Speaking

Give Camp FTW!

Dave Redding — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:39:22 GMT

I spent this last weekend at GiveCamp - Ann Arbor helping out charities. If you've never heard of Givecamp, you should dentally check out the link.

A Give Camp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

Givecamp was a huge success it's first year in Ann Arbor. I've never seen so many dedicated developers so sleep deprived working on a volunteer basis.

I was assigned to the Charity "Arab American Community Center" based out of Ypsilanti. We managed to work in a fancy set of features such as Localized languages. Our web app was built on top of a framework that I've never used before called, "SiteFinity". So look forward to some posts on both those topics in the near future.

I wish I had more for you guys, but I'm ramping back up to get into my regular blog swing-of-things.

Hot Damn!!

Dave Redding — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:14:12 GMT

I know a WMDODN (West Michigan Day of .Net) Post is in order, but that can wait. check this out!

http://blogs.msdn.com/xna/archive/2008/05/07/announcing-xna-game-studio-3-0-community-technical-preview-ctp.aspx

Finally, we can start building games for our zunes! WOOT! I expect to create a talk on the topic very soon

My traveling talk begins with CODODN!

Dave Redding — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:23:36 GMT

The C# variety Show began on Thursday with my trip to GLUG.net in Lansing, (this is a great group of guys and gals, and if your free, I highly recommend you to attend, they even have a user group in Flint now!) and didn't stop until yesterday when I got home from CODODN.

At about 6:30 on Friday, Mr. McWherter shows up at my house and the road trip begins. After about 4.5 hours, stopping only for necessities we arrive in Wilmington Ohio around. After checking in at the hotel adjoined to the conference center we started twittering to find out if anyone else had made it down yet, and got no love. Now...for those of you who have never visited Wilmington, this picture should illustrate what it's like...

Right...almost the middle of nowhere...However the Roberts Conference Center is conveniently located between the 3 major user groups in the area: Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the opportunity to visit any of the sessions because I had to polish up the demos for my presentation. I did however get to hang with some of the best speakers around in the speakers lounge. It was great to be surrounded by folk who knew what they were doing and were able to throw this newbie speaker some great hints (Like, write your demos before you show up to the conference). Also, with three user groups involved I was able to meet A lot of great folks. All in all, the venue was a perfect fit for the conference.

I had just finished up my Demos when it was my turn to present. At first, there were only a handful of people in the room, but within a span of just a few minutes, there were people standing in the back. I was nervous as hell, but managed to get through the presentation, even with my funky new presentation mouse constantly wanting to zoom in on everything (Kudos to Mr. Prince for the presenter mouse). I had a lot of good questions throughout the presentation and most of the folk seemed to respond well to the "bite-sized-pieces-of-information" format. I even managed to get a few laughs out of my crude since of humor. One of the best pieces of feedback I received was that my talk was "..Like the man show meets the Nerd show"...so maybe "Girls on trampolines" isn't to racy for my talk after all :)

After my presentation, I had the chance to hang out with Josh Holmes and Joe O'Brian where we talked about presentation styles and they regaled presenting war stories (I especially like how Joe was trying to make a point and almost fell of the stage...priceless!). After the final presentations let out, we all ventured into the main ballroom for the swag give away. Some folks walked away with great gear, including licenses to Infragistics controls, Refactor and a host of other fantastic developer tools.

Once the conference was declared closed, most of us headed over to Max and Erma's, which was attached to the hotel/conference center. Due to a mis-communication, the restaurant had no idea that we were coming. Eventually we wound up with a party of 30, which the Hostess' and wait staff handled very elegantly. The service was top notch, however, most of us never received our appetizers (those of us back in the restaurant..there were quite a few of us still in the bar). So dinner went GREAT and the food was fantastic (Loved my heartattack-on-a-bun-pulling-over-in-Toledo-on-the-way- back-to-blow-up-a-restroom burger...thanks Mr. Hawley and Mr. Prince).

After things quieted down at the dinner table, about half (if not more) of us ventured up the Mr. Blankenburgs room for a little poker party. things got off to a great start, at my table was Dave Smith, Sarah Dutkiewicz, Matt Casto, James Bender, Monish (Mo) Nagisetty, Phil (Can't remember your last name chief) and Dan Rigsby. I had never had a chance to sit and hang out with most of these guys so it was great, drinking Sam Adams (even though Blankenburg got Miller and Coors just to f with me) and talking a combination of smack and tech.

