Last week I presented at the DFW UPA meeting with about 7 other Big Design presenters, along with a tour of the awesome offices at Usability Sciences, we all gave 10 minute previews of our various Big Design talks. Here are my “preview” slides. Enjoy!

I will be presenting on Friday at 1pm… on strategies to integrate your UX team with Scrum.. these techniques are used to help scale Scrum to large enterprise organizations.

Also, be sure to register with the hotel (that’s where all the cool kids will be) and just for reading this blog, you can register at the hotel with the code “BDS” for a discount (Big Design Sexy).

Final tip.. (and this one’s just between us… so shhh!) use the code “just4dfwupa” to save some extra on your Big Design tickets!

For anyone in the Houston area this Friday, I will be speaking at the Agile DOTNET Conference hosted by Improving Enterprises and Microsoft. I’m really excited for this year’s conference – it seems that my friends at Improving like to take it up a notch each year. Last year the Houston event was at the Microsoft office.. this year, it’s at a Major League Baseball Park with an after party watching the Astros play the Dodgers! Awesome.

I’ll be pulling from my experiences working with global agile teams to talk about 3 patterns we’ve used to scale scrum. This talk is a lot of fun, and I hope everyone has something that they can take away from it!

If you’re planning on attending.. be sure to swing by and say hi,

Hope to see you there!

Image Credit – Chris Weldon

Hey Dallas! I’ll be presenting tonight at the Dallas XAML User Group, meeting at the Improving offices in Addison. One of the things that I really like about the Dallas XAML user group is it’s small group, hands on feel. If you’ve never been out one of there meetings, it’s a great place to ask questions, get answers and work on some real hands-on type of sessions.

If you attended my Dallas Day of Dot Net session, this is essentially the code examples that we never got to in that session (ran out of time). So you could think of this as “Coding Naked part 2” – we’ll be looking at MVC/MVP and MVVM patterns, talking when you would want to use which, and then digging in to the code for some MVP and MVVM goodness.

If you are planning on being there tonight, they simply ask that you complete the free registration!

Also, be sure to check out the upcoming series:

• April 3rd – TDD with MVVM / MVP – Caleb Jenkins
• May 1st and June 5th – More Test Driven Development with MVVM and MVC
• July 3rd – Using Design Patterns
• August 7th – Optimized Memory and Performance in XAML Applications
• September 4th – Keeping it Clean and Blendable – Using Expression Blend with Discipline and Making our Code Maintainable

See you tonight!

This was a great conference with a ton of amazing presenters. Hat’s off the Chandler who put the event on, his wife and all of the great volunteers! Here are my slides…

Some favorite highlights:

• Scott Hansleman’s ninja move with Nuget (when the site went down while he was presenting live, he quickly demo’d the offline caching features of Nuget – ninja presenter skillz in action)
• Stephen Bohlen’s full day track (in one day, he did 4 out of 5 talks in a single track – way to bring the awesome!)
• Eric Sowell did a live edit of my blog, that he converted to a mobile friendly, responsive web, css driven layout -  It was impressive. I’ll be updating my CSS with his changes soon – more on this to come!
  Grab the code from Eric’s GitHub
  

My talk, Coding Naked, had it’s own interesting twists. A friend of mine driving down from OKC reached out to me ahead of time to make sure that my talk was going to be “mixed company appropriate”.

So, the short answer is that yes.. my talk is perfectly suitable for mixed company.

Coding Naked is an attempt to bring TDD practices to the masses. To make Test Driven development as natural as playing Lego’s, and to make having code without tests as uncomfortable as coding naked.

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(CC) DielesBug2007

Car accident. Pls help me. Cops coming

Um what?!! No mention of an ambulance being needed – so that’s good. I called – it goes to voice mail. As you can imagine, my packing up to head out the door went much faster than usual.. I finally get through. My wife, and our 4 kids were driving when they got rear-ended, and the person just took off leaving them there. Seriously?!!

Nobody is hurt too bad, just shaken up, and sore (sigh of relief)… we need to get them all to the ER to double check backs and necks. Fortunately I work about 15 minutes from where this happened; I leave immediately , sending out this tweet.

