Events

TechEd 2010 Bound

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:24:10 GMT

Well, its already that time. I’ll be flying into New Orleans tonight at about 9 pm, and am looking forward to connecting with some friends and taking in the sights and sounds of this great city. Its been about 9 years since I’ve been there and am curious to see how the city has changed since the storm.

Conferences are always a great chance to connect with old friends, make new friends, and learn and share with others passionate about technology. TechEd 2010 will be no exception.

If you’re in The Learning Center next week, stop by and say hi. I’ll be at the Windows Server AppFabric, WCF & WF booth (Booth#: TLC/Blue/ASI) doing some demos and talking to folks about the exciting capabilities Windows Server AppFabric brings to the enterprise Business Platform.

I also hope you’ll join me for what I hope will be an inspiring discussion on the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You can find more information about the session here: http://rickgaribay.net/archive/2010/04/26/teched-north-america-2010.aspx and make sure to add it to your schedule using session builder by selecting “Birds-of-a-Feather” under Types and “Windows Server AppFabric” under Product Technology (note: should actually be in the Azure AppFabric category, we are working to fix this). This will be a highly interactive discussion with participants influencing the discussion.

AZ Give Camp Call for Volunteers

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:23:20 GMT

AZGiveCamp is a massive weekend event where the software development community comes together to support charities and non-profits by developing or improving their web sites and applications. It's fun, it's agile, it's geeky, and it's good for the community. More about AZGiveCamp here: http://azgivecamp.org/FAQs/FAQ.aspx

WHAT

We are in the process of identifying and selecting charities and are looking for Dev Leads and BA/PM Leads for each charity team.

The Dev Lead and BA/PM Lead forms the leadership team for each charity team, with immediate responsibilities including:

The Dev Lead will be responsible for partnering with the BA/PM Lead and the charity team to conduct requirements elicitation, draft a vision statement and develop the charity sponsor relationship to scope and commit to what the team hopes to accomplish the weekend of AZ GiveCamp.

The BA/PM Lead will be responsible for partnering with the Dev Lead and the charity team to conduct requirements elicitation, draft a vision statement and develop the charity sponsor relationship to scope and commit to what the team hopes to accomplish the weekend of AZ GiveCamp.

The Dev Lead and BA/PM Lead will be responsible for building a team of 3 to 5 additional volunteers to deliver the project over the weekend of AZ Give Camp. This means coding, building, configuring, testing, etc all weekend until the job is done.

The Dev Lead and BA/PM Lead will be responsible for self-organizing, mentoring, guiding and managing risk on the project team the weekend of the event from the evening of 5/21 through the afternoon of 5/23.

Note: While there will be plenty of room for creative license, the name of the game is scale so the vast majority of *new* charity work will entail the delivery of CMS using Sitefinity, Sharepoint 2007/2010, WordPress as the main delivery platforms. Exceptions can always be made so any ideas are welcome as long as they don’t entail re-inventing a wheel that already exists.

WHEN

May 21st - 23rd, 2010

WHERE

Chandler Senior Center

ACTION

Everyone in the community has an opportunity to make a visible impact on this event. If you are interested in volunteering to be a Dev Lead or BA/PM Lead please contact me here.

If you are not interested in the leadership role, but would like to be an individual contributor, register ASAP with a preferred team name and if you don’t have a team name yet, please enter “PCSUG” here and we can change it later: http://azgivecamp.org/Volunteer.aspx You will then be interviewed and matched with the appropriate charity team based on your skillset and interests.

*** IMPORTANT***

Please be mindful that regardless of role chosen, this is a hard commitment that you are making to be engaged and involved in this event from the time you volunteer through the evening of May 23^rd. There will be ebbs and flows and periods of intense commitment. You are volunteering to make a marked impact on this event and giving up your entire weekend on the evening of 5/21 through 5/23.

OTHER WAYS TO CONTRIBUTE

Know of a killer charity that would kill for a CMS to get them up and running? Little r me and I will get you connected to our charity director. Please note that we are particularly interested in helping smaller, local charities and non-profits.
Have some Sharepoint licenses sitting around or have a connection with a friend at Microsoft to get some Sharepoint love to a charity in need? The more the merrier! Please contact me here.

Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to working with you to make the first AZGiveCamp a huge success!

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Event Content Download

Rick G. Garibay — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:45:01 GMT

Thanks to all who came out to the event in Phoenix, Salt Lake City & Las Vegas. We had a great turnout at all events with great questions and discussions.

