Monospace Conference

Monospace: .NET Open Source Social at the Norwegian Developers Conference

2010-04-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to be working with the folks at the Norwegian Developers Conference (NDC) in Oslo from June 16th to 18th on a very special event.

On Wednesday evening, June 16th, we'll be celebrating open source software in the .NET space with members of the Mono Project as well as NDC speakers and attendees from the .NET open source community, and the open source curious. Cap off your day with complimentary refreshments and a look at some of the community projects that have changed the face of .NET.

Did you know that you can run .NET applications on iPhone and Android using the Mono Project's open source implementation of the .NET stack? Mono will also let you run your apps in powerful and mature cloud platforms like Amazon EC2 and build for special purpose hardware platforms. Want to deploy your apps to Linux and Mac? No problem, that's what Mono does for you. Use your C# skills to go further than you ever thought possible, and you don't even have to leave Visual Studio!

Not only has the open source community made cross-platform .NET development a reality for all .NET developers, but open source provides a wealth of development tools that have become the leading indicator and the gold standard for where .NET software development is heading. Unit testing, ORM, build scripts, UI testing, MVC, continuous integration, source control... all of these fields were led by open source efforts years before they started showing up in commercial products. Stop waiting to find out where .NET development is going! Come to Monospace and greet the future right here in the present!

If you don't have any experience with open source, join the party and see what the fuss is about. Learn about the wealth of tools available to you as a .NET developer, made available by some of the most accomplished and expert developers in the community. Get your questions answered by the pros, and get tips on how to augment your projects and your skills with the vast array of mature, stable, open source tools and products. This event is for you. You don't have to be an open source hacker to enjoy Monospace. Stick around and indulge your curiosity!

If you're an open source user, add your voice to the conversation. There will be plenty of .NET developers with questions to answer and experiences to share. Participate in discussions and demonstrations and even get a chance to learn about projects that you haven't heard of yet. Bring your laptop and sit down with open source contributors and users for a little hacking and show and tell!

Join Jackson Harper of the Mono Project, as well as myself, and many of the NDC speakers and attendees for a fun night of sharing and networking at the Monospace social.

Check out this list of NDC people who are open sourcers: Rob Conery, Scott Allen, Ben Hall, Roy Osherove, James Gregory, Greg Young, Jon Skeet, Robert C. Martin, Michael Feathers, Louis Dejardin, Sebastien Lambla, Shay Friedman, Anders Norås, Kevlin Henney, Lisa Crispin, Richard Campbell. And that's just a partial list! Come out to Monospace and find out what attracts these leading thinkers and practitioners to open source solutions.

Expand your .NET horizons at the Monospace social at the Norwegian Developers Conference. Information, links, and more at: Monospace.us

Also, checkout the NDC conference agenda for great sessions on Mono and .NET open source at: www.ndc2010.no

Many thanks to the Norwegian Developers Conference for supporting and sponsoring the Monospace social, and for making it happen.

See you there!

Monospace Conference Schedule

2009-10-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the final schedule for Monospace. Thanks for all your feedback! It really helped shape the conference.

TUTORIAL PROGRAM

Tuesday, October 27th, Morning

Registration
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM

Conference Keynote - Miguel de Icaza
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Room 18C

10 Minute Break
10:00 AM - 10:10 PM

iPhone Development with MonoTouch
10:10 AM - 12:10 PM
Room 18C
Geoff Norton, Engineering Lead for MonoTouch, Novell
MonoTouch is one of the most exciting developments in the iPhone apps world. Use your .NET skills to build beautiful mobile apps on the world's most successful and lucrative mobile applications platform.

Extensible Applications Using the Managed Extensibility Framework
10:10 AM - 12:10 PM
Room 18D
Glenn Block, Program Manager, Microsoft
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a composition framework supporting plugin architectures and third-party extensions of applications. MEF will ship in Microsoft .NET 4.0 but is available right now as MSPL code that in compatible with Mono.

