Were you at Day of .NET last year? Couldn’t get enough? This year there will be two Day of .NET events in Michigan! That’s right, you read it right – two Day of .NET events in Michigan! The first will be in Ann Arbor at the Washtinaw Community College on May 5th and the second will be in Grand Rapids at Davenport University on May 19th. These are two distinct events with different speakers and agendas. I’m fortunate enough to have been chosen to speak at both.

I’m talking about Architecting the User Experience and a joint session on Mobility with Dan Hibbitts in Ann Arbor. I’m repeating part of the ArcReady content on What do Architects Do Anyway and Architecture Assets – an Introduction to Patterns and Practices Group.

You should plan on coming to at least one of these events if not both!

Registration for the Ann Arbor Day of .NET

Registration for the Grand Rapids Day of .NET

I’m really excited about virtualization – as a lot of people are. I just ran across this video on a TechNet Blog by Kevin Remde and thought I’d share out.

In the demo you will see:

• Windows Server Virtualization running on Server Core managed from another Windows Server Longhorn box
• 64-bit hosts and 32-bit hosts and a Linux running on the same server core box
• An 8-core virtual machine
• System Center Virtual Machine Manager
• System Center Operations Manager
• Monitoring the VMs on the Server Core box 
• Fire off a PowerShell script to hot-add another NIC to a SQL VHD Image

Link to Full of I.T. : Longhorn – Windows Server Virtualization and Server Core

VS>NET is a great set of tools – however, sometimes it’s not all that you need. In those cases – VS.NET is a great platform to build tools on top of and you can extend it to do a ton of different things.

There’s a great webcast coming up on May 3rd presented by my good buddy DonXML… Don Demsak, AKA DonXML, is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for XML and a Microsoft .NET solutions architect who specializes in architecting and programming multi-tier applications using the Microsoft .NET Framework. He is also a technology evangelist known for advocating the benefits of XML, Contract-First Web Services, and the .NET Framework through blogging and various Web discussion groups. Don is a cofounder of the Mvp.Xml open-source project (www.mvpxml.org) that enhances XML capabilities in the .NET Framework. The Mvp.Xml project includes XPathmania, which adds XPath testing support to the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005.

http://shrinkster.com/o5a

Chris Kotsis, one of the long time supporters and current Marketing Chair of GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group – the L and the U are silent… 🙂 ), is giving a talk on the VS.NET 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (AKA DataDude). He’s worked with Randy Pagel to put together the content and such. If you have not seen DataDude, you should definitly come check it out. Even if you have seen it, I know that Chris will bring his own unique perspective to the table and show you things that you probably haven’t seen before.

Link to Great Lakes Area .NET User Group (GANG) > Meetings ( DNN 2.1.2 )

Larry Clarin (one of my fellow Architect Evangelists) has a great write-up of the ArcReady tour and a bit about the new one coming.

Larry Clarkin on the upcoming ArcReady events

From the ArcReady site:

Architecting the next generation of software. The why, the what and the how.

Microsoft’s journey towards creating new technology strategies, platforms, tools and practices is to drive the next generation of software for consumers and the enterprise. It’s not without irony that one of the most neglected and challenging components of the software design process is understanding how to identify, design and implement the ‘experience’ that an individual will have with an interface. Learn how Microsoft is elevating ‘user experience’ to a first-class citizen in the software design and development process. Understand why ‘user experience’ may be one of the most important parts of an Architect’s job in creating new software that will matter.

Our next ArcReady program is called “Architecting for the User Experience.” Our guest speaker will be Chris Bernard, UX Evangelist for Microsoft. Together with the Central Region Architect Evangelists, we’ll discuss the role of the ‘user experience’ in architectural design and provide hands-on, practical guidance for getting better results in your own projects. We’ll discuss WPF, WPF/e, XAML and the new Expressions suite of products that allow designers, architects and developers to build great ‘user experiences’ using the same base technologies. More importantly, we will discuss how architects can work with software design professionals in new and innovative ways to create the next generation of ‘experiences’ and products that will be demanded by consumers and the enterprise.

Session 1: “Why the User Experience Matters in Architecture”

Session 2: “Architecting for the User Experience”

Join Us for This Free Event.

Show Cities and Dates

• Houston – 05/07/07
  
• Dallas – 05/08/07
  
• St Louis – 05/09/07
  
• Kansas City – 05/11/07
  
• Austin – 05/15/07
  
• Downers Grove – 05/15/07
  
• Minneapolis – 05/16/07
  
• Des Moines – 05/18/07
  
• + Nashville – 05/21/07
  
• + Louisville – 05/22/07
  
• + Cincinnati – 05/23/07
  
• Indianapolis – 05/24/07
  
• + Detroit – 05/25/07
  
• * Memphis – 06/11/07
  
• Milwaukee – 06/12/07
  
• * Cleveland – 06/13/07
  
• * Columbus – 06/14/07
  
• * Grand Rapids – 06/15/07

The ones with the + are where Chris and I will be speaking together and the ones with the * are were I will be speaking by myself or with a partner such as Jeff Blankenburg.

