Are you in the Indianapolis area?  Can spare a day or can you talk your boss into giving you an “education” day? If so, then you should check out the series of events that Microsoft is bringing to town!  Every three months ArcReady and MSDN Unleashed make an appearance in our area, and they’re now joined by TechNet Unleashed. For those who aren’t familiar with these events they are targeted towards specific audiences, but have a high level of value to anyone in the Information Technology Field.

ArcReady - Architecting for the cloud

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 Platforms 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 premise application, using .NET Services.  We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud services, such as regulatory and compliance issues.

Session 2: Mesh and Live Services

In our second session we will take a slightly different look at cloud based services by exploring Live Mesh and Live Services.  Live Mesh is a data synchronization client that has a rich API to build applications on.  Live services are a collection of APIs that can be used to create rich applications for your customers.  Live Services are based on internet standard protocols and data formats.

Date: March 12,2009
Time: 9:00 – 12:00
Location: Microsoft in Indianapolis, IN
Register: http://tinyurl.com/cup63m

Community Lunch

Whether you are attending ArcReady or the Unleashed Events, we invite you to join us for lunch between 12:00 – 1:00, we will have pizza and soda (food is on a first come / first served basis).

MSDN Unleashed! – Debugging and mobile devices

Enhance your coding capabilities with new tools, tips, and inside secrets from MSDN Events. We’ll start by showing you how to take full advantage of the Visual Studio debugger. We’ll offer some great tips and tricks to help you debug faster and more efficiently, while applying fresh techniques to ramp up your problem solving abilities. Additionally, you’ll see how developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your current coding skills and can make it simple to build, deploy and debug cool new devices.

Session 1: Tips & Tricks for the Visual Studio 2008 Debugger

The Visual Studio debugger is a highly underutilized tool for many developers. In this session, you’ll learn how to use it like a pro, while picking up new techniques to fast-forward your problem solving and debugging abilities. We’ll show you how to use advanced breakpoints, advanced watch window / Expression evaluator tricks, modifiers, assertions on the fly, remote debugging, and more. Whether you’re writing C#, VB, WPF, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, or services, we’ll provide tips and tricks that will have you debugging faster and much more efficiently. The debugger is your primary tool for finding bugs, so join us and learn how to make the most of it.

Session 2: Developing for Windows Mobile Devices

Mobile development is growing fast, and Windows Mobile is at the forefront with over 18 million phones shipped last year and many more cutting-edge devices on the way. Visual Studio developers have tremendous opportunities in this space. Why? Developing for a Windows Mobile phone leverages your existing coding experience and takes it to new heights. In this session, we’ll look at some of the coolest new devices, you’ll learn how to set up Visual Studio with the latest SDK and device emulators, and you’ll see how to build, deploy and debug Windows Mobile applications. We’ll also explore how Internet Explorer Mobile 6 provides new AJAX capabilities that offer the richness of the desktop with pan and zoom features tuned for mobile devices.

Date: March 12, 2009
Time: 1:00 – 3:00
Location: Microsoft in Indianapolis, IN
Register: http://tinyurl.com/csvx5m

Technet Unleashed - Windows Server 2008

In this session we will look at Windows Server 2008 and the improvements that have been made to Microsoft’s premier server operating system.  Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is the most advanced Windows Server operating system yet, designed to power the next generation of networks, applications, and Web services. With Windows Server 2008 you can develop, deliver, and manage rich user experiences and applications, provide a highly secure network infrastructure, and increase technological efficiency and value within your organization.

Windows Server 2008 introduces several new capabilities including 64bit virtualization, a robust web and development platform, improvements in networking, security, high availability and disaster recovery.  In addition, there is a new “Core” installation option that reduces the operating system overhead by removing the graphical user interface thus freeing resources and lowering the potential security attack surface.  Come see demonstrations on many of the features in a technical deep dive you won’t want to miss!

Date: March 12,2009
Time: 3:00 – 5:00
Location: Microsoft in Indianapolis, IN
Register:  http://tinyurl.com/aazpcn

IndyNDA – Making your Website “Pop”

Are you tasked with keeping a plain vanilla website up to date?  Larry Clarkin is and he was looking for an excuse to update it with some “jazz”.  We will explore some things to add a little punch to your website (or at least reduce the complications in keeping it up to date).  We will explore Microformats, Webslices, jquery, Virtual Earth and ADO .NET Data Services to update a real website (not some Contoso demo).  If all goes well at the end of the night we will click the publish button.  We will also talk about the importance of knowing some web standards before you start coding!