Lunch
12:10 PM - 1:30 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Tuesday, October 27th, Afternoon

Advanced iPhone Development with MonoTouch
1:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18C
Geoff Norton, Engineering Lead for MonoTouch, Novell
This tutorial takes you beyond the basics of iPhone development with MonoTouch, going deeper into iPhone application development, the iPhone platform, and the high-productivity developer experience provided by the MonoTouch tools and framework.

Mono and the Web - ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, Tools, and Servers
1:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18D
Jackson Harper, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell
Eric Hexter, Principal Consultant, Headspring Systems
ASP.NET WebForms and MVC apps run out-of-the-box on either Windows and .NET or on Mono on a variety of platforms. Build applications on one platform and deploy to another. Lean all about taking advantage of all of the platforms that run your ASP.NET apps.

Tuesday, October 27th, Evening

Special Event: MonoTouch presentation at Austin's Cocoa Coders user group by Geoff Norton

Wednesday, October 28th, Morning

Opening Session
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Room 18C

Advanced NHibernate
9:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 18C
Ayende Rahien, Consultant, NHibernate Principal Contributor, Author of Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo
The most mature and most widely-adopted object-relational mapping system for Mono and .NET taught by one of its foremost experts and project contributors.

Moonlight
9:00 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 18D
Larry Ewing, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell
Rod Paddock, Editor, Code Magazine and Principal Consultant, Dashpoint Software
Moonlight is the Mono implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA platform. Developed with the support of Microsoft, Moonlight brings the power of RIA to Mono. Learn about the platform and the tool support for RIA on Mono with Moonlight.

Lunch
11:30 PM - 12:30 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Wednesday, October 28th, Afternoon I

Linux Jumpstart for Windows Developers
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Room 18C
Joseph Hill, Mono Product Manager, Novell
New to Linux? Don't let that get in your way. Get a giant head start on being as comfortable with developing .NET applications on Linux as you are with Windows.

The Mono Runtime and Core Extensions
12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Room 18D
Rodrigo Kumpera, Software Engineer, Novell
Learn how to use the Mono.Simd and Mono.Tasklets API to do things at runtime that are not presently possible on .NET! A deep dive into runtime embedding and profiling APIs, Mono.Tasklets, and Mono.Simd.

15 Minute Break
2:30PM - 2:45 PM

Wednesday, October 28th, Afternoon II

Mono in the Amazon Web Services Cloud
2:45 PM - 4:45 PM
Room 18C
M. David Peterson, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, 3rd&Urban
Running existing ASP.NET applications that scale-on-demand based on server load. Building a real-time queryable web logging system backed by Mono.Fuse and written directly to SimpleDB. Creating an adaptive bit-rate live audio and video streaming system using EC2's load balancing and auto-scaling service for processing incoming streams, S3 for interim storage of the processed segments, and CloudFront for on-demand high-speed access to the rendered streams over HTTP(S) to a Silverlight/Moonlight application, iPhone user, or any other RIA-enabled mobile device.

Cross-Platform Development with Mono
2:45 PM - 4:45 PM
Room 18D
Aaron Bockover, Maintainer and Lead Developer of the Banshee Media Player, Novell
The demands of cross-platform development push design, testing, and pattern to its limits. Learn from the experience and success of the cross-platform Banshee Media Player.

Functional programming on Mono with F#
2:45 PM - 4:45 PM
Room 18B
Amanda Laucher, Consultant, ThoughtWorks
Joshua Graham, Architect, ThoughtWorks
The functional paradigm brings a powerful approach to compute-intensive apps.
F# is a MSPL-licensed language from Microsoft that runs equally well on Mono
as well as on .NET without any platform restrictions.

OPEN SPACE PROGRAM

Thursday, October 29th, Morning

Opening the Space
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM
Room 18C
A welcome to the Open Space: An introduction to the Open Space format and protocols, and how the next two days' agendas will be set by you, the participant.

Open Source Panel and Fishbowl
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Room 18C
With so many open source power houses at the conference, we'd be missing an incredible opportunity if we didn't put them in the same room at the same time for a panel discussion on open source in .NET. The panel is moderated by Rod Paddock, Editor of CoDe Magazine and will include Miguel de Icaza (Mono), Sam Ramji (CodePlex), Ayende Rahien (NHibernate, Rhino), and Glenn Block (Microsoft). But this is no ordinary panel discussion! After a period of the traditional panel discussion format, we'll turn the panel into a fishbowl, allowing you, the conference attendee, to cycle through the panel, adding your voice to the dialog.

