not so trivial .net

New Efficiency Launch Presentations

Clint Edmonson — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:56:00 -0700

Here are the slides from my sessions on Windows Server 2008 R2 for the New Efficiency Launch events. If you’d like to grab the decks for offline viewing, follow the links over to Slideshare.net and you can download them directly.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Dev Session 01

Windows Server 2008 R2 Dev Session 02

Visual Studio 2010 SKU Transition Overview Dev Launch

Windows Server 2008 R2 Dev Session 03

St. Louis Coders 4 Charities 2009 - Event Report

Clint Edmonson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:24:00 -0700

The St. Louis.NET User Group held its first Coders 4 Charities event this past weekend. The volunteer driven event paired teams of web developers, designers and analysts with representatives from local charities to receive "extreme makeovers" of their web sites and applications in just 48 hours. In total there were 9 local St. Louis charities seeking assistance and over 50 volunteers from the St. Louis metropolitan area who participated. The charities were:

Humanitri
Community Council of St. Charles County
Jobs and Employment Support Services
Warren County Council Against Domestic Violence
Senior Services Plus
Violence Prevention Center of Southwestern Illinois
Child Day Care Association
Long Term Care Ombudsman Program
St. Louis United Way

The event kicked off on Friday evening with a pizza dinner and introductions between the charities and volunteers. The first evening was spent reviewing existing applications and requirements and choosing strategies and technologies for the makeovers with the doors finally closing at midnight.

The doors opened again on Saturday at 7:30 am and teams eagerly attacked their charity projects with gusto and with the doors closing once more around midnight. Sunday was crunch time with all the teams hammering out their final features as the 5:00 pm deadline approached. At the conclusion, each team presented their solution to the group and received well deserved applause for their efforts.

Highlights

Smooth execution. Event organizers were put in touch with the leaders of the Kansas City C4C event and received advice on how to best run the event. Team leads had already met with the charities beforehand and had their requirements ready when volunteers showed up. Everything ran smoothly throughout the entire weekend.

Great teams. I was proud to see the teams comes together quickly on Friday night and dig right into their projects. It’s amazing to watch dedicated professionals at work.

Excellent facilities. Washington University’s CAIT classroom facilities were ideal for the event. The four large classrooms had plenty of room for teams to work and collaborate and all had workstations preloaded with Visual Studio 2008.

Kudos

I want to call out Kevin Grossnicklaus, Muljadi Budiman, Scott Spradlin, and Chris Deweese for their outstanding efforts in organizing and running this event.

More Photos

More photos can be seen on the C4C Group Pool on flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/groups/c4cstl/pool/

Microsoft Data Center Future Vision Video

Clint Edmonson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:40:12 -0700

A number of people have contacted me about the video we showed during our recent Real World Azure with Microsoft IT road show tour. It’s available on YouTube and I’ve included it here as well. Enjoy!

Friday Goodie Bag

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:22:00 -0700

It’s been a while since the last goodie bag so I felt it was time to post some new goodies I’ve found on the net.

The Visual Studio Documentary

This is an hour long documentary that takes you behind the scenes of Microsoft's "Visual Studio". It goes back to the very beginning when Alan Cooper sold Visual Basic to Bill Gates in 1988 and takes you into the future of the yet to be released Visual Studio 2010.

10 Must-Know Topics for Software Architects In 2009

There are some key trends emerging this year that will have ramifications for our work over the next decade. This article describes 10 topics that every developer should understand and have conversational knowledge about. Make sure you’re up to speed.

dev{shaped} eBook

All the great content from {You Shape} IT MSDN is now available for free as a compelling eBook for offline reading! Over the course of one year we assembled a collection of outstanding articles and resources for developers on www.microsoft.com/youshapeit/msdn and compiled them into a nice and consumable format for offline reading and forwarding that is really useful, interesting and fun to read too.

Snoop

This awesome tool was made to simplify visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime. It allows you to attach to a running WPF application and view a visual tree of the user interface control hierarchy, the property values of every control, and list of routed control events as they happen.

Vischeck and Daltonize

These two web based apps help you to adapt your applications to support people who are color blind. Vischeck simulates colorblind vision and Daltonize corrects images for colorblind viewers. Amazing and informative stuff.

Database Downloads

I learned about about this site at a geek meetup last night. They aggregate and sell several hundred databases of reference data across a variety of industries. Prices vary from tens to hundreds of dollars depending on the volume and nature of data. I highly recommend a browse through their collection – you might find just the some valuable data you can use on your current project.

