There a many great events being planned and some are already announced.

Here is a short list of events and links to their websites. Save this link, as I hear of new events I’ll make sure to update this blog post to add them.  Just a reminder that most of these events are in the “Heartland District” as defined by Microsoft which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee but I’ll add events in other neighboring states as well. Don’t mistake me, this isn’t just a list of Microsoft events either! Any technology event in the area that I hear about I will list. If you know of any drop me a line and I’ll get it added!

February 2010

Grand Rapids Code Retreat - Grand Rapids, MI - February 6th, 2010 (Free)

March 2010

Roanoke Code Camp - Roanoke, VA - March 13th, 2010 (Free)

Southern Maryland Give Camp - St. Mary’s City, MD - March 19th - 21st, 2010 (Free)

Lansing Give Camp - Lansing, MI - March 26th - 28th, 2010 (Free)

April 2010

Pittsburgh Code Retreat - Pittsburgh, PA - April 3rd, 2010 (Free)

Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise - Philadelphia, PA - April 8th - 9th, 2010 ($325.00)

Philadelphia Code Retreat - Philadelphia, PA - April 10th, 2010 (Free)

Kalamazoo X Conference - Kalamazoo, MI - April 10th, 2010 ($35.00 Professional / $15.00 Student)

Great Lakes Ruby Bash - Lansing, MI - April 17th, 2010 (????)

Grand Rapids Silverlight 4 Firestarter - Grand Rapids, MI - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

Pittsburgh Code Camp - Pittsburgh, PA - April 17th, 2010 (Free)

May 2010

Ann Arbor Day of .Net - Ann Arbor, MI - May 1st, 2010 ($10.00)

Chicago Code Camp - Chicago, IL - May 1st, 2010 (Free)

Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition - Columbus, OH - May 7th, 2010 ($25.00)

IndyTechFest - Indianapolis, IN - May 22nd, 2010 (Free)

June 2010

CodeStock - Knoxville, TN - June 25th - 26th, 2010 ($55.00)

July 2010

Ann Arbor Give Camp - Ann Arbor, MI - July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

Cleveland Give Camp - Cleveland, OH, July 16th - 18th, 2010 (Free)

August 2010

DevLink - Nashville, TN - August 5th - 7th, 2010 ($100.00)

September 2010

Ohio Linux Fest - Columbus, OH - September 10th - 12th, 2010 (Free)

October 2010

erubycon - Columbus, OH - October 1st - 3rd, 2010 (~$300.00)

November 2010

NO EVENTS

I can’t stress enough how much fun these events are. Not only can you learn a lot of things but you get a chance to hang out and socialize with some of the top developers in the area. I encourage all developers to try to attend at least one local event. You will not regret it!

Another CodeStock has gone and passed and what an event it was! They finally moved from The Pellissippi State Community College out in the boonies of Knoxville, TN to The University of Tennessee Conference Center in downtown Knoxville. Even better the “official” hotel of the event was the Hilton right across the street. Major props to the event organizers for setting this up so well.

Thursday

I had a nice 7 hour drive from Bowling Green, Ohio to Knoxville and by nice I mean a pain in the butt. I ran into major traffic slowdowns several times and hit two torrential downpours that had the entire highway driving 20-25mph through the mountains.

Luckily I managed to make it safely and got checked into the hotel. The hotel was very nice! Much better than the Laquinta I’ve stayed in the past 2 years!
I ended up meeting up with a large group and we went over to the Downtown Grill and Brewery for some good eats and drinks and then back to the hotel to hang and enjoy a few cigars.

Friday

Awake at the crack of 7:30am I was showered and across the street to the UT Conference Center.

I started out my day in Jeff Barnes (@jeff_barnes) session “Building Reliable and Scalable Systems with NServiceBus”.  This was a great intro to service buses and similar technology for scaling systems. I learned a lot from Jeff’s presentation and could see a few potential uses for this system at my own company if we were to re-engineer some of the core systems.

Sessions 2 was Robert Cain’s (@arcanecode) “The Decoder Ring for Data Warehousing / Business Intelligence with SQL Server”. Thank you so much Robert! You were amazing! I’ve been trying to get my head around the basics of data warehouses for some time now and for some reason I just couldn’t “get it” until you explained it. I have a few book suggestions from him as well so I need to pick those up to get moving forward on this for my company as well.

Next I hit the early lunch session and wandered over to the open spaces.

Sidenote, I love the way they did lunches at CodeStock. Instead of the usual set lunchtime that everyone eats at they just had lunch available for two sessions so that you could grab food between sessions and eat in a session. I liked that much better as it lets early or late eaters choose when they want to eat and it doesn’t waste precious learning time. I call it genius!

So at open spaces I ended up getting into a very long discussion about changes in society and the devaluation of information, free market, piracy, etc.  Holy cow was that a great conversation. This is one of the reasons I love events like this. So many smart people in one little area to share and disseminate knowledge, ideas and thoughts.
After that discussion I spend a good majority of the time speaking with a few people about my beliefs that our industry needs to be professionalized like engineers, doctors and lawyers. This is a highly volatile area of thought so I won’t go into the discussion now but it was fun to share my thoughts with other people.

The last session of the day I caught was Layla Driscoll (@LaylaDriscoll), .Net CLR Program Manager at Microsoft, on “.Net from within: CLR 4.0 and beyond”. It ended up being a very good presentation on some of the new 4.0 features and even a chance to ask questions about how Microsoft adds features. Very informative and cool to get some inside scoop on how MS works.