Creating the Schedule
10:00 AM - 12:00PM
Room 18C
Using the Open Space format and protocols, participants will build their own conference by suggesting topics for the schedule, and taking ownership of convening sessions, discussions, panels, fishbowls, demonstrations, and presentations.

Lunch
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Thursday, October 29th, Afternoon

Breakout Sessions
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Closing the Day
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18C
Closing comments, observations from participants, suggestions, questions, announcements, life, the universe, and everything. Planing and reminders for the next day. Well wishes for the evening out in the Live Music Capitol of the World!

Thursday, October 29th, Evening

Monospace Attendee Party!
6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
The Highball
http://thehighball.com/

Friday, October 30th, Morning

Opening the Day
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Room 18C
Morning announcements, schedule changes, comments, observations, suggestions, questions.

Breakout Sessions
9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Lunch
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Friday, October 30th, Afternoon

Breakout Sessions
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Closing the Space
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18C
A round of closing comments from participants. Plans for the next event. A fond farewell. So long and thanks for all the fish! Be careful out there tonight - it's Friday before halloween in Austin!

Draft Schedule for Monospace

2009-10-13T22:30:00.000-07:00

This is still in the works, and certainly some changes may be made to it, but I thought I'd share this with the community right off before it gets final polish and is published to the conference website.

TUTORIAL PROGRAM

Tuesday, October 27th, Morning

Registration
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM

Opening Session
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Room 18C

iPhone Development with MonoTouch
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18C
Geoff Norton, Engineering Lead for MonoTouch, Novell
MonoTouch is one of the most exciting developments in the iPhone apps world. Use your .NET skills to build beautiful mobile apps on the world's most successful and lucrative mobile applications platform.

Introduction to Developing on Mono
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18D
Miguel de Icaza, Mono Project Founder and Vice President of Developer Platform, Novell
All things Mono taught by the founder of the Mono Project

The Mono Runtime and Core Extensions
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18B
Rodrigo Kumpera, Software Engineer, Novell
Learn how to use the Mono.Simd and Mono.Tasklets API to do things at runtime that are not presently possible on .NET! A deep dive into runtime embedding and profiling APIs, Mono.Tasklets, and Mono.Simd.

Lunch
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Tuesday, October 27th, Afternoon

Advanced iPhone Development with MonoTouch
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18C
Miguel de Icaza, Mono Project Founder and Vice President of Developer Platform, Novell
This tutorial, taught by the founder of the Mono Project, takes you beyond the basics of iPhone development with MonoTouch, going deeper into iPhone application development, the iPhone platform, and the high-productivity developer experience provided by the MonoTouch tools and framework.

Extensible Applications Using the Managed Extensibility Framework
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18D
Glenn Block, Program Manager, Microsoft
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a composition framework supporting plugin architectures and third-party extensions of applications. MEF will ship in Microsoft .NET 4.0 but is available right now as MSPL code that in compatible with Mono.

(session TBA)
1:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18B

Tuesday, October 27th, Evening

Special Event: MonoTouch presentation at Austin's Cocoa Coders user group by Geoff Norton

Wednesday, October 28th, Morning

Opening Session
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Room 18C

Mono and the Web - ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, Tools, and Servers
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18C
Jackson Harper, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell
Eric Hexter, Principal Consultant, Headspring Systems
ASP.NET WebForms and MVC apps run out-of-the-box on either Windows and .NET or on Mono on a variety of platforms. Build applications on one platform and deploy to another. Lean all about taking advantage of all of the platforms that run your ASP.NET apps.

Advanced NHibernate
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18D
Ayende Rahien, Consultant, NHibernate Principal Contributor, Author of Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo
The most mature and most widely-adopted object-relational mapping system for Mono and .NET taught by one of its foremost experts and project contributors.