You’re invited to the Community Jam at HDC!

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:22:06 -0700

Announcing Community Jam! Are you passionate about community? Always wanted to start a User Group, schedule a developer event or just curious about what a TechMasters chapter is? You're invited to the first annual Community Jam being held at the Upstream Brewing Company in Omaha on Wednesday Oct 14 from 2:00 to 6:30 before the Heartland Developer Conference kicks off.

The goal of this summit is to bring together the developer community enthusiasts to share goals and best practices for building great things for our fellow technologist. We will take an open spaces format to make sure you get value for your time.

Proposed Agenda:

2:00 - 2:30 : Welcome – meet & greet

2:30 - 3:30 : Open Session 1 (3 groups...topics to be determined)

3:45 - 4:45 : Open Session 2

5:00 - 6:00 : Open Session 3

6:00 - 6:15 : Closing thoughts

This is meant to be open to any and all members of the technical community, both Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. Ideas for topics for the open sessions might include how to start a user group, presentation tips 101, how to create a killer demo, event logistics for the beginner, social media 101, TechMasters 101, etc. It will be a great chance to network with technical professionals that are as enthused about the community as you are

Please register at http://tinyurl.com/comjam if you’re interested.

Leveling Up & Leveling Out: Optimizing the Team Mix

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:46:00 -0700

Having taken stock in your team’s current skill levels from part 1 of this series, it’s time to think for a minute about what your ideal team could look like. What do you think? Should they all be rock stars? Everyone would instantly gel and become best friends, you’d meet all your deadlines, and your application would scream. The proverbial dream team.

There are reasons that dream might turn into a nightmare. I’m going to challenge the notion that you need a team of experts to build software in this new economy. Here are my arguments:

Conflict avoidance. You may end up with too many cooks if you’re not careful. Cast your memory back to the last time there was a heated argument in your team. Chances are the participants were at about the same skill level. The fiercest technical arguments I’ve seen have taken place between team members who were equally matched in the same skill. Resolution was slow if ever and resentment ran high for the loser. It was incredibly disruptive. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a team with staggered skill levels? The more experienced team member should always be able to resolve a conflict with junior teammates. Notice I said resolve, not win. The more highly skilled team members should be strong enough to win an argument in favor of their solution or be able to recognize the merits of an alternative and accept it as a better approach.

Morale. Not every task on a project will have the same difficulty. Someone’s got to write the reporting modules and installation scripts. Tasks that challenge a novice or advanced beginner will drive more highly skilled members to boredom. If task assignments are blown, you’ll find your team members surfing the net instead of deeply engaged in their work. This will negatively impact overall project productivity.

Upward mobility and growth. How can we distinguish ourselves from our peers if we’re all doing the same work at the same level? It’s a proverbial cat fight with everyone trying to out do their team mates for recognition. The result is an environment where it’s extremely difficult to shine and just as importantly, difficult for leaders to identify the superstars who are increasing in skill. We all assume that we’ll get a merit pay increase every year but at some point we will hit the salary ceiling within our industry. When this happens there are three paths: hover near the ceiling and hope to get a “market” adjustment every few years, move to another role within the company with a higher salary base, or move on to a new company willing to pay a premium for your skills. None of these choices is good for team stability.

Cost to your employer. Ask yourself this question: If it was your money, would you keep a team of experts on staff if you didn’t need to? Businesses live and die by optimizing costs in order to maximize profit. From a business perspective, if a company is paying more than the market rate for a particular service or skill they’re paying too much. Certainly more than their competitors are willing to pay. That’s money that could have been allocated elsewhere – training, new equipment, bonuses, or profit. Employment is a contractual agreement that carries with it an obligation to provide an employer with an appropriate return on investment for the salary being paid.

So what’s a good blend of skill levels to make sure everyone benefits? Skill level mismatches on a team are essential and you need a balanced distribution to have a healthy team.

I want to show a suggested distribution adapted from Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking. There are no exact numbers, It’s meant to more for guidance that hard analysis. Andy uses this diagram to describe the population of all developers in the industry with a particular skill. Notice that it’s a non-linear distribution and weighted towards lower skill levels.

I think it makes a good model for team lineups as well and provides an excellent cost-to-benefit ratio. Your expert and proficient members would make up no more than 10-15% of your team. Your company will pay a premium for them, but their higher skill levels will provide the bulk of the productivity on projects and also provide leadership and oversight while your junior members grow into their roles.