Date: March 12,2009
Time: 6:00 – 8:00
Location: Junior Achievement Center in Indianapolis, IN
Register: No registration required

For some reason, the folks at INETA thought I was worthy of an INETA Community Champion Award this quarter.  I am not sure what I did to deserve this, but I appreciate the honor and love to assist the community. I am humbled that I was considered for this quarter considering all of the other people out there contributing to the community.  Congrats to all of the other awardees out there!

The INETA Community Champion Award is given out every quarter to 10 individuals who go above and beyond in the community.  This award lasts for a period of one year and can be renewed thereafter.  The Award package includes a letter of commendation, a certificate of achievement, much deserved online recognition, and your choice of a MSDN Subscription, Xbox or $300 gift check.  It’s not a bad little package.  The money can be used to help cover the gas to speak at even more events!  You can read more about the award program on the INETA site here: http://www.ineta.org/Champions/CommunityChampionInfo.aspx.

As always, I encourage every developer to get involved in your local community.  You could start by attending your local user groups, volunteering time, speaking, blogging, working the forums, etc.  It is a rewarding experience that can help you network, assist others, give back to the community, stay on top of your career, and open doors for future employment opportunities.  I am thankful that I have a wonderful wife and family who allow me to invest some of my time back into the community.

If you haven’t heard by now, Microsoft is hosting a little event out in LA next week called “Microsoft Professional Developer Conference” (PDC).  Not everyone can afford this event or can take the time out to make the trip.  Microsoft has recognized this and is going to be streaming all of the keynotes  live.  They will also be recording of all the sessions and making them viewable online sometime after PDC.  However, many people like to hear the content, ask questions, and learn more.  To make up for this, Microsoft has also just announced the MSDN Developer Conference (MDC) series. 

What is the MDC

“We deliver the core message, content and experience of the PDC in a one day, multi-track event to multiple cities across the United States”

The MDC is a day long, 12 city tour in the US that will deliver the key information from PDC in a cheaper, more concise, and streamlined form. MDC is a glimpse into the future of the Microsoft Application Platform. Some of the major areas of discussion will be Windows 7, Cloud Computing, Internet services platform, Silverlight, .Net additions, Live Mesh, and other PDC surprises.  You will miss much of the excitement, depth, and social aspects of PDC, but for the price and convenience, this event will be one that you won’t want to miss.

Even if you did attend PDC, you may want to register for a MDC event near you as well.  You can use this time to brush up on things you missed, ask new questions, or hear about how development and feedback has been going since PDC.

The main MDC website is: http://www.msdndevcon.com/

Registration

Registration opens Monday October 20th for all locations.  Space is limited, but each venue will be able accommodate between 300-1000 attendees depending on the location.

Register here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/register.aspx

Cost

Unlike some other community events, the MSDN Dev Conference is priced at $99.  It’s a lot less than the $2400 cost of PDC + travel, hotel, etc. The content alone is worth the cost, and it is a small price to pay for what is delivered and available.  It does include sessions, lunch, swag, social interaction, and other surprises.

Speakers

The speaker line up varies from city to city, but each of the sessions will be delivered by Microsoft team members, local Microsoft Evangelists, local community leaders, Regional Directors, and MVPs.

Tentatively, I will be presenting the Developing and Deploying Your First Cloud Services session at the Chicago event. More details about this will unfold in the coming weeks.

Agenda

You can view all of the session descriptions here: http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/sessions.aspx.

Dates & Locations

You can catch me at the Chicago location, but get out there and register for the location closest to you!

Open Spaces

Each event will feature a dedicated room for Open Spaces.  Open Spaces will run parallel to the main tracks, and will offer attendees a chance to dive deeper into a topic area or talk about topics not included in the MDC agenda.  At some conferences, the Open Space area is empty and often forgotten. At the MDC, thiswon’t be the case. The room will be manned by a coordinator with  local MVPs and other experts.

Social

• Facebook: join the group
• Twitter: follow the feed
• Flickr
• Delicious
• Twemes

Microsoft has announced their October/November MSDN Events, and once again they are making a stop in Indianapolis!  It’s good to see them showing us some love.  The Indianapolis event occurs the Tuesday before Microsoft PDC 2008 and 3 weeks after IndyTechFest.  I think there are plenty of Microsoft development events in October to keep even someone such as myself satisfied.  I hope to see many of you there!

