Unhandled Exceptions

>Whew!<  After a pretty crazy January and February of preparation leading up to the event, I’m really pleased to announce that the 4th Annual NYC CodeCamp is officially OVER (Thank God!).  This past Saturday March 6th, 2010 we held the actual event and I have to say that based on just about every metric I can use as a measure, the event was a great success!

Some Numbers

By way of just some idea of the size of this event, here are some numbers from a variety of categories:

• 400 Registered Attendees
• 175+ Wait-listed Attendees
• 300+ Attendees actually showed up
• 85+ speaker submissions
• 40 sessions accepted
• 37 Speakers
• 8 concurrent 75-minute sessions during ea. session slot
• 85 Pizzas
• 240 Bottles of Water
• 144 Donuts
• 144 Bagels
• 200 cups of coffee
• 3 XBoxes
• 2 ZuneHDs
• 1 Partridge in a Pear Tree

I’m of course kidding about that last one – though things were a little chaotic throughout the day, so who can be sure?

“Well, Gentlemen, looks like we just had our glitch for this mission.” – Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 Mission Commander

About the only near-catastrophe happened right after the Opening Session and, if not resolved quickly, threatened to throw the whole event into complete chaos.  Right after the Opening Session where we kicked-off the event, addressed some logistics, and were addressed by the event’s two Platinum Sponsors we needed to extend the mechanized movable partitions that can be used to divide the larger space into several smaller rooms for the subsequent CodeCamp sessions.

Of all the things that I considered in advance and had a contingency in mind for, having the mechanized walls move only about 2/3 of the distance needed and then grind to a complete halt without properly subdividing the larger room wasn’t anywhere on my radar screen!  Sure enough, that’s what happened: the walls stopped moving about five to eight feet shy of where they needed to be to finish subdividing the larger room into four smaller quarter-sized rooms.  If we couldn’t get them to move, there was no way we could hold four simultaneous sessions in these rooms without them being properly acoustically isolated.  Everyone in each of the four rooms would be able to hear everything happening in each of the other rooms at the same time!

Here’s a riddle for you:

“How many software engineers does it take to extend a movable wall system at 9:00am on a Saturday morning?”

Answer:

Apparently about 300, based on my empirical evidence!

Fortunately we were able to puzzle out that the sets of walls had to be extended in a very specific sequence or else each of their safety-sensors would be blocked in turn by the other of the moveable walls!  After a bit of a panic, we realized our error, reversed the walls, and then re-extended them in the proper sequence in short order.

Despite this near-disaster to start the day, the first CodeCamp sessions in those four newly-subdivided rooms started only about 2-3 minutes late (>whew!<)

Other Challenges Throughout the Day

There were some other surprises throughout the day, but they were pretty minor compared to The Great Movable Wall Disaster of CodeCamp 2010…

• One of our speakers for the first session at 9:15am was unable to attend at the last minute and we had to scramble quickly to find a replacement.  Fortunately Steve Andrews was in attendance and able to whip out an “Intro to TFS 2010” talk he had on-hand.  It was hardly a like-for-like swap with the now-missing talk on Iron Python but we were glad to have him step up and fill the void so capably with very little notice.
• Getting 300+ people past building security in 30 minutes was an interesting challenge and did lead to some bottlenecks.  Fortunately, we CodeCamp organizers were lucky to have several volunteers who really stepped up and took on the challenge of efficiently processing the mass of attendees in what I think was about the most expeditious manner possible – thanks, guys, you really helped out in a pinch there!
• Another of our speakers, who unfortunately was assigned TWO talks on Azure, was called away out of town on urgent business just Friday afternoon before the Saturday CodeCamp and in his hurry to scramble to get packed and fly out on such short notice he failed to remember to call us to tell us!  Imagine this cell phone conversation, an hour before his first session:

Us: “We notice you haven’t checked in at the speakers’ table yet and your session starts in an hour…”

Him: “Uh…I’m in Texas right now…”

It all worked out in the end and we were able to give the slots to a couple of other stand-by speakers that just hadn’t quite managed to fit into the overall schedule otherwise (since we had nearly 90 submissions for barely 40 spots) but it made for some quick last-minute session-juggling, to be sure!

