It took awhile but I am happy to announce that the new date and venue for our SQL Saturday event is now set!  SQL Saturday Phoenix will be held on February 19^th 2011 at the Chandler-Gilbert Community College Pecos Campus. As you are probably aware, the event was originally scheduled for July 17th of this year and we unfortunately had to postpone.

The postponement was due to feedback that we had received from several potential attendees and speakers who had scheduling issues due to summer activities. Also, some just didn’t want to head to the “Valley of the Sun” in the middle of summer (OK so 115 degree temperatures can be a little crazy). So we went with the new date in February to avoid getting caught up in the holidays and also hope that some folks from the colder areas will have a really good reason to come. Phoenix is awesome in the “winter” time! Just take a look at the average temperatures for February. 

The event site has been updated with the latest information, with more regarding sessions and sponsors coming soon. Samson and I are working with all involved to make sure that speakers can still make it for the event and that sponsors are still onboard. With all that being said, we are open for registration and the call for speakers is once again processing submissions (ok so it never stopped). If you have any questions, comments, concerns or maybe are interested in helping out let us know!

Also, we would like to thank the City of Chandler for their help in getting the location for the event. It just needs to be said that they help when they can and are really working to grow the technology community in their city!

Last week I was excited (and very surprised) to find out that I was awarded the INETA Community Champion Award for Q2 2010. During the last year I have found a great deal of pleasure and enjoyment by getting more involved in the technical community. Most of my involvement came from being new to Phoenix, wanting to meet new people and just wanting to help so the community keeps growing.

Here is the description for the award from the INETA site:

“The INETA Community Champion Award is an annual award given to those who give to the developer community. It is awarded on a quarterly basis and lasts for twelve months. Members record their numerous contributions to the community. At the end of each quarter the top contributors will be selected to receive the INETA Community Champion Award.”

So here’s to starting my second year in the Phoenix area and helping to build our community stronger with each day. Thank you very much for the recognition (even though it is tough for me to think of myself as a champion)!

I hope that I can continue to provide value to the community and am excited to see what we do in the future.

On June 22nd we held another Social Mixer for SEVDNUG (Southeast Valley .NET User Group), and had a great time! The event was hosted at the AMF McRay Lanes in Chandler. The goal of these Social Mixers is to allow members of our local tech community to come together and communicate outside the typical monthly meetings which are predominantly presentation-based.

During the past year, the group has organized several of these events, and they have been quite a success in allowing our members to talk freely, enjoy a evening together, and get to know each other better. Personally, I enjoy the fact that several of these mixers have been hosted at locations that allow our members to bring their families along for a good time. Not only does this help foster great conversations, but friendships and long lasting networking contacts are also made.

These events would not be possible with out the support of our sponsors and our local tech community! We would like to thank COMSYS for sponsoring and participating in this particular event

To see more of our bowling adventures,  check out these pictures taken by Joseph Guadagno.

For more information on future events please watch the SEVDNUG usergroup website and follow us on Twitter. Join us this month on July 22nd for our next SEVDNUG meeting, which will feature a presentation on Easing ASP.NET Deployment with Visual Studio 2010 and Web Deployment.

We look forward to seeing you at our next meeting!

I have been dipping into Microsoft’s Entity Framework

Microsoft Entity Framework in Action

The book is broken into four parts, each building on the knowledge gained from the previous section. Part 1 of the book is an introduction to O/RMs and a quick guide as to what they provide developers. The coverage in this section is to help you get a better understanding of the Object/Relational Mismatch that occurs in applications and how solutions such as EF are developed to help with this mismatch. At the end of this section you will build the structure for a sample app that will be referenced throughout the book. This is a simple order application but it is used intelligently and explained in such a way that makes referencing it later helpful for understanding how EF usage is a benefit to the project.

Part 2 quickly starts diving into EF and guiding the reader through querying and understanding the model. In addition, it goes into the mechanics used for persistence and concurrency via EF. I’ll be referencing this section quite often due to all the examples that are included for dealing with data via querying, such as grouping, sorting and projecting results for ease of use. After the querying sections you are guided through the Entity Data Model (EDM) and how it is constructed and described using its different parts: Conceptual Model (CSDL), Storage Model (SSDL) and the Mapping (MSL). In most cases developers will use the Designer and the EDMX file generated in Visual Studio. Having an understanding of how the XML is built and how to build one manually, however, can really help when you want to make tweaks outside of the designer, such as extending the EDM with custom annotations.