The Indianapolis event will be held:
Tuesday, October 21, 2008 1:00 PM -  5:00 PM Eastern Time
Welcome Time: 12:30 AM

At:
Indianapolis Marriott East
7202 East 21st Street
Indianapolis Indiana 46219

Click here to register:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032388496

Check the MSDN Events site for other locations:
http://www.msdnevents.com/fall08/

Event Details:

Join MSDN Events for the latest tips, tools and technical information you need to build powerful applications and engaging user experiences. We’ll show you how SQL Server 2008 delivers new development capabilities, including support for Spatial Data types, a fresh storage mechanism and more. You’ll also learn how to leverage the Silverlight platform to build next generation applications for consumers and business, and how Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) addresses some of the toughest challenges facing today’s Office solution developers. Don’t miss these free, live sessions near you.

Session 1: What’s New in SQL Server 2008 for Developers
SQL Server 2008 adds numerous new capabilities for developers – from support for Spatial Data types to a storage mechanism for SQL BLOB data using the NTFS file system, and much, much more. The new release also delivers several improvements to development-related areas, from T-SQL to SQLCLR to XML. This presentation will provide a technical dive into the latest and greatest features you’ll find in SQL Server 2008, while offering insight into how to effectively apply them to your upcoming development projects.

Session 2: Power up your Office applications with VSTO
In this presentation, we’ll focus on the power and productivity of Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System (VSTO) – a .NET Smart Client technology. We’ll give you tips and tricks for designing and building smart client applications with VSTO, which allows you to create managed code applications with .NET languages including Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Visual C#. VSTO also makes it simple to manifest the functionality of those applications in the rich user interfaces of Microsoft Office Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook and others from the Office stack. VSTO addresses some of the biggest challenges that Office solution developers are facing today, including separation of data and view elements, server-side and offline scenarios, seamless integration with the Visual Studio tools, deployment and updating. Join us for this eye-opening session and learn just how easy it is to build and deploy powerful applications with VSTO.

Session 3: Build next generation applications with Silverlight 2.0
Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this session, we’ll take a look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate how to build a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET. We’ll explore how to use Microsoft Visual Studio to create applications, and how to create UI using XAML markup and code, controls, and File I/O. We’ll also discuss networking, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and various other aspects of building Silverlight applications.

REST API format for adding a new Bookmark

MSDN Social Bookmark FeedFlare

Here is what I have so far for a FeedFlare item for MSDN Social Bookmarks.  As the REST API opens up more, I will try to add more to this.

<!DOCTYPE FeedFlareUnit SYSTEM "FeedFlareUnit-1.0.dtd">
<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>Bookmark on MSDN Social</Title>
        <Description>Add a link as a bookmark on MSDN Social.</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Bookmark on MSDN Social</Text>
        <Link href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/action/create/s/E/?url=${link}&amp;ttl=${title}&amp;d=${title}"/>
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

Note:

You can adjust the URL in the link node to hit any of the 4 Microsoft bookmark sites:

• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com
• http://social.technet.microsoft.com
• http://social.expression.microsoft.com
• http://social.microsoft.com

How to use the FeedFlare

To use the FeedFlare item, you need to have a FeedBurner account.  This account is free and easy to setup, just register here: https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/register.  Once you have your account, add your feed to the list.  On the main feed page click the “Optimize” tab and select the “FeedFlare” link to the left:

What it looks like

If you add the FeedFlare to your blog site, this is what the link looks like:

If you add the FeedFlare to your feed, this is what the link looks like in Google Reader:

When the link is clicked the url of the bookmark is set and the title and description are prepopulated with the feed item’s name.  You can modify these values and tag the bookmark before saving it.

Enhancements

I would love to see the following features added once more of the REST API is opened up (or revealed) for MSDN Bookmarks:

• A count of how many people have bookmarked the same link.
• A list of the tags used to bookmark the link. (ordered by most used tag)

The enhancements would have the link look a lot like the Delicious FeedFlare item.  Here is an example of what it would look like on the site:

Larry Clarkin will be in town to present at the next ArcReady event.  Larry is an Architect Evangelist at Microsoft for the Midwest District and is a good friend of mine.  Larry is a wonderful speaker and brings a lot of knowledge and experience to his talks.  You do not want to miss this event.

If you are in the Indianapolis area, or want to make the trip out, you can attend this session and Bill Steele’s session on MSDN Events Unleashed immediately afterwards. From 9am till 4pm EST, you can enjoy hearing from two of the best speakers in the Midwest and learn a lot about Microsoft technology and architecture at the same time!