I actually arrive on the scene before the police or fire department, 1 witness stopped, but then left without giving his name because he was driving without a drivers license! Another person, saw the whole thing, then followed the car and got his license plate, phoning that in to 911. (Hooray for proactive active citizens!)

So, to the 2 people that stopped – thank you. Thank you for having the decency to make sure that my family was ok and safe, and to even tracking the license plate down to make sure that the police can follow up with the person that hit them. Thank you.

We did go to the ER. One of my girls had to ride in the ambulance because we were the most concerned about her and the possibility of neck injuries. Bottom line: everyone checked out OK, they’re just going to be very sore for the next couple of days.

		Hit-n-Run Hospital Visit VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

In the meantime.. twitter and Facebook blew up with friends responding, and reaching out to my wife and I . Here’s a quick snap shot….

Wow… twitter really is where the people are! .. and on that note. Thanks to Mark Miller, Seth Juarez, Michael Letterle, Allen Shaw, Brandon Kelly, Joel Dow, Jeffrey Palermo, Tim Mitchell, Erik Porter, Darcy Lussier, Amanda Hardeman, Alan Stevens, Keyvan Nayyeri, Dustin Davis, Scott Koon, Cori Drew, Javier Lozano, Jeff Blankenburg, David Yancey, Laurent Bugnion, Randy Peterman and others…

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

Thank you all for the prayers, thoughts, DM’s and in general being great people and encouraging me during a rough night. I’m still recovering from all of what that took out of me, both emotionally, and it’s also amazing what that does to a person’s physical energy!

I’ve developed software on the web for the better part of 15 years. I’ve lived through the classic ASP + VB6, learned the in’s and out’s of ASP.NET WebForms, WebForms with MVP and then MVC… and I have a confession, the web hasn’t excited me for several years now. Oh sure, there have been improvements here and there, but my passion, my focus my love, if you will, has slowly and steadily been being pulled away.

It was that harlot. That user experience promising Silverlight, with her Blend goodness, and RIA enticing ways.. I mean sure, ASP.NET had some good stuff going for it, but let’s face – things were just easier with Silverlight, XAML layouts worked! User Controls behaved the way you expected them to without having to worry about when in the magic pipeline was I invoking this control, and why weren’t my run time changes getting picked up?! Nope, not with Silverlight – she was just too sexy for that nonsense.

Were you one of those too? Did you get pulled away from your first web love to chase after the promises of offline applications, rich internet environments? Seriously, who could blame you right? That MVVM is the way things are supposed to be done right?

Well friends, it’s been about 8 days since I got back from a full week in Bellevue at the Microsoft Campus for the 2012 MVP Summit, and I can say this:

I have never been more excited to be a web developer than I am today, and it’s not even what you think.

You might be thinking that I’m all excited over the new good stuff in Visual Studio 11, or ASP.NET MVC 4 or even that the new templates are leveraging Nuget – and those things are all good!

I’ll tell you this right now, my new crush is developing SPA applications with ASP.NET Web API, the sweetness of Knockout.JS, Upshot.JS, SignalR and a couple of HTML 5 / CSS frameworks that I can’t really talk about yet. What’s so awesome about these applications? For one thing, if done properly, these will make some of the best candidate applications for Windows 8 Metro, the data binding and layout has finally caught up to what XAML offers,  Expression Blend for HTML is super nice, plus a whole lot more!

While some of the (most exciting) things that were talked about are covered under NDA and can’t be discussed yet.. let me say this:  Look for good things to come from Redmond – very open and awesome stuff in the near future, and just remember that this is when everything changes (for the better).

It’s a very exciting time to be a web developer on the Microsoft platform!

Do you do .NET? C#? Are you agile or trying to be? You should check out the AgilDotNET Conference in Dallas! This will be the 3rd year that my friends over at Improving have put on these conference and each year it get’s better! This year I’ll be introducing some concepts that can help Scrum scale to larger “enterprise” organizations.

Check out the full day’s agenda!

There are some impressive people presenting this year, check out the complete list of presenters on the site… and run on over to register. See you there!

One of the largest challenges working with a global company are increasingly large number of dislocated teams that we interact with.

Last year, one of my colleagues and I set out to help remove some of the barriers that exist for dislocated teams. Specifically, we looked at the various options that are available for interactive whiteboards. We wanted to find something that any team could afford, travel with, and use easily.