Event Photos

UPDATE: When I originally wrote this post, I was aware that the photos had been taken by Lorri Freedman, wife of fellow CodeCamp organizer Mark Freedman, but I was unaware that Lorri was a professional photographer (though the high quality of the photos should have been a tip-off for me!)

I’ve since been advised that Lorri has an online presence of her own and more of her work can be found here.  She’s got some really great photos there — as an ex-architect I particularly enjoyed the cityscapes from around NYC, but there’s lots more there too!  Lorri also has her own blog where she offers all kinds of useful tips + tricks on photography as well as post-processing with Photoshop and more!  Check it out!

There were plenty of photos captured of the event too – following are a few choice ones that caught my eye when rifling through them afterwards…

Here is a shot of our ‘Dynamically-Adjustable Schedule Wall’.  Despite the apparent inelegance of the blue Painters’ Tape, this flexible approach permitted us to easily relocate sessions dynamically to larger or smaller rooms later in the day as we observed attendance ebb and flow in same/similar-focused talks.  We were also able to quickly substitute talks for ones that had to be canceled for one or another reason.

Here you see the schedule wall in action during one of the 15-minute breaks between sessions (my apologies to the gentleman in the foreground of the first image for having been embarrassingly caught yawning so obviously – that’s what happens when you get 300+ developers up to start an event at 8am on a Saturday!  I was skeptical that 300+ people would be able to wander past this thing during the 15-minute breaks without overcrowding, but I was pleasantly proven completely wrong and I have to say that the idea worked out really well in practice.

On the wall opposite the schedule wall, we posted the Speaker Bios and Detailed Session Abstracts for each session so that attendees could inspect them in some detail beyond just the titles listed on the schedule wall itself.  This seemed to work out pretty well too even though I was also skeptical that this wouldn’t become a bottleneck between sessions.

Some sessions were held in classroom-style rooms where we removed the worktables to make more room for attendee seating.  Here, Dane Morgridge prepares to deliver his session on Entity Framework.

Other sessions were held in the Multi-Purpose Rooms (once the trouble with the movable walls was resolved and the larger room was successfully-divided into quarters).  Here Andrew Brust is getting ready to deliver a talk on PowerPivot in one of the Multi-Purpose Rooms.

Personally, I have more fun in the Speaker’s Lounge of CodeCamps and this one was no exception.  Here we see many of our speakers putting the finishing touches on their presentations (including me on the right) while all kinds of interesting conversations go on around them.  From left to right are: Mark Freedman (CodeCamp co-organizer), Surpriyo “SB” Chatterjee, Edwin Ames (who also graciously stepped up and filled a spot filled by an unexpected cancelation), John Feminlla (in the blue shirt, nearly obscured), Jason Farrell (standing in front of the projector screen), John Baird (back to the camera), Carl Franklin (behind John Baird), JP Toto, and myself.

Here’s another shot of the conversation in the Speakers’ Lounge showing (left to right): Ben Dewey – another of our NYC ALT.NET Organizers, myself (foreground), Supriyo “SB” Chatterjee (standing), John Baird, and Carl Franklin of DotNetRocks fame.  Far from discussing anything Earth-shattering, IIRC Carl was demonstrating his webcam that could be remotely controlled to focus on a fish tank and track the fish’s motion over the Internet

Conversations happen outside the speakers’ lounge too.  In this photo, Todd Snyder of Infragistics and Jess Chadwick –another of our speakers at the event– converse with several attendees who stopped by the Infragistics sponsor table to investigate their products.

There were other sponsors who sent staff to the event as well.  This year the CodeCamp was pleased to welcome Lab49 as one of our Platinum Sponsors.  Here a passerby stops during the break between sessions to get more information about the company and its services.

With Microsoft’s recent remodeling of their office spaces in midtown Manhattan, they added a larger number of informal seating spaces – all of which also make great places for impromptu conversations.  Here Milan Negovan, Don Demsak, and others are relaxing in between sessions in one of the lounge seating areas.