The Indianapolis ArcReady will be held:
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 9:00 AM-  11:30 AM Eastern Time
Welcome Time: 8:30 AM

At:
Microsoft Offices
500 E. 96th Street - Suite 460
Indianapolis Indiana 46240

This event will be followed by the MSDN Events Unleashed event at the same location.

Click here to register:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032385767&Culture=en-US

Check the ArcReady site for other locations:
http://www.arcready.com/

Event Details:

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 right technologies to meet our user’s needs and integrate nicely into our existing IT ecosystems.

Session 1: Blueprints for Success

In this session, we will survey the modern architecture landscape from the ground up, including infrastructure, application, and client solution choices. We’ll discuss how current industry trends are shaping our architectures and present an innovative architecture mapping technique for analyzing our customer’s needs and aligning them to today’s technologies and solution patterns.

Session 2: Making It Real

In this session, we’ll take a look at several case studies to learn how to apply the mapping technique from Session 1 to architect real world solutions that add true business value. We’ll examine applications we use every day and take a walk through a Microsoft reference architecture that explores many of the decisions we face when building modern distributed applications.

Microsoft’s STO (Server & Tools Online) team released a new online site today called MSDN Social bookmarks.  This is a Social Bookmarking site where users can add bookmarks, tag them in various ways, share them with others, etc.  This new site is part of a greater initiative by the team to create a common social platform:

Some of the finer points of this diagram have yet to be explained, but the revamp of MSDN Forums, Codeplex, and some of the classic MSDN features we have known and loved are all part of the “bigger” picture.

I am excited about the potential impact this site can have on the Developer Community.  It should fit in nicely with the Forums, MSDN Library, and other sites.  User’s will be able to follow tags on their interested topics, sites can link to tag lists, people can follow the bookmarks of subject matter experts etc.

The concept isn’t new to most of us. We have seen Social Bookmarking sites before.  Delicious was founded in 2003 and has all of the same basic functionality.  According to wikipedia, Delicious currently has over 50 million users and sports over 150 million uniquely bookmarked Urls. I have been an avid user myself since sometime in 2005 (the same year it was purchased by Yahoo!).  Delicious underwent a huge redesign on July 31, 2008 and how has a series of add-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer.

However, the concept of Social Bookmarking may be new to some of you. So before I go any further, I should probably define it and list some of the advantages and weak points of using a Social Bookmarking site over of just using Internet Explorer’s (IE) Favorites or Firefox’s Bookmarks.

What is Social Bookmarking:

Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

 (Source: Wikipedia)

Advantages:

1. Bookmarks can have a title and description.  Most application bookmarks don’t allow any addition description of the content.
2. Bookmarks can have multiple tags.  Instead of putting bookmarks in a hierarchical folder, you simply add tags to them.  You can then sort by tag.  The nice thing about this is that if you have a bookmark that spans multiple subjects, you don’t need to decide which folder it should go into and forget where you put it.
3. Bookmarks are accessible online.  If you store them in IE or Firefox, you can’t access them from another computer.
4. Bookmarks can easy be shared by others.  This is where the word “social” starts to come into play.
5. Users can follow Bookmarks based on a tag.
6. Users can follow Bookmarks created by others.

Weak Points:

1. There is no standard on tags.  Because of this things can be improperly tagged or there could be redundant tags.  Examples are PDC, PDC08, PDC2008, MicrosoftPDC, etc which could all represent Microsoft PDC 2008.
2. Spammers have used Social Bookmarking sites as another means of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The more times a site is bookmarked, the higher it is returned in some searches.  So some tags can be flooded with spam.
3. Some Social Bookmarking sites may not allow “private” Bookmarks.  However, even if they are private, I think that people keep their “non-work safe” bookmarks more local.

All Social Bookmarking sites share these same Advantages and Weak Points.  So why should you choose to use MSDN Social bookmarks over Delicious?  I am not going to advocate moving off Delicious just yet.  In general it is a simple design, but MSDN Social bookmarks is new, while Delicious has been out a long time.  However, Microsoft has a good track record for scalability and this site should be highly stable and will only get better. I don’t really think that MSDN Social bookmarks it out to compete directly with Delicious though.  MSDN Social bookmarks is marketed to a MUCH smaller audience.  Delicious is used by anyone and everyone to bookmark anything.  MSDN Social bookmarks are targeted primarily at Microsoft Developers for bookmarking development related resources.

