Please join us on Thursday, November 12th for a presentation by Eric Lee on "Common Anti-Patterns in Legacy Code & How to Work Your Way Out of Them"

About the Presentation: One of the most dreaded phrases in software engineering are the words “legacy code”. You know what that means: old, nasty code that gives you ulcers and makes you tear our your hair. In this presentation we’ll swap horror stories, discuss ways to make legacy code a little more manageable, and learn some principles that will help you avoid writing legacy code of your own.

About Eric Lee: I’ve worked for Microsoft for over fifteen years as a developer of testing tools and other applications in the Office division and in Microsoft Game Studios. I’ve inherited multiple legacy systems during my career and have had to suffer through the resulting pain. I’m sad to say I’ve probably also written a legacy system or two. As a result I have some opinions about the sorts of things that makes code either maintainable or a legacy nightmare.

November 12th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)

All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 

The South Sound .NET Users Group is pleased to present Microsoft’s Eric Lee on the evening of November 12th from 7:00 PM – 9:00PM at Olympia Center in downtown Olympia. This presentation promises to be an enlightening evening with not only an outstanding member of the .NET community offering sage advice, but also honest upfront discussion from a developer with over 15 years of experience working in the belly of Microsoft’s most successful divisions.

About Eric’s presentation “Common Anti-Patterns in Legacy Code”:

One of the most dreaded phrases in software engineering are the words “legacy code”.  You know what that means: old, nasty code that gives you ulcers and makes you tear our your hair.  In this presentation we’ll swap horror stories, discuss ways to make legacy code a little more manageable, and learn some principles that will help you avoid writing legacy code of your own.

About Eric Lee:

I’ve worked for Microsoft for over fifteen years as a developer of testing tools and other applications in the Office division and in Microsoft Game Studios.  I’ve inherited multiple legacy systems during my career and have had to suffer through the resulting pain.  I’m sad to say I’ve probably also written a legacy system or two.  As a result I have some opinions about the sorts of things that makes code either maintainable or a legacy nightmare.

 

View Larger Map

 

So last week I threw up the bat signal to the internets in an effort to help my local user group find some speakers for the coming months. The response has been great and I have successfully booked some great speakers. I set a goal to book six months of “no wizard based demo” speakers and I am quickly achieving that goal.

Here is a sample of what is coming in the next few months. I have made up titles for the presentations based on discussions with the presenters, so they are subject to change once then have finalized their presentations. But you get the idea. This stuff is going to be a code monkeys dream come true.

October 8th	Jeff Olson	Introduction to TDD & Context/Specification Testing
November 12th	Eric Lee	Common Anti-Patterns in Legacy Code & How to Work Your Way Out of Them
December 10th	James Thigpen	Introduction to MVP in WinForms Applications
January 14th
February 11th	Jason Olson	Parallel Programming with Visual Studio 2010
March 11th
April 8th

I have also heard from Chris Tavares (Enterprise Library 5), Chris Bilson (Introduction to PowerShell), Ron Woan (Mr. Awesome) and Justin Bozonier and am working out dates with them.

Once again, if you are interested in coming to beautiful downtown Olympia, WA (where Kurt Kobain began his musical journey into depression) and speaking feel free to email me at bobby.johnson@gmail.com.

 

The amazing Camey has been organizing speakers for the South Sound .NET Users Group longer than I have been a participating member. She recently received the bouncing bundle of joy visit from the stork and needs some well deserved time off. She asked if I could take over the reigns and gather up some folks to come talk to us and I readily agreed.

So, if you read my blog, are local to Olympia, WA (I’m looking at you Seattle and Portland…) and are interested in presenting to a .NET Users Group have I got a deal for you! I have one slightly cramped room and a projector with your name on it.

We meet regularly each month on the second Thursday at the Olympia Center in downtown Olympia. Meetings start at 7:00 PM and run for two hours till 9:00 PM. We usually retire to the Fish Tail Brewing Company’s pub the Fish Bowl for a few pints and conversation afterward. Speakers always drink free.

We currently have the following dates available (which are filling up fast!):

October 8th	Jeff Olson	Introduction to TDD & Context/Specification Testing
November 12th	Eric Lee	Common Anti-Patterns in Legacy Code & How to Work Your Way Out of Them
December 10th	James Thigpen	Introduction to MVP in ASP.NET
January 14th
February 11th	Jason Olson	Parallel Programming with Visual Studio 2010
March 11th
April 8th

If you are interested at all please feel free to contact me bobby.johnson@gmail.com.