What’s the best course of action if you find yourself with an unbalanced team? Look for opportunities to rebalance at the conclusion of projects or major milestones to minimize disruption. If you find yourself with team members with matched skill levels on the same skills, consider breaking your team into sub teams or spinning off separate projects and readjusting the lineups. This is going to be a continuous effort and you’ll see gradual improvements along the way. They key is to avoid combining equivalent skill levels working on the similar tasks on the same team.

Real World Azure Road Show Materials

Clint Edmonson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:42:29 -0700

Thanks to everyone who attended our Real World Azure with Microsoft IT road shows in Kansas City and St. Louis. Here are the presentation materials for both the IT Pro and Dev talks.

TechNet Presents: Real World Azure for IT Pros

MSDN Presents: Real World Azure for Developers

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009: Great Time Had By All

Clint Edmonson — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 09:36:06 -0700

The 2009 St. Louis Day of .NET (with an extra bonus day thrown in for good measure) kicked off with a bang this past Friday morning when over 500 geeks gathered at the Ameristar Casino & Resort to participate in the largest community driven developer event ever to hit St. Louis. Over the two days, attendees were treated to more than 65 high impact sessions discussing the latest .NET technologies and best practices, all delivered by world class MVPs, book authors, and technologists from throughout the region. Facilities were first class, sessions were awesome, tweets were flying, and networking and knowledge sharing were overflowing into the hallways and lounges.

This year’s event literally doubled in size from last year - two full days, twice the sessions, twice the speakers, and twice the attendees. Feedback we’re hearing is incredibly positive and I’ve been assured that plans are already under way to make it even bigger and better next year.

I want to personally thank the organizers for the tremendous effort they put into this event.

Kevin Grossnicklaus

Jeff Fattic

Scott Spradlin

Chris Deweese

Muljadi Budiman

Michelle Marcus

Jeff Strauss

It was a 100% volunteer effort and each and everyone of them delivered 200%. Rock on!

Also a big thank you to everyone who spoke and attended. You made this event the huge success that it was.

You can see more great pictures from the event in the St. Louis Day of .NET flickr pool.

Slides from my sessions

Double thanks to all of you who came to my sessions and for the feedback I’ve received. Here are all my slide decks:

DODN2009 - Jump Start Silverlight

DODN2009 - Architecting Modern Distributed Applications

Start Me Up - 6 Steps to Launching Your Own Startup Company

DevLink Decompression

Clint Edmonson — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 14:01:50 -0700

Got back from DevLink last night and I am finally starting to unwind and decompress. I was blown away by the incredible feeling of energy and excitement that ran high throughout all three days of the conference. I had the pleasure of meeting hundreds of awesome developers, architects, and community leaders from all over the country. What an event!

I want to thank the chairman John Keller and all the other members of the organizing committee for a the warm welcome and offer up a huge round of applause for running a first class conference.

Also, a big thank you to the attendees who came to my two architecture sessions. Here are my slides for your further review:

DevLink - Architecting Scalable Web Applications

DevLink - Architecting Modern Distributed Applications

Leveling Up & Leveling Out: Assessing Your Team's Skills

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:04:00 -0700

Building strong teams has always been important to me. Over the years I’ve had successes and failures and spent a lot of time reflecting on the ins and outs of attracting, motivating, and growing talented developers. Major influences in my thinking have come from Joel Spolsky (Smart and Gets Things Done) and George Leonard (Mastery), Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All The Rules), and most recently Andy Hunt (Pragmatic Thinking & Learning).

In Pragmatic Thinking & Learning, Andy Hunt provides an overview of the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. The Dreyfus model is a cross disciplinary study of technical people and their skill levels. The results of the study call out specific skill levels and identify the characteristics of people at each level. I’ve listed some highlights below and bolded the characteristic that I think best exemplifies someone at a particular level:

Novice – “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

rigid adherence to rules
no discretional judgment
does not feel or accept responsibility for outcomes

Advanced Beginner – “I’m ready for my next task.”

lacks perception of big picture or larger context is seen as irrelevant,
all situations are treated with equal priority.
still does not feel responsible for outcomes
rules can be applied situationally

Competent – “I’ll have it done by the end of the day.”

still follows rules but begins to encounter and cope with crowding and conflicts (multiple activities, information, rules)
begins to explore the reasoning behind rules
sees actions as part of larger, long term goals
forms deliberate, organized plans
feeling of responsibility begins to arise from active decision making

According to the Dreyfus study, most people don’t get beyond Competent at most skills. There’s just no need or not enough challenge in a particular activity once our goals are met. To go beyond this level requires dedication and concerted effort to get better. In other words, it’s time to go pro!