In the last two chapters of this section the book goes into Persistence and Concurrency via EF. The persistence was one of the most interesting areas of the book for me (due to my DBA experiences). I think that too many times we use frameworks like EF without understanding the impact that some of our coding makes on the data store of our applications. These two sections give the reader a better understanding of how,and when, entities are marked in such a way that SQL calls will be made to the database for managing them. Having a better understanding of EntityState and ObjectStateManager can help a developer in mitigating the number of calls that will be made to the database by making sure that objects are marked correctly before calling SaveChanges methods. Also, through some of the techniques described for managing concurrency and transactions in your EF application, including managing entities in a disconnected manner, you can help ensure that the application works as expected.

Part 3 of the book focuses on some of the more advanced topics of EF including Entity SQL, usage of Functions and Stored Procedures in your model, querying the EDM programmatically, and customizing the EF code and designer. I was mainly interested the usage of Functions and Stored Procedures here. The book does a good job of providing the reader with several examples for mapping and consuming SPROCs from EF; including selecting data, updating entities and building functions that can be used against the inheritance hierarchy that you defined in your application.

The final section of the book walks you through bringing all of this new found EF knowledge together for building the order application. The authors did a good job of presenting not only their example application, but also providing the reader with meaningful information that can be used for building application architectures that use EF. Chapters include ASP .NET, Windows Applications and how to integrate EF with a traditional n-tier application. The last chapter provides helpful information on building unit tests against your EF enabled application.

I would recommend the book for those who are looking to increase their understanding of Microsoft’s Entity Framework. The book is not only a walk-through of how to build and use EF, it also provides the reader with a lot of reference material that can be used in day-to-day development work. I plan on referencing the “Working with Entity Framework” section quite often on my next project with EF in my attempts to streamline all data transactions that occur in my application when dealing with my entities.

I just finished reading the MEAP version of Jon Skeet’s C# in Depth Second Edition from Manning Publishing. For those that are not familiar with Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) you can check it out here. The idea is that you can purchase a book, eBook or physical, and during the development of the book you get access to eBook drafts from the publisher. They have some great books/authors, and this gives you access to material before the book comes out. Handy if you are learning new technologies and do not want to wait.

I had not read the first edition and wanted to get caught up on some of the changes made to the framework for C# 4. The book is broken up into 4 main sections with a total of 16 chapters. The first section touches briefly on version 1 of C# and then each section builds on this foundation while introducing you changes in C# 2, 3 and 4 in the remaining sections.  At the time of this writing I was not able to read Chapter 1 and Appendixes due to them not being available via the MEAP program yet, but the meat and potatoes of the book were here.

The book flows differently than some of the other development books I have read. It walks you through where the language started and builds through the different versions and the improvements made with each. In the first chapters I was coming across a decent amount of "We will discuss this in 3.4" kind of references and generally I do not like this. For me, if a topic is being touched on why not go ahead and just tell me. But Skeet did a great job of giving a brief description as to why the topic is described later and once you get to the more advanced topic it makes sense.

This book does not strike me as a good book for beginners (but it wouldn’t hurt: keep reading) due to the depth that the author takes in explaining the challenges and changes made in previous versions of the framework. It is written to expect a certain level of experience with C# and the framework. I found times that I needed to do some research to make sure I understood what was being discussed. But if you are willing to do some extracurricular digging while reading the book you will be fine at any level and find yourself rewarded with a better understanding at the end.

The best part of the book is that Skeet keeps you involved and wanting to learn more. This is done by using several examples of the concepts being taught and then building on those concepts as you learn about the next version of the language. Also the book remains engaging due to the sprinkling of humor and explaining some less-than-recommended ways of using features.

Overall I would highly recommend this book for developers looking to gain knowledge of C# 4 and also to understand some of the “why” behind how we got to the current language feature set. Using Skeet’s style of building upon previous knowledge and deconstructing features in order to explain them, I found the chapters on Dynamic Binding and Code Contracts very engaging and they helped me to better understand these concepts in C# 4. This book will be staying on my kindle for awhile to use as a reference.

