Jacqui's Dev Blog: Microsoft Community

If you want to catch some free sessions on the state-of-the-art in .NET development, SQL Server and developer security then sign up for Code Camp Auckland 2009 now.

Code Camps are non-profit, and organised by members of the local developer community. This year the Auckland Code Camp is the day before TechEd (Sunday 13 September), so we've managed to nab a few great speakers on their day off to present to us.

It's the biggest Code Camp ever - over 14 hours of sessions across 3 streams from 10am till 5pm:

Development...

What's Happening in .NET Languages and Why Should You Care?
Behaviour Driven Development
Domain Specific Languages
C# 4.0 new features
Silverlight with Prism
.NET on the iPhone
Becoming Certified
Lightning Talks
and more!

The latest and greatest in development topics, by the people that know!

SQL Server?

SQL Server Virtualisation Best Practices and Recommendations
SQL Server Analysis Services and Gemini
Query Optimization and Query Tuning
Understanding SQL Server Indexing
SQL Server Maintenance

Training and guidance from the best SQL trainers in the industry!

Security!

Secure Development Lifecycle and Threat Modelling workshop
Secure Coding Practices

We are lucky to have Michael Howard, author of Writing Secure Code and 24 Deadly Sins of Software Security giving a free workshop for developers, architects and team leads on Threat Modelling and the Secure Development Lifecycle. This will be followed by a session on how to write secure .NET code.

Auckland has never seen such an awesome free event!

Presenters that are offering their time include Greg Low, Nicholas Dritsas and Auckland's Alex Henderson of Architecture Chat fame.

To cover the costs of the event, we have the help of our generous sponsors: Microsoft, Datacom, Intergen, INETA and Xero.

All that's left for you to do is to visit the website for more details, and sign up now!

P.S. Location! Of coz!

We have three rooms at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Auckland, which is across the road from TechEd:

http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/cp/1/en/hotel/aklnz

128 ALBERT STREET PO BOX 6841
AUCKLAND, 1030 NEW ZEALAND

Thursday, 16 October 2008

Guest Lecture: Emerging Technologies covering database

I had done a guest lecture for INFOSYS330 in University of Auckland this afternoon. It was good... I think? Usually in the second last week of the semester there are not many students attending class, but this lecture marks attendance, so nearly everyone come to lecture, ha-ha. That made me feel better. :D

Anyway, just want to put up some slides and code.

Here: slides and codes

P.S. I have polygon data for NZ map - and yes, I traced it. :P

Friday, 3 October 2008

Imagine Cup 2009

http://www.microsoft.com/nz/imaginecup09/

Yes! Imagine Cup – “The world’s premier student technology competition” – is here again! This year we are going to mentor a team. Which one? I have no idea yet, haha. I am very excited about this event and mentoring. :)

If your company wants to mentor a team as well, please email icnz@microsoft.com. Look forward to have our team competing with yours! :P

Monday, 11 August 2008

Auckland Code Camp 2008

Hello guys and girls, yes! Code Camp is here again! If you came last year you'd know how good it is, and I have to tell you that this year it is even better! This year code camp is going to be more relaxed, which suits my personality very well, ha ha. Anyway. you can register at http://codecamp.net.nz and you have to be quick because we have over 200 registration already!

Date: 31st August 2008

Time: 9:00am - 6:00pm

Venue: Crown Plaza Hotel in Auckland (just next door to Tech Ed)

Cost: Free! Lunch will be provided by our sponsors. The after-match function is an optional dinner to be held at a restaurant within walking distance of the Crowne Plaza. Cost of the dinner will be less than $30.

Agenda:

We are close to finalising the sessions. Speaker details and a full agenda will be available shortly.

Sessions for the day will be:

Thinking in WPF
Silverlight for developers
WCF
ASP.NET MVC
Real world TDD: Building Dependable Code with Dependency Injection
As well as a bunch of Lightning Talks showcasing projects, products, companies and people in New Zealand

The day will run from 9am till 6pm, with a lunch and afternoon tea provided by the generous support of our sponsors (Datacom, Olympic Software, Intergen, Microsoft MVP).

