I am still scheduled to present for the Birmingham .NET User Group at the July 2006 meeting. As I previously posted, I am debating between Mashups using ATLAS or Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation. I have a personal preference towards one of the topics, but I thought it would be cool to let the user group decide. So, I have uploaded a poll to my website. I have given the information to Jeremy Chance and he should be sending it out to the user group email distribution list in the near future.
You can access the poll here: http://www.jeffbarnes.net/bugdotnet/poll.aspx
The decision will be announced at the next user group meeting on Tuesday, June 13. If you plan on attending the July meeting, then please take a moment to vote your preference.
So, it has been a little while since my last post. Since the Alabama Code Camp, I have been extremely busy between the Softech Celebrity Shootout golf tournament that my company sponsored and an upcoming deadline for a client. In other words, blogging was temporarily put on the back burner. However, I thought I would take a moment to make a quick post about some upcoming events.
Birmingham .NET User Group
The next meeting will be Tuesday, May 9th out at EBSCO. The speaker will be Doug Turnure of Microsoft. He will be speaking about extensible design. Essentially, it is a discussion about interfaces vs. inheritance and why/when one should be used over the other. Based on previous experiences of hearing Doug speak at MSDN events, this should be a good presentation.
For the June meeting, Teri Webster will be speaking, but I am not sure what the topic will be. For July, I am still scheduled to speak, but I am still undecided about my topic as well. Currently, I am debating between a more detailed version of my code camp presentation about mashups or an introductory look at Windows Communication Foundation. I will probably make up my mind within the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, I will get some feedback from the user group to determine what they prefer to hear.
ASP.NET 2.0 Boot Camp
The Birmingham Software Developer Association will be sponsoring an ASP.NET 2.0 Boot Camp from Friday, May 12th to Sunday, May 14th. It will be held at Virgina College in Homewood. For additional information, visit there site.
Book Reviews
I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon: Practical .NET 2 and C# 2 and Framework Design Guidelines. I also have a copy of Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art that I won at code camp. Of course, there are numerous reviews already available concerning these books, but I will be posting my opinions as well within the next couple of weeks. Between these books and my backlog of professional magazines, I should have plenty of reading material for vacation.
Birmingham Tech Mixer
On Thursday, May 18th at the Wynfrey Hotel, there is a "mixer" event scheduled from 6PM to 8PM. Admission is free and there will be a cash bar. From what I have been told, this is intended to be an opportunity to network and learn more about the various user groups and associations within the Birmingham area. Most of them will be booths setup at the event. If you can make it, please drop by to check it out. If it wasn't for being on vacation, I would be there as well.
As far as I know, those are all of the upcoming events within the next few weeks. As far as my blogging is concerned, you can expect to see me start churning out posts about WCF as soon as I get passed this client's deadline. In my extremely limited spare time over the last couple of weeks, I have started digging into the details of the framework, and I definitely like what I see!