This post is being written after having just moved to the Phoenix area about 6 months ago, and discovering a new level of “community”. This new level and insight has changed the way I have looked at what I do everyday and how I feel about my Life, my Career, and the place I now call home. I want to start by saying that as much as I have enjoyed moving to Phoenix, it has been tough. Really tough. My wife and I left the place that I had called home for the last 30+ years: Columbus, Ohio. I grew up there, I have family there, and I have life-long friends there, but my wife and decided it was time to move on and make the jump to Phoenix. This jump was to help our own sanity and to be near some important family members (the only city in the US that provided us with parental units for both of us).

During the last couple of years I have been attending several developer community events in the Great Lakes region for .Net developers. I had not ventured outside the .Net topics much, but with every event or group I felt that I had expanded myself. This personal expansion was done by meeting new people and having some great discussions with others. Now I found myself in a new city where I did not know anybody at all and it scared the living crap out of me. Was I going to be able to make some connections and what would the community be like, based on the limited community experience I had? I needed to find it. At first I did not find much in the way of community, and I was concerned… But I was just not digging far enough.
Discovering What is Here

Twitter to the rescue! I logged in and started tweeting. I had an account that I had hardly used at all and started to connect with some friends back East at first. Then I started tweeting about being new to the Phoenix and quickly found myself pointed to a local community site www.azgroups.com. Bang(Bing for all you MS lovers), there it was! I had found a great resource and I was very happy. I had not spent a lot of time looking, just because job hunting and moving had taken up most of it. I don’t mean to say that the community was hidden in any way.

Several meetings, 1 Laid Off Camp and 1 Desert Code Camp later I now find myself loving where I am and what the people of this city have to offer. There is more community here then I imagined possible. It is a new experience for me and it is making me change the way I look at myself and my interactions with the community. Now I wonder: What was back East that I was missing? Maybe a lot. In the Phoenix area there is one place that personifies this community and it is Gangplank.

Now to Gangplank! All I can say about this place is: Amazing! It is simply (if it can be put that way) a place for people to come together to work, learn and share. It is a open environment that can be used by anybody… just show up and do your thing. Any day of the week you can find people here working, learning and hacking. It is like the old rec center that I used to go to when growing up… but they have video games and internet access. Currently there are several business that rent space at the GP, but there is still plenty of room for YOU to show up. They hold weekly brown bag talks, usergroup meetings throughout the month, meetings for local businesses, and so much more.

What is the Point?

This is meant just to give you a look into what is available, not just here but in many cities. During the last 6 months I have made so many connections and new friends that I am now happy to call this new (to me) city home. And each day I wake up wondering what will I find here today. I feel that so many people are missing this in their lives! It changes you and makes you want to do better, and all along YOU ARE bettering yourself!

I would like to send out a big “Thank You” to all those involved in the Phoenix community. There is a special thing here and it is helping others grow.

So what can you do?

    * Explore social media in your area (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
    * Look for community groups that interest you (coffee groups, interest group meetings and such)
    * Get involved in the conversation (when you attend, say “Hi” to some people). This may take some time, I know it does for me, but it is worth it!
    * Pay it forward in your community. When you find somebody that could use a boost, try to find a way to give it them. You feel you can give back? Do it! The first thing I have learned is that if you try to give back (no matter how little) it will come back to you more than you can imagine.

If you are in the Phoenix area, I urge you to check out some of the following sites and see what excites you. Each one lists events in the area and you can research further what each offers:

    * GangplankHQ – www.gangplankhq.com
    * AZGroups – www.azgroups.com
    * Eventification – www.eventification.com

This is my first post on my "new" blog= second attempt . It is little wordy, but LaidOffCampPhx rocked and it is worth it.

Last weekend I had the pleasure to attend a different kind of community "Camp" called LaidOffCamp Phoenix with my wife. At first I was not really even paying that close of attention to it, because currently I am employed and things are going pretty good. On the other hand the wife unit is job hunting, but I figured it was going to be a day full of obvious resume tips and people telling you to go "fill out an application on our website". But a couple of weeks after I heard about I was at lunch with Joe Guadagno for tech lunch south and he made a comment about it. I went back to the office and read the session abstracts and was really interested. The camp appeared to fill a special place by including sessions like "this is what companies are really doing" for people job hunting and information like "starting your own business" to give be a lot of choices in what they may want to do with their professional lives now. So I fired up the chat and gave the information to the wife and she signed up with me.