Plan to stay until 6pm, as we're gathering up prizes to give away at the end of the day.

In fact, plan to stay the night, as we'll be going out for dinner afterwards.

So Register Here: HTTP://CODECAMP.NET.NZ

Tuesday, 4 March 2008

2008 Summer Road Trip - Slides and Code!

Yes! We do have the code and slides for the summer road trip!

Code: RoadTripCode.zip (3.90MB)
Slides: SummerRoadTrip.pptx (1.35MB)

According to Jeremy,

The Code package contains a quick README on getting things set up, feel free to comment if you have more detail you want to add to this, however be warned you will want to put this in a PRE-PRODUCTION / TEST environment as it makes use of many beta bits such as SQL Server 2008 and the Entity Framework.
If you are looking to build such a VM up from scratch then these instructions may help you out in terms of what you need to install..
1. Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with No Hyper-V operating system installation
    - Roles: Web Server, File Services, Application Server: Enable TCP and Named Pipe Activation and Distributed Transactions
    - Features: Windows Powershell, Telnet Client
2. Visual Studio 2008
3. SQL Server 2008 CTP 6
    - Install only Database Server, Books Online and Client Tools
    - Execute sp_filestream_configure @enable_level = 2 after server has installed
    - Create C:\FSData directory locally for storing filestream data for the Road Trip database
4. Entity Framework Beta 3
    - Also install Visual Studio hotfix for Entity Framework Beta 3
    - Also install Entity Framework Tools for Visual Studio

Have fun with the code and slides!

Tuesday, 5 February 2008

2008 Summer Road Trip - Auckland - Done (Yay yay!)

The weather wasn't so great yesterday, but the event made the day special. Yes, it's the first day of the 2008 Summer Road Trip and they were here in Auckland. It's a good experience for me as this is the first time (after at least 10 years) for me to MC in an event with about 200 people. I was quite nervous and actually I had left out something in the Intro and Outro but I think it wasn't too bad.

We had a very little unexpected problem about the venue (see Darryl's blog) but we sort ourselves out. We started the show at 1:30pm. Chris, Jeremy and Alex had given us very informative presentations. They have a very interesting showcase and everyone seems to be impressed. We have pretty good feedback (as far as I can see from the evaluation forms), except, ah, apparently everyone wants a toilet break like me.

It's good to see familiar and unfamiliar faces in the event. I really hope to see all these faces again in our Ellerslie User Group events and have a chance to talk to each. Yesterday was a bit rush and I didn't even have a chance to say hi and bye to my own colleagues (from Olympic Software and friends. So, look forward to meet and talk to everyone in the near future! :)

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

2008 Summer Road Trip - Auckland

Date and time:
Monday, 4 February 2008 at 1:00 p.m.

Hosted by:
Jacqui Chow (ya apparently that's me!)

Location:
Auckland Institute of Technology, Ground Floor, Wright Stevenson House 585 Great South Road, Penrose, Auckland

Summer is here! And with it is coming new technology from Microsoft that will affect how we design and build infrastructure and applications.

Come and join Chris Auld and Jeremy Boyd along with local, Alex Henderson, as they set up a solution entirely on Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and host an application built in Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5 over a two hour period.

The application show cases all the latest features of these products including Virtualization, IIS, Spatial data, web and HTTP programing, and much more to demonstrate how these products will affect technology professionals (both infrastructure and developers) in the next couple of years.

There will be some very cool spot prizes and give aways on the day, and by registering and turning up on the day you will go into the draw to win one of three Windows Home Servers (to be drawn at the end of the road trip on Feb 21).

To register for the road trip, click here, enter your details (plus any friends you want to invite) and click register.

Doors open at 1pm, presentation starts at 1:30pm and the presentation will be done by 3:30pm.

Come along and meet your peers and learn about the latest technology and maybe even win a (very cool) prize - for free!

Dont forget to register at http://www.dot.net.nz/Default.aspx?tabid=113!

See you there!