Small & Mighty

Someone once said that free food has zero calories. I wonder if that rule applies to other free stuff. Like if I wore a free shirt would I look skinny? or if get a free copy of Visual Studio 2008 can my code come out bugless? Well here is your chance to find out. We're hosting a Visual Studio 2008 party at various cities through the US. For a more complete list of cities visit TimH's blog.

Here is a list of cities in PA and DE. The registration link for the others will be available shortly.

• December 4th : Malvern, PA
• December 11th : Pittsburgh, PA
• December 17th : Allentown, PA
• December 18th : Scranton, PA (yes Dunder Mifflin head quarters)
• December 27th : New Castle, DE
• January 15th : Harrisburg, PA

Oh and yes we will have zero calories food.

On December 15^th, 2007 Microsoft will be hosting Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter on the Malvern, PA Office. This daylong event is free to anyone who wants to learn about designing and developing with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 is a cross platform browser plug-in that enables for easy development of media rich web sites.  For more information, visit http://silverlight.net.

Register here

Speaker line up here

The food has been ordered and the SWAG is ready for the second annual Philly .Net "15 Minutes of Fame". This event also marks the 6 year anniversary of this great user group. Kudos to the leadership team (A-Z): Andy, Bill, Mark M, Mark Z, Mitch, Rob, Steve and Travis. This team has some great events planned for 2008. I can't wait.

So back the the "15 Minutes of Fame" thingy. Basically, we have 10 speakers giving a 15 minutes presentation each. Hence the "15 Minutes of Fame"...get it? 15 minutes...fame. So here is the line up. Since we are all (most at least) some what out of shape I am going with a 10 men softball roster. I am looking for a team name. Right now I am going with "Los DotNeters De Filadelfia".

1. Mark Ziss (2B) - Using Subsonic to build a Data Access Layer and Admin App
2. Mark Magliocco (C) - Mentoring 101
3. Steve Andrews (LF) - Building a Visual Studio Debugger Visualizer
4. Andy Schwam (CF) - It's Time To Learn LINQ
5. Travis LaBorde (4th Outfielder, it's softball remember)- XML is awesome in VB9
6. Brian Donahue (RF)- ALT.NET -The Pursuit of Happiness (on the .NET Framework)
7. Dani Diaz (SS) - How to be more valuable
8. David Mann (3B)- WSS as a Web Application Platform
9. Mitch Ruebush (P) -  Build a Game in 15 Minutes with XNA and C#
10. Bill Wolff (1B) - Microsoft Developer Roadmap

If you are in the Philly area you should not miss this event. It is guaranty to be a blast. More information and registration here.

I am a fan of Guitar Hero (although I don't have it yet...hint) so I was thrilled when I saw this Silverlight game by Rick Barraza.  Enjoy!

While I am on the subject, Microsoft is hosting a free all day Silverlight workshop on December 15th at the Malvern Office just outside Philadelphia. I will post more details next week.

I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I think it is pretty cool that Microsoft is providing an Open XML to DAISY translator. Visit Doug's blog for more details - Doug Mahugh : Open XML to DAISY XML Translator . Oh and it is open source. I can't wait to get my hands on the code. It will be a great resource for Open XML developers and a good example of the features and advantages of the Open XML format architecture. Enjoy!

The Philly Office Geeks hosted their second meeting last night. The meeting was held at the Microsoft office in Malvern, PA. I had the honor to give the keynote on Open XML Formats, a topic I have been following for over a year now. I am a huge fan of the Open XML Formats. I have worked on some pretty cool Office projects so I  can attest to the good news this is for Office developers.

It was perfect timing to talk about this topic as I think every Office developer should be at the very least familiar with Open XML. This being the second meeting, it  made perfect sense to introduce the group to it.

The presentation itself went ok. There was a lot to cover so I was not able go too deep on the content. I purposely wanted to give an overview because all three topics I talked about (and more) are covered on these excellent free training videos from Microsoft . They are really great and highly recommended. More information about Open XML can be found here.

Ashin did the fifteen minutes of code session (I will try to video tape them from now on). Ashin is an extremely talented developer/architect. I have not seem him give a bad presentation yet. Now I just got to get him to start blogging. I can only imagine the gems that will come out of there.

Speaking about blogging, check out Dave Mann's blog. And since you are at it buy a copy or two of his book. The man has to eat. Dave is the brain behind Philly Office Geeks and an all round nice guy. Oh did I forget to say that he is also a SharePoint MVP? Well he is. Congrats Dave you deserve it.

I am really excited about Office Geeks. The first two meeting have been pretty interactive. We get some great questions and some great answers by the group. There were about 30 people in attendance last night which is pretty good considering we sent the meeting reminder pretty late.

I also want to thank K2, the sponsor for last night's event. Bill Nagle gave a good developer friendly overview of their product. It did not feel like a sales talk at all.

Thanks again to the Philly Office Geeks leadership for organizing the event.