The Software Devotional

Speaking at VSLive Dallas

One of my favorite things to do is talk at professional conferences. If you've ever seen me speak at one, you'll know immediately that professional speaking is not an essential skill in my profession, but I am getting a little better each time. I will be speaking at VSLive in Dallas about one of my favorite topics: cloud computing.

Come see me from 9:45 - 11:00 AM on Tuesday, December 9. My hope is to dispel some of the hype, and related mistrust, surrounding cloud computing. I will give you the practical knowledge of how to build big-company reliability and scalability into your product for a small-company price. Amazon's web services offerings are changing the landscape of software development - come see how it can impact you.

Here's the official session information:

Cloud Computing for .NET Developers

Cloud computing services are beginning to impact the developer community in a big way. Companies ranging from microISV start-ups to Fortune 500 companies are finding tremendous value in cloud-sourcing functions traditionally serviced by in-house facilities. Amazon's Simple Storage Service broke the ice with inexpensive large-scale reliable storage that catered to the development community. More recently, the Simple Queue Service, the Elastic Compute Cloud, and SimpleDB services have made possible what was too expensive to consider previously. The time has come to change the way we look at infrastructure - not only do we not need to build these services any longer, but we don't even need to manage them.

This session will start by exploring the possibilities to leverage cloud services available from Amazon. We will discuss how they are commonly being used, and how the services can best be adopted in your applications. Then we will spend the majority of our time exploring code to use each of these services inside your applications. We will discuss freely available tools and libraries that are available and how they can serve you best. PowerPoint will be kept to a minimum in favor of code and samples. You will leave this session with a solid understanding of how cloud computing services can help you build more robust applications more quickly and less expensively.

If you use the promotional code SPJON when you register, you'll receive $300 off your conference registration package of your choice!

Speaking at VSLive New York

Last week I learned that I would be speaking at VSLive in New York this fall. I will be presenting two talks on Wednesday, September 10. One talk is entitled "Microsoft's Patterns and Practices - More Than Just Good Advice" and the other is "Fall in Love with Visual Basic All Over Again - Visual Basic 9". In the patterns talk my goal is to not only educate attendees about the functionality present in Microsoft's patterns and practices libraries but also to try to convince the listeners that it isn't worth spending time rebuilding these same tools - use your developers' time to build products that add business value. My talk about VB9 will cover many of the new features added in the latest release of VB, along with some features that come as part of Visual Studio 2008. I don't plan to cover the LINQ features in VB9 as I am sure you will see more LINQ presentations than you care to think about.

Speaking at CodeStock 2008

Yesterday I received word that I would be speaking at the upcoming CodeStock 2008 conference in Knoxville, TN. CodeStock is one of a growing number of smaller regional conferences organized by passionate developers and/or local user groups. The size of these conferences make them fun to speak at and attend. Unlike other conferences that cost a fortune, take you out of the office for a week, and require you to fly to other states (maybe you like those things), conferences like CodeStock are short (1 day for CodeStock) and are held close to where you live and work. Try one out before signing up for a big national conference.

I will be giving a talk about one of my favorite topics: Amazon's web services framework. I will be covering the ins and outs of using S3, SQS, and SimpleDB from a .NET app.

According to the CodeStock web 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. Sign up now to learn how you can join us for CodeStock 2008!

Register for CodeStock today. The cost is only $25.