Here are some of the advantages I see to using MSDN Social bookmarks on top of the simple Social Bookmarking features:

1. Its developer focused.  Bookmarks are by developers for developers about development primarily with Microsoft products.  You won’t find a lot of fluff when looking at tags for help.
2. RSS feeds for tags and users.  (Most other Social Bookmarking sites have this too).  I can see adding WCF and OSLO tags to my RSS Reader.
3. Tools to import bookmarks from Firefox, IE, and Delicious.  (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/Tools/).  There are also tools for saving bookmarks to MSDN.
4. Single sign in via your Windows Live ID.  Say what you will about Passport, but I like having a single identity throughout my MSDN Subscription, Hotmail, Forum access, Bookmarks, etc.
5. Potential for tight integration with other MSDN content and Microsoft products.  The diagram above hints at this, but we can expect bookmarks to play an even bigger role in the MSDN developer community in the coming months.  We should probably expect to see some other announcements from the team either at PDC or by the end of the year.  I wonder if this will play into this “reputation” piece they have on the diagram. I also wonder how this will play into MSDN Stars?
6. Enable social connections by users finding like minded developers.  For instance, if I am following a WCF tag and notice someone bookmarking under that tag a lot, I may seek to get to know that person better.

You have to remember, you can still use Delicious or another site for your primary bookmarking needs if you so choose.  You can even use it for all of your development bookmarks, then use the import tools to bring them into MSDN Social bookmarks .

MSDN Social Bookmarks Overview

Finding Bookmarks

The site itself looks very much like other MSDN content:

The main page shows the most popular tags by default, but gives you the ability to find or filter on more tags. The find screen allows you to look through the tags, or just start typing to find tags that start with your criteria:

Once you have your filtered list of bookmarks youc an scan them to your heart’s content. One thing I do really like is that when you are looking at a bookmark, not only can you see how many others have bookmarked that site, but there is also a nice ajax callback to display the list to you:

It is nice that they added the “Report” flag as well.  There is nothing worse than bad or inappropriate content filling up these sites.  I hope that the moderators for the bookmarks are diligent and proactive.

Finding Users

You can also easily search and find by username.  Hopefully they will add other ways to find users.  Perhaps based on state/region/city or area of expertise:

Creating Bookmarks

The “Add Bookmark” control is very basic right now.  Hopefully they will add in some additional ajax support like what Delicious does.  If i am using a URL that is already been used, it should start to show related tags used for that URL:

I am hoping there will be some good documentation for the REST interface for adding bookmarks.  This will help the community come up with better tools.  They have added a little snippet of html that you can add to your page though to help others bookmark your site on MSDN Social bookmarks:

<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://Services.social.microsoft.com/widgets/bookmark.jss?type=0&brand=Msdn&locale=1033"></script>

Conclusion

It will be some time before we really see how this site gets used, but I am planning on importing over some of my Delicious Bookmarks and giving this site a chance.  I am excited about some of the developer community possibilities that can be derived from this site. Overall, the site is very good for a first release.  I expect to see improvements over time. Here is what I believe the STO team needs to do to rise above the competition:

1. Build Tools. Build tools for easy integration into IE and Firefox.  These tools could be a lot like the Delicious tools, but could also include things such as IE 8 Accelerators.
2. Integration into Visual Studio.  If I am looking for a help on a topic, I should be able to easily find Bookmarks with related tags.
3. Integration into MSDN Library.  Much like Visual Studio integration, MSDN Library resources should link to bookmarks with relative tags.
4. Embrace the competition.  What would be better than to have a link on each tag page that could take you directly to Delicious to search for more tags on the subject?  This would help the developers find more resources and bridge any gap they have with Delicious.  I am sure they would want to get approval from Yahoo first before doing this though.
5. Open the API or at least provide some good documentation.  This is probably only a matter of time.  Microsoft is pretty good about documentation and they will want developers to make the post of this site.
6. Keep up with Development.  Hopefully we will continue to see great features added to this over time.  The last thing we want is yet another product that is developed, but loses a lot of its’ momentum.  There are a lot of integration and improvements that could be made over time.  I can think of a number of mini-gadgets they could build.
7. Get the site listed on social aggregators like FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.
8. Continue to market the site and show its value to the community.
9. Advertise the most popular bookmark feeds for people.  For instance, if someone like Scott Hanselman uses the site and starts creating a lot of bookmarks, showcase his feed for other users to follow.  This will help people find the value in following others.
10. Add Tag Clouds.  I love these things.   They give a great visual view off the data.

I encourage everyone to at least check out this site.  Please post your thoughts or comments on this here or directly to the STO team.  Microsoft has always been pretty responsive to comments and “creative” criticism.

