Archives for May 2010

I’m grateful to have been selected as a speaker to this years Microsoft TechEd North America. I know there are 1000’s of qualified speakers and I’m honored to have had high enough scores in TechEd’s past to be invited back. That said – planning is well under way to make the best talk possible. My talk is titled “Visual Studio Tips and Tricks” and I’m co-presenting with the famous Dustin Campbell. My goal is to cover as much new material as possible. New tricks that I have not shown in past Tip/Trick talks. This is hard because there are so many VERY COOL new parts of Visual Studio 2010. Some of them deserve a lot of time, and others are 2 second “remember this keyboard shortcut” tricks.

If you’re a following of @VSTricks then you know I’m video/screen cast happy on my blog. It’s not for everyone, but to me, it’s the best learning tool. Again, I know this isn’t the best for everyone, but FOR ME, it’s the quickest, best media for me to use to get my message across. i have decided to pre-record all of my TechEd Tip/Tricks and put them online shortly before my presentation. The reason is simple. I don’t want the attendees to have to try and take notes during this “Fire Hose” style Tips/Tricks presentation. I’ll take the notes for you, right here on ScottCate.com – the whole talk will be posted in nice, easy to watch, small 5-10 minute video segments.

The only thing the attendee should think is “Wow that’s cool, I didn’t know that” and then look at the power point slide and see a blog url.

The risk: Everyone will just watch the video blog, and no one will attend my TechEd session. Yeah Right! In my wildest dreams I could get that kind of traffic.

The Upside: No note taking, and a wider audience. Not ScottGu or ScottHa wider, but a little larger none-the-less. So in the coming weeks, watch for TechEd specific Video Blog Posts.

Here are the categories that we’ll be covering Tips/Tricks in (no particular order)

• Intellisence
• The VS Start Page
• 3rd Party Add-On’s (In the box)
• Code Editor Tricks (code faster / better)
• Multi Mon Tricks
• Outlining
• Navigation
• Temp Projects
• New Projects
• Coding Faster (maybe this belongs up with editor tricks??)
• Code Snippets
• Debugging
• Diagrams
• Extending VS
• Something super secret NDA can’t tell you yet (Part 1)
• Something super secret NDA can’t tell you yet (Part 2)

WOW. Another event behind us. What a speaker line up this year huh?

• Scott Guthrie
• Scott Guthrie
• Scott Hanselman
• Jeffrey Palermo
• Tim Heuer
• Scott Guthrie

Why is ScottGu listed 3 times? Because he gave us 4 hours of content. Amazing that he’s got so much energy, coding talent, stage presence, and community concern to still donate this much of his time. I can’t say how grateful we are as a community that ScottGu continues to agrees to come to our event.

We also have to take a moment and say thank you to the Sponsors. Without their financial support, this event is not possible. The bottom line is the event takes money and it has to come from somewhere. Either it comes from the attendees or sponsors (or a hybrid of some sorts, like VIP seats). So THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! to all the Sponsors. I hope it was as enjoyable for you as it was for all the attendees, and I hope to see your name on the list again for the next event 🙂

• http://DevExpress.com
• http://GoDaddy.com
• http://Axosoft.com
• http://DiscountASP.NET
• http://Telerik.com
• http://InterfaceTT.com
• http://Microsoft.com
• http://NextSlide.com

Looking back at the reviews I asked people to fill out, all-in-all the day was a success. We did have some logistical problems with parking, eating fast enough, handing out prizes, etc. We also had 100% positive notes across the board for the Speakers. Some didn’t understand the professional level talk on MVC2 because it was out of their comfort zone. They either said “I’m not suing MVC2” or “I’m not advanced enough to follows the MVC2 tricks” but many many evals came back positive of the talk as well. At the end of the day, I’m happy with the content. Something for everyone, something targeted at the beginners, and something targeting at the MVC professionals.

We have Photos

You may know our own community member Richard Kimbrough. He’s the guy we always as to take pictures, and he does an amazing job. We’ve uploaded them to Flickr, which you can browse around and tag yourself, or watch the Slide Show. If you have photos, please feel free to upload them to your favorite hosting site and tag them #AZGroups so we can find them. Or if you like, zip them up and use http://TransferBigFiles.com to send them to me. I’ll upload them as part of the official set.

We have NextSlide.com Video

I was contacted about 3 months ago from NextSlide.com. They are a local .net shop that has a product for sharing presentations. They offered to do some volunteer work on our behalf, and I’m not sure they new what they were getting into 🙂 They have been VERY VERY helpful and quite frankly we could not have this content online if it were not for them. Now that we have a content service provider to build and host the content, we need a way to record it. Very special thanks to two people for making that happen. First, Josh Vorves ran our Video Mixing board which let the audience see close ups of the speaker, and the computer screen, and the picture in picture effects for the DevExpress.com demo (Mark Miller coding with a Guitar, say what ???? wait for it, it’ll be online later), and Josh also did a ton of behind the scenes work to help with the video and audio recordings. And Lorin Thwaits came through for us with all the camera gear. Lorin spent many hours of prep before the event, as well as the entire day running the cameras, and checking on the audio/video recordings. Out community friend Matt Birmingham also stepped up last minute as a volunteer to run one of the audience cameras. Thank you Matt. At the end of the day, what you’re about to see online was only possible because of these 4 volunteer team members.

• NextSlide.com (Their whole company)
• Lorin Thwaits
• Josh Vorves
• Matt Birmingham

We did have one video/audio/technical casualty during the day where Mr. Jeffrey Palermo’s video was lost. We kind of knew going into this event that the entire “video online afterwards” project was going to be difficult to get perfect. To be honest, I’m ecstatic that we have all of the content that we do have, but I sincerely regret to announce that the MVC2 tips/tricks talk could not be posted online. We have portions of it, but at this point we’ve decided that it’s not enough to salvage the talk. After that downer – if you’re interested, there is a guy on Palermo’s team that did a very similar talk that is to be posted for the May 2010 Meeting on Community for MVC.net and Jeffrey Palermo has his slides posted here.

Head on over to the AZGroups channel on NextSlide.com to see all the talks. And know that I’ll be using NextSlide.com for my events in the future as well.

http://azgroups.nextslide.com/

VistaPrint.com is a place that prints very cheap (free sometimes) business cards and post cards. I’ve used them in the past for my user group business cards. The printing is free, but you have to pay fro shipping, and they usually have a VistaPrint Logo on them. For community stuff, it’s great.

I received an email this morning about a free post card offer, and I thought I would put together a post card that promotes the AZGroups.org calendar. This calendar is meant to be a simple calendar of Technical User Group events. The best part about this calendar is that it’s a simple Google Calendar, and we can assign Write Privileges to anyone. So if you’re a user group leader, you can log in your self, and add your own event(s) to the calendar. But I’m not sure all the User Group leaders around town know about the calendar. So this postcard is targeting User Group leaders, and my goal is to enable 5-10 people to help me distribute them to Tech Community members around the state.

So in typical community fashion, before I order them – I would like to ask your opinion. Please leave comments. I’m sure that these could be better. This is my rough draft. What do you think?