We looked at various options to create a usable, interactive whiteboard solution, including software for the Microsoft Kinect device and options using a Nintendo Wii remote. We found that actually holding a “pen” that was required for the Wii solution was much more natural and had a higher fidelity than waving our hands in the air with the Kinect.

Check out some of the early software and prototyping that Johnny Lee did with Wii Remotes. This early work inspired many Wii solutions. Below is a list of the tools and resources that we used for our Portable Interactive Collaboration Room solution.

Bottom line, you can have an interactive while board, with HD video and audio for less than $250.

We leveraged Live Meeting (though you could use WebEx just as easily). You’ll also need a laptop and a projector (or large screen display) not included in the $250 price. Enjoy!

We’ve been having a good time introducing teams to these tools. What do you use to help with your dislocated teams?

I’ve never been a fan of “New Years Resolutions”, maybe it’s because they seam to be so quickly abandoned.. maybe it’s because of the sound of permanence that they carry. A resolution, resolute, solidarity… oops, I missed it, why even try now. Hmmm.. so I like goals. Goal can me missed, re-adjusted, and gone after again. Goals can be small and quickly achievable or they can be grandiose and drivers for the whole year. I have life goals. I have things I strive for all they time.. and then I have goals, that I set as markers for each year.

2 years ago, I had a developer goal of getting better at my code-ninja skills. Then I sat with David O’Hara and Mark Miller at the MVP Summit, they showed me CodeRush, I embraced it….
Check  mission accomplished.

Last year, I was starting a new job, learning GIT,  finishing a chapter for a book, finishing some Windows Phone 7 apps for Microsoft’s Showcase – so those were my goals.

I’ve been at my new job for over a year now, my side company, that specialized in developer mentoring and architecture, Proaction Mentors,  finished 3 showcased Windows Phone 7 apps for Microsoft (because of NDA’s I can’t tell you which one’s – sorry… *however* I can tell you that if you have a Windows Phone, then you probably already have one of my apps installed). I discovered Smart GIT (love this for GIT!),  Finally, yes, with all of this going on, we were able to get a new and awesome book out the door!
Check missions accomplished.

This year, I have a couple of developer goals as well.

1. Start using my GIT Hub account to actually post code and participate in some project, instead of just stalking the projects that I’m interested in.   At a minimum, I’d like to get my demo code out there, and reference that as the place to get the code for any of my talks. Preferably, I’d like to fork and contribute to some of the projects that I’ve been using (and locally improving) recently.

2. Attend and speak at some new conferences. I’ve already blogged about this, but it’s worth mentioning, I’m moving in to some new areas with the Agile community this year, and I’m planning on making a focused effort on participating more at a  couple of conferences… with some new talks that I’m really excited about!

3. Do more with ASP.NET MVC and AZURE. This is for my personal saw sharpening. I’d like to create and publish and commercial product on these platforms this year… that’s goal #3 on purpose. I have no idea if I’ll actually have time to get this done – but I’d like to!

What about you? What are your developer goals for this year? Have you made any resolutions? Share them in the comments.

Happy New Year of Coding!

Image Credit
Sally Mahoney
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Here is a quick look at some of the conferences and events that I’m attending, or I’ve submitted for or am planning on submitting talks for this year…  this could be a busy year!

Attending Microsoft MVP Summit  – Feb 28 – Mar 2

Day of .NET – Dallas – Mar 9-10

DFW Scrum – a great group of Agile’ists in the Dallas area!

North Dallas .NET User Group (Date TBA)

Ft. Worth .NET User Group (Date TBA)

Dallas Tech Fest (Dates TBA)

Big Design 2012 (Dallas) – May 31 – June 2

Tulsa Tech Fest (Dates TBA)

 Tulsa School of Dev (Dates TBA)

VS Live May 14-17 (NY) &  Aug 6-10 (Redmond)

Agile Alliance Conference – August 13-17 in Dallas, Texas

Unfortunately, the Agile Alliance Conference overlaps That Conference “summer camp for geeks” August 13th – 15th – I was really looking forward to that!

Image Credit John Pozadzides

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some rights reserved