It wouldn’t be a CodeCamp without plenty of pizza!  The logistics of trying to feed 300+ people with 85+ pizzas in under and hour are…interesting!  Here we see how we co-opted the Microsoft office’s renovated sushi and wine bar into becoming a makeshift pizza servery for the lunch hour.  Despite my fears about how difficult it would be to pull this part of the event off, I was pleasantly surprised at how well lunch seemed to have gone over.

Sitting space for 300+ to eat pizza all at once was another matter, however!  Here one of the many smaller conference rooms not being used to deliver sessions is pressed into service as a lunchroom.  On the far left is CodeCamp co-organizer Mark Freedman taking a much-deserved rest for a moment in the middle of the day.

Here we are at the Closing Session.  That’s NYC Region Microsoft Developer Evangelist Peter Laudati in the orange shirt on the far right addressing the room and thanking the speakers (assembled in front of the crowd on the left) for their contributions to the event.  If you squint hard, you can see me standing behind the podium obscured by Andrew Brust

After thanking the speakers at the Closing Session, the next (and final) task of the day loomed: distributing loads of donated SWAG in an efficient manner.  Here we see our attempt to organize the collection of give-aways to raffle off.  From left to right are: Rachel Appel (our recently-hired second NYC Regional Microsoft Developer Evangelist), and CodeCamp co-organizers Mark Pollack and Mark Freedman with the prizes arrayed in front of them.

Giving away three XBoxes Elite 360s, 2 ZunesHDs, 10+ TekPub subscriptions, a pass to the upcoming Devscovery conference, 20+ Infragistics NetVantage licenses, multiple copies of JetBrains’ Resharper and DotTrace, DevExpress’ CodeRush and DXperience UI control suite, Telerik’s RADControls Suites and lots more in an efficient manner is no easy task!  But like a well-oiled machine, we somehow managed to work assembly-line style to get all that SWAG distributed in just a mere 30 minutes.  In these photos that’s me with the microphone describing the prizes as Mark Pollack picks names and everyone else helps the attendees come up to claim their prizes.

After a hard day’s work (volunteering!) we were lucky enough to have sufficient sponsorship for this CodeCamp to be able to afford to take the speakers, volunteers, and, yes, even the organizers out for a complimentary dinner and drinks at Connelly’s Pub, a local Irish watering hole just a scant six blocks away from the CodeCamp site.  A special shout-out to Chris Williams from INETA who not only spoke at the event but also contributed to making this after-event dinner possible on our limited budget!  Here we see some of the volunteers sitting (finally!) and getting a chance to relax after a long, hard day’s work.

Leave it to a bunch of geeks to be seated around a table, having ordered food and liquor, and still be checking their smartphones.  A geek and their PDA shall never be parted, apparently!

Hey!   Look!  I can order my dinner on my iPhone!  There’s an app for that!

As the night wore on, here we see Miguel Castro’s eyes begin to glow red (as they often do as the alcohol begins to take affect <g>)…

Not sure why, but Miguel looks happier in this photo than John Baird does…

Meanwhile, the four-way debate at the end table about who has the best PDA continues unabated…

Here’s (left to right) speakers Steve Andrews, Chris Love, Dane Morgridge, and JP Toto sitting with several of our day-of volunteers (without any of whom we never would have been able to pull this event off).

Lastly, here’s a shot of myself and co-organizer Mark Freedman stealing a rare moment of relaxation in between one of the afternoon sessions.  We’re discussing what was working so far, what wasn’t, the nature and future of CodeCamps in the .NET ecosystem, what motivates someone to volunteer for such torture, and other points of philosophical interest.  Actually, I threw this picture in here at the end because I figured it would just confirm for everyone what I’m sure you all already know: putting on a successful CodeCamp is really pretty easy: you just show up and sit around all day and it just happens all around you

What Next for this Intrepid Explorer?

Well, there’s talk of holding another NYC CodeCamp before the next year (perhaps in the Autumn of 2010).  We’ll see if I have it in me to participate to the degree I did for this one.  Time will tell.  Part of me really wants to be able to put what I learned (the hard way) from this one about what to do and what not to do into practice again on another one.  And part of me wants to run screaming in the opposite direction as fast as humanly possible! :)  Time heals all wounds, they say, so let’s see if that’s true by the time the next of these might come around for me to consider being involved with.