 

Work on the Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop is coming along nicely. We announced the workshop on May 5th and have 20 people signed up already. If you are interested in attending, secure your seat ASAP. Only 15 seats left.

So what progress has been made on the materials? The amazing Trevor has been working hard on our customer personae. Not only has he created a great set of user stories, for our fake customer but he has also gone off and created a whole online presence as well. If you are planning to attend, be sure to get familiar with our customer, the more we understand their business the better crafted our solution will be.

Our workshop is focused on taking an existing application and applying principals and techniques of quality software development to make the application more maintainable and easier to add new functionality to.

This requires that we have an existing application. So this last weekend I began working on version 1 of SUFORS, the State UFO Reporting System. Version 1 of SUFORS is intended to be built using the MSDN recommended style of development. So I have attempted to lean on Visual Studio to do most of the heavy lifting for me.

For example, lets examine the Citizen Detail page. In this page I have used the Visual Studio designer to create and configure three SqlDataSources that feed data to a GridView, DataList and DetailsView. The SqlDataSources use a set of CRUD stored procedures to interact with the database. Combined this gives us a nicely crafted page consisting of the Citizen's personal information, a list of any internal "Concern" flags and a tabular view of all the Reports submitted by that Citizen.

The page also has some preconfigured actions. The table of reports obviously links off to a Report Detail page. The menu content area is populated with options to Edit the current Citizen, Add a new Report or simply Cancel out of this page and return form where ever you came from.

So as you can see SUFORS is not your average, sample application. It will be fully functional. It would be awesome of all the attendees would download the current version and become familiar with it. Also keep your eyes on the source control repository for updates as we add new features over the next couple weeks.

The other members of the team (Chris, Justin, Jeff, Robin, Anne & Shanah) are planning to meet at this weekends ALT.NET Seattle meeting to work out some more details. I'll post again afterwards to keep you up to date on any new material or changes.

Looking forward to seeing you all there and having a great time at the workshop.

 

A few friends and I from ALT.NET Seattle are putting on a software workshop right here in Olympia. Chris did a great job of describing it, so I will quote him:

Some of us folks from ALT.NET Seattle have been working on putting together a workshop for developers in Olympia, WA, focusing on Software Craftsmanship – which, to us, means caring about our craft and applying the principles we know work to what we are doing. The workshop is inspired by some of the discussions started in the much despised, “Why So Mean” session at the recent Seattle ALT.NET conference, as well as discussions in the follow up (and less controversial) “ALT.NET Pedagogy” session, as well as what @briandonahue has been doing in Philadelphia with the “Foundation Series.”

I am hoping this will raise the bar a little bit and get more people walking the walk. My view has always been that we all have to work together, so better to get everyone up to speed on what’s working and what’s not, and for as many people to be passionate and excited about the work they are doing as possible.

And here is the official announcement:

You’re at work and you catch yourself writing another 100 line method that you can’t test and really can’t even understand. You scour the Internet for ideas but there are so many ideas. Some say don’t test, others says don’t test anything, still others say test every keystroke! You just let your head drop to your desk with a solid thud. You think to yourself, “Is this really the best I can do?”

The Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop is one day workshop, developed with the intention of increasing the level of awareness of practices and skills that can improve our software.

Any developer interested in improving and learning new skills is welcome. If you can bring a laptop, please do. We will provide the software you need. If you can’t bring a laptop, don’t worry, you can pair up with someone who has one.

 

What: Olympia Software Craftsmanship Workshop

Where: Olympia Center, 222 Columbia St NW, Olympia, WA 98501

When: Saturday June 6, 2009.  10 am to 4 pm

How much does it cost? $25.00 to cover the cost of the facility and lunch. Seating is limited to the first 35 people to both register and submit a payment.

How do I sign up? Go to www.olympiasoftwarecraftsmanship.org

The workshop is hosted by members of the South Sound.NET users group and Alt.Net Seattle who want to help others build better software.

For more information: http://github.com/altnetseattle/olympia_software_craftsmanship_workshop/tree/master

 

Just in case you missed it the Portland Code Camp is on for May 30th, 2009 at Reed College. It looks to be a great time already and is so far totally dominated by the ALT.NET movement.

Seattle's Justin Bozonier has posted a sessions on Artistic Expression Through Code and Solid Principles in Practice and TDD/BDD. Chris Bilson posted sessions on Client Side Rendering and F# - It's Not Just for Scientists. I personally am planning on doing my Beginning Dependency Injection talk as well as something new that I am working on that is an Introduction to ORM and nHibernate.

