User Groups

Registration is open for first Code Camp in Kraków

Szymon Kobalczyk — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:14:25 GMT

Some time ago I wrote that there is a wave of HCL events sweeping through Poland. Today I'm happy to announce that we opened registration for the Code Camp in Kraków. This is the first such conference organized by the members of KGD UG for the .NET developer community.

We will meet on June 7th for the chance to listen to sessions from five great speakers:

The world has changed… What are the dilemmas of designing software solutions in the year 2008? - Tadeusz Golonka
Reach End-Users With Next Generation Web Applications - Chris Koenig
Addressing non-functional requirements with PostSharp - Gael Fraiteur
SQL Server 2008 Integration Services - Grzegorz Stolecki
Developer's role in an agile project - Bartosz Pampuch

Follow this link to register. The conference is free but the number of seats is limited so make sure to register early.

Along the conference we organized a little programming contest. The first round is over but you still have a chance to win one of the cool prizes (including XBox 360) in the second round. It's quite simple - you just need to implement a single method. More details on this page.

Hope to see you soon at CodeCamp.pl

HEROES happen in Kraków

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:31:48 GMT

Last Wednesday I had the privilege of representing the KGD.NET user group at the Heroes Happen Here launch event in Kraków. It's hard for me to say anything about the presentations because I actually didn't see even a single one (but others already blogged about it here and here). Instead I spent the whole day backstage chatting with my good friends: Asia Grzywna, Mateusz Kierepka, Paweł Potasiński, Bartosz Pampuch, Tadeusz Golonka, Grzegorz Kolarz, Paweł Łukasik, and Michał Brzozowski just to name the few.

After the event Michał Żyliński and Barbara Sokólska invited us to a geek dinner where I had opportunity to meet great guys from Insys - company that build the first commercial website in Poland using Silverlight 1.0 (Lech Poznań TV).

For me this was the ultimate geek day so thank you all for taking your time to hang out with me!

Polish .NET Community grows strong

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:27:21 GMT

There are so many good things happening right now in the Polish .NET Community that I thogh it would be best to put it together in one post. So here you have it:

C2C'08 is a first ever countrywide IT conference organized by community of Microsoft .NET and SQL Server professionals. On April 5th 2008 eleven speakers will have opportunity to show the most wanted topics, and answer the most desired questions. The list of speakers looks very impressive and includes celebrities like Dino Esposito and Matin Kulov, along with best speakers selected by members of Polish user groups.

Here are the key facts:

Purpose: learning, sharing knowledge and interacting with other professionals and geeks
Topics: two tracks - .NET and SQL Server
Number of attendees: 200
Date: April 5th, 2008
Place: Microsoft, Al. Jerozolimskie 195A, Warsaw, Poland
Pricing: free
Website: www.c2c2008.pl

Although the official Heroes Happen Here product launch wave is over, there is still opportunity to learn about the new exciting products and other Microsoft technologies. Very soon user groups around the globe will begin executing the Heroes Community Launch events delivering deep technical training on Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008. Here is the current schedule for Polish user groups:

March 27^th, Warszawa – Warszawska Grupa .NET
April 3^rd, Białystok - Białostocka Grupa .NET
April 30^th, Szczecin – Szczecińska Grupa Specialistów IT
May 6-8^th, Lublin – Lubelskie Dni Informatyki
May 9^th, Dąbrowa Górnicza – Śląska Regionalna Grupa Microsoft
June 2^nd, Wrocław – Wrocławska Grupa .NET

Our group, KGD.NET will organize the conference on Saturday, June 7^th 2008. We plan to have 5-6 sessions and about 200 attendees. To make this happen and to bring you some great speakers we are joining forces with Wroc.NET. I will post the details here in following weeks.

SharePoint training in Kraków

Besides the regular meetings (the next is scheduled on 26th March) in next few weeks KGD will organize a SharePoint training for group members. It will cover both WSS and MOSS and will be deliveried by Michał Gołda, certified SharePoint expert from Making Waves. We don't have the date set yet but if you are interested register now.

Speaking

On personal note; I received several invitations to speak on some of these events. Here is my current schedule:

I was invited to speak at the event called "Discover the Next Web" that will be held on March 31st at Microsoft's Polish Office in Warsaw. My session is titled "User Interface 2.0", and as you could guess I will by speaking about WPF and showcase some of the cool projects that we've done at InterKnowlogy
I'm also helping my friends Marcin Celej and Michał Brzozowski build the coolest app ever to showcase during their session at the C2C conference on April 5^th.
I accepted the invitation to speak at the Warsaw .NET UG in April but we need to work out the exact date.
And finally I will be speaking at the Heroes Community Launch event in Wrocław on June 2nd.

I'm looking forward to meet you there!

Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Krakow

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 08:36:36 GMT

Early this month I've read Scott Hanselman's invitation to Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Portland. If found the idea to get lots of people to install Visual Studio together quite interesting. I started looking around and quickly learned that this is a huge event for all .NET user groups in United States. However it turned out these meetings are not being held anywhere in Europe. What a bummer!

But I liked the idea so much that I though we should organize this in our user group ourselves. We asked for help our friends at local Microsoft office and although we didn't get free VS licenses we got two boxes of other gifts. We also got support from two local .NET shops: JCommerce, and Making Waves.