The day finally ended and we all hiked over to the Bijou Theater for the keynote. I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of the keynote being 3 blocks away but it worked out so no complaints.

Rachel Appel (@RachelAppel), Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, gave the keynote on the topic of community. She brought up many people to talk about their experiences in the technology community. It was a fun keynote and best of all they did the prize giveaway there. Again, great idea staff! It’s nice not to have to wait after the event is over for an hour of prize giveaways since many people want to get on the road home.

Again, I headed back to the hotel for a few drinks at the bar and cigars. I was feeling very happy by the end of the night!

Saturday

Once again I was awake and at the event ready to go.

Session 1 was by Michael Eaton (@mjeaton) on “Going Independent 101: Lessons learned from a decade of independence”. This was a top notch session and it was very nice of Michael to share so many good tips and suggestions for how to move into the path of consultant.

I had planned to see Jennifer Marsman’s (@jennifermarsman) presentation on Win7 multitouch next but I ended up in Open spaces again chatting with people on many different topics.

Lunch time I sat in on Michael Kimsal’s (@mgkimsal) session “Getting start with Twilio”. This was probably the most useful session I sat in on. I do a lot of telephony work at my job and Twilio could end up being the perfect fit replacement for managing our own phone systems. I’m very happy that Michael did this presentation so I could be exposed to this technology.

After that session I sat around OpenSpaces for a while talking about jQuery, Sharepoint, sharing work horror stories and finally bailing out early to watch the USA soccer game.

The only thing left to do was attend the world renowned Alan Steven‘s (@alanstevens) Post-Stock party at his place. It’s so nice of Alan and his wife to open up their house to dozens of nerds to enjoy a fun night. There were drinks flowing aplenty and plenty of folks smoking pipes and cigars outside. We even had a bonfire to sit around while several people took turns playing guitars and singing songs.

Sunday

Getting up was a killer after staying up so late at Alan’s place but I managed to get checked out by 10:00am and on the road home to Ohio. Traffic flowed better but I still managed to get caught in two separate torrential downpours again that slowed traffic to a crawl. Man what is it about the mountains and rain?

I finally pulled into my home around 6pm and was glad to be back with my family and my own bed.

Now all I can think about is my next big adventure… DevLink!

Sample Code:

---

class OneAtATimePlease {
// Use a name unique to the application (eg include your company URL)
static Mutex mutex = new Mutex (false, "oreilly.com OneAtATimeDemo");

static void Main() {
// Wait 5 seconds if contended – in case another instance
// of the program is in the process of shutting down.
if (!mutex.WaitOne (TimeSpan.FromSeconds (5), false)) {
Console.WriteLine ("Another instance of the app is running. Bye!");
return;
}
      try {
Console.WriteLine ("Running - press Enter to exit");
Console.ReadLine();
}
finally {
mutex.ReleaseMutex();
}
  }
}

---

A good feature of Mutex is that if the application terminates without ReleaseMutex first being called, the CLR will release the Mutex automatically.

As you can see it’s pretty simple code. You create a Mutex object. However, until you call the WaitOne function you do not actually make your claim to ownership of the mutex. So remember to do that!

* Disclaimer: This code and content are taken from multithreading in C# by Joseph Albahari. I do not claim any ownership or rights to this content. I am merely copying for my own future reference and to share the knowledge.

There will be a small nominal fee of $10.00 this year to help cover expenses. Lets be honest her folks, for the great amount of information you be getting and the amazing opportunities to network with other professionals it’s worth the small fee.

It will be held Saturday, May 1st, 2010 in Ann Arbor, MI at Washtenaw Community College again.

Hurry up and go get registered before it’s too late!

This is extremely easy to setup

Step 1: Login in as root and navigate to “/etc/ssh”.

Step 2: create a file named “sshd-banner” using your editor of choice.

Step 3: create your banner content and save the file.

Step 4: open “sshd_config” for editing.

Step 5: Add the following line to your config file “Banner /etc/ssh/sshd-banner” and save.

Step 6: Restart the sshd server. On a linux server this would be “/etc/init.d/sshd restart”

Feel free to log back into your server to test.

What is the X Conference?

The Kalamazoo X Conference is a one-day software development conference hosted in beautiful Southwest Michigan. While there are many great technical conferences in the region, their focus tends toward new technologies and programming languages. The Kalamazoo X Conference intends to uniquely complement those conferences by enabling attendees to boost their process, design, and communication skills in the following areas:

•Human interaction, including social, personal, and career development.
•Interface and graphic design
•Development processes and best practices
•Requirements analysis, architecture, design, and modeling

I attended this event last year and it was great. It’s run as a single track rapid fire series of talks that focuses on the so called “soft skills”, all that non-technical junk you need to know to do your job!

Please check it out and attend if you can. It will be well worth it.

About GiveCamp

GiveCamp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new website for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or a application for the Red Cross that automatically emails a blood donor three months after they’ve donated blood to remind them that they are now eligible to donate again. The only limitation is that the project should be scoped to be able to be completed in a weekend.

The Cleveland event will be held July 16th - 18th, 2010 at LeanDog located at 1151 North Marginal Road Cleveland, OH 44114.

So please check out the Cleveland GiveCamp 2010 and sign up to help if you can!

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

This is another book from Andy Hunt and the Pragmatic series. I can’t emphasize enough how great these books are.

Where as in Pragmatic Programming they discussed patterns and practices to improve your developer skills this book takes a step back and is looks at how your brain works. It’s a very interesting concept and one I suggest developers think more about.

The book as the title implies covered two areas:

The first part goes over the thought process and after reading this book I gained so much insight into