I just found a nice feature in TechSmith’s Snag-It Editor that I didn’t know was there, but came in very handy. Batch Processing. Select a group of images, and then manipulate them. Change the size, colors, borders, captions, and a whole bunch of other helpful parameters around your images. Here is a quick video that shows the process.

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?

 

 

Monday May 10th, 2010 represents my largest and best event to-date, that I have ever hosted. For the last seven years, I’ve grown a technical audience around Microsoft programming / developers in the Phoenix area. Some travel from California, New Mexico, and other parts of Arizona, but for the most part the crowd is local.

In years past, this all day event has been as small as 300 folks, and as large as 500, and I’ve tried been to venues around the valley some better than others.

This year I had 850 reservations for the free event (lunch included). So let me post this question to you? Where can you put 850 people for an entire day (8-5), have room for parking (free parking no less), feed them, AND (yes capital AND) have a single room/theater large enough to let them hear your speaker?

In the major Phoenix/Scottsdale metropolitan area – there is only one place. Of course I’m exaggerating here, there are many places, but only one that I will use going forward.

Scottsdale Resort and Conference Center

Just the name “Resort and Conference Center” is magic. That’s what they do. They’re a big resort that specializes in Conferences. With the planning that I did with the resort staff before the meeting, I got to walk the property and see all of the rooms available. All the rooms, including the sleeping rooms/casitas/suites/pools/meeting rooms. Our VIP presenters that flew in from out of town stayed in the Presidential and Casita Suites.

Note about the sleeping rooms and suites. If you’re going to book the presidential suites (there are 3 of them) request either the second or the third floor. Not that the first floor presidential is bad, but it does have it’s draw backs. It’s right by an entrance door, which can be a little noisy, and the hallway for that door is used on the 2nd and 3rd floors to make the room bigger, and the entrance nicer. And of course, it’ll be a little quieter.

A note about the Casitas. There may be more than one group of casitas, but we stayed in the 10,15,20,25 group of casita rooms. If you’re VIP guests are bringing kids – book them in the Casitas – not the presidential. I made this mistake, by putting a family in the presidential+side room. So they effectively had two rooms, connecting, but the casita would have been a much nicer fit. Casita 10 has a full kitchen. Complete with ice maker, and a full size refrigerator. It also has two pull out beds from the couches, and a bunch of flat screen TV’s. To do it over again (which I will be in 2010 Q4 and 2011 Q2) I would reposition my guests, so that the business traveler would be in the Presidential and the families would be in the Casitas. Word of caution for families with young children – the Casita doors (ours at least) opens to a semi-private wading pool that is 4ft deep.

Back to the meeting side of things.

Audio Visual. Ask for Ben. As far as I can tell, he runs the audio video show at Scottsdale Resort and Conference Center (SRCC), and we couldn’t stump him. They have so many event and conferences, and so much equipment that we never had a request they couldn’t immediately answer. If you book events, then you know what it’s like to have an on site AV department. This isn’t just an onsite AV department though, it’s the best AV department I’ve ever worked with. Imagine having a Best Buy on site for your meeting, so that anything and everything you could need for the day, was just right there at your disposal. That’s what I felt like. Need an extra VGA cable? Just ask right? Any conference center could do that. Need a 50’ VGA cable? You’re 50/50 here on who would have it. Need 10 of those 50 foot cables? Very few conference AV departments could come through – Ben at SRCC had no problem. This was just a tiny example. We had live cameras at the stage, and the audience, 3 projectors, flying screens, lots of mics/lavs/handhelds/podiums (with not a single feedback issue) and all kids of stuff. It’s a very difficult event technically to pull off, and SRCC AV came through. You know the best event happens when no one complains about AV. The screen is too far, too small, not bright enough. Very few attendees will brag about good AV – so the best compliment you can have is if/when no one complains – and that was out event. Ben – if you ever read this. Special Thanks to you and your team.

Parking. They have a 2 story parking garage, and offer both valet, and self parking. This was more than enough parking for our attendees.

Catering. In the morning we had coffee stations and water. But no food. The coffee was constantly refreshed and was never out. Complete win. For lunch we had a BBQ style chicken, hamburger, hot dogs, vegi-burgers, salad(s), condiment station, and soda/water bottle stations. Everyone loved the lunch. This again is where you can run into trouble with a large event. You have to have good food. Good food is expensive, especially for this size crowd every dollar * 850 adds up quickly. On the tables we had water/candy stations for every 3 people. No that big-o-deal for the morning, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it refreshed twice for the day.

Banquets. Tables and Seating. The comfortable chairs we had fro this event, were amazing. I call them 8-Hour chairs. They’re captains chairs with arm rests, soft seating, adjustable swivel chars. For this reason alone – I recommend you use Scottsdale Resort and Conference Planning.

Sales Team. I worked with Kate M. and Marianna R. for my Sales and Meeting managers. (480)991-9000 I highly recommend you call and work with SRCC for your meeting/conference. And if you call them – please tell them Scott Cate with AZGroups recommended you! These two ladies were the keys to my successful event. They are both proactive to ask the right questions and foresee both failure and success. They know what’s going to work, and what isn’t. And if I disagree or push back – they are able to talk about it and come up with whatever is going to work best. I’m excited to start my next event planning with SRCC.

If you’re an attendee at one of my events, please get used to driving to SRCC, because we’ll be there again in the future 🙂