I’m already committed to another Agile Firestarter event that I’ll be co-organizing for March 27th with the rest of the NYC Alt.NET Organizing Team.  That’s barely three more weeks away and so soon it will be nose-to-the-grindstone time for me on the logistics for that event.

And we’re tentatively planning to also hold an entirely different kind of event that right now we’re calling the ‘Agile CampFire’ – a sort of blending of a CodeCamp and the Agile Firestarter with much more emphasis on hands-on lab experiences than presentation-style content.  That’s looking like it will be hot on the heels of the 3/27 Agile Firestarter on either May 1st or May 8th so soon that too will be into hard-core focus-time for me.

But for now, its time for me to wrap a bow around this one, put it up on the shelf, and call it done.

It Takes a Village…

It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community to pull off a successful community event like this.  Thanks so much to everyone who contributed to making this event the success it never could have been without you: speakers, volunteers, organizers, and even attendees!  A successful community event requires all of these things and so we should all be collectively proud of how well this one came off.

That’s a wrap!

Just by way of a quick update, the Session Schedule for the upcoming NYC CodeCamp on 3/6/2010 has just been posted publicly here.

This year’s event promises to have something for everyone with session topics ranging from Parallel .NET Programming to SharePoint to Silverlight to MVC to JQuery to Continuous Integration.  Since the recently-completed renovation of the Microsoft offices in midtown has resulted in more available meeting rooms with increased capacity, we’ve been able to increase the number of sessions for the day from 30 in past years to 40 as well as increase the maximum attendance accordingly.

Even so, the event still has over 100 attendees wait-listed, demonstrating the huge level of interest in this kind of event in the greater NYC area.  Sadly, we cannot accommodate all who want to attend due to space constraints, but hopefully if this event is successful there will be enough interest to organize another before the year is out.

Hope to see you there next weekend~!

Last evening (Thursday) I had the pleasure of being asked to speak at the monthly meeting of the Philadelphia Alt.NET User Group.  As mentioned previously in this post here, I delivered my “Pragmatic Implementation Patterns for Domain Driven Design in .NET” presentation to an enthusiastic audience of about 40-50.

A big thanks to everyone who took time out of their busy schedule and other obligations to attend the meeting!  The attendees were engaged, interested, and provided really great questions and feedback, both in Q+A during the presentation as well as in conversations afterward.  As a presenter, there’s really nothing more satisfying than to give a talk to a room full of people genuinely interested in the information you have to share and to an audience willing to engage with the topic.

Thanks to Penn State Great Valley School of Professional Studies

A big thanks goes out to the Penn State Great Valley School of Professional Studies for providing a truly excellent facility for the meeting.  As you can see from the photo at left, we were given a classroom-style room complete with A/V facilities and lots of comfortable seating for the attendees (some of which appear in the photo).  Located in Malvern, PA just slightly north and west of Center City Philadelphia, this location was a little easier for me to get to from the greater NYC area at the end of the business day than downtown Philly would have been.

A special thanks goes out to Sharon Kauffman, Program Manager for the Continuing Professional Education program.  She and her staff and faculty went well out of their way to ensure that the needs of the group and myself were entirely attended to both before and after the meeting.  Her team is really to be commended for their professionalism and great courtesy in welcoming both myself and the Philly Alt.NET group into their campus.

In fact, the experience has me wondering if the NYC Alt.NET Group shouldn’t also try to reach out to other Continuing Education programs in the NYC area to see if similar kinds of spaces might be available for our own meetings!

(Surprise) Bonus: VB.NET Continuing Education Students in the House

As an entirely unexpected bonus, a class of about 15 students from a VB.NET Continuing Education class was able to sit in on my presentation for the first hour or so.  Even though all of my code samples were in C# and my topic was clearly a pretty advanced one for a class of students without extensive career experience as OO software developers, I hope I did at least a passable job of trying to explain the high-order concepts at play in such a way that the content was still valuable to them.

When you’re delivering a presentation (as a speaker, teacher, or whatever) and there are two pretty disparate groups in attendance, it can often be hard to split-the-difference in a way that doesn’t leave one group bored to tears and another group feeling like they’ve just been dropped in the deep end of the ocean.  I hope I managed to do a decent job of delivery of the material there!