Remember that the conversation continues on twitter.

If you attended the event and have a question or comment for any of the presenters, use the following hashtags:

Phoenix: #vs2010phx
Salt Lake City: #vs2010slc
Las Vegas: #vs2010vegas

Below are the presentations from all four sessions in each city:

Phoenix	A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010	Rick G. Garibay
Phoenix	Agile Management with TFS	Brendon Birdoes	*
Phoenix	No More "No Repro"	Brendon Birdoes	*
Phoenix	Architecture for Everyone	Rick G. Garibay
Salt Lake City	A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010	Rick G. Garibay
Salt Lake City	Agile Management with TFS	Jeff Leite	*
Salt Lake City	No More "No Repro"	Jeff Leite	*
Salt Lake City	Architecture for Everyone	Rick G. Garibay
Las Vegas	A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010	Rick G. Garibay
Las Vegas	Agile Management with TFS	Mickey Williams	*
Las Vegas	No More "No Repro"	Mickey Williams	*
Las Vegas	Architecture for Everyone	Rick G. Garibay

* Note that content for all venues is very similar but may vary from presenter to presenter. ~~All content for both venues will be available soon so please check back shortly.~~

PCSUG AZ Million Meal Event 11/21

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:42:10 GMT

The Phoenix Connected Systems User Group is partnering with the Feed My Starving Children organization to pack food for thousands of needy children who need your help.

Join us as we pack 1 million meals for Feed My Starving Children in just one weekend. That’s enough to feed more than 2,700 children for a year! We will need thousands of volunteers to pack these life-saving meals. We also need to raise more than $170,000 to pay for production costs.

About Feed My Starving Children

Feed My Starving Children is a non-profit Christian organization (see FAQs below) committed to feeding God’s starving children hungry in body and spirit. The approach is simple: children and adults hand-pack meals formulated specially for starving children, and FMSC ships the meals to more than 60 countries around the world.

This year, Feed My Starving Children is committing to providing 91 million meals.

How can you help?

Join PCSUG on Saturday, 11/21 from 9:00 am to 11:00 am at La Casa de Cristo Lutheran Church in Scottsdale, AZ. In this 2 hour shift, we’ll pack thousands of meals to be distributed worldwide and help FMSC get one step closer to their goal of 1 million meals.

Volunteering your time and energy to help pack these meals for which there is an urgent need is our highest priority. If you can help, please register for the 9:00 am shift on 11/21 here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/459671891

In addition, Feed My Starving Children is accepting donations of $40 per volunteer to cover the production costs of the food. Just $40 pays for the ingredients you pack, and $62 feeds a child for a year! To make an online donation, click here.

Please note that donations are not a requirement to contribute.

FAQs

Here are some common questions from the FAQ : http://www.fmsc.org/Page.aspx?pid=278

Where do you send your food?

We have sent food to more than 60 countries including Haiti, Sudan, Jamaica, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Lesotho, Liberia, Ghana, Guatemala, Malawi, Cambodia, East Timor, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, India, Indonesia, Cameroon, Niger, Colombia, and El Salvador, and to Hurricane Katrina victims in Louisiana and Mississippi.

Do you feed children here in the United States?

Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) targets feeding programs to children who are in the most severe circumstances, those suffering from severe malnutrition and threatened with death from starvation. The United States does not have that level of hunger on a widespread basis. In the past we have supplied food to an Indian reservation in South Dakota and to those affected by Hurricane Katrina.

How long have you been doing this?

Feed My Starving Children was founded in 1987; the first shipment of the current food formula was sent in 1991.

Do you have to be a Christian to pack?

No. We welcome people of every faith to participate in our life-giving mission.

Do you require delivery of a Christian message when the food is served?

No. Our food is given to the neediest children, regardless of their faith or whether a Christian message is delivered. All of God’s children deserve to be fed.

Can the hunger problem ever be solved?

There is currently enough food in the world to feed everyone. The model FMSC has created works. With many people working together, we can have a significant impact on hunger and malnutrition worldwide.

What makes FMSC food so special for a malnourished child?

Our food was designed by food scientists at Cargill and General Mills to meet the nutritional needs of a 4-to-8-year-old malnourished child. Each meal has 20 different vitamins and minerals that are specifically tailored to meet a child’s nutritional needs for one day.

How old do you have to be to volunteer?

