundhousE and DropkicK as well as something new I’ve been working on known as...
That’s right: Wessty is on tour. Okay, the banner and the tour is a little over the top, but I am really excited about my upcoming speaking engagements to spread the word about HTML 5! I have already kicked off the tour with the Winnipeg Code Camp last weekend with the world premiere of HTML 5 for .NET Pro presentation, and the turn out fantastic. It was the last presentation of the day, but we still had some great questions about the new standard and got to see how HTML 5 can fit into .NET web applications...
As of today, I will be partnering with Sevensteps when it comes to developing great Surface, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 Touch applications. Below you’ll find the press release we sent out today. I am looking forward to this partnership and expect great things coming from us both in the future! Dennis Vroegop, Microsoft MVP, joins Sevensteps partner network 1 March 2011, Seattle / Amersfoort Today Dennis Vroegop and Bart Roozendaal, both Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft Surface,...
Microsoft Tech ed 2010 was a great success. Infact Most of such conferences always provide a great place to meet other technology enthusiasts and ofcourse,whats in the pipeline for future products of a company or field.. And yet again,MS Tech ed India is coming on 23-25 march in Banglore,India.Well,the place is ofcourse right suited for any IT/Computing conference.After all,Its Silicon Valley of India.. From Last year.I remember a session by Harish about “Building pure client side apps with Jquery...
As some may have noticed, I have taken a liking to Ruby (and Rails in particular) quite a bit recently. This last weekend I spoke at the NYC Code Camp on a comparison of ASP.NET and Rails as well as an intro to Entity Framework talk. I am speaking at RubyNation in April and have submitted to other ruby conferences around the area and I am also doing a Rails and MongoDB talk at the Philly Code Camp in April. Before you start to think this is my "I'm leaving .NET post", which it isn't so I need to...
So, all you aspiring SharePoint experts out there (especially those of you who put “expert” in your resumes). It’s time for a cold cool splash of reality. More than likely you are NOT an expert (I know I’m not). Yes, you may have some expertise in certain aspects in SharePoint (it’s questionable if I have THAT some days), but make sure you’ve got the basics down before you start throwing that word “expert” around. I know that it becomes frustrating to those looking to hire SharePoint people and having...
This short list is what I consider to be the “cream-of-the-crop” in developer conferences. This is also a list of the conferences that I plan on attending in 2011. If you feel your conference is just as good, then shoot me an email at [michael[at]michaelcrump[do... and if possible I will check it out. In-Person Event Las Vegas on April 18th-22nd, 2011 Redmond on October 17th-21st, 2011 Orlando on December 5th-9th, 2011 Visual Studio Live – I attended this event in November of last year and blogged...
My grandmother wanted me to make her a video when she heard I got MVP in SharePoint Server of one of my sessions. I decided I haven’t visited in two years, so maybe I can do an in person session. I googled around and found South Florida Code Camp, which will be Saturday, February 12th. I will be doing a session at 9:50 in the morning on Silverlight just for my grandmother and whoever shows up. Here is the link for more information: http://www.fladotnet.com/co... In the upcoming months I plan...
From Feb 7th-9th I’ll be presenting two sessions at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011. My first presentation is a new session called “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” which covers many of the new tools and functionality available to SharePoint 2010 developers. My second sessions is called “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” (presented at last SPTech Con Boston) which covers tips, tricks, and advice on deploying SharePoint 2007 solutions. If you hurry you may still...
So, yesterday I presented a session for the online SharePoint Saturday event SharePoint Saturday EMEA on using SharePoint & jQuery. I created this session as an overview session on using jQuery and SharePoint together detailing best practices on deployment, maintenance, performance, and hopefully pointing some people to some good resources to help them get started. I also spent some time on why jQuery is a valuable tool for the SharePoint developer’s toolkit. If you aren’t just a jQuery hater,...