Hitting the Target?

Since only about 20% of the attendees were already familiar with many of the concepts underlying Domain-Driven Design (DDD), in addition to talking about implementation patterns I also spent significant time digging more deeply into the high-level concepts and principles of DDD than I’d originally intended.  Since I hadn’t prepared for that, those elements of my talk had to be more off-the-cuff than rehearsed.

Any time you as a teacher find yourself speaking more extemporaneously like that there’s a huge danger you run that you’re not structuring your delivery in a coherent manner so as to enable the attendees to follow your train of thought properly.  In such cases, you can often find yourself delivering a stream of data devoid of proper context and that certainly tends to inhibit effective learning on the part of your audience.

Earlier today, however, I received an e-mail from an attendee from which I wanted to share an excerpt:

I did not get a chance to tell you how much I got out of [the presentation]. Your presentation was great and it really helped me understand DDD. It also helped me demystify a lot of the concepts. I realized that even if you do not practice pure DDD the overall concept of designing according to the domain’s own internal language is a powerful idea and one that can be used in most OO projects.

This kind of response is indeed heartening for a teacher to receive – its validation that for at least one attendee, the truly important parts of the content got through as intended!  Several others that approached me in person after the meeting had similar positive feedback to share, so hopefully this means that attendees were able to glean value out of the content.

Presentation and Sample Code

For those interested in a copy of the presentation content, here are links to direct downloads of the materials:

• Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation (pptx file)
• Sample Code Solution (zip file)

As always with my content, please feel free to do whatever you want with it as you see fit but as a matter of simple professional courtesy I would request simply that if you plan to re-use the content to deliver a presentation of your own that you at least mention that my work formed at least some of your inspiration

Proteus Domain Foundation Project on Google Code

Those in attendance saw much of the sample code I showed make use of a set of DDD-centric helper classes that made implementation of some of the patterns much more straightforward.  The binary of the assembly that contains these libraries is included in the code download of course, but for those interested in seeing the source code for this assembly I wanted to just mention that its all part of a project of mine that is available as open source and is hosted on Google Code as the Proteus Project.

As mentioned in the presentation, in addition to base classes that make it trivial to implement things like Entities and Value Objects in .NET by simply deriving from specific base-classes, this library also contains classes and interfaces to facilitate implementations of the Specification Pattern leveraging all kinds of boolean logic such as ANDs, ORs and the like.

Since this is open source, you can feel free download it, change it as you want to suit your needs, or just take a look at it to better understand how it all works.

Happy coding, everyone~!

Thanks to a code contribution from an adopter of NDbUnit, I’m happy to announce that NDbUnit v1.6 is now released and available for download from the Google Code downloads page with support for Oracle 8i and later.

Oracle support has been on the project’s roadmap for some time now and its great to be able to introduce this support at long-last (and even more enjoyable to be able to jump-start this functionality with a contribution from an adopter of the project).

I’m happy to say that this now brings the complete list of supported DB targets under NDbUnit to six:

• Microsoft SQL Server (including Express Editions and on up to Enterprise)
• Microsoft OleDb-supported databases*
• Microsoft SqlServerCe/Mobile Edition/whatever its called this month
• MySql
• Oracle (including XE and on up to Enterprise)
• SqlLite (including both on-disk and in-memory variants)

*there is currently a known issue with OleDb support that is under review

FWIW, I’d still love to get support for PostGreSql in there too at some point (hint –hint, community!)

Proteus Unit Test Libraries update Released as well!

Now that NDbUnit properly supports Oracle, its possible to extend the Proteus Project’s Unit testing libraries to do the same and so I’m also happy to announce that the 1.2.6 release of the Proteus.UnitTest.dll library is also now available for download from its own Google Code downloads page.  The Proteus utility classes that wrap NDbUnit with a series of convenience methods now also support Oracle as a database target.

Happy coding~!

Next Thursday evening (2/4/2010) from 6:00pm-9:00pm I’ll be speaking at the Philadelphia Alt.NET user group on real-world Domain Driven Design implementation patterns in .NET.

