User Groups

Glenn Block Tour in Poland

Szymon Kobalczyk — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:22:37 GMT

Next week several .NET User Groups in Poland will host a special guest - Glenn Block, Program Manager in the .NET FX team (and previously PM for p&p “Prism”). As you probably already know, Glenn is the man behind the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) project and thus this will be the main topic of his talks:

Building openly extensible applications in .NET 4.0

Are you tired of building monolithic style apps? Are you tired of hacking your app to bits to meet just one more requirement. Do you want to enable third parties to provide add-on value to your apps?

If the answer to any of these is yes, then come learn about the new Managed Extensibility Framework which ships in .NET 4.0.

Applications built on MEF dynamically discover and compose available components at runtime. This makes MEF ideal for third-party extensibility scenarios, where the type and number of extensions are undefined. With MEF you can enable customers and third-parties to take your apps where no man has gone before.

During the tour Glenn will visit following cities:

2009-06-22 18:30 Olsztyn
2009-06-23 18:00 Toruń
2009-06-24 18:00 Warszawa
2009-06-25 18:30 Kraków
2009-06-26 18:00 Katowice

You can register for the meeting in the city near you by clicking on the links above. More information on the official website. Also visit Glenn’s blog and leave him a comment if you like to hear about any particular topic.

[PL] Znamy uczestników konkursu Speaker Idol 2009

Szymon Kobalczyk — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:09:34 GMT

Wczoraj zakończyła się rejestracja do konkursu o tytuł Speaker Idol 2009, a zatem znamy już nazwiska siedmiu śmiałków którzy zmierzą się ze sobą w środowy wieczór. Oto oni:

Marcin Kruszyński – Innowacje w Silverlight 3
Michał Brzozowski – Zasada „SOLID”
Wiesław Nizio – Microsoft Excel i Windows Forms. Co wybrać Ole Automation, czy OleDb?
Jakub Malinowski – CRUD UI dla danych w .Net
Krystian Czepiel – Wykorzystanie Modelu MVC przy tworzeniu aplikacji ASP.NET
Łukasz Podolak – Software Craftsmanship
Arkadiusz Beer – Pex: Zautomatyzowane generatory testów

Już teraz możecie się zapoznać z tematami ich prezentacji opublikowanymi na stronie konkursu.

Serdecznie zapraszamy na spotkanie – wieczór zapowiada się naprawdę interesująco!

[PL] Konkurs Speaker Idol na CodeCamp 2009

Szymon Kobalczyk — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:41:13 GMT

Chcesz sprawdzić się w roli prezentera? Weź udział w konkursie Speaker Idol i zostań idolem publiczności CodeCamp 2009! Wystarczy 10 minutowa prezentacja. Zasady są proste, a nagrody ciekawe...

Co należy zrobić?

Przygotować krótką prezentację (do 7-10 minut).
Zgłosić swoje uczestnictwo do 26 kwietnia 2009 (niedziela) włącznie.
Wygłosić prezentację na spotkaniu KGD 29 kwietnia 2009 (środa) i zachwycić publiczność.
Wygrać w głosowaniu publiczności i odebrać nagrodę!

Zachęcamy do nadsyłania swoich zgłoszeń na adres si@codecamp.pl

Co można wygrać?

Możliwość wystąpienia na CodeCamp 2009
Visual Studio 2008 Professional
Lincencje na produkty firmy Telerik
Do wyboru: OpenAccess for ORM, Sitefinity Telerik Reporting, RadControls for Winforms, RadControls for ASP.NET Ajax, RadControls for WPF lub RadControls for Silverlight
Nevron Chart for .NET Lite edition
Narzędzia NDepend
Plecaki Microsoft
Kamerka internetowa i myszka
i inne...

Więcej informacji na stronie: http://codecamp.pl/pl/speakeridol.aspx

Strona spotkania: http://ms-groups.pl/kgd.net/47_spotkanie/default.aspx

Full agenda available for C2C and 4Developers conferences

Szymon Kobalczyk — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:56:59 GMT

Last month I wrote about two conferences coming up soon in Poland. Organizers were busy all the time working on providing you with greatest speakers and technical content, and today we know the full agenda of both events.