Moonlight
9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Room 18B
Larry Ewing, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell
Rod Paddock, Editor, Code Magazine and Principal Consultant, Dashpoint Software
Moonlight is the Mono implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA platform. Developed with the support of Microsoft, Moonlight brings the power of RIA to Mono. Learn about the platform and the tool support for RIA on Mono with Moonlight.

Lunch
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Wednesday, October 28th, Afternoon

Cross-Platform Development with Mono
13:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18C
Aaron Bockover, Maintainer and Lead Developer of the Banshee Media Player, Novell
The demands of cross-platform development push design, testing, and pattern to its limits. Learn from the experience and success of the cross-platform Banshee Media Player.

Linux Jumpstart for Windows Developers
13:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18D
Joseph Hill, Mono Product Manager, Novell
New to Linux? Don't let that get in your way. Get a giant head start on being as comfortable with developing .NET applications on Linux as you are with Windows.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon Web Services
13:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Room 18B
Marcus Irven, Vice President of Development and Co-Founder, Minggl
EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which a customer can create virtual machines on which the software of their choice can be installed. Amazon also provides message queueing services and storage service. Learn about Amazon's platform in an overview taught by someone who runs applications in Amazon's cloud.

Wednesday, October 28th, Evening

Monospace Attendee Party!
6:00 PM - 8:30 PM
The Highball
http://thehighball.com/

OPEN SPACE PROGRAM

Thursday, October 29th, Morning

Opening the Space
8:00 AM - 8:30 AM
Room 18C
A welcome to the Open Space: An introduction to the Open Space format and protocols, and how the next two days' agendas will be set by you, the participant.

Open Source Panel and Fishbowl
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM
Room 18C
With so many open source power houses at the conference, we'd be missing an incredible opportunity if we didn't put them in the same room at the same time for a panel discussion on open source in .NET. The panel is moderated by Rod Paddock, Editor of CoDe Magazine and will include Miguel de Icaza (Mono), Sam Ramji (CodePlex), Ayende Rahien (NHibernate, Rhino), and Glenn Block (Microsoft). But this is no ordinary panel discussion! After a period of the traditional panel discussion format, we'll turn the panel into a fishbowl, allowing you, the conference attendee, to cycle through the panel, adding your voice to the dialog.

Creating the Schedule
10:00 AM - 12:00PM
Room 18C
Using the Open Space format and protocols, participants will build their own conference by suggesting topics for the schedule, and taking ownership of convening sessions, discussions, panels, fishbowls, demonstrations, and presentations.

Lunch
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Thursday, October 29th, Afternoon

Breakout Sessions
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Closing the Day
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18C
Closing comments, observations from participants, suggestions, questions, announcements, life, the universe, and everything. Planing and reminders for the next day. Well wishes for the evening out in the Live Music Capitol of the World!

Friday, October 30th, Morning

Opening the Day
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Room 18C
Morning announcements, schedule changes, comments, observations, suggestions, questions.

Breakout Sessions
9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Lunch
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Many eateries for every budget around the Austin Convention Center

Friday, October 30th, Afternoon

Breakout Sessions
1:00 PM - 2:15 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Breakout Sessions
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
Room 18B, 18C, 18D

Closing the Space
3:30 PM - 4:00 PM
Room 18C
A round of closing comments from participants. Plans for the next event. A fond farewell. So long and thanks for all the fish! Be careful out there tonight - it's Friday before Halloween in Austin!

Stellar Open Source Panel Kicking Off Day 3 of Monospace

2009-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

The Open Space program of the Monospace conference starts on the Thursday morning of the conference, and we've got a great event lined up to kick things off!

With so many open source power houses at the conference, we'd be missing an incredible opportunity if we didn't put them in the same room at the same time for a panel discussion on open source in .NET.

But this is no ordinary panel discussion! After a period of the traditional panel discussion format, we'll turn the panel into a fishbowl, allowing you, the conference attendee, to cycle through the panel, adding your voice to the dialog.

Our panelists represent the breadth and diversity of open source accomplishment in the .NET space, and each has had significant impact on open source across the diaspora of open source roles, projects, and organizations.