The full title of the session is going to be “Lessons from the Trenches: Pragmatic Implementation Patterns for DDD in .NET” and the overview synopsis will be:

In this session, we’ll take a look at common implementation patterns for Domain Driven Design concepts in .NET.  Focusing less on Powerpoint and more on code samples and discussion, we’ll dig into exploring implementation patterns for Entities, Value Objects, Services, Factories, Repositories, and other DDD constructs as well as patterns for wiring them up to collaborate between each other in a larger application.  We’ll also discuss people’s real-world implementation experiences and investigate common pain-points in applying DDD to the software development process.

For details and to RSVP if you want to attend, visit this link.  I’m looking forward to a thorough interactive discussion session where we can dig into attendees’ real-world experiences with DDD and get at the heart of what it means to use a DDD approach to engineering your software solutions!

To my knowledge these meetings aren’t recorded but I hope to see everyone there (if you’re in the area and can make it!)

Episode 23 of the Connected Show podcast has been released!  In this episode, host Peter Laudati interviews Andrew Brust about what he saw at this year’s CES in Las Vegas and then proceeds to interview none other than yours-truly about some of the work that myself and others have been doing with the Agile Firestarter events in and around the NYC metro area.

Agile: Putting the “Soft” in Software

In the interview Peter and I talk at length about the principles, values, and practices that underpin the Agile approach to software development, discuss why you as a developer should care about Agile, debate flawed metaphors comparing software engineering with the construction industry, investigate technical practices that make Agile successful, and even dig a bit into my thoughts about the challenges facing software engineering as a profession for the future.

Although it probably runs a bit longer than most Connected Show episodes, hopefully I found valuable things to say to fill the time

You can download the podcast directly from right here and the show notes can be found on Peter’s blog here.

As usual, all feedback/commentary on anything I do is welcome.  Happy listening~!

Its time for the semi-annual “What is ALT.NET and what does it mean to me?” introspection merry-go-round.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: introspection is a healthy form of self-review and an expression of self-awareness for both people and organizations/movements/shared-value-systems/whatever ALT.NET might be.  The last time this theme surfaced (to my knowledge) was back in March of 2009 and I blogged about my thoughts at that time in this post.

Since then, my thoughts on the subject haven’t changed much; I still feel that ALT.NET exists as an effective rallying-point for a shared set of values, ideas, and approaches to software engineering in the .NET ecosystem that’s every bit as important now as it was before.  Whether we like the name or don’t, accept the history (good and bad) of the ‘movement’ or attempt to reject it, consider it a success or a failure, for better or worse its still a name and concept that I experience all the time has traction as an identifier both for those that consider themselves part of it and those that do not.

Twitter –> Blogs –> Twitter

This particular round of introspection started on Twitter and then spilled over into the blog-o-sphere where various people offered their thoughts and opinions in long-form since 140 characters just didn’t seem to cut it for them.  Comments about the comments about the blog posts then continued on Twitter for some time afterward (yes, that sounds silly to me too FWIW )

As a point of reference, here are some links to some of those posts for the interested reader:

• Ian Cooper wonders at length about the meaning of ALT.NET (and its purpose, goals, and possible future (ir)relevance) in a post entitled “Whither ALT.NET?”.
• Sergio Pereira attempts to categorize the different broad types of people and their interaction styles with ALT.NET in a post entitled “On ALT.NET and Patience” that is somewhat reminiscent of what I was getting at in my post last March in that it tries to acknowledge that there are both many different kinds of people who interact with ALT.NET and thus many different experiences these people have in their interactions.
• Derrick Bailey contributed a post, “Active vs. Activist”, to the discussion where he attempts to explore the eternal tension between the idealism of the revolutionary zeal and the pragmatism of effective leadership by comparing the canonical definitions of “Activists” rage against the machine with those that are merely “Active” in a movement.

Read the Comments!

I would encourage everyone interested to please read not only the blogs themselves but also the comments posted to them.  Whether you are ‘for’ or ‘against’ ALT.NET, care about its future or not, both the posts and the comments are useful as a measurement-in-time in the life (or death) of an idea and are probably worth your time to read for that reason alone.

This is a public call for greater community participation in the Virtual Alt.Net online community for 2010 and beyond.

What is Virtual Alt.Net?