4Developers, 7^th March, Kraków

Here is the agenda for .NET track:

Ted Neward - Busy .NET Developer’s Guide to F#: Introduction
Marcin Celej - Wykresy przy użyciu biblioteki .NET Charts
Szymon Pobiega - Inversion of Control w systemach zbudowanych w oparciu o obiektowy model domeny
Marcin Kruszyński - Model-driven development w technologii “Oslo”
Barbara Fusińska - Od aspektów do Design by Contract, czyli wyraź swoje intencje
Mateusz Kierepka - BOKU aktualnie KODU (Xbox 360) – czyli nowatorski wizualny język programowania
Raymond Lewallen

I’m especially proud that we also have KGD speakers representing us on this conference.

You can find more information and registration form here: http://4developers.org.pl/

(There is a special discount available for KGD.NET members, so contact me before you register.)

C2C 2009, 14^th March, Warsaw

I think C2C shoots for more sophisticated audience, and provides great content from both well known international speakers, as well as our polish best selected from speaker idol contest. Just take a look at list of sessions for .NET track:

Marek Byszewski - Tour de VSTS 2010
Julia Lerman - My Favorite Entity Framework Tips & Tricks
Piotr Leszczyński - Kolejny kontener Dependency Injection? NIE - dziękuję! Czyli o koncepcji meta-kontenera słów kilka
Ingo Rammer - Hardcore Production Debugging of .NET Applications
Udi Dahan - Avoid a Failed SOA - Business and Autonomous Components to the Rescue
Artur Paluszyński - Interakcyjne sceny 3D w Windows Presentation Foundation

Also check out the agenda for SQL and IT Pro tracks here: http://2009.c2c.org.pl/pl/sessions.aspx

Updated: ~~Registration will be open soon.~~ Registration ended very quickly because number of tickets was very limited. Hope you made it though and we can meet there.

Both conferences look very promising, and I do my best to participate in both.

Conference season begins in Poland

Szymon Kobalczyk — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:59:48 GMT

I have a great pleasure to invite you to two community driven conferences that are organized in Poland:

4Developers, 7^th March, Kraków

4Developers is a first “hybrid” conference organized in Kraków, combining different programming languages (C#, Java, PHP, Ruby), as well as project management and database topics. It is planned for 700 attendees who can participate in 4 parallel tracks.

Java – the track will be opened by Neal Ford and Adam Bien
.NET & C# – everything one must know about Microsoft technologies presented by Ted Neward and others
Dedicated Languages – track concerns open languages: PHP & Ruby and programming data bases
IT Project Management – effective managing of IT projects discussed by the most experienced PMs in the industry, in example those who are responsible for the success of “The Witcher” game.

Kraków .NET Developers Group (KGD) is actively helping with organization of the .NET track. We plan to host the .NET Underground with lightning talks and some fun contests.

Read more about 4Developers on http://4developers.org.pl/

C2C 2009, 14^th March, Warsaw

Last year’s edition of C2C was first conference organized by Polish .NET and SQL community. Over 200 attendees participated in 10 sessions from top speakers including our special guests Dino Esposito and Martin Kulov.

This year’s C2C is even bigger and better. In addition to .NET and SQL it now includes IT Pro track, and each track will host 5 sessions. Among others we will hear Allan Mitchell – SQL Server MVP (Most Valuable Professional) – the world class expert, the author of many books on the subject.

Key information

Goal: experience exchange; hotheads and professionals communities’ integration;
Topics: .Net, SQL Server and IT Pro – sessions chosen by the participants by “call for papers” method;
Number of participants: 350 – 400;
Date: 14th of March 2009;
Address: Warsaw, Poland
Participation: free.
Website: http://2009.c2c.org.pl/

C2C conference is a great occasion for discussion, knowledge gaining and specialists from all over Poland meeting.

Call for papers

Both conferences still have open slots for speakers. So if you’d like to visit Poland just ping me directly and I can get you in touch with the organizers.

But that’s not all! How about spending a whole week in Poland? Because dates of these conference are only week apart you can be a presenter on both. In the meantime we will organize you a road-show through Poland. You can visit many beautiful Polish cities and meet with developers from .NET User Groups.

