Brian H. Prince

We were hanging out at the hotel bar on Saturday night (August 23rd), just hanging out. It was my birthday, and we were unwinding from devLink (which rocked!), and I was exhausted from working really long days. Carl and Richard from .NET Rocks was hanging out there as well. After the conversation got rolling, they whipped out a wireless microphone with onboard memory and started interviewing everyone at the table. There is a great discussion of devLink, OpenSpaces, CodeMash, and lots of other stuff. It was a lot of fun. Take some time and give a listen to show #372 .

Jeremy Sublett and Chad Campbell are organizing the second Kentucky Day of .NET.   It will be on Saturday, September 6. They have lined up a number of great speakers to cover lots of .NET topics for developers.  Please visit http://kydayof.net to see the sessions and to sign up. Jeff Blankenburg will be keynoting, and I will be presenting my Soft Skillz talk. If you need a ride from Columbus, maybe we can carpool.   Saturday, Sept. 6 Sullivan University 9:00 am to 4:00 pm

I'm pleased and excited to inform you that CodeMash 2009 planning is underway! We'll be returning to the Kalahari Resort to hold our third event this coming January 7-9, 2009, and do hope you'll consider participating. Submit your proposed session through the CodeMash website by navigating to http://codemash.org/BeASpeaker.aspx . As with prior events, speakers are provided with a free conference pass, including food, admission to all sessions, and all of the fame and glory attached to being a CodeMash participant. The deadline for submission is October 22, 2008 , however given the volume of proposals we'd appreciate it if you could strive to beat this deadline by at least a few weeks. January 7-9, you ask? You read it right, we're expanding the event to include a third day! Dubbed the CodeMash Precompiler, this day long event (held on January 7) will include a number of hands-on labs which give attendees the opportunity to explore a topic at great depth. We...

We are ready to announce our next ArcReady and MSDN Unleashed tour dates. ArcReady was detailed in the prior blog post. For those that are new, these are events given by your local evangelism team, in as many local cities as we can work out. These events happen every quarter. The ArcReadys are always in the morning, from 9am-11:30am. MSDN is from 1pm-4pm. They will usually be held in the same facility. ArcReady is geared for practicing and aspiring architects. You don’t have to be an architect to get value out of it. MSDN Unleashed events are geared for all types of developers. MSDN Unleashed Session 1 : Demystifying WPF Today’s applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an ap...

We are ready to announce our next ArcReady and MSDN Unleashed tour dates. MSDN Unleashed info in next blog post. For those that are new, these are events given by your local evangelism team, in as many local cities as we can work out. These events happen every quarter. The ArcReadys are always in the morning, from 9am-11:30am. MSDN is from 1pm-4pm. They will usually be held in the same facility. ArcReady is geared for practicing and aspiring architects. You don’t have to be an architect to get value out of it. MSDN Unleashed events are geared for all types of developers. Microsoft ArcReady Architecting Modern Distributed Applications Nearly every application we build today has dependencies to other systems. How do we design them to work together to meet our goals? How do we decide what to build and what to buy? Do we host it ourselves or in the cloud? With a bewildering array of choices, the biggest challenge we face today is how to architect robust applications with the ri...

A few months ago I sat down with Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan at Quick Solutions to talk about an elegant way to handle a difficult scenario. ARCast.TV - Jim Holmes and Philip Jordan on Excel Services http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/ARCast.TV/ARCastTV-Jim-Homes-and-Philip-Jordan-on-Business-Models-that-leverage-Excel-Services/ They often have customers with complex business logic in Excel, and the customer often thinks they want a new application to replace this. But the users also want to be able to update not only the business data, but the business MODELS. Trying to do this can be difficult, so Jim and Philip turned to MOSS, and Excel Services. Excel Services allows the user to publish their spreadsheets to their consumers. The consumers use the sheet in the browser. They don’t need Excel on the desktop. The great thing is the Intellectual Property of the business model is safe, because the end consumer only ever gets to see the output of the models, not the math behind th...

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I was speaking a while ago at ITT in Nashville, TN. After my talk, several students came up to tell me about a site they were running called FlameGoat.net . The voice of the site is intended to be a little on the edge, with a ‘fight the power’ type tone. The site is interesting, with a lot of gaming news and trailers. They have started sections aimed at developers, with room to post videos and tutorials. These students were clearly self starters, taking their idea, and executing it, instead of just talking about it. The other great thing, is that 15%-25% of the ad revenue is donated to Saint Jude’s Children Hospital every month. Not only did they execute their idea, they are using it to help the community. That’s just awesome. As I look at my career, and the people I have known, I remember seeing some great idea, and thinking that I had the same idea, but never did it. I slowly learned that many times you can’t wait for someone else to let you do something, you just need to find ...