A couple of hours later, we combined tables where it was Me (I made it woot!), Dave, Phil, Jeff Blankenburg, Jeff McWherter Kevin (blanking on your last name to bud) Cory Haines, and I think Darrell Hawley (I had a bit of whisky in me by this point so I'm a little fuzzy on the details). I ended up going out on the second hand where I called Kevin, thought he was bluffing...but he ended up having a flush and taking me out. Was a great game and I walked away with "Extreme programming adventures in c#" as a consolation prize. I do remember that at one point, Amanda Laucher Took all my chips while I was ordering Pizza and made them all pink...I immediately grabbed one of Dave Smiths chip racks and exchanged it for the pink one. The night continued on in due form with lots of great tech talk and a whole lot of drunk humor. Mad props go out to Blankenburg and the rest of the MS guys that made this happen. It was a great way to end a fantastic conference.

The Next morning, those of us who had survived the night of poker ventured down to Max and Ermas once again for a fantastic breakfast. Shortly thereafter, we all headed back home.

This was my first overnight stay for a conference and I enjoyed every last minute of it. A perfect way to bring many people who are passionate about what they do together. I had the opportunity to meet and talk with a fantastic group of professionals who are dedicated to the community. I can't wait till the Western Michigan day of .net where we can all meet up again. After that, who knows, maybe the Cleveland Day of .net? or even the upcoming Lansing Day of .net!

Lets start this show!

Dave Redding — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:47:17 GMT

So last night kicked off my tour with the C# Variety show talk that i'll be giving in about 5 other places (as of this writing). I had the opprtunity to present before a fairly large group of folk at GLUG .net. And I have to say that they were fantastic hosts. I got alot of great feedback on the talk and we had a great time at the bar afterwards (As is tradition for all user groups).

I'll be on the road tonight carpoolin' with Jeff McWherter starting tonight. I've got two seats left in the BaddAss-Mobile if your interested in riding,drop me a line. We'll both be speaking at the CODODN Tomorrow, and I encourage you all to just show up. I'll be presenting around 2:50 in the afternoon.

Where:
Roberts Centre‎
123 Gano Rd
Wilmington, OH
45177

I look forward to meeting you all there. I look even more forward to sharing my bottle of makers mark after the conference with you.

Speaking engagements

Dave Redding — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:36:37 GMT

So, you might have noticed the badges on the left. Let me give you a run down. I'll be presenting the C# Variety Show at the following places, at the following dates...feel like i'm on tour

Lansing .Net Usergroup               April 17th
Central Ohio Day Of .Net                April 19th
West Michigan Day of .Net           May 10th
Eastern Tenn. .Net User Group    June 24th

So, i'm going to be busy. I'm still waiting to hear back from the Cleveland Day of .net and a few user groups in Texas. Keep an eye out, The C# Variety show may be comming to a city near you!

Central Ohio Day Of .Net

Dave Redding — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:12:08 GMT

It's that time of year again. Where the snow hasn't quite gone away, and it's still cold as Steve Job's gaze. Which means it must be time for a Day of .Net event! WOOT!

I'll be presenting a new talk I've derived. Some of you may remember the XNA presentation I gave for the last DODN in Ann Arbor. Don't worry; my ADD has kicked into overdrive and now i'm off to other sparkly things that are not XNA.

For this go-around i'll be giving a new talk that I've wrangled up from the inner most reaches of Reddingdom. Here is the abstract in it's original and uncut format.

Abstract: The C# Variety Show! Lvl: 200-300

Let's face it, Technology is boring to the non-technologist. How many of you run home to your significant other and say "Ooh OOH Guess what I learned today…" I'm guessing at this point you get "That's nice dear, what's for dinner?". Well, let's change that. If you really want something to talk about, come listen to Dave Redding explain how his wife's only job is to fetch beer from the fridge using Yield Return, or about how Mom and Dad give Kid a personally disorder since he's a Singleton. This talk will cover a wide variety C# and Software development topics, ranging from Design patterns to C# specific implementations. I guarantee you'll see more references to Beer, Women and small furry rodents than you ever had in any other technology talk.

I'll be updating this in the weeks to come based on some excellent feedback that i've received. But the spirit of the talk will be the same. Roughly, this talk will cover a few key Tech in 5 min articles I've written over the past year. Maybe I should change the title to "Tech in 5 min Live!" or "How to offend your neighbors with C#", either way, it's going to be a great time....assuming Ohio Isn't still buried under 123' of snow.

Come on down and I might ... just might, get you to buy me a beer.

On the road again...

Dave Redding — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:12:23 GMT

Hey everybody (Hi Dr. Dave). I'm confirmed for two speaking engagements this month! Woot! Apparently my XNA talk grew legs and is ready to walk. Next week (Nov. 20th) I'll be out at the West Michigan .Net user group and then I'll be heading down to Detroit for the IDGA user group (a indy, game developer user group...very cool!)

I'll be giving talks similar to the one I gave at DoDN, but this time, i've prepared a special demo. this demo works kinda like the web game Collapse, except it takes advantage of the GHII controller. It's a simple game in principal, and still relies on all the basic XNA stuff (Spritebatches, controller input etc etc) And it should be a little more interesting than the Pong demo. Not that beer pong is un-cool by any stretch of the imagination.