Here is the roster of panelists:

Miguel de Icaza
Mono Project Founder
Vice President of Developer Platform at Novell
CodePlex Foundation Board Member
Author of GNOME

Sam Ramji
President, CodePlex Foundation
Former Director of Microsoft's Open Source Lab, Port25
Former Lead of Technical Product Strategy at BEA Systems

Ayende Rahien
NHibernate Project Contributor
Castle Project Contributor
Creator of RhinoMocks
Creator of RhinoCommons
Creator of NHibernate Profiler

Glenn Block
Program Manager for the Managed Extensibility Framework at Microsoft
Former Product Designer at Microsoft Patterns and Practices
Long-time friend and ally of .NET open source and community

Rod Paddock, Editor of CoDe Magazine, will be our panel moderator.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monospace Welcomes Headspring Systems as a Principal Sponsor

2009-10-09T05:30:00.000-07:00

Continuing its involvement in open source for the .NET Framework, Headspring has become a principal sponsor of the Monospace Conference.

A commitment to open source for .NET is a core principal of Headspring. In addition to sponsoring Monospace, Headspring’s employees have contributed to numerous .NET open source projects including, MvcContrib, AutoMapper, The Tarantino Project, and CodeCampServer. Jeffrey Palermo, Headspring’s CTO, comments "We leverage open source software when delivering software projects. The more we support the open source community, the more we benefit.”

Dustin Wells, Headspring’s CEO, comments “Headspring is very excited about the future of Mono and the possibilities it opens for utilizing the .NET Framework on iPhones, Macs, and Linux.”

Headspring is a custom software development and Agile software consulting firm in Austin, Texas. Headspring specializes in delivering custom software development using Agile methods to help clients build and manage custom software projects more effectively. Headspring has helped clients maximize the value of each dollar spent through high-velocity output from each team member supported by Headspring's rigorous development standards and commitment to quality. In addition to custom software development, Headspring also helps clients through our technology training and coaching programs.

For more information about Headspring, please visit the website at www.HeadspringSystems.com.

Book Now! Flight Costs Are About to Increase!

2009-10-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

We're really close to the 21-day limit for purchasing your flight without incurring the airlines' standard "last minute" penalty.

Don't wait to book your flights to Monospace! Book today!

See you there.

http://monospace.us

Monospace: The iPhone Development Training Opportunity that Can't Be Beat!

2009-10-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

The Monospace conference is offering a full day of iPhone development training with the MonoTouch development tools and framework!

On Wednesday, October 28th, the Monospace conference features two back-to-back training sessions on iPhone development:

iPhone Development with Monotouch, taught by Geoff Norton, Engineering Lean for Montouch, and Advanced iPhone Development with Monotouch, taught by Miguel de Icaza, Mono Project Founder and Vice President of Developer Platform at Novell.

The Monospace conference is four full days of development training and open format learning and teaching for only $249! For a limited time, use the discount code MONO199 and bring the price down to $199.

Attendees of the Monospace conference will also receive a $150 discount on the MonoTouch tools.

In addition to the MonoTouch training, Geoff Norton will be giving a MonoTouch demo at Austin's Cocoa Coders iPhone developer user group on the evening of Tuesday, October 29th.

You can come to Monospace just for the full day of iPhone training, or stay the whole week. Either way, it's a value that can't be beat!

Register at: http://monospace.us

See you there!

Mono Project People Teaching at Monospace

2009-10-01T20:46:00.000-07:00

The Monospace Conference brings software developers together with some of the industry's most knowledgeable experts in Mono and its platforms.

Many of the Monospace tutorial teachers are the people developing the Mono technologies, and this is your chance to learn directly from them.

From iPhone development with MonoTouch to Moonlight, and from web apps to cross-platform development, the tutorial program puts you in-touch with the people with the most knowledge in the subjects you want to know more about.