Children should be in third grade or older to participate. Younger children may have difficulty reaching to pour food into and packing food in the ingredient funnels. We realize that there will be some mixed age groups, in which case we ask that younger children work one-on-one with an adult and are not left unattended.

The Saturday shift is limited to 52 volunteers, which, at capacity can pack up to 30,000 meals. I would love nothing more than to hear that Eventbrite is out of tickets for that shift!

Thank you for considering this opportunity to volunteer and give back to the community in a much needed way!

Donate Here: http://www.fmsc.org/Page.aspx?pid=383

Desert Code Camp November 7th

Rick G. Garibay — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 12:11:22 GMT

I will be speaking at DCC on November 7th on the following topics:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage
Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage

There are several excellent sessions this time around, including talks from fellow colleagues at Neudesic like Michael Collins, Joel Neubeck and Andrew Wilson.

Hope to see you there!

Speaking at Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22

Rick G. Garibay — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:14:09 GMT

I will be speaking at the SQL Server Worldwide User Group Ultimate Virtual Conference on October 22.

If you haven’t experienced an Ultimate Virtual Conference, it is very similar to other industry conferences. There are a number of tracks including .NET, SQL and MOSS and sessions are scheduled on specific days.

Unlike traditional conferences, however, you don’t have to leave the comfort of your home or office to attend. All sessions are streamed in HD video at the scheduled time. Speakers are available via live chat during the initial screening of their sessions and then you can watch the sessions again and again.

I will be delivering the following two sessions:

Developing and Deploying an On-Premise .NET Application with Azure Table Storage

Azure Table Storage provides a scalable data access solution for applications hosted on-premise or in the Azure cloud. Learn how to get up and running with Table Storage with a look at building entities, provisioning Table Storage locally in Development Storage and in Azure Table Storage along with techniques for maintaining a consistent development experience when developing locally or against the cloud.

Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage.

The Azure Compute Service provides robust hosting capabilities of you .NET application in the Azure operating system. Learn about Web Roles and Worker Roles and how to configure your .NET application for deployment to Windows Azure. We will also explore techniques for consuming data via Azure Table Storage and put at all together and deploy the application live to Windows Azure.

My colleague Brendon Birdoes of Neudesic will also be presenting the following sessions:

ESB Toolkit 2.0 Overview

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is an architectural pattern and a key enabler in implementing the infrastructure for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ESB Toolkit for BizTalk Server 2009 implements best practices and patterns for building loosely coupled service oriented solutions using BizTalk as the bus. The ESB Toolkit 2.0 is one of the best new features of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009! Join Brendon as he explains what the ESB Toolkit is, explores the features and capabilities and discusses the benefits of using the Toolkit for your BizTalk solutions.

Implementing Messaging Solutions Using ESB Toolkit 2.0

Itinerary based routing is the key pattern in delivering solutions in the ESB Toolkit 2.0. The challenge though is how to take a traditional BizTalk scenario and implement it using the ESB Toolkit and itinerary based routing. This session will walk through a real world scenario and iteratively build the solution from a simple itinerary to a more complex itinerary including some of the more advanced capabilities of the Toolkit. This session will also take a closer look at the best new feature of the ESB Toolkit which is the Itinerary Designer that is fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008. If you are a BizTalk developer and would like to get an idea of the Toolkit development experience, this is a must see.

For a complete list of sessions and speakers, go to http://www.vconferenceonline.com/shows/fall09/uvc/

~~I have a limited amount of discount codes I can give out so feel free to contact me via email or @rickggaribay on twitter and I will set you up.~~

Please feel free to use discount code SPRGUVC09 for $25 off registration discount.

AZ Give Camp Organizer's Meeting 10/15

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:39:20 GMT

Give Camp is a growing nationwide effort for software professionals to give back to the community. On a given weekend, the development community comes together to partner with non-profits and charities, and over the course of one weekend developers take projects from idea to completion!

Your technical skills are important, but what is needed most is dedication and energy. If you have an interest in having a big role in the success of Give Camp, please attend the AZ Give Camp organizers meeting on October 15^that Microsoft's downtown office from 6pm to 8pm.

To learn more about Give Camp, you can visit http://www.givecamp.org and follow them on Twitter @AZGiveCamp or call them at 623.252.GIVE if you have questions.