Last year Chris Koenig was brave enough to take on this quest and it seems he enjoyed it. In October we had a pleasure to invite Tim Huckaby and Carl Franklin to Kraków and they had their share of fun too.

Hope to see you there!

Won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest

Szymon Kobalczyk — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:38:37 GMT

Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by receiving email from David Silverlight that I had won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest. The prize I won is the awesome Electronic Drum-Kit T-Shirt that you can hit with your finder to play drum sounds. I think it would totally rock combined with the Equalizer T-Shirt I got from my lovely wife some time ago.

The Community Credit awards are presented for community related activities that you submit during a month. For each activity you receive a certain amount of points. I knew about the contest for about a year, but I assumed it is only for uber-geeks and far above my reach. Only recently I was encouraged by Karl Shifflet and started adding my points. This award proves, I was totally wrong. The best part is that you are probably already doing the activities that could earn you credit like blogging, speaking, answering forum questions, and helping your user group. So why not give yourself some credit and win these cool prizes, huh?

Here is what I did last month:

From October 8th to 9th I was at the MTS 2008 Conference in Warsaw, where I did a session about “Building Line Of Business Applications in WPF” (you can find the slides here). I was also manning the user groups booth for few hours. That’s 12,000 points.

This month our group had very special guests: Tim Huckaby & Carl Franklin stopped for two days in Cracow on their way from SDC in Amsterdam to DevReach in Sophia. They made a fantastic performance for our group on October 10th. That’s 17,250 points for organizing this event and inviting top speakers.

We also had two regular UG meetings (on October 1st and October 29th). I’m usually in charge of scheduling speakers, making announcements and doing raffles (there are no points only for being the UG leader – you need to actually do something). That’s another 17,000 points total.

(During October 1st meeting we celebrated Marcin Celej’s MVP nomination)

Last Thursday (October 30th) I traveled to UG in Poznań to speak about “Composite Application Guidance for WPF” and other stuff (get the slides here). I really enjoyed this meeting, and I’m glad I finally got there despite the long travel (7 hours by train). From the feedback I reckon my friends liked it too. That’s 6,300 points.
I wasn’t very active online this month, but I published a code sample of using the Touchless SDK in WPF (and I will be contributing more to this project very soon). That’s 8,000 points.

I ended up with 60,550 total but October was pretty busy for me anyway. But even if I did only a half of the stuff above, it would secure me one of the prizes (the lowest winning score was 30,000 points). Congratulations to other current and past winners.

So don’t wait anymore: go check the cool prizes for this month and start adding your points now!

Speaking of community awards, I also like to mention the idea of the Most Valuable Member Awards invented by James Johnson from Inland Empire .NET UG. This program gives recognition to most active user group members, with the goal to increase member’s participation and involvement. I plan to introduce this to our .NET user group in Cracow, so if any sponsors are reading this and would like to help please contact me.

Now let’s see: Writing a blog posts is worth 500 points, plus 5000 for linking to Community Credit, that’s already 5,500 points closer to this month’s Handpresso Portable Espresso Maker :-)

Registration is open for first Code Camp in Kraków

Szymon Kobalczyk — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:14:25 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 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 04:31:48 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 — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:27:21 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 15:36:36 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.

User Groups

Glenn Block Tour in Poland

[PL] Znamy uczestników konkursu Speaker Idol 2009

[PL] Konkurs Speaker Idol na CodeCamp 2009

Co należy zrobić?

Co można wygrać?

Full agenda available for C2C and 4Developers conferences

4Developers, 7th March, Kraków

C2C 2009, 14th March, Warsaw

Conference season begins in Poland

4Developers, 7th March, Kraków

C2C 2009, 14th March, Warsaw

Call for papers

Won 4th prize in Community Credit October 2008 Contest

Registration is open for first Code Camp in Kraków

HEROES happen in Kraków

Polish .NET Community grows strong

SharePoint training in Kraków

Speaking

Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest in Krakow

4Developers, 7^th March, Kraków

C2C 2009, 14^th March, Warsaw

4Developers, 7^th March, Kraków

C2C 2009, 14^th March, Warsaw