Brian H. Prince

Wow! A year has come and gone and the second annual DogFood conference is done. We had 19 partners come together to put on a two day event for customers in Columbus, Ohio. We had attendees from four hours away! There were over 45 sessions. I was able to deliver a talk on using Azure. There were 400 attendees over the two days, and I think everyone had a lot of fun, and learned a lot. I want to thank everyone who came to my session, and please connect with me if you have more questions about Azure. The slides are here:

We have just wrapped up the first Windows 7 launch tour. We hit all of the major cities. Now that we have brushed the dust from our boots, we are heading back out and doubling back to hit more local cities. If you weren’t able to make it to one of the big launches you should sign up to make it to one of these local launches. There will be some cool prizes as well. I will be speaking at the Nashville event (Franklin, TN), and the Columbus event. I hope to see you there. From the official invite…   ------------------------- TechNet & MSDN Events Present: Highlights from “the New Efficiency” Launch Join us as we explore how Windows® 7, Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Exchange Server® 2010 deliver on the new efficiency where cost savings, productivity and innovations come together. At this free event we’ll cover the “best of” content and deliver highlights from “the New Efficiency” Launch events taking p...

We recently wrapped up a 17 city road show covering real work experiences with Azure. We had both an IT Pro session, and a developer session. While we were in Nashville we webcasted the event. If you weren’t able to get to one of the events, now is your chance to see the recordings. We cover the architecture, and development of solutions running on Azure, as well as how to manage and provisions the solutions. Just because the app is running in the cloud doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be managed. You just aren’t spending as much time managing the underlying infrastructure. You can replay the videos, or download them for offline viewing. The IT Pro one has also been published to TechNet here . TechNet Events Presents: Real World Azure https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425946&role=attend&pw=WE45G3T7   MSDN Events Presents: Real World Azure - Live Meeting https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032425948&role=attend&pw=E45W7...

While I was at devLink I presented a talk called "5 frameworks you can’t live without.” I wanted to talk to people about how to not be a plumber, and how to reduce the code you write to only what only someone like you can write. I also wanted to share some frameworks that I know a lot of people are using and having success with. This deck is very unsophisticated, and it has a very interesting origination story. I will be happy to share it with anyone who buys me a drink. Big thanks to Mike Wood for helping me with it. As a whole, devLink was a blast. It is always fun to attend it. If you didn’t get to go you should mark it on your calendar for next year.  

nPlus1.org is hosting it's third Architecture Summit on June 10th at the Microsoft office in Nashville, TN (Franklin).  The topic of this summit will be Patterns and Principles. Session One: Software Patterns Patterns are an important tool to use as architects and developers. They provide a common vocabulary for us to design with, as well as a common approach to a common problem. Come learn about useful patterns, and how to use them in your everyday code. Session Two: How I Learned To Love Dependency Injection Dependency Injection is one of those scary topics that most developers avoid. It sounds all ‘high-falootin’ and complex. It’s not. Really. We wouldn’t lie. It’s a great way to manage complexity in your system, and a great way to make your system so much more testable. And isn’t that what we all want? Each session will be followed by open discussions periods. A catered lunch will be provided starting at noon when the welcome time begins. Register here: https://ww...

So, you live in GR, and you want to go to ArcReady, but Detroit is just too far away? Then rest easy my friend. With some great help from Chris Woodruff , and the great folks at RCM Technologies, we are bringing ArcReady to Grand Rapids. The www.arcready.com site should be updated soon. The link to register is http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032413886&Culture=en-US . For information on what the sessions will be about, check out my post from last week .

While I am here at the great West Michigan .NET University event, I wanted to tell you about another Michigan event coming up. This one has a bit of a different flavor though. Instead of being all about hard skills, all of the talks will be about soft skills. I think this is a great change. While we have a very strong community in the area, our user groups spend too much of their time talking about hard skills, and not enough time about skills that make them better developers as a whole. The Kalamaxoo event team set out to change this. I will be speaking, as well as some other great people, so check it out.   From their site http://blindbackup.com/ ,   The Kalamazoo X Conference is a one-day software development conference hosted in beautiful Southwest Michigan. While there are many great technical conferences in the region, their focus tends toward new technologies and programming languages. The Kalamazoo X Conference intends to uniquely complement those conferen...

I could sit here and tell you about the great conference that devLink is, or how inexpensive (and cost effective it is), or say how awesome it was last year, or about the great speakers (and myself) that will be there. But I figured just pasting in their own well written announcement is enough. It’s call code reuse. I get to be a speaker again this year. While I doubt there will be a devLink bus this year (people still haven’t recovered from last year’s bus) but it would be cheap to get some buddies, and carpool down there. See you there!        The devLink Technical Conference is pleased to announce it's fourth annual event - devLink 2009.  This year devLink will take place August 13 - 15 in Nashville, TN.  We have worked hard to bring you the best content possible at a price you can afford.  This year promises to be the best devLink ever with nearly 100 sessions offered over three days.  That's right, we have expanded devLink to a t...