Link to Larry Clarkin – Architecture meets User Experience at upcoming ArcReady events

Registration for the next round of ArcReady events – http://www.arcready.com

These were interesting links that we put together at the end of the Mobility Touchdown

Windows Mobile Developer Wiki
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Mobile

Developer HomePage MSDN Windows Mobile
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsmobile/default.aspx

MSDN Windows Embedded (CE)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/embedded/default.aspx

Loke Uei’s blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/lokeuei/

Josh’s Moblog
http://foreme.spaces.live.com/

Ann Arbor .Net Developers Group
http://www.aadnd.org/

Great Lakes .Net Developers Group (Southfield)
http://www.migang.org/

West Michigan .Net Developers Group (Western Michigan)
http://www.grdotnet.org/

In case you haven’t seen it – Enterprise Library 3.0 has been released.

There are a ton of new features. Most of these are additive.

• Validation Application Block – this allows you to centralize your validation rules and validate data from anywhere in your application. This means that through config – you can use the exact same validation in your smart client, ASP.NET, server side and so on.
  
• Policy Injection Application Block – Provides a powerful approach for separating cross-cutting concerns from business logic using declarative policies that are attached at runtime to methods on your objects.
  
• Application Block Software Factory – Dramatically simplifies the process of building application blocks and providers through the magic of guidance automation.
  
• Visual Studio-integrated Configuration Editor – great improvements on the config editor and VS.NET integration.
  
• Environmental Overrides – Use the configuration tool to specify configuration settings that are common or different across multiple environments, and merge this information into configuration files to be deployed with your applications.
  
• WCF Integration – This is a bigger deal that it seams as we are now able to config the services layer o the Enterprise Libraries to talk to almost anything through Windows Communication Foundation. This has implications on the Logging, Exception Handling and Validation Application Blocks.
  
• Pre-compiled, strong-named binaries. No need to compile and strong name the code unless you want to manage and evolve the code yourself.

Check out Tom Hollander’s blog for a more compete write-up.

Link to patterns & practices – Enterprise Library

 Were you at Day of .NET last year? Couldn’t get enough? This year there will be two Day of .NET events in Michigan! That’s right, you read it right – two Day of .NET events in Michigan! The first will be in Ann Arbor at the Washtinaw Community College on May 5th and the second will be in Grand Rapids at Davenport University on May 19th. These are two distinct events with different speakers and agendas. I’m fortunate enough to have been chosen to speak at both.

I’m talking about Architecting the User Experience and a joint session on Mobility with Dan Hibbitts in Ann Arbor. I’m repeating part of the ArcReady content on What do Architects Do Anyway and Architecture Assets – an Introduction to Patterns and Practices Group.

You should plan on coming to at least one of these events if not both!

Registration for the Ann Arbor Day of .NET

Registration for the Grand Rapids Day of .NET

SRT Solutions hosted a “User Interface Smackdown” yesterday. While the “Smackdown” part of the name was a little off what happened, it was a great event with some great discussions. James Ward (a Flex Evangelist from Adobe), Drew Robbins (Developer Evangelist for Microsoft), Chris Bernard (User Experience Evangelist from Microsoft), Dianne Marsh (SRT Solutions), Bill Wagner (SRT Solutions), Mark Ramm (Contributor to Turbo Gears and author of the best book out on the subject), myself and a number of other technologists and business owners totaling 34 in all got together and discussed a lot of different options on the user interface and creating the best user experience possible. The event was in an Open Spaces format which means that none of us lead the conference but all of us contributed, none of us knew what the topics were going to be when we started but all of us got to vote on them and suggest new topics and none of us knew what the outcome of the event would be but we all helped shape it. I don’t think that the Open Spaces format is the right fit for every event, but it is a great format for learning and promoting discussion. I learned a lot more about GWT, Flex, Turbo Gears, Ruby on Rails and more. I also learned more about what people are thinking in the areas of design, Rich Internet Applications, Smart Clients and more. We talked about everything from WPF to WPF/e to the Web Services Software Factory to Click One Deployment to an amazing number of other topics. It’s really hard to capture all that we talked about yesterday.

It was not a smackdown at all – it was a coming together of minds, technologies and disiplines that I think everyone who attended was able to take something positive away from. I really enjoyed the event and hope that we will have more like in the local area.

Link to User Interface Smackdown 2007 | SRT Solutions

The ArcReady slides have been posted in the ArcReady download area.

Thanks to all that came – feel free to follow up with me with any questions or comments.

Link to Microsoft ArcReady – Downloads