Proficient - “The XYZ pattern can solve that problem perfectly.”

can distinguish important elements of a situation and ignore irrelevant details
can learn from the experience of others (e.g. case studies)
uses pattern recognition and past experience to identify a problem and maxims (as opposed to rules) to solve them
intuition begins to take over for rules

Expert (aka Master or Wizard) - “Did you need anything else?”

no longer reliant upon rules, pattern recognition and maxims are baked-in
can formulate possible outcomes and future visions of what is possible
can very quickly establish an intuitive grasp the situation and solve problems seemingly without effort

I’ve quickly come to love this model for its clarity. It cleanly describes the increasing scope of awareness and how experience gets baked into our consciousness. It provides a discrete set of criteria upon which to assess the current skill set of our teams and more importantly, it’s actionable. We can plot the next steps to our team improve and grow.

If you’re involved in decisions related to team management it behooves you to take a moment to asses your team members and build a quick skill level inventory based on the criteria above. Based on that inventory you can begin taking action. Stay tuned for part 2 where I will share some thoughts on optimizing the team lineup.

St. Louis Day of .NET 2009 open for registration!

Clint Edmonson — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:16:00 -0700

The organizers have announced that registration is officially open for this year’s highly anticipated St. Louis Day of .NET conference and there’s a special surprise – it’s two days! That’s right - two full days of technical content. The the highlights are listed below and you can get all the details and sign up here: http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/.

Please join us for this awesome event and pass the word along to your friends and coworkers as well.

Architect Bookshelf: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:51:00 -0700

Architecting Applications for the Enterprise by Dino Esposito & Andrea Saltarello

If you’re an .NET developer looking to get a better understanding of software architecture you’re in luck. This book offers a superb hands-on introduction to all the aspects of application architecture you’ll need. You’ll get an introduction to software architecture as a discipline as well as an overview of UML and a review of commonly accepted industry design principles. From there Dino and Andrea dive right into the heart of application architecture – designing your data, business, service, and presentation layers.

There’s a TON of guidance on the options available for each of your layers and when to choose which. The greatest strength of this book - it's all proven out in a real world working example that you can download and try out. I can’t underscore how important this book is to the working developer. I applaud this book for it’s greatness and curse Dino and Andrea for writing the book I wanted to write. Highly recommended!

Check out my Architect Bookshelf compilation for more recommendations for software architects.

We Care Ministries: A Coders 4 Charities Post-Mortem

Clint Edmonson — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:23:00 -0700

Last weekend after participating as a volunteer in the Coders 4 Charities event, I tweeted the following: “+1 to Sitefinity from Telerik - made it extremely easy to build our site this weekend at #C4C. Combines the best from Rails and SharePoint.” Several people have contacted me to elaborate on this statement so I thought I’d write up a quick post-mortem of the project I worked on and provide some reasons behind my statement.

We Care Ministries is a charity dedicated to providing spiritual, emotional and other needs to the elderly, the handicapped, and the needy. Their founders, Reverend Gary Barnes and his wife Carol Barnes, RN, petitioned the Coders 4 Charities committee to have their web site redone. Their original site was already online but had never completed. The donation button was broken and there was no systematic way for volunteers to offer their time and services. Our goal was to give the site a face lift so it would look more modern and appealing and address the broken or missing features. Shown below are before and after pictures of the site.

What Went Right

Great teams do great work. I definitely want to call out my teammates: Chandra Yarlagadda, Cody Inman, and James Peckham, Ross Fuhlman. Everyone on the team showed up ready and eager to work and got along great. Each person brought great ideas to the table, took ownership of their tasks, and drove them to completion without any setbacks. Special mention for Cody - he was definitely the Chuck Norris of design and CSS styling.

