Rachel Hawley's DevExpress Community Blog

May 2011 - Posts

• Scott Hanselman on the “Web Stack of Love” at Portland Code Camp

  DevExpress is excited to be supporting Portland Code Camp again this year. This annual event attracts hundreds of eager developers looking to learn about new technologies and spend a full day in sessions with their peers. This event really is a full day of materials – starting at 8am and going right the way through to 10pm – and not only that, the event includes a code camp social event too. This year the event will be on Saturday June 4th at the Eliot Center, Salmon Street, Portland, OR.  Keynote from Scott Hanselman Local resident, Mr Hanselman, will be offering a PowerPoint free keynote session in which he’ll see what he can build with the latest and greatest bits from Microsoft’s “Web Stack of Love”. Now I don’t know about you but after the Magic Unicorn Edition of Entity Framework, I am excited to find out what direction the “Microsoft Web Stack of Love” is taking post-PDC. Something tells me that with these unicorns and all this love, we might end up seeing some triple rainbows. Fabulous! Register for Portland Code Camp Registration is already open for Portland Code Camp, and what’s more the whole thing is free. With the great work that Arnie Rowland and his co-ordinators have done to secure sponsorship from supporters, this event can be put on completely free of charge for you to attend and enjoy. You can register via the link on the code camp website, and I strongly recommend that you do. Woody has told me that this is a fabulous event, and if he weren’t already going to CodeStock he’d be at Portland Code Camp! Posted May 24 2011, 06:33 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with no comments Filed under: Community, events

• DEVLINK 2011 Keynote Speakers Announced

  DevExpress is proud to be the Partner Sponsor for the 2011 edition of the community conference, DEVLINK. For those of you who are unfamiliar with DEVLINK, this is a premium level conference without the inflated price tag. DEVLINK offers 3 full days of technical sessions, a buzzing vendor area and social networking events for you to meet and spend time with speakers and other attendees. You can be a part of DEVLINK for as little as $100. Yes, $100.  Keynote Speakers at DEVLINK 2011 Today, the keynote speakers for this year’s event were announced. DevExpress friend, Ayende Rahien has been invited to present the opening keynote session. Ayende is the author of Rhino Mocks, one of the most popular mocking frameworks on the .NET platform, and is also a leading figure in other well known open source projects including the Castle project and NHibernate.  An internationally known presenter, Ayende is the author of "Building Domain Specific Languages with Boo". Keith Elder will be presenting the closing keynote session. Keith co-hosts the popular online tech podcast Deep Fried Bytes with Chris Woodruff. He is a professional developer and Director of Software Engineering at Quicken Loans.  Keith is very active in the community having founded the Hattiesburg Microsoft .Net User Group, Hub City NUG. Keith is an experienced technologist, systems administrator, software engineer, speaker, trainer and all around geek. Register for DEVLINK 2011 DEVLINK 2011 is open for registrations and you can book your seat from as little as $100. Remember, even though conference budgets at your workplace might be tight, this conference gives you all the value and experience of a national event. Check with your boss to see if there is room in the career development budget for just $100. They may well reward your conference frugality with a hotel room too! Posted May 24 2011, 03:50 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with no comments Filed under: Community, Conferences, events, DEVLINK

• Vote for NYC GiveCamp Alumni in “Apps for Good” Contest

  Earlier this year, DevExpress co-hosted the first GiveCamp in NYC with the help of Microsoft. As part of NYC GiveCamp we invited local non-profits and charity organisations to come forward and submit their projects to our teams of volunteer developers. One of the non-profits whose project was selected was Remás. Remás helps immigrants in the US locate the best rates for sending money back home. They left NYC GiveCamp with a great looking site along with an Android application that allows their users to search for the best exchange and pricing rates when sending money back to their families in their home countries. NYC GiveCamp – The Remás Sequel! The Remás team recently regrouped their GiveCamp volunteers with the goal of completing the apps that they still had on their list. We got a phenomenal boost at GiveCamp, and are still riding the wave! ~ Brendan McBride, Remás It’s amazing to see GiveCamp being such a motivator for the team behind Remás, and we are so pleased that we were able to offer them resources through NYC GiveCamp that gave them such a fantastic launch pad from which they could continue striving to reach their goals. Support Remás in One Economy's Apps for Good Contest Remás are hoping to continue the success of their project through their participation in the Apps for Good contest - a national online contest for apps that help solve problems in low-income communities. Winning this contest could provide them with vital funds to continue their great work and offer them national recognition for their achievements. Please consider supporting their on-going efforts by registering to vote for their application in this contest. And as a final note, don’t forget to check GiveCamp.org for details on a GiveCamp event near you. If you don’t see one, why not reach out to other community members and think about hosting your own? The positive effect that you can have on the charities in your local area is far-reaching. Posted May 23 2011, 06:06 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Community, givecamp