Resources

Interview with John Martin about the changes coming to MSDN and Social Bookmarking:

http://8zucnw.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pFn6K0FOcN62M6-cyRDgSC3eLks36OEvuV75X5UgFo-GZwKy8P0LeYGplzkFhvvPp3Qn-rkNfcag/CdnDevsJohnMartin.mp3?download

Interview with PM/dev:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=312b773d-a0a5-4e37-8a5e-af7554c647e4

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 1:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=dadc2865-0aec-4f23-8d70-76a4b8f8012e

How-to use MSDN Social bookmarks Video Part 2:

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=81def583-f4f0-4b7f-8061-fc32e189bc7f

Links

John Martin’s Announcement: https://blogs.technet.com/johmar/archive/2008/09/08/now-live-social-bookmarking-v-1-0-for-microsoft-msdn-technet-and-expression-sites.aspx

Chris Slemp’s Announcement: http://blogs.msdn.com/cslemp/archive/2008/09/09/launched-social-bookmarking-v1-on-msdn-and-technet-video.aspx

Questions or comments about MSDN Social bookmarks?  Visit the Social Bookmarks Discussion Forums.

I had the opportunity to speak the Kentucky Day of .Net yesterday. I gave my Agile Project Management with Scrum talk and got to premier my newest presentation on REST entitled RESTing on the Web with Wcf.  Both talks went very well.  The REST presentation was a blast to do.  I got a number of excellent comments afterwards, and I think it may be my new favorite talk to give.  I want to give a “Thank You” to the organizers of such a great event,  and I want to thank all of the people who made it out. If you attended any of my talks, please pass on any feedback about what I could do better or what I did right.  I am always looking for ways to improve and to help convey the material to others. And, if you are interested in REST, know a lot about it, or are giving other presentations on REST, I would appreciate any comments you may have on my slides.

To catch any of my future talks, you can always check out my speaking engagements here: Speaking Engagements. I am currently promoting 4 main talks this season (September – November). If you are interested in hearing any of these, please send me an email, talk to your user group leaders, or comment on this thread.  I enjoy every opportunity to speak, share, and talk with my peers. I do still have materials for a session on Heroes {Community} Launch (Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5), if there is any interest in this still.

Expect new presentations for Winter (December – February).  I am anticipating upcoming talks on the following: JQuery, Live Mesh API, Oslo, and PDC 2008.

As a treat, here is a picture of “RESTifarian Dan the Pig” taken at the closing ceremony of Kentucky Day of .Net.  I didn’t wear both of these items at the same time during my talks, but those who attended would understand each of these props.

My many months of contributions to Microsoft’s MSDN message forums haven’t gone unnoticed.  It was less than a week ago that I finally achieved 5/5 stars, and yesterday I received an email thanking me for my work and asking if I would like to take on a more involved role a forum moderator.  I accepted the honor and promised to take this role seriously.  I help out on the forums because I enjoying helping others learn and learning myself in the process.  I hope that I can keep this up even more a moderator.

Moderators are granted the power to delete, edit, and merge posts.  Moderators can also mark posts as “Answers” which is probably the most important role.  Many people who ask questions, don’t mark the answers that are made.  Marking a post as answered not only gives credit to the answerer, but also causes these posts to show up with a higher rating in search engines.  This can help others who are searching the Internet for their own questions.

Please visit the MSDN Forums (or the new Forums) if you have questions about Microsoft products.  There are many different forum topics and thousands of people who can help and share insights.  While you are visiting, feel free to help out others as well.  As a  community site dedicated to helping everyone learn, it needs your involvement and support.  If you want to get more involved in the community, are seeking to test your skills, or just want to help others, this is the place for you.

If you haven’t heard about Microsoft PDC 2008, then check out this post: http://www.danrigsby.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/18/microsoft-pdc-2008/

The PDC team announced today (via the speakers page) that Chris Anderson and Don Box are going to join Ray Ozzie and Rick Rashid as keynote speakers.  Chris has been at Microsoft for 10 years and has been heavily involved in things such as WPF and XAML, but has been working on Oslo for the last couple of years.  And we all know who Don Box is. The addition of these 2 keynote speakers only helps solidify what we have already assumed: PDC 2008 is all about cloud programming.

The speakers page still states: “More keynote speakers will be announced soon!”.  So we may see more keynote names coming soon.  There are 3 keynote slots in the agenda right now, but most of these slot will have multiple speakers.