Good customer and expectation management. Cody had met with our charity founders prior to the C4C weekend kickoff and had come up with a list of requirements. After initial review and discussion internally, we found that we needed clarification on quite a few points. When we met with Gary and Carol for the first time, we discovered that what makes them a great team were their different perspectives on their charity mission. This was confusing at first because we were having a tough time getting a coherent set of marching orders that we could execute on. It took us several rounds of discussion to determine how they’ve partitioned their responsibilities and put together a site design that met both their needs. After a couple of design iterations we arrived at a wireframe design of the new site that they were happy with. However, knew there was a high probability of change after the event was over so we wanted to make sure that we provided them with a solution that was flexible enough to change and grow with their charity. This leads me to the next item…

Picked the right tool for the right job. Having attended last year’s C4C event, I knew that teams would struggle to complete their projects under a 48 hour deadline. Successful teams had leveraged an existing platform rather than writing their application from scratch. Coming into the event, I knew this would be an early decision point in our project and I had two solutions in mind: SharePoint and BlogEngine.NET. Both were readily available and very customizable. SharePoint offered a great option for a content heavy site and BlogEngine.NET offered a good starting point for a site that might require some custom coded workflow and data storage. It turned out that we needed a solution that offered both: end-user content management and custom coding to accept volunteers electronically. Cody Inman suggested Telerik’s Sitefinity, a product he had used in the past with success so we all decided to check it out. We immediately encountered a small hiccup - not a single one if us could get the developer trial installed successfully using the packaged installer. We ended up downloading a zip file containing a blank Sitefinity starter web site, loaded it directly into Visual Studio 2008, and were off and running. After that we all gave Sitefinity the thumbs up and began digging into our tasks.

Sitefinity turned out to be a great accelerator for us. It’s drag & drop content management features allowed us to build out the structure of the site very quickly and provided the flexibility for our customer to change any and all of the content after delivery. With regard to custom development, all we needed to do was create asp.net usercontrols and drop them into the site. Sitefinity detected them automatically and added them to its screen layout toolbox palette. For our project we created just one user control that hosted a form to allow volunteers to submit their contact information. We dropped it onto the Volunteer page using Sitefinity’s content management tools. It couldn’t have been any easier. Sitefinity also includes a simple database driven list engine which we leveraged to store volunteer information. The list engine is primitive in that it stores just one big string for each item but that was enough for our needs. If we had needed more complex data storage, we could’ve just added our own tables in the Sitefinity database (SQL Server Express, btw) and written our own database handling code. Sitefinity was a pleasant surprise and met our needs perfectly. So there you have it: we got SharePoint like content management and database driven list management and a very simple, easy to learn programming model much like a framework such as Rails. (Note: I don’t want to mislead anyone. Sitefinity does NOT provide the same programming capabilities as Rails, just a straight forward development paradigm that you can learn in less than one day). If you build custom sites I suggest you check out Sitefinity. It just might help you accelerate development on your projects as well.

PayPal integration was a breeze. The two most important requirements were accepting volunteers and donations. Luckily, We Care Ministries already had a PayPal account and we were able use PayPal’s tools to set up a donation link with no coding whatsoever. We simply needed to embed a URL link containing the their appropriate account information into the site. Couldn’t have been any easier.

What Went Wrong

No source control or build management. We knew we would need to produce a single deployable site by the end of the weekend and discussed source control and configuration management early on Friday evening. Due to the lack of resources we were reluctant to set up a source repository and perform a full software engineering build cycle. As a result, we struggled throughout the weekend trying to integrate and redistribute all our changes. We had at least one occasion were some work was overwritten while copying between machines and had to be redone. Our final solution was to just integrate everything onto a USB memory stick and run the final “build” directly from it. Less than ideal but we were pressed for time. The proper approach would have been to set up a dedicated stand alone “build” machine and have each team member integrate their work onto it and then copy back the entire project back to their local machine before beginning the next task.

Not enough time. Let’s face it – 48 hours to build a fully functioning web site is just not enough time. We iterated through several site designs through Saturday afternoon before settling on a winner. We were able to complete all the interactive elements and programming but getting the site’s look and feel flushed out and the CSS built was too time consuming. Hats off to Cody Inman for putting in a herculean effort. He carried the bulk of our design load and was working right up until the bell to try to get the site completed. The final result demo’d well but there were still some kinks to work out.

We didn’t go live. The weekend would have been a home run for us if we had been able to go live with the site by Sunday evening. Alas, the old site was hosted on Lunix servers and with all the development work we had to do, we simply did not have enough time to find an alternate hosting provider running windows servers and get DNS name resolution rerouted. Major bummer for us and hopefully better pre-event planning will help us get there next year.

All in all, both the Coders 4 Charities weekend our project were a success. The new and improved should be going live within the next week or so at www.wecareministries.org. I hope this short post-mortem provides a glimpse into what it was like to participate at C4C and will serve as a record of lessons learned that we can apply next year to make the event even better.

Coders 4 Charities 2009 - Event Report

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:18:00 -0700

Back to back events this month and I’ve got another great report for you.