PCSUG Meeting this Thursday: Developing and Deploying a WCF Application with Azure Compute Services and Azure Table Storage

Rick G. Garibay — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:11:48 GMT

I will be speaking at the PCSUG this Thursday on how to design, develop and deploy a WCF application for Windows Azure. I’ll demonstrate configuration for testing locally in the development fabric as well as development storage and wrap up with deployment to Compute Service and Table Storage.

Pizza and sodas at 5:30 pm, and we’ll kick off at 6:00 pm and go until 7:30 pm.

Hope to see you there!

Slides and demo code are now available here: http://pcsug.org/Home/Events

What a Night!

Rick G. Garibay — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:42:31 GMT

Thanks to all who came out to the Phoenix Connected Systems User Group 1 Year Anniversary party!

I want to quickly recap the evening and then close out with our take-aways and action items. If I missed anything, please let me know.

We started off with a nostalgic year-in-review, highlighting each of the talks that were delivered over the last 12 months, including:

June 2009 – Scott Cate
An Insider's Look at CloudDB

May 2009 – Rick G. Garibay
Building Transactional Distributed Services with Windows Communication Foundation 3.5

April 2009 - INETA Sponsored Event – Robert Green
Client Application Services

March 2009 – Todd Sussman
Expose and Consume Web Services from Anywhere with the .NET Service Bus

February 2009 – Brendon Birdoes
A First Look at Microsoft ESB Guidance 2.0 for BizTalk Server 2009

January 2009 – Rob Bagby
Exposing and Consuming Resources with REST in WCF

November 2008 – Rob Wisehart
An Introduction to Windows Workflow 3.5

October 2008 – Rick G. Garibay
Building Service-Oriented Applications with WCF

September 2008 -Todd Sussman
Architectural Overview of BizTalk Server 2006 R2

Ausgust 2008 Todd Sussman and Rick G. Garibay
Putting The "A" into Service Orientation

Again, a BIG thank you to all of the speakers who dedicated themselves and their time to give something back to the community. You can find most presentations and sample source code on the PCSUG website here: http://pcsug.org/Home/Events

Next, we moved on to awards.

The First Annual PCSUG Sustaining Sponsor Award went to Rob Bagby at Microsoft Corporation. Rob has been instrumental to the success of the PCSUG and has been a sponsor and partner from day one. Always the pragmatist, it is Rob who has helped us to calibrate our message to gain the widest reach and to keep it simple. In addition, Rob has been kind enough to dedicate even more of his personal time to sponsor our location, arriving at 5:00 pm to help with setup and sometimes staying as late as 8:30 pm to tear down. Rob’s leadership and commitment to the PCSUG, local and worldwide community has been profound and we are proud to present him with this award. Due to extenuating circumstances, Rob was unable to accept the award in-person, so I had the honor of doing so.

The next award went to Jeff Stowe. Jeff has been an inspiration to the Phoenix community as far back as I can remember. If there is a Microsoft-focused community event, you can count on Jeff being there to support the leaders, ask questions and just be a part of the community. When starting a new user group, it is incredibly inspiring to know that no matter what the topic, you can count on Jeff being there. As a result, it was Todd and my pleasure to award Jeff with the PCSUG Sustaining Member Award. Thanks again Jeff!

After some much needed pizza and cake, we were ready to get to work, so we conducted a retrospective over the last 12 months and discussed what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what we can do better over the next 12 months.

We got some great feedback from everyone along with some new ideas for what we can do better going forward. Some of these initiatives include:

Alternating Foundational and Scenario-Driven sessions every other month. The idea being that there is a need for foundational content on Connected Systems’ related technologies and at the same time, we want to continue with our goal of delivering scenario-based-take-home-and-try-it-tomorrow content. The challenge has been that for scenario-focused sessions, we learned that we often lose folks who are new to a technology like WCF or BizTalk early on, so by staggering sessions we should be more successful at reaching as wide an audience as possible.

Another suggestion was to play with the idea of elastic content that starts off at level 200, goes for 45 minutes, then do a break and jump to 300+ level content. This would give the group both a foundational coverage of the topic as well as the opportunity to bail out or stay for the deeper coverage. I am interested in your thoughts around this approach, so please contact me and let me know what you think!

Tapping into colleges and continuing education providers. As stated in our mission statement, our goal is share the message of Connected Systems technologies and why we feel that the move from imperative software development to declarative and model-driven development is a profound one. What better way to incubate these ideas than within the academic community? This, year we will try to develop a channel with local educators like ASU, Devry, MCC and UAT to ensure that their CS programs have an open invitation to participate in our community.