Virtual Alt.Net is an online community that met weekly over the past year or so utilizing Live Meeting as a platform for exposing as many people as possible to software development concepts and ideas that many consider to be related to the Alt.Net community.  Virtual Alt.Net was spearheaded by Zack Young who accepted primary responsibility (along with several other people assisting him) for ensuring that speakers were invited, announcements of upcoming meetings distributed to as many people as possible, a web site for the effort was created, and a calendar of upcoming talks maintained.  Essentially, this entailed all the effort that would normally be related to maintaining a real-world user group, but didn’t include the need to secure a facility for the meetings, order food and beverage, and ensure attendees have access to the building.

As a member of the organizing team for the NYC Alt.Net user group that meets monthly, I can easily appreciate the amount of effort required to organize a weekly meeting.  Even without the requirement of securing space and refreshment, coordinating speakers on a weekly basis is a significant effort and Zack and his team are to be commended for assembling interesting topics on a weekly basis throughout the year.

What makes a healthy user group community?

The backbone of a healthy user group requires just one thing: community participation.  Forming a user group may be the act of a few individuals, but its continued health depends on the participation of the community at large.  The NYC Alt.Net user group was founded in late summer 2008 by small group of 4 to 5 individuals who formed the initial organizing team.  Today, about 18 months later, the organizing team is still 4 to 5 individuals.  But only three of the original organizers remain.  One of our original team had to bow out due to health reasons.  Another took a nine month assignment overseas in the Far East, and still another took a gig that required him to be out of town Monday through Friday every week for the past six months.  In the interim, others have stepped up to fill the gaps and help organize the group on a monthly basis.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all to say that keeping this user group alive for the past 18 months would have been a lot harder for the original team had others in the membership not stepped up and offered to assist in the monthly organizing tasks.  Now, Virtual Alt.Net is in need of the same kind of increased membership participation in order to help ensure its future viability as well.

Wanted: Virtual Alt.Net Organizers

Virtual Alt.Net is looking for individuals that are willing to participate in scheduling the regular Live Meeting sessions, coordinating speakers, updating calendars, and distributing meeting announcements to the virtual community (via blog posts, twitter, email, and discussion forums).  Instead of having a single person spearhead this responsibility for virtual Alt.Net, it’s important for the continued health of the effort that a broader group of people gather together to collectively organize future meetings as a team.  If you would like to participate in this organization process, please add a comment to this blog post or contact me directly via e-mail (sbohlen@gmail.com).

Wanted: Virtual Alt.Net Contributors

If you’d like to help participate but would rather not commit to being a full fledged organizer, there are still a multitude of areas in which the group could benefit from other community contributions.  Since each virtual Alt.Net session is recorded via Live Meeting, each recording needs to be post-processed and posted to the virtual Alt.Net web site to make it available for download.  While this does not entail a significant amount of work, it is definitely an area in which members of the community could help to participate in the group.  If you would like to volunteer some of your time for this task, please add a comment to this blog post or contact me directly via e-mail (sbohlen@gmail.com).

Wanted: Virtual Alt.Net Presenters

Since virtual Alt.Net doesn’t require the use of any facilities to hold meetings, the most significant impediment to its future health is ensuring interesting speakers and topics are scheduled for every meeting.  In the past virtual Alt.Net has welcomed speakers ranging from the reasonably well known (Oren Eini, Jeremy Miller, Scott Bellware, etc.) to the much less well-known (like myself and others!) speaking on topics ranging from NHibernate to StoryTeller to Domain Driven Design to NHProf to SOLID design principles (for a full list of past topics, see their recordings on the Virtual Alt.Net website here).

Are you someone who has recently delivered a technical presentation to another user group (Alt.Net or otherwise)?  Then perhaps you would be willing to repeat the delivery for a virtual Alt.Net session.

Have you recently attended a presentation whose content you think might be of interest to other virtual Alt.Net attendees?  Then perhaps you might recommend to the presenter that they contact virtual Alt.Net an offer to deliver the same presentation in an online session.

Do you know somebody with expertise in a topic that might be of interest to virtual Alt.Net attendees?  Then you might be able to encourage them to contact us an offer to deliver presentation on the subject.