 

I will be attending the ALT.NET Seattle 2009 Conference this weekend February 27th - March 1st at the DigiPen Campus in Redmond, WA. If any ALT.NET people want to get together for lunch or dinner while I am there feel free to contact me via the plethora of options to the right. I will be in full on geek out mode and happy to talk with you.

Looking forward to seeing everybody.

UPDATE: I just realized I posted this with the wrong date... No wonder no body was looking for me. 8(

 

I was asked by a few people for access to my slide deck and code samples, so here they are.

• Dependency Injection Slides
• Sample Code

The walk though of Dependency Injection by hand and how to use Ninject was directly adapted from the documentation for Ninject written by the amazing Nate Kohari.

To learn more about the SOLID principals check out Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin's original white papers on the subject or pick up the book Agile Principals, Patterns and Practices in C#.

If you are interested in playing with an IoC container, here is the list I discussed last night:

• Spring.NET
• Castle Windsor
• StructureMap
• ObjectBuilder
• Unity
• Ninject

I had a ton of fun last night, thanks for listening to me ramble.

 

Please join us Thursday, February 12th, to eat pizza and enjoy a informative presentation by Bobby Johnson on Dependency Injection: A Beginners Guild to Why Ninjas Are Awesome

Special thanks to Alliance Enterprises for providing pizza.

Presentation Summary
This presentation will describe the core concepts of  Dependency Injection (DI), first described by Martin Fowler in his article Inversion of Control (IoC) Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern.

The presentation will highlight the benefits of Dependency Injection including:

• Creating classes that are easier to unit test in isolation
• Promotes loose coupling between classes and subsystems
• Adds potential flexibility to a codebase for future changes
• Can enable better code reuse

Bobby will also be sharing simple and fun examples on how to use DI along with a real world example of its use in a web-based application.

Speaker Bio
Bobby Johnson is a Senior Software Developer at Alliance Enterprises, a performance management software company based in Lacey, Washington.  As an avid enthusiast of Agile methods and a self proclaimed code monkey, Bobby is currently focused on overseeing the  implementation of Agile techniques like DDD, TDD, CI into Alliance's software and quality engineering processes.  Prior to joining Alliance, Bobby worked at the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries as a  Development Specialist.

To find out more about Bobby and his technical misadventures visit his blog at www.iamnotmyself.com. 
Meeting Specifics
February 12th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)

All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

That's right b@#$%es, I'm packing a posse and they are bringing the pizza.

 

There are several upcoming ALT.NET Seattle events. Meetings are open to any developer who is passionate about writing software and eager to get better and it. You don't need permission or an invite to show up. Simply show up and participate.

Our meetings are somewhat different from the Olympia .NET Users Group in that we typically don't have a set presenter. We are all presenters. We follow an Open Spaces format. You probably also won't find many demonstrations of Visual Studio RAD tools either. Here are a sampling of topics that I have attended:

• TDD/BDD
• Dependancy Injection
• GIT Source Control
• ASP.NET MVC
• NHibernate
• MEF
• Continuous Integration/Improvement
• Agile Adoption

Meetings are held at the Microsoft Westlake Avenue office. The meetings are usually held from 10:00 AM - 5:00PM on a Saturday. The next meeting appears to be on the 17th of January. The February meeting appears to be getting lined up for the 7th but may be postponed to the lager ALT.NET Seattle 2009 Conf.

The ALT.NET Seattle 2009 Conf was just announced this week. It is planned for the weekend prior to the Microsoft MVP Summit, February 27th - March 1st. Registration opens at 6:00PM PST, Tuesday January 6th here. Admission is free, but space is limited to the first 150 people to register.

 

Please join us Thursday, January 8th for Ade Miller's (twitter) presentation on Continuous Integration and Defense In Depth: Experiences at Microsoft.

Presentation Summary
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of building and testing the application under development. Usually right after each and every check-in. CI grew out of the agile software development community but can add value to almost any project. This talk will describe the basic approach to CI and also some other practices teams can adopt to get even more out of their investment in CI. The talk will also cover the Microsoft patterns & practices team’s experience with CI and show some of the likely cost savings of adopting this practice on your team.

Speaker Bio
Ade Miller is currently the Development Manager for Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices group (P&P) where he manages several agile teams executing on a variety of projects. He also lead the development of the P&P Web Services Software Factory: Modeling Edition. Before joining P&P Ade was a developer and then a Development Lead on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and 2008.