During the upcoming ArcReady tour, I will be sitting in on a KNOThead meeting. The meeting is at EdFinancial, and is from 5:30-8:00pm on 3/10/2008. We will talk about cloud computing, and how this shift is affecting our organizations, especially during this time of grapefruit. So come out for ArcReady, and hang around for the KNOThead meeting.   Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN

[ArcReady has two siblings, MSDN Unleashed , and TechNet Unleashed . For some reason we haven’t unleashed ArcReady yet.] For our next ArcReady, we will explore a topic on everyone’s mind: Cloud computing. Several industry companies have announced cloud computing services. In October 2008 at the Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced the next phase of our Software + Services vision: the Azure Services Platform. The Azure Services Platform provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on premises environments or the internet. Session 1 : Cloud Services In our first session we will explore the current state of cloud services. We will then look at how applications should be architected for the cloud and explore a reference application deployed on Windows Azure. We will also look at the services that can be built for on premises application, using .NET Services. We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud servi...

The Northwest .NET Users Group has been kind enough to invite me to speak at their February meeting. It will be on 2/17 at 6:00p – 8:00p, located at 333 North Summit Street, Toledo, Oh . I will be speaking on cloud computing, what it can mean to you, and what the Azure Services Platform is. Given enough time, we will even look at some code. I hope to see you there!

I have been working with some friends that are on our Enterprise team to put together an event. We decided to call it the Dog Food Developer Conference. About half of the speakers are local community leaders, and the other half are Microsofties. DF will be held on November 20th, 2008, and starts at 8:00am. We will have three tracks throughout the day, covering a wide range of topics. The schedule is listed below. The last part of the afternoon is left for open discussion with the speakers. We have reserved plenty of small rooms, so you can snag a speaker, and sneak off to have a private conversation. You can, of course, have your conversation out in the open if you want. The event is free, and there are only a few seats left, so register quickly. Lunch will be provided. Time: Track 0 Track 1 Track 2 8 to 9:00 AM Register 9 - 9:45 Key Note S oftware + S ervices , MS Roadmaps, PDC Announcements Speaker: Brian Prince , MS S oftware + S ervices , MS Roadmaps, PDC Announc...

I am just now recovering from a great tip up to AA. The event went very well, and the organizers did a great job. It is really cool to see leaders from five different user groups get together to put on such a smoothly run event. The speakers and content they lined up were just great. I ended up in the big amphitheatre room again, as the last session of the day, just like last year. But I am not complaining. I actually like that. It allows me to tie some of the things I have seen during the day together, and weave them into my talk. I spoke on ‘How to be an architect.’ This was the first instance of this talk, and I think, with that being said, it went pretty well. I definitely found ways to smooth the delivery, and increase the connectedness of some of the value flow. I will work to make these improvements before the next time I deliver it. I have posted the slides here , if you are interested. I do want to follow up on some of the questions that were asked. 0. Someone ask...

The Tennessee tour for ArcReady went very well (followed up by an awesome week at Disney for vacation). I want to thank everyone who came out. We had a lot of good conversations. Here are the slides: Session 1 covers the patterns and concepts for how to architect for different distributed systems using modern architectures. Session 2 covers Zermatt, and how you can use it to deploy scenarios covered in session 1.

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

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...

CodeStock is a new local event in Knoxville, TN being put on by the community leaders in the area. Save the date on your calendar, and check out the site . CodeStock's mission is to bring the best and brightest code experts to East Tennessee for a one day conference open to all developers. This is not a trade show with slick salesman giving prepared demos - this is a gathering of real programmers learning about the latest in technology from each other.  If you would like to speak at CodeStock, go to http://www.codestock.org/Pages/Speakers.aspx and put in your submission.  We’re looking for talks in all areas of software development, including .NET, RIA, Web, AJAX, Databases, and other.  This will be a great opportunity for you to speak and to show your knowledge to the community. They plan on revealing major details next Tuesday on June 17th, so stay tuned. Microsoft will be a Platinum sponsor. I plan on being there and presenting my Soft Skillz talk. It wi...

I will be speaking to a whole bunch of students at ITT in Nashville, TN this Friday (June 13th) at 6:00pm. Contact me if you want to attend. I will be covering my Soft Skillz talk, focusing on the career management aspects of it.

Last night I delivered a talk to the Cleveland .NET User Group. I think  we had about 60 people there.   We had a great time. Despite the rumors, there is no “Screw Developers!” button on the Excel tab for TFS. Here are the slides.

I will be presenting this Tuesday (June 10th, 2008) at the Bennett Adelson .NET SIG in Cleveland. Summary: .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008 SP1 are on track to be released this summer. In this presentation, Brian will cover a lap around the new frameworks, and features it includes. These servicing updates provide a roll-up of bug fixes and performance improvements for issues reported since Microsoft released the products last November. They also contain a number of feature additions and enhancements that make building .NET applications better. This includes ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET Routing Engine, ASP.NET AJAX Back/Forward Button Support, ADO.NET Entity Framework, and LINQ to Entities, and ADO.NET Data Services.   Reserve Your Seat: To confirm your attendance at this month's .NET SIG, please reserve your seat . Walk-ins are always welcome. Location: Microsoft Corporation 6050 Oak Tree Blvd. Independence, Ohio 44131   Here is some information on ...