Brian H. Prince

Big Sigh of Relief! I just got home with my family. We have finally unpacked, and caught our breath. The past nine months have been a lot of work. And not just for me, but for the whole CodeMash planning team. Just some of the volunteers that put this year together: Jim Holmes , Jason Gilmore , Jason Follas , Jeff Blankenburg , Josh Holmes , Dianne Marsh , John Hopkins , Brian Sherwin , and Chris Woodruff . There are plenty of others that helped out, and I want to thank you folks as well. How do I even begin to capture the energy that was at CodeMash this year? The keynoters were FANTASTIC. Each brought a different something to the conference. Neal Ford did a great job setting the tone of the conference. Scott Hanselman really livened things up after lunch, and showed that cross platform is in the real world with his demo of PHP on IIS (with huge performance improvements). Then Brian Goetz showed that there were still some great challenges left for us to solve. Our speaker...

Scott Hanselman and I were up on stage, really grooving with what we were doing. The crowd was going crazy. Then Scott just lost his rhythm, the worst nightmare for anyone on any stage. He couldn't keep up, and I felt like I was loosing him. Three times I had to distract the crowd from his mistakes, until he could get back on track. Fortunately, it worked, and we made it to the end, without too many embarrassing moments. ... Of course, I am talking about Rock Band at CodeMash. Scott checked in at CodeMash fairly late on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008. I was packing away the TV and Rock Band setup we had at the QSI booth, when he walked up and asked if I could reconnect it so he could see what it was like. I wheeled it into the grand ballroom, and set it back up. Of course a crowd started to assemble around us. We started up a game, with Scott on drums, and myself on the guitar. Scott admitted he didn't know how to play drums, and it showed. :) In the game, if you mak...

So, I am a little late in posting about the CONDG December meeting. This December, like usual, we had joined out November and December meeting into one, and chose a light topic, with an XBOX party afterwards. I presented a quick lap around all of Visual Studio 2008, and .NET Framework 3.5. Jeff supplied me with a bunch or slide decks about all of the new features, and I Frankensteined a deck together. Jeff announced that he had a limited number of FREE copied of VS2008 to give out, if people pre-registered. We normally get about 50-60 attendees at each meeting. That night, there were 120! It was very crowded, with people sitting on the floor, and out in the hall. I have to say, it was one of the most fun speaking engagements I have ever done. After the meeting we played Guitar Hero III and Rock Band. Everyone had a great time!

Jeff and Josh invited me to attend the Heartland Influencer Summit in Detroit, MI, on Dec 7. There were a lot of great people there, many I know from the user group and MVP communities. Josh and Jeff wanted to get us together to discuss how we can work better together as community leaders, and what MS could do to help support us better. There was some great idea swapping. For example, other groups use a session called 'lightening talks' I want to do in our group ( CONDG ). For lightening talks, members sign up with any topic they want, and speak for ten minutes. The audience votes for best presentation. The winners get the swag. The lightening talks keeps the pace moving fast, and short, so the 'new' speaker doesn't have much to prepare or stress about. I think this is a great way to start grooming new community leaders and speakers. Coming out of this meeting was a few other action items. Josh/Jeff are going to put together a MOSS portal for the Heartl...