Prior to joining Microsoft Ade worked in a variety of development environments including start-ups, consultancy and web publishing. His primary interest is in improving the way people develop software. He spends much of his time trying to figure out what being “agile” really means. Ade is a regular speaker on these topics, he also blogs and writes about his experiences. Ade received his BSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Southampton, UK.

Meeting Specifics
January 8th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)

All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.
Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 

It looks like Glenn let the cat out of the bag so to speak. ALT.NET Seattle 2009 is on and I am a part of the organizing committee.

This year's event is planned for the weekend prior to the Microsoft MVP Summit, February 27th through March 1st of 2009. We intend to follow the same Open Spaces format as in previous years with the addition of a keynote speaker on the first day. We have secured the Digipen Institute in Redmond, Washington as our location.

We will be opening registration at the beginning of the month. 130 seats will be made available to the public with an additional allotment reserved for special guests including sponsors.

From Glenn's site here are the details so far:

• What: ALT.NET Seattle 2009. (The site is still being worked on. Thanks to Justin Bonozier and Shoshanah Bain for getting the site up).
• Where: Digipen (thanks to Jeff Tucker for lining up the space)
• When: Evening February 27th through March 1st.
• Registration: Opens this Tuesday evening at 6PM. We're holding on registration to allow the word to spread. There will be a max of 150 attendees. Check the wiki on Tuesday for details.

I'll be handling organizing sponsors, so if your company is interested and have not been contact by me already shoot me an email to hash out details.

There are three levels of sponsorship:

• Gold – $1000
• Silver – $500
• Bronze – $250

In exchange for being a sponsor, we will offer you the following:

1. Attendance to the event. We will reserve a seat at the conference for your representative to attend.
2. Your company banner featured on our web site, and at the event (You will need to supply the banner).
3. A table at the conference where you can have some promotional material.
4. Recognition at the event for being a sponsor.

You can reach me at: bobbyDOTjohnsonATgmailDOTcom.

 

Discovered these little gem during the Christmas Potluck today.

And part 2..

 

UPDATE: Wanted to update this item to give credit to Shane Frost for creating these movies. Shane is no longer with Alliance, but after having watched these movies I would welcome him back any time. Hope things are working out well for you at the state Shane.

 

The somewhat monthly meeting of the Seattle ALT.NET Open Spaces Group has been scheduled for December 13th at Microsoft's West Lake office. Please feel free to join us as we discuss a wide variety of topics in the software development and process space.

If you are curious what IoC, Continuous Improvement or NHibernate is all about, this is the meeting to come check out. And if finally no one is interested in those topics we might cover Git, Lean, Kanban or other cutting edge practices that you need to know about.

Where: Microsoft, 320 Westlake Avenue, Seattle

When: Saturday, Dec. 13th, 10am-5pm

Go to the 3rd floor once you arrive, and then you'll see a phone number to call to get in.
 

Since discovering the ALT.NET community and its dramatic effect on my personal outlook on the way I think about and write code, I have been looking for ways to bring this philosophy to my local developer community. This meeting represents the first major achievement in that goal.

Connecting Camey with Glenn Block and Ade Miller was a stroke of divine intervention. If ever there was a time to come down and check out what the South Sound .NET Users Group is all about this is it.

Please join us on Thursday, December 11th for a presentation on MEF by Glenn Block.

Meeting Summary
Today, it is difficult for applications and frameworks to meet an open-ended set of needs. Building in extensibility allows third-party customization, however there are many challenges in doing so. The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new extensibility model in the .NET framework that addresses many of these problems. It provides as simple declarative model for application developers and extenders. Come to this session and get an overview on what it is and what it will do for you.

About Glenn Block
Glenn is a PM for the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. Prior to Microsoft, he worked for 10 years in various startups and ISVs wearing many different hats all related to developing software. Glenn has been writing code practically since the time he learned how to ride a bicycle. When he's not writing code, he's working on ways to build better software through learning good software design principles and methodologies. Glenn is a geek at heart and spends a good portion of the rest of this time spreading that geekdom through conferences, and the community through groups such as ALT.NET. When he's not working and playing with technology, he spends his time with his wife and four year old daughter either at their Seattle apartment or at one of the local coffee shops.

