After many years in Nashville, TN, the Devlink conference moved to Chattanooga, TN. John Kellar, the founder and lead organizer, moved to Chattanooga, and as someone who runs conferences in different cities, I can appreciate John wanting to have DevLink follow him.

In the days leading up to the event, it was interesting to hear some folks say they weren’t going to go “because it’s not in Nashville”.  Well, I can say first hand, they screwed up!  John and crew once again put on an awesome show!  Over 120 sessions, and open spaces track, and plenty of off-hours activities made this one...

[Cross posted from http://www.skimedic.com/blog]

The 4th annual St. Louis Day(s) of .NET built on the previous years successes and once again delivered an amazing show.  Held at the beautiful Ameristar Casino and Resort in St. Charles, Missouri.  This year, the conference maxed out the capacity of the conference center (over 800 people attended the show!)

Hats off to Jeff Fattic, Scott Spradlin, and Kevin Grossnicklaus and the scores (yes I mean scores) of other volunteers that made this event possible. I also have to give props to their spouses, children, friends, and co-workers, since the time commitment to run such a large event is...

[Cross Posted from skimedic.com]

I was invited to speak in Colorado and Arizona for three user groups, and it was a great time!

I kicked off the trip in Colorado Springs at the South Colorado .NET Users Group ran by Ben Hoelting, a fellow MVP and a friend of mine that also speaks at VSLive.  We had a great chat with an overview of Uncle Bob Martin’s SOLID Principles, and then spent the majority of the time discussion software patterns and where they would make sense in the real world.

Next up saw North Colorado .NET Users Group, headed up by Jeff Certain, also...

Last week marked another great CodeStock, a two day developer conference in Knoxville, TN.  The organizer, Michael Neel, does a great job of juggling the speakers, schedule, and venue, and the show continues to get better and better!

Telerik was once again one of the core sponsors of the conference, as we continue our wide and deep support of the developer community.  I also gave for presentations:

• Test Driven Development for T-SQL
• Windows Presentation Foundation for Developers
• Implementing M-V-VM in WPF (Have you tried our WPF Controls?)
• Test The Hard Stuff With JustMock 

All of the code can be found on my blog’s...

It’s been another busy week supporting the community!  On Tuesday, I gave two presentations.  One over lunch for the Cincinnati Financial Corporation Internal .NET Users Group on “Implementing MVVM for Windows Presentation Foundation” and in the evening spoke for my home user group, the Cincinnati .NET Users Group (CINNUG) on “Test Driving ASP.NET”.  On Wednesday, I drove up to the Dayton .NET Developers’ Group to give my “Deliver Cleaner Code with LINQ to Objects” talk, and had to take a 30 minute intermission due to a tornado warning!  Not to be stopped, we actually had a great open spaces style discussion while...

The organizers of the Richmond Code Camp rang in another successful event.  Telerik was a sponsor of the event, and the .NET Ninja shirts and Ninja heads were flying all around!  I was also a speaker at the event, delivering two successful talks that both received great feedback.

The two talks that gave were “Lessons Learned: Being Agile in a Waterfall Sandbox” and “Delivering Cleaner Code with LINQ to Objects”.  Both sessions had great interaction from the audience, and quite a few hallway conversations to boot.  if you are interested in the content, you can download the slides and the code samples...

TechEd 2011 was another great event.  We had a lot of traffic at the Telerik booth, giving away a huge amount of T-Shirts and Ninja head stress balls, showed a ton of demos of our software, and had great conversations with not only customers but people discerning what to buy.

I was also busy working the “Ask the Architect” booth in the Microsoft Technical Learning Center, and I gave two Birds of a Feather sessions, and both were a great success.

Agile Development: Can it Work For Everyone

This session I gave in conjunction with Mario Cardinal, another thought leader in the agile space. ...

SQL Saturday 72 (Honolulu) was a great success!  This event had three tracks – one for SQL (of course), one for .NET and one for more general topics.  Chris Eargle (@kodefuguru) and I came from the mainland and presented (between the two of us) 7 topics.

This was my first time in Hawaii, and it was great.  Although I could only stay for 48 hours (I think I spent more time in planes than I did in the Islands), everyone I met was extremely friendly.  The attendees at the event were very engaging, asked a ton of great questions, and followed...