User Group Talks

Steve Milroy rocks!

Jeff Certain — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:36:12 GMT

We had Steve Milroy (Microsoft RD and MVP) speak to the Northern Colorado .NET SIG last night.

Steve gave a great presentation on Virtual Earth, including a great overview of the capabilities and features. There's some very cool, very powerful pieces to the VE API.

Indeed, in many situations, I'd far prefer the VE API to some of the enterprise-level GIS APIs I've used in the past.

For those interested in learning more about VE, Microsoft has one of the best API documentation/demo/tutorial sites I've seen here.

Front Range Code Camp Post Mortem

Jeff Certain — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:50:26 GMT

Well, the Front Range Code Camp was this past Saturday. I gave two talks -- threading and speech recognition.

The threading talk (code samples and slide deck here) was pretty well attended -- about 12 people, which was a good third of the attendees. The strangest part was that there were only two people in the room that were .NET developers, and one of those was still using 1.1 so my BackgroundWorker examples weren't all that much use to him. The rest were Ruby and Java developers, plus a small cadre of profs from Metro College.

That only set the stage for my speech recognition talk (code and slide deck here), which only had three people in the audience... one dev each for Ruby, Java and C++. Considering that the talk was entirely focused on System.Speech, and writeen using VB .NET, the code samples were again somewhat less than relevant.

Design Patterns

Jeff Certain — Wed, 16 May 2007 18:18:40 GMT

This month's Northern Colorado .NET Special Interest Group presentation was on Design Patterns. Ben Hoelting came up from Colorado Springs, and gave a great talk; slide deck and code samples will be posted on his blog.

Ben will be giving a similar talk at the Denver VSUG in July. If you're at all responsible for design, especially design you get to do the maintenance on later, you'll want to be familiar with these patterns.

Front Range Code Camp

Jeff Certain — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:44:02 GMT

Next Saturday (May 19th) is the Front Range Code Camp in Denver. I'll be speaking on both the System.Speech namespace and threading in .NET.