Check out the list of people from the Mono Project teaching at Monospace!

iPhone Development with MonoTouch
Geoff Norton, Engineering Lead for MonoTouch, Novell

Moonlight
Larry Ewing, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell
Rod Paddock, Editor, Code Magazine | Principal Consultant and Founder, Dashpoint Software

Introduction to Developing on Mono
Miguel de Icaza, Mono Project Founder and Vice President of Developer Platform, Novell

Linux Jumpstart for Windows Developers
Joseph Hill, Mono Product Manager, Novell

Mono and the Web - ASP.NET MVC, WebForms, Tools, and Servers
Jackson Harper, Engineer, Mono Project, Novell

Cross-Platform Development with Mono
Aaron Bockover, Lead Developer of the Banshee Media Player and Engineer at Novell

The Mono Runtime and Core Extensions
Rodrigo Kumpera, Software Engineer, Novell

See you at Monospace!

Advanced NHibernate Tutorial by Ayende Rahien at Monospace

2009-09-21T13:50:00.001-07:00

NHibernate is the most mature and widely-adopted Object-Relational Mapping framework for .NET, and Ayende Rahien is it's best-known expert and project contributor.

The Monospace Conference offers you a unique opportunity to learn from the best at Ayende's Advanced NHibernate tutorial. Here's a chance to rapidly increase your skill and understanding of NHibernate by learning from an industry leader who has built NHibernate applications across a number of industries and system scales, from personal websites to large-scale, high-transaction enterprise apps.

Monospace attendees will also receive a discount coupon for NHibernate Profiler, the visual debugger and performance analyzer for Hibernate and NHibernate.

Don't miss this unique opportunity to improve your software development abilities in a rare installment of this popular workshop in North America!

Sign up for Monospace now at: http://monospace.us

Monospace Welcomes the CodePlex Foundation

2009-09-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

The announcement of the CodePlex Foundation has sparked a lively and engaging on-line conversation about open source in the Microsoft community. The Monospace Conference is taking that on-line conversation real-time!

Monospace is the open source and cross-platform conference for Mono and .NET. The first two days of the conference program offers a series of half-day workshops, teaching .NET developers how to leverage existing skills on the myriad platforms and opportunities that the Mono Project opens up, including iPhone, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

During the last two days of the conference, participants are invited to take over, shaping their own conference according to their own needs and interests, going deeper into the new understandings gained in the first two days of tutorials, or on any subject that participants want to explore. Open space sessions can be presentations, panels, chalk talks, group discussions, workshops, or any format that a session convener chooses.

During the open space at Monospace, open source leaders, contributors, and users have a chance to engage directly with Sam Ramji, President of the CodePlex Foundation, and Miguel de Icaza, Founder of the Mono Project, and CodePlex Foundation Board of Directors member.

Monospace provides a unique opportunity to hold a frank dialog about the CodePlex Foundation with the people who have been working to bring it to life, giving participants a chance to clarify the meaning of the CodePlex Foundation and its goals, and maybe even shape the foundation and the future of broader open source support and adoption in the Microsoft world.

The frank and open dialog offered by the open space format has had a tremendous impact on the open source community in the .NET space over the past couple of years, and this year with the participation of the Mono community, the conversation goes even deeper, and the community grows ever broader and in new directions.

We're really excited to have the CodePlex Foundation's participation at Monospace and we appreciate the dedication of Sam and Miguel to open source on the CLI and in the Microsoft communities, and for their openness to engage in the dialog!

Ten Reasons to Come to Monospace

2009-07-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

The Monospace Conference is taking place from October 27th to October 30th in Austin, Texas. Here are a handful of reasons why you should attend!

The People

They looked outside of the box and liked what they saw. They came, they, saw, and they connected. The rest is future history!

The Fusion

Two .NET communities walked into a bar... three came out. I thought that "fusion" might a good name for this conference. I can't wait to see what comes of the Microsoft .NET community and the Mono community spending four days together learning and talking about cross-platform software development on the CLI.

It's in Austin

Monospace will be a last grasp at warm, pleasant weather before winter for many people coming to the conference. Austin is a city of music, swimming holes, mostly laid back people, and free wireless for as far as the eye can see. We'll try to work swimming holes into the conference program somehow.

It's Cheap

There's two days of tutorials and two days of Open Space. It's happening at the Austin Convention Center, the world class home of Austin's annual South By Southwest conference. It's only $249 USD.

It's a Good Time for a Broad Array of Cost Alternatives

If you're running all of your .NET apps on commercial systems, you might be able to change the equation and move some of those apps onto open platforms. It's the economy, stupid.