Saturday morning quickly arrived and we headed out, this was the first community event that I had the chance to attend with Wendy and I was pretty excited to see what she thought. I attend quite a few developer oriented events on weekends and get to meet a lot of great people at them, now it was her chance. Breakfast was served and we spent some time talking to Justin English from TEKsystems while eating. The morning started with introduction by Mayor John Lewis of Gilbert which was followed by Karen Burns who talked about her book The Amazing Adventures of Working Girl and the her personal experiences of having 59 jobs in her life. Wow that is a lot of jobs and she has done quite a few different things.

For the first session Wendy and I decided to both go to Eric Knott’s talk on Key Strategies from a Corporate Regional Recruiting Manager. Eric talked about things that he has seen not only resumes, but just in interviewing and dealing with applications for large companies. Some little tidbits from this took that I liked was that 70% of the jobs in corporate America never even make it to any kind of posting and how easy HR types will toss resumes for being either over complicated or a pain to read. Already by this session we had met a lot of friendly people that warmly welcomed us to Phoenix.

For the next two sessions we gave it the good old tag-team approach. She headed off to a session on saving money which she enjoyed and I stayed out in the halls doing the unconference thing, meeting more great people and talked for awhile with some who gave me great pointers about the tech community here in Phoenix. Next time slot I went to Matt Clower ‘s session Connect Better with Different Personalities and was wondering how it would fit with this agenda of the camp, but now the light is in my eyes. I learned a little about understanding people (something I need to work on) so I can better meet their needs when communicating and working with them. I see how this would be a invaluable skill when trying to get your own thing going (along with other aspects of life). More research will be done on this topic in my spare time. Wendy spent her 65mins in Susan Baier’s session titled How to Land That Gig and she loved it. Susan you get a big Thank You from me in regards to making Wendy feel better about what she is going through job hunting right now. And we learned Susan is a great person to sit down and have a conversation with, hope to have many more in the future.

PIZZA TIME! Lunch was sponsored by TEXsystems and they provided the event with enough pizza for an old fashion quakefest and the pizza was mighty yummy. Wendy and I picked a table to sit at and started discussing our day so far. Next thing I know we are talking to Pamela Slim about some of ideas of wanting to start our own business and where we currently stand with it. The one lunch conversation was worth the entire day, but wait she is giving a talk right after lunch. WhammyBar!  I have to say I really enjoyed the extended lunch time which allowed for more conversations and networking then I have experienced at a lot of events.

THE BEST SESSION I WENT TO Pamela Slim OH:"Rocked It"
During lunch we had talked for a little bit and she gave us a copy of her book Escape From Cubicle Nation which I read a couple pages of while waiting for the session (Scrappy and effective ways to launch a side business as you figure out your next career move) to start. I had also heard nothing but praises for what she has done for some many people there. Plain and simple no let down.  Within a matter of a couple of minutes I had goose-bumps just because we have been through some crazy (good and bad) times during the last couple of years and she was able to describe how I feel now. She nailed what I want now and later! She described it all and I do not feel crazy for it either. I could go on about this session alone for another hour. I won’t. You just need to check out her site! <<Excitement fills the crowd>>.  Sorry one last comment: To all the people that DM’ed me about my catalyst thank you very much. 

Next up was a panel session: Go It On Your Own: Run Your Own Business. We both went to this and harvested quite a bit of personal experience and vision as to how the small business may go and who can help us. The biggest thing I got out of this panel is that "It is possible" as long as you’re ready to do it. People talked about some of the pitfalls they have experienced and also the great experiences they have had while busting their butt for what they want.

After the camp was over quite a few people headed over to Liberty Market in Gilbert where the great conversations continued and some beer was had. Like I said this was one of the better experiences I have had in a while and I came out of it on a high. Not expecting to be able to take over the whole world and end my run in the gray cubicle nation, but feeling that if I work my butt off with my wife we can make our lives a lot better for us together. Just got to do it RightSmart.

So to all of those involved in the LaidOffCamp Phoenix event (especially Rachel Reese): hats off, awesome job, and thanks for making somebody feel better about where they are.

Check out the event website http://laidoffcamp.pbworks.com/Phoenix and also check out some tweets about it under the hashtag #locphx.