Alternate Media. Let’s face it. Its hard to get people off the couch. I firmly believe that there is no substitute for in-person collaboration. Do we increase our reach with alternate media like podcasts, screencasts and recorded sessions on the PCSUG website or does this discourage in-person interaction? We’ll ponder this tough question over the next few months.

Topics

Moving on to topics, these are the topics the community would like to see over the next several months:

Windows Azure
- Compute and Table Services
- SQL Data Services
- .NET Services
A closer look at Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technologies like N-Service Bus and Neuron ESB.
Oslo & M – You’d likely like to see M broken out.
WCF 3.5 – you want to learn about WCF so you can apply it today and also take a look at what’s new in WCF 4.0
WF 4.0 – why the change? What’s new, better, different? Where should you start if you are new to WF modeling?
Understanding the progression from imperative code, to declarative and model-driven software ala objects to components to services to composable services.
BizTalk 2009 ESB Toolkit 2.0

Sponsors

We are also looking very closely at the possibility of moving our meeting to Interface Technical Training. We are currently discussing this with J. Michael Palermo and promise to make a decision as soon as possible to minimize any venue change disruptions.

We are also looking for sponsors for pizza and sodas. In exchange, we’ll put your logo on our website on the www.pcsug.org/events page and our sponsor thank you slide during the introduction of the presenter/topic. Please contact me if you are interested in sponsoring a meeting.

I think that just about covers it. If I missed anything, or you have any other ideas for what you’d like to see over the next 12 months, please drop me a line.

Thanks again to everyone for making our first year a success!

Phoenix Connected Systems User Group 1 Year Birthday Party this Thursday!

Rick G. Garibay — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:55:25 GMT

Just a reminder that you are invited to the 1 year birthday party celebration of the PCSUG. The cake order has been placed, award layouts have been finalized and the list of prizes continues to grow.

We also want to provide some parking tips for folks who do not want to pay for parking in the parking garage:

A very reliable alternative is to park on the NW corner of Catalina and Central in the Interface Technical Training parking lot. This is a public parking lot, however please use caution when crossing Thomas street, and be sure to use the cross walk.

Another option is to use the LightRail which stops just in front of the Microsoft building. If you haven't used the LightRail, it is a very clean and convenient way to get around. Check out the map here: http://www.valleymetro.org/images/uploads/system_map/0727_light_rail.pdf and the schedule here: http://www.valleymetro.org/bus_schedules/transit_routes_0727/Metro_Light_Raila.html#wp1111582

Please see original invitation below and feel free to bring a friend!

Join us as we celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the Phoenix Connected Systems User Group!

We will have pizza, sodas and cake along with some special community awards to mark one year of community around Connected Systems Technologies!

In addition, we will present a one-year in review, highlighting the speakers and topics over the last year. Following that, we will have an open, round-table forum to do a retrospective on what you've liked so far, what you didn't like and talk about our plans for the next year including your feedback on topics and speakers you'd like to see over the next year.

If you have been involved in PCSUG, please come out and share in the celebration of a community that YOU have helped create.

If you are interested in distributed application development, connected systems technologies, or SOA, this is a perfect opportunity to come meet our members, and contribute thoughts and ideas to mold the topics and structure for the next 12 months.

Please feel free to forward this invitation to friends and colleagues and thank you all for making PCSUG a success!

Meeting Place: Microsoft District Office - 2929 N. Central Avenue, Suite 1400, Phoenix, AZ

Meeting Time: Thursday, August 13th 6pm to 7:30pm

All attendees will receive the latest copy of CODE Magazine and we have several prizes to give away, so be prepared to provide candid feedback on this month's topic to be entered to win.

Hope to see you there!

Rick & Todd

More about PCSUG:

The goal of the Phoenix Connected Systems User Group is to educate, evangelize and inform the community about the direction in which the Microsoft Connected Systems Division (and software engineering) is going, and how developers and architects of various, yet intersecting disciplines can start to prepare for what is ahead while serving the community through knowledge sharing and evangelism of current shipping technologies.

We meet the 2nd Thursday of each month at the Microsoft District Office - 2929 N. Central Avenue, Suite 1400, Phoenix, AZ from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm.

Follow us on:

Twitter: #PCSUG, @rickggaribay, @biztodd

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groupRegistration?gid=138312

Facebook: Search for Phoenix Connected Systems User Group