Meeting Specifics
December 11th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)

All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more. Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 

Don't forget about Seattle Code Camp v4.0 this weekend in Redmond.  For all the details, go to the Seattle Code Camp website.  This is a free weekend of presentations on a wide variety of software development subjects.  This isn't a 'Microsoft' only event, check out the list of sessions if you don't believe me.

Two South Sound .NET User Group members will be presenting:

Chris Bilson is presenting 'Getting Git'

Git is a distributed version control system. It's a little different than other source control systems you may have used (Subversion, TFS, etc.), and a little more powerful too. In this session we'll talk a little bit about what the big deal is with distributed revision control systems, which ones exist, git, some tools related to git, web sites that work with git, and go through a typical git workflow.

Camey Combs is presenting "What's the Big EFing Deal? Even Newbies can do Entity Framework"

Have you done anything with Entity Framework yet? Have you heard of it? Curious about it? if you're new to EF and want to do some coding utilizing it, this is the session for you. Come and see what a newbie (you and your presenter) can do with EF after only a few short lessons. Bring your laptop loaded up and ready to go and follow along, building your own simple applications using EF.

 

Please join us on Thursday, November 13th for a presentation on MVC by Chris Tavares.

Meeting Summary:
The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is a new web development framework that sits next to the existing ASP.NET WebForms framework. Rather than attempting to abstract away the Web, MVC embraces the web programming model. The result is a very different experience for writing web applications on the .NET platform. In this talk, we’ll look at what the MVC framework is, the basics of how to use it, why it exists, and how to decide whether to use it (or not).

Speaker Info:
Chris is a developer on the Microsoft patterns & practices team. He started his obsession with computers in third grade with an actual teletype taking to a mainframe. The job has gotten rather easier since. He’s worked in embedded systems, shrink wrap software, developer tools, consulting, and as a developer trainer before joining Microsoft. His current projects are as dev lead / architect for Microsoft’s Enterprise Library, and consulting software designer on the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Meeting Specifics:
November 13th, 7 - 9 PM
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)
All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 

If you don't know why, you are dead to me. I couldn't get a fanboy picture of myself with John Lam, but this totally made up for it.

 

I am currently attending the Devscovery conference on the Microsoft campus. So this is a perfect opportunity to meet up with my friends in the local ALT.NET group while I am here.

I turned on the batsignal and it was determined that Celtic Bayou was the location and this coming Thursday night at 5:30 is the time.

So if you are in town and have some free time, come join us and discuss all things software with fellow passionate developers. The beer is great and the food is even better. See you there.

 

What: Geek Dinner

When: Thursday, Aug 21st 2008 5:30 PM - Till we all leave

Where: Celtic Bayou

 

I will be attending the Wintellect Devscovery conference this week, August 19th - 21st, on the Microsoft campus in Redmond. If any ALT.NET people want to get together for lunch or dinner while I am there feel free to contact me via the plethora of options to the right. I will be in full on geek out mode and happy to talk with you.

Here is my schedule while I am there:

 

Tuesday
9:00 AM	Keynote - I am ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions and So Can You! - Hanselman
10:45 AM	Translating Architecture to Technologies - Dahlman
12:15 PM	Lunch
1:30 PM	An Overview of ASP.NET MVC - Haack
3:15 PM	An Introduction to TDD - Haack
Wednesday
9:00 AM	Windows Communication Foundation: Rest with WCF - Mehner
10:45 AM	Windows Communication Foundation: Debugging & Error Handling - Mehner
12:15 PM	Lunch
1:30 PM	Practical Workflow Foundation, Part 1 - Mehner
3:15 PM	Practical Workflow Foundation, Part 2 - Mehner
Thursday
9:00 AM	An Introduction to LINQ to SQL - Demsak
10:45 AM	An Introduction to LINQ to Entities - Demsak
12:15 PM	Lunch
1:30 PM	Unit Testing & Code Coverage Best Practices - Robbins
3:15 PM	.NET Performance Tips & Tricks - Robbins

 

Please join us on Thursday, June 12th for a presentation on Silverlight 2.0 by Erik Mork.

Meeting Specifics:

Erik Mork will be returning to Olympia in June to present Silverlight 2.0 to the South Sound .NET User Group. Our last visit from Erik was in July 2007, when he told us about Silverlight 1.0 and looked forward to what might be in version 2.0. Now, with Silverlight 2.0 released in Beta, he can come back and give us the next chapter in this ongoing story.