If you or someone you know is interested in getting some experience presenting technical topics to groups of listeners, then virtual Alt.Net can be a perfect place to begin to gain some of that experience.  Because the group is virtual, there is much less stress than presenting to a roomful of people, offering a great forum for new presenters to hone their skills.  The atmosphere is relaxed and informal, and everyone in attendance is there to learn something.

Whether you have a full-blown presentation to provide, a discussion topic for debate and investigation among the attendees, sample code that demonstrates something you feel attendees might find interesting, or just an interesting problem for which you found a clever solution, virtual Alt.Net represents a great opportunity for you to share your insights with the rest of the community.

Virtual Alt.Net Presentations: a Unique Format and Opportunity

One of the most common complaints that I routinely hear from both presenters and attendees at a live events is…

Its so hard to get anything meaningful across in a 1 hour session.  Presentations either have to be rushed in order to squeeze everything into the short time frame, or they have to be so high level as to be largely useless for the attendees.

Because virtual Alt.Net meets weekly, many meetings and topics are able to span multiple successive weekly sessions.  This format can offer a significantly deeper dive into a topic or area of interest, enabling both the presenter and attendees to gain significantly more value from such a format than they would be able to with a single presentation at a live event like the code camp or other.  If you are presenter that frequently laments the short time constraints in most live events and has a desire to be able to dig deeper into a particular topic in order to provide greater value for attendees, then virtual Alt.Net represents the unique opportunity for you to provide this content over a multi week series of presentations where you have the flexibility to dig deeper into your subject matter and provide greater value to attendees.

And if you don’t want to do a presentation as a multi-week deep dive into the content, then a presentation that lasts just a single session would certainly be welcome as well!

Change in Meeting Frequency?

In order to lighten the burden of having to assemble speakers on a weekly basis, beginning in 2010 virtual Alt.Net meetings will run monthly instead of weekly as a rule.  If and when topics arise that make sense to deliver in a series of successive meetings rather than a single session, these meetings will be delivered in a weekly fashion.  This is designed to try to strike an effective balance between the overhead of lining up speakers for weekly events and the desire for successive related sessions to not have too long a delay between meetings.  Single sessions will occur monthly and series of sessions will occur weekly (or at whatever other interval the presenter feels appropriate).

So in short, the success or failure of the future of Virtual Alt.Net is in the hands of the community.  This effort will only be as successful as the contributions of the larger community enable it to be.  If you or someone you know would like to be an organizer, contributor, or presenter for virtual Alt.Net in order to broaden its organizing team, please add a comment to this blog post or contact me directly via e-mail (sbohlen@gmail.com).

I hope to hear from you soon to ensure that the Virtual Alt.Net effort remains healthy!

For those of you who attended the Agile Firestarter in NJ in December of last year (and also anyone who didn’t!), this is just a quick note to let you know that the content for the event’s presentations has been posted for download as mentioned in Peter Laudati’s blog post here.  Not all of the slide decks are yet available for download, but my two presentations (Intro to Agile and Agile Estimation) are there along with Sara Chipps’ TDD talk.

Unlike the inaugural NY Agile Firestarter event we held back in June of 2009, these NJ sessions weren’t recorded, but you can get a good idea of the content from reviewing the slides at your leisure.  Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming announcements of future NYC-based Agile Firestarter events – there are definitely plans in the works for another NYC event (perhaps Spring 2010) if you weren’t able to attend either of the prior events in NYC or NJ.

Happy Coding~!

The NYC developer community is proud to announce the 4^th (sort of annual) Code Camp to be held on Saturday, March 6, 2010, from 8:00 AM until 6:30 PM. It will take place at the Manhattan Microsoft office on 6th Avenue across the street from Radio City Music Hall.

We have our call for speakers open from now until February 5^th.

To apply for a speaking slot, first please register as a speaker here: http://tinyurl.com/nycspeaker

Then with the email address you registered with on our speaker page, please add as many abstracts as you like here: http://tinyurl.com/nycsession

Submit on anything you like in the .NET space, there is no central “theme” to our Code Camp except .NET development!

Unfortunately we can’t afford to pay any T&E, but we will stuff you with lots of pizza and soda!