I don’t think it’s fully hit me yet. This past Thursday was the last user group meeting of the year and the last meeting with me present as leader. Next week I am meeting with about 4 or 5 people to hand over the KC Office Geeks. Every so often I look back and reflect on where I have come in the past few years and how I got to this point in time. We have 177 people on the mailing list and an average from 15-20 people at each meeting. When Jeff handed off the group to me we were average 3 people per...
For all 10 of you guys who read my blog and the 200 or so bots that are there to make me feel comfortable I learned something really sad tonight. Jeremy Thake, who runs http://www.sharepointdevwiki.com, lost his shirt sponsor for SharePoint Conference. We all use it as developers in the SharePoint world from correct disposal to how would you loop through a series of items in a list. So come on guys you know you want to sponsor the shirts he was going to make up for SharePoint Conference so we all...
To help developers and architects better understand how to leverage the cloud, Microsoft is offering two "train-the-trainer" sessions for user group leaders and influentials. Here's a great opportunity to learn more and present back to your user groups. Sessions are: Wednesday, September 9, 2009 5:00 PM-6:00 PM (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) Tuesday, September 15, 2009 8:00 AM-9:00 AM (UTC-8:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) Here's What You'll Learn Development tools for Visual Studio...
Yesterday I’ve been informed that I’ve gained the Most Valuable Professional award again for next year, in ASP.NET category. This is the third time I have received this award, which is pretty exciting. Here is my MVP profile: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Ashraful Special thanks to few Microsoft employees including Technical Fellow Brain Harry, Sr. Program Manager Joe Stagner, Lead Product Manager Dan Fernandez and South Asia MVP Lead Abhishek Kant who encouraged and supported me in several...
Thanks everybody who Participated in the event Microsoft Day @ Dhaka, held on 20 June 2009 at IDB Auditorium, Dhaka. It was an excellent gathering of 250+ professionals, specially developers in Bangladesh. Besides the knowledge sharing stuffs, the event was very successful to create a social gathering of technical professionals. I was really found it pretty nice that, I have meet at least 20+ guys there, whom I knew and meet virtually before. The good news for the community is, we will be organizing...
Microsoft Community in Bangladesh proudly presents Microsoft Day @ Dhaka. This is a special day dedicated to all Microsoft technology professionals and students in Bangladesh. We will be having the best Microsoft community technologists from Bangladesh - Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) delivering sessions at the event. This technology marathon is a great opportunity to learn from the best and network with each other. Both Microsoft developers and networking professionals would find the...
So I’ve blogged about this a lot. If you read my blog you know how I got started. Kansas City .Net User Group and walking up to the right person at the right time plus meeting the right people at the right events that just clicked as good people (Lee, Brian, Jeff, John, Tim, Michael). I guess looking back over the past 2 years (as of this month I believe?) in retrospect would be nice. I was pretty hardcore into World of Warcraft back then without many friends newly moved to Kansas City. Right now...
Hearty congratulations go out to Dave Kolb and everyone at the WNC .NET Developers Guild. They are celebrating their first anniversary tonight! Happy Birthday Dave! The WNC .NET Developers Guild is an independent, all volunteer organization, dedicated to promoting Microsoft .NET technology and education to the software developer community of Asheville, NC and the surrounding areas. Meeting on the second Tuesday of every month, Dave has had a very impressive start over the past twelve months. Their...
It’s a little hard to believe that I haven’t posted a blog in over a month. Where have I been? Frankly, doing my job and trying to keep up with my personal life at the same time. I’ve been hesitant to include personal jabbering in my mostly technical blog. But, I want to express what is most important to me. I hope that most of you have similar priorities. At the beginning of the year, the church I attend lost it’s music director. While we were looking for a replacement, I filled in as temporary...
ASP.NET Developers, Bangladesh is a group of professional developers, which focuses the latest development trends in ASP.NET and it’s related technologies. This professional group is member of INETA (International .NET Association) and Culminis. The previous group site address has been changed, as it was hosted at MSN group, which was closed from March 2009. All of the previous group members and those who are not yet been member but interested to share and learn new cutting edge technologies are...
I attended the Houston TechFest today, and am now finding it difficult to sleep with all of the new knowledge and relationships filling my mind. I finally decided to get out of bed and put some of my thoughts in writing. The Fest was great. There are a few good reasons to attend an event like this. It's free. You get to meet new people with common interests. Employment opportunities are there if you are looking for them. You almost certainly learn something (if not many things). There are lot's of...
After seeing a couple of other posts about resolutions, I couldn't resist. The funny thing is, I got this on the second attempt. Tags: Humor, Community...