Erik was with Tranxition last year and looking toward self-employment. He's made that leap now, founding Silver Bay Labs. In addition, he and with his wife is producing a Silverlight podcast called Sparkling Client. Recent shows featured interviews with Adam Kinney aka The Silverlight Surfer and Jesse Liberty aka Captain Silverlight.

If you're into Silverlight, definitely check out what the Morks are up to and plan to attend the South Sound .NET meeting on June 12th with Erik and Silverlight 2.0.

 

Meeting Specifics:
June 12th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)
All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included t-shirts, technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 

I recieved a fully licensed copy of Office Ultimate 2007 (Retail $454.99) last night at the Olympia Code Trip event. I would like to trade it straight across for a copy of Code Rush (Retail $249.99).

If you are interested please, feel free to contact me.

UPDATE: Trade made to Dylan in Issaquah. Thanks Dylan.
 

Come out to the Thurston County Fairgrounds on Monday night and get 3 hours of great information on new and exciting technologies from Microsoft and other sources.

Adam Kinney will present information on Silverlight 2.0. Woody Pewitt will talk about Internet Explorer 8 and the Code Trip Bus Cam. Jason Mauer will take us Under the Hood of the code Trip, explaining the technologies used on the bus and on the website.

Thousands of dollars worth of software will be given away from Infragistics (NetAdvantage for .NET), Telerik (RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, RadControls for WinForms, Telerik Reporting,Sitefinity CMS), Identity Mine (Blendables Essentials Mix) and copies of CodeRush by Devexpress. Along with all of that goodness, there will be some foam Code Trip Buses and Code Trip Laptop sleeves given away. Free stuff and free high quality presentations -- you don't want to miss this.

To answer a question posed by some of you, sorry, no food this time, but grab something on the way out to the fairgrounds and stuff your face while while Jason, Woody and Adam stuff our brains full of new and shiny information.

Monday, April 14, 2008
6:30 PM to 9:30 PM
Olympia is the last stop for the Code Trip before the end of the line in Seattle. In partnership with the South Sound .NET User Group, they'll be pulling out all the stops and unleashing a technical tour de force at the Thurston County Fairgrounds.

Location

Thurston County Fairgrounds
Expo Hall
3054 Carpenter Rd SE

 

 

I received the following message from my local DNUG, the South Sound .NET Users Group about The Code Camp coming to our area. I plan on attending and hope to see you there.

"Are you ready for the Code Trip to come to Olympia?  Jason Mauer is coming back to Olympia with a tour bus full of geeks.  They'll be pulling up to the Thurston County Fairgrounds on Monday, April 14th.  There will be giveaways, and great information on the newest technology from great presenters.

Have you been tracking the Code Trip?  They started in Las Vegas at MIX08 on March 7th and headed north.  They've made about 13 stops since then and Olympia will be the last one before arriving at the MVP Summit in Seattle on Tuesday, April 15th.  The capacity of our venue is 288, let's see how close we can get to that total, ok? 

Jason will be sending us a list soon of the roster of geeks we'll see performing on the 14th.  We're going to set up the Expo Hall so that multiple presentations can be happening at one time, to make the most of the time we have.

Other Code Trip events have featured talks on the newest technologies to emerge from MIX08, including Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 8, SQL Server Data Services, Windows Live.  Some attendees have been treated to talks on the technology powering the Code Trip, both online and on the bus.  We'll update you as soon as we know what the recipe for the Olympia stop will be.

Tell your friends, drag your co-workers along, let's give the Code Trippers a big final event before they get back to the mothership.

For more on the Code Trip, including information on current and past events and where the Bus is now, see TheCodeTrip.com.  You can see profiles of the Roadies -- people who have spent time in the bus.  There's a behind the scenes section called 'Under the Hood' where you can get information on the technologies used on the Code Trip, the use of GPS information in tracking the route and current bus location and other technical goodness being used to keep them in touch with the rest of the world.  The Toolbox provides links to the tools used along the way to keep the Trip running smoothly.

The Travel Log is a blog contributed to by various people, mostly Jason Mauer and Tim Heuer.  Video blogs, info on participants and events gets you right into the action.  It certainly gets me fired up to see them in Olympia.  Makes me more than a little envious really, getting to ride a tour bus full of state of the art equipment and full of other geeks sounds like a lot of fun.

So, you coming or what?  Put it on your calendar, invite some other folks and we'll see you there.

Monday, April 14th, 2008
6:30pm - 9:30pm
The Expo Hall at the Thurston County Fairgrounds
3054 Carpenter Rd SE
for directions"