The meeting was held on Wendsday, 19th December at the nice pub called Cafe Szafe. We started by distributing copies of the VS Install DVD to everyone who wanted to install. Later Bartek Pampuch (MVP) did a great live demo of new features found in Visual Studio 2008. But we also had a fun part with two contests: a turnament in "Dead or Alive 4" on XBox360 and in Powerball spinning. The two winners got a special prizes, but we got plenty of other gifts so nobody left with empty hands. We also did a raffle for one license of ASP.NET RadControl provided by our friends at Telerik.

Overall 40 people showed at the meeting, and 33 of them got their laptops ready for installing VS. Among them we counted at least 25 successful installations.

You can find more photos here and here.

Thanks to everyone who helped me organize this. We got a lot of positive feedback from our group members so I think we should organize more of such events in future. We already have few ideas.

We have a new MVP in Kraków!

Szymon Kobalczyk — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:48:06 GMT

I'm really happy to announce that last week our good friend Bartosz Pampuch received the MVP award in Visual Developer - Team System category. I think this is a well deserved nomination.

I've met Bartek few years ago at one of our first .NET user group meetings (KGD). From the outset he was a very active member and throughout the years delivered many outstanding presentations.

Bartek is currently leading the RND team for one of the largest software houses in Poland, where he researches new technologies and software factories for other development teams. He is expert in Visual Studio Team System and MSF software process. Last year he was leading excellent workshops on VSTS and MSF, that I was fortunate to attend. Another area of his interest that we both share is Smart Client architecture, and Bartek is Microsoft's P&P Smart Client Software Factory adviser. He is also well known editor on the CodeGuru.pl portal (and soon on ITCore.pl).

Bartek is also a very funny person to talk with, so if you wish to meet him in person join us on the KGD.NET or Geek Lunch event. You can read more about Bartek and his many activities on his personal web page.

Congratulations!

Summary of 19th September .NET Geeks Lunch

Szymon Kobalczyk — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 07:56:04 GMT

Yesterday we met for again on .NET Geeks Lunch in Kraków. I'm happy to report that this time we had doubled the number of participants (9 people showed up) and welcomed some new faces. So in order to break the ice we had prepared a super-short presentation (just enough to fit the time between ordering the meal and bringing it to the table). The topic was on methods and tools to support our learning process.

Bartek demonstrated how he uses some cool features of Microsoft OneNote for taking notes.
Marcin showed us how he used the TiddlyWiki before, and currently switched to building mind maps using FreeMind (which is a free alternative to MindManager).
Tadek pointed out that he uses both of these tools regularly as they are complementary to each other.

After this the usual conversation started. Here are some subjects I managed to pick up, and the links I promised:

Tomek told us about working at Microsoft. He was an intern in Redmond, and starts to work there in few days. Good Luck!
Bartek is evaluating ReSharper (again!) and asks for advice (what do you think of Refactor!)
Online backup services like Mozy Online Backup (also recommended by Rob) and others
Tools to search for .NET code snippets like Koders (which also provides a VS plugin and API) and Google Code Search
I've talked about Windows Home Server (search this blog for pics of some upcoming devices) ...
... and Media Center Extenders (with recently added support for DivX)
Guys took some interest in my new Lenovo x61 Tablet PC which is also great for taking notes
In my opinion the best book to start learning WPF is Adam Nathan's "WPF Unleashed" Adam Nathan. Then you can also read "Essential WPF" by Chris Anderson and "Programming WPF" by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths. And is still intend to read Charles Petzold's "3D Programing for Windows"
For WCF Marcin recommends "Programming WCF Services" by Juval Lowy, but we also look forward to read "Learning WCF" by Michele Bustamante
You can read most of these books (if not all) online on O'Reily's Safari Books Online (take a look at the list of publishers on the front page)
Piotr W. asked for recommendations on the client-server vs. offline smart client architecture (and we need to discuss this further)
On the way back to work we also talked briefly about the RSS Readers we use (FeedDemon, RssBandit, JetBrains Omea Reader, and myPodder), workspace synchronization (also NewsGatoreDesktop Beta) and favorite blogs and podcasts

I would like to thank everyone who participated in this meeting, and I can't wait to meet with you again next month. Cheers!

Our first .NET geek dinner was great!

Szymon Kobalczyk — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 06:11:40 GMT

Since February I work as independent contractor, and so far I like it a lot but the only thing I miss about working from home is face-to-face contact with other developers. So after listening to Scott Hanselman's podcast on how to become a better developer I decided to take one of his advices and organize a geek dinner. I invited few friends from my past jobs and our Kraków .NET User Group. We met in nice indian restaurant near Kraków's market square and had great time discussing all maters mostly related to .NET (but the food was good too).

Here are some things we talked about (some links are in Polish):

Second Life and how people are making money out of it (Kraków is one of the first cities in Europe introduced to SL).
What we like and don't like in TFS and some workarounds (also hosted TFS, Subversion and Exchange).
Community Server and using other application frameworks (Share Point, DotNetNuke) to quickly create applications instead of building them from scratch.
How we like Acropolis, and why we need application services on the client.
New stuff in Orcas and .NET 3.5 (including AppDomain isolated add-ins)
Of course we had to talk about Silverlight vs. Flash, but this also led us to Dynamic CLR (also here and here).
How BizTalk Services can simplify WCF service deployment on internet (and don't get confused by BizTalk in the name - it is good for any WCF app)
We also shared some trick on sharing large files over internet
And finally, check out the NASA Photosynth

I would like to thank Bartek, Marcin, and Michał for taking their time to talk. I think that from now on we would organize this regularly every month. Next time I'll post info in advance here, so if you live anywhere near Kraków and would like to join us feel free to drop by.