The Format

Twelve half-day tutorials will be taught in three tracks during the first two days. The following two days are an Open Space. It's a format geared for retention. You learn a few things and they get grounded by two days of Open Space. It's not the kind of conference you could catch later on-line.

Mono Developers

Developers who make Mono and developers who make stuff using Mono, as well as developers who are excited about learning Mono and about the platforms that it runs on. It's a conference for people who recognize Mono's advantages and who are learning to take those advantages, and for people who are showing others how to do the same.

Teach a Windows Guy about Grep

Ok, that one is a bit contrived. Most of the Windows .NET people at Monospace are comfortable at the command line. They're the uncommon .NET people who also use Linux and Mac. Nonetheless, many .NET folks are just beginning to come up to speed on the array of platforms that Mono opens to .NET development. So, if you've ever wanted to show off your favorite features of your favorite platform to someone who hasn't used it before, Monospace is the place to connect with open-minded learners!

The Location

It's in Austin. I know we talked about this already, but you really ought to do an image search for Austin, TX. Ignore the picture of the snake on the first page of results. The association of snakes and Texas appears to be some kind of flaw in Google's indexing.

This Spot Intentionally Left Blank

You'll fill this spot in with you're own stuff. Let me know why you want to come to the Monospace Conference!

Lean more about Monospace at http://monospace.us

Call for Speakers!

2009-06-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

The Monospace Conference is looking for teachers to give tutorials on the Mono framework, tools, languages, and platforms supported by Mono.

Some tutorials are aimed at .NET developers with little experience with operating systems other than Windows, and others are geared to experienced Mono developers with exposure to the various Mono platforms.

The tutorials are two hour to three hour interactive sessions that can be any combination of follow-along examples, labs, and lecture.

We're looking for tutorials on subjects such as Linux, Mac, Windows, web, desktop, servers, message queues, databases, iPhone, Android, Amazon's EC2, among others.

Contact information for speaker submissions is on the Monospace website at http://monospace.us/contact

Monospace is a Learning Conference

2009-06-30T01:34:00.001-07:00

Over four days, 250 participants will be immersed in workshops, breakout sessions, and innumerable conversations with teachers, industry leaders, and peers, learning to master the full spectrum of platforms open to .NET skills. During Open Space sessions and conference gatherings, they will forge new professional and personal networks that will support on-going efforts to bring the full spectrum of .NET-compatible environments to bear, whether to take advantage of new business avenues, or to capitalize on cost-saving opportunities with open systems.

The unique format of this conference provides an incredible opportunity for attendees to not only participate in deep learning, but to solidify their learning through community interaction and study.

The conference starts with two days of half-day tutorials taught by industry leaders, experts, and community influencers. Participants can choose from any of three simultaneous tracks of tutorials, and move between sessions at will. The tutorials are followed by two days of Open Space where participants hone their understanding of their new knowledge, and extend their understanding through interaction, dialog, and Q&A with other participants and community leaders.

This highly-effective format is geared specifically to learning and retention, and is unlike any typical software conference. It was first introduced at the Continuous Improvement in Software Development Conference, and has since been used successfully at a number of learning conferences in North America and Europe.

The Monospace Conference is organized by the same people who created the ALT.NET Open Space Conference and the Continuous Improvement in Software Development Conference. Both of these conferences had a profound and lasting impact on .NET software development and development community.

In 2007, the ALT.NET Open Space Conference solidified one of the most influential communities in the .NET space. Since then, this community has had significant impact on the Microsoft community and on Microsoft itself, leading to many advances in technology and thinking, as well as introducing the Microsoft community to the Open Space format, which is now a familiar part of Microsoft conferences at large.

In 2008, the Continuous Improvement in Software Development Conference brought a community leaders and influencers together to take a deeper look at Lean Software Development and Continuous Improvement, kicking off a year of study, practice, and dialog that led to broader adoption of Lean and Kanban in the Microsoft community, and serious consideration of existing Agile Development practices.

in 2009, the Monospace Conference will continue the tradition of excellence in providing opportunities for developers to truly learn and to join learning communities that are essential to retention and improvement.