Recently I posted a recap of my goals from 2010. Now it’s time to post my goals and focus areas for 2011. Just as I did in 2010 I’m splitting goals between professional and personal. Professional Blog – I intended to continue blogging at least twice a month, sometimes more frequently when time and motivation allows. I have begun looking at other platforms or distribution methods for my blogging and will continue to investigate those. I’ll post details on here if anything changes. Speaking – In 2010...
There are several conferences lining up for 2011. There are some private conferences I will be participating in and some other where there is an invitation to submit content for consideration. That is the case with Mix 2011. The date: April 12-14, 2011 The venue: Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas Here is the general information: http://live.visitmix.com/ To submit content: http://live.visitmix.com/op...
What does SharePoint Composer, an IPad, and a Halo Reach Xbox 360 bundle have in common? The 2010 SharePoint Composer Giveaway! ShareSquared is hosting a giveaway that has some terrific prizes. We have used this same giveaway at the last few technical conferences and it is about to close. Generally, we are giving you the ability to get in on the action even if you were not able to attend one of the conferences. If you would like more detail about the giveaway, timeline, and its rules then follow...
Latest update (and hopefully last update): Microsoft has published a few posts to clarify the debate. Please consider the following: PDC and Silverlight by Bob Muglia PDC Thoughts by Steve Ballmer *NEW* Silverlight Questions by Scott Guthrie Silverlight is dead. Long live Silverlight! by Tim Heuer Committed to Silverlight by John Papa ---------------------------... Disclaimer: I am a Silverlight MVP and book author, and as such I have an interest (some would say...
So, if you come away with one thing from last week’s SharePoint Technology Conference in Boston, I’d like it to be this… Pescadigitation… The act of doing magic or sleight of hand with fish… What does that have to do with SharePoint or Collaboration? Well… nothing really… I was trying to say “Pescatarian” (a Vegetarian who also eats fish) at SharePint at Boston Beer Works and it came out “Pescadigitarion”.. which got me thinking… first of all, that the Pumpkin ale was really good.. but also that.....
Over the past few years, I have watched developers go to conferences and be filled with excitement over agile development. We love the thought of the rapid changes and better feedback. We get into the buzzwords like Scrum, and Kanban, and the term Burndown list excites every developer’s inner pyromaniac. Then, we take all that excitement back to our day to day lives and quickly find out that we are not in a position to change the process that is in place. Developers talk to me all the time about...
A few posts ago you may have read that I have a few side projects going on that would be taking up my time the next few months. I can’t give you full details on many of those yet, but I did want to drop a little information as I’ve been getting questions from friends lately. The first thing that I’m working on is a writing two chapters for a book coming from a big (at least in the SharePoint world) publisher. This project came about because of some great connections I’ve made in the SharePoint community...
Show of hands… who out there has ever Googled the words “SharePoint” and “Best Practices”? Come on.. be honest? I know I have… well, I’m here to save you some time on those searches…. THERE ARE NO SHAREPOINT BEST PRACTICES! Okay, maybe that was a bit brusque, and not entirely true. The more accurate statement is that you will not find the information you need by doing a Google search on “SharePoint” and “Best Practices”. Why??? Because the answer will depend on YOUR unique situation. A best practice...
Yesterday (22nd July 2010) was mvcConf – “the Virtual ASP.NET MVC Conference”. This was an ambitious undertaking by the community to deliver a three track, 20+ session conference for FREE using Live Meeting. And… it worked great. A big well done to everyone involved. It was particularly interesting to me and my team as we are hoping/planning to do similar online conferences in UK time around technologies such as the Windows Azure Platform and Windows Phone 7 – and attending yesterday gave me the...
OpenCa.mp is a muti-platform web content-creation event taking place in Addison, TX (north Dallas) on August 27-29th at the Crowne Plaza Hotel OpenCa.mp isn’t about a single technology as the “best” solution. It is about sharing experiences and discussing what works across several platforms. The format of OpenCa.mp is different from other multi-platform conferences with mornings full of common sessions and afternoons of brief focused break out sessions. Again, the focus is to bring people together...