One of the timeless articles among the lists of "must reads" for programmers, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Steven Raymond, was written to expose how the open source community can succeed. The article exposed commercial software construction as an unyielding entity that is structured and secretive, where only those closely involved understood the inner workings. Similarly, open source was associated with the bazaar, as a thriving community where everyone is involved, and the internal structure...
First of all, I have no complaints. There are certainly people with more to worry about than me. For those who don't know, I live in Houston, and Hurricane Ike "passed" through Friday night. I am still without, power, but my boss has power now as of yesterday afternoon. In fact, I am at his house now and will probably be working from there for the next week or so. There is minor damage to my home. In fact the worst is the ruined food in my fridge. The power company said that it will likely take two...
Mostafa Murad, a great UI designer whom I've worked with in two companies, was having a BIG dish party yesterday. Maybe in the occasion of himself recently becoming a team leader in ITWorx or just out of hospitality. He put few simple rules (I'm quoting him here): It is not solely barbecue anymore, you are free to bring whatever food you like. You are free to invite your friends or family members. Many people will bring their spouses and children. There is a big clean garden which is very suitable...
I have been awarded by Community Credit, for the monthly community contribution competition of July 2008. One of my main contributions for July 2008, besides blogging, moderating developer group etc, was organizing a panel discussion and seminar with 120+ students of American International University - Bangladesh. Along with Mr Enam Noor, we had a nice time with students, while providing them a guideline to get prepared for industry standard software development. Along with the support of my current...
Employee Info Starter Kit is an asp.net starter kit, which demonstrates the use of simple CRUD operations for maintaining a company's employee information. It has been developed by me as a guideline for building enterprise level projects. In last few months this starter kit placed in the top chart at code.msdn.microsoft.com for several times regarding the popularity. A very exciting news for all of Employee Info Starter Kit fans is yesterday this starter kit has been placed in the front page of Official...
It's great pleasure for me that Microsoft has awarded me as MVP (in ASP.NET category) again this year! I become MVP for the second time, for my contribution in developer community. Check out my MVP profile here. Besides, another interesting news to be shared with all, in the last weekly show of Channel 9, two of my posts published here 10 Tools Which I Left After Using VSTS 2008 and 10 Tools Which I Still Use, Even I Have VSTS 2008 has been discussed. Thanks Microsoft for your recognition! It really...
I posted the following post on The Server Room forum at Ars Technica ————————————————————— Hi all,Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I get the distinct impression that sysadmins, for some reason, are not very community-oriented. If you look online for developer communities, you find a fantastic amount of forums, websites, and blogging communities. When I wanted to start blogging about my sysadmin adventures, I looked for communities similar to developer sites like geekswithblogs.net, Channel9,...
This weekend I attended an awesome event in Dallas, TX, the Community Leader Summit. Soon to become CommunityCamp. Thanks Caleb for organizing this event. There were user groups there represented by a huge cross section of the user community. Everything from .NET to Podcasting, and Joomla. It was very interesting to see that even though our groups are focused on different technologies that we all struggle with the same things. And it was great to see how other groups has solved them. I am sure the...
On the way home from We Are Microsoft, Doug and I determined we had to create an event in Kansas City modeled after the Dallas event. We ran the idea by John and he was 100% on board. One week later, we have started the site, thanks to Telligent for letting us use the Graffiti CMS product. The name of the event is Coders 4 Charities, with the corresponding domain coders4charities.org. What do we need? Everything thus far, except a web site, but we are not quite ready. First thing we need to do is...
In the past I have had an aversion to link list posts. I have picked up a large number of blog subscriptions and most of these lists just contain what I have already seen. Lately my opinion has changed slightly. I am trying to evangelize within the company that I work for. In order to grow awareness of what is going on in the community as a whole I have started sending out emails with a distilled list of blog links. I figure if I have already found what I think are the jewels I can save others the...
Thanks to community credit to consider me as a member! Being a member of community member, my posts in GWB will be automatically be approved for the credit points. Thanks to GWB as well as to support for this cool stuff! Technorati Tags: community,blog...
CORRECTION - now one week earlier, on 17th May (was 24th May previously). A quick plug for the London .NET user group geek dinner on 17th May. Zi has setup a page on the .NET user group wiki here so sign up and vote for your favourite eatery. See you there. Technorati tags: geek dinner, community, london .Net User Group...
Wow, it is hard to believe it has been three years as a real community. Sunday marks the three year anniversary of the site as a community, not just my blog. I had written a blog engine that worked for my own, but after a few months of trying to build the admin tooling, I contacted Scott and got this site working with .Text. Hard to believe it is still running the same engine, with a few tweaks. That said, we really need to move into the future. We have started designing the strategy of GWB 2.0,...