• Mid Atlantic Developer Expo–You’ll be MAD to miss it!

  Steve Presley, an online friend of not inconsiderable years(!), contacted me recently to ask if we would support a new venture that he was a part of – the Mid Atlantic Developer Expo. Since we’ve known each other for some time and I consider him a great community supporter I had a look into this event to see how it might be different to just another code camp. Definitely not just another code camp Steve, and the rest of the organising committee behind this event, have gone to great lengths to create an inclusive platform for developers of all shapes and shades to come together to share, inspire and learn. And that isn’t just some marketing mumbo jumbo, this event really is run by developers for developers. They are creating an environment that they would like to benefit from, and they can’t be the only developers in the Mid Atlantic area to think that this could be a great opportunity. MADExpo is bringing together diverse backgrounds to create an innovative collection of sessions and demos designed to light the fires of developers who want to explore ideas and practices outside of their comfort zones. They’ve got web development with ASP.NET and PHP, Kinect hacking, mobile development of all varieties, and they are putting it all together to encourage collaboration and creativity. The conference will run from June 30th to July 1st at the Hampton Road Convention Center in Hampton, VA. Premium conference content for just $99! I’m serious! Until the end of May you can register for MADExpo for just $99. $99 for 2 full days of sessions, networking and demos from leading industry experts. When conference prices for your team are getting so high that it’s clouding your boss’s opinion of your on-going personal development, opportunities like MADExpo are a perfect replacement for high dollar conference tickets. The same international speakers you can find at events all over the globe will be coming to this event and delivering the same high quality content. Give your boss’s training budget a new lease of life. Register for MADExpo.  Posted May 17 2011, 04:47 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with 4 comment(s)

• Countdown to CodeStock

  There is just one month left until CodeStock 2011 begins on June 3rd. The final few tickets News came in this week that Mike Neel and the committee behind CodeStock were getting close to capacity. With only 450 spaces available for this great event you need to act fast to grab your space. The event is returning to the University of Tennessee Conference Center in Downtown Knoxville, with the keynote, prize raffle and CodeStock Social being held in the beautiful Bijou Theatre, and the DevExpress team can’t wait to get there and be part of the action.  Great sessions, great speakers The amazing thing about this event is the eclectic mix of themes and topics that all come together to brew the heady mix that is CodeStock. With the agenda now available, you can expect to see a fine blend of the expected, and even a few left field topics. Along with our DevExpress speakers Seth Juarez and Woody Pewitt who will be speaking on Machine Learning for .NET and The Basics of Developing for the Web for Windows Developers, there will be a host of other excellent sessions including HTML 5, MVC development, MVVM for Silverlight and even game development with XNA. For those of you that want to use your free time to get down to the nitty gritty and get coding, there is even a Coding Dojo. The best thing about CodeStock is not just the things that you might learn, it is the people that you could meet. Last year when Gary and I travelled to CodeStock we came across the most insanely intelligent and personable guy … he ended up being our Reporting Evangelist. If it wasn’t for Gary indulging his curiosity for Machine Learning, we might never have met Seth Juarez. How different things could have been .     It’s about time you were registered! Whilst I am terribly flattered that you are still reading this post, I can’t help but think that you are missing out on an amazing opportunity. Book this into your calendars – June 3rd and 4th in Knoxville, TN. It will cost you just $85 to get some CodeStock in your life. What a bargain! Register now, I dare you. Posted May 04 2011, 03:59 PM by Rachel Hawley (DevExpress) with no comments