The Kansas City .NET User Group held its 2^nd annual Coders 4 Charities event this past weekend. The volunteer driven event paired teams of web developers, designers and analysts with representatives from local charities to receive "extreme makeovers" of web sites or full online applications for their use in just 48 hours. In total there were 8 local Kansas City charities seeking assistance and 35 volunteers from the KC metropolitan area who participated. The charities involved spanned a wide range of concerns from church ministries to crime prevention to job clubs.

The event kicked off on Friday, April 24^th with a dinner and introductions between the charities and volunteers. The first evening was spent reviewing existing applications and requirements and choosing strategies and technologies for the makeovers with the doors closing at 10:30 pm. The doors opened again on Saturday at 7:00 am and teams eagerly attacked their charity projects until well into the night with the doors closing once more at 10:30 pm. Sunday was crunch time with all the teams hammering out their final features as the 5:00 pm deadline approached. At the conclusion, each team was given 15 minutes to present their solution to the group and receive their well deserved applause for their efforts.

Highlights

Incredible teamwork and cooperation. Teams came together very quickly and delivered under pressure. The level of professionalism and dedication to the projects was inspiring. There was a Rock Band room set up for blowing off steam but, by and large, it was quiet most of the weekend. There simply wasn’t time to relax when the stakes were so high for the charities. I was extremely proud of everyone who participated. It was an event like no other I’ve attended this year.

Great 2^nd year effort. With 8 charities and 35 volunteers, there was excellent growth from the inaugural event last year (5 charities, 25 volunteers). It’s expected that at least 7 of the 8 projects will go live within the next few weeks.

More designers added to the mix. Last year’s teams struggled due to the lack of design skills so this year there was a concerted effort to recruit more designers. This helped balance the workload among teams and the end results were substantially more usable and complete than last year. Developer art is NEVER pretty and CSS does not come naturally to most C# and VB developers.

Fantastic facilities. Centriq Training Center of Kansas City provided first class facilities. Each team was given their own training room complete with whiteboards and plenty of room to spread out and get to work. Sponsors came through big time with fully catered meals and there was ample food for everyone throughout the weekend.

This was an incredibly successful event by all measures and I want to especially call out Doug Butscher, Lee Brandt, and Jeff Julian for organizing and leading this great effort.

More Photos

More photos can be seen on the C4C flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/groups/coders4charities/

St. Louis MOSS Camp 2009 - Event Report

Clint Edmonson — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:48:00 -0700

The St. Louis SharePoint User Group held its 2^nd annual MOSS Camp this past Saturday, April 18th from 8 am – 5 pm at the New Horizons Computer Learning Center in St. Louis. The free event provided 20 sessions along 3 tracks: Development, Infrastructure, and Governance/Business. The goal of the event was to support the local St. Louis SharePoint ecosystem by providing free community driven training and raising awareness of local partners that offer SharePoint services. The emphasis was on working examples, process, and demonstration of real world solutions.

Tweets were flying throughout the event. The speakers, organizers, and attendees did a great job keeping the energy and excitement level high all day and the experience was extended out to participants as far away as Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia. At last count, there were over 520 tweets tagged with #stlmosscamp during the event. Having competition with a sister event in Atlanta running on the same day was a great motivator for everyone involved. A capture of the tweets from both the events as they ran simultaneously can be found here:

http://www.endusersharepoint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/2009-04-18-DoubleFeed.php

Highlights

Top notch speakers. We had great speakers travel in from as far as Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and Minnesota. Our speakers included INETA speakers and leaders, MPVs, and book authors. You can find out more about them here.

Standing room only. With 12 sponsors, 20 sessions, 18 speakers, and over 80 attendees there was noticeable growth over last year’s event. Sessions were packed and we had to grab every chair we could find throughout the building. More growth is expected for next year and planning for more space is already under way.

Competition creates buzz. The Atlanta MOSS Camp was being run on the same day. This created a great sense of excitement and competition as the leaders and speakers at each event attempted to out-do each other for buzz via social media channels. Virtual highlights of each session were tweeted as they happened in both cities. The energy level was WAY up and the tweets were flying!

I want to be sure to call out the organizers for putting together a great event: Kurt Rolland, Matt Bremer, Todd Kitta, J.D. Wade, Daniel Gallant, and Joe Rhodes. A special thanks to T.C. Slater for hosting us at their excellent facilities.

More Photos

More photos of this awesome event can be found on my flickr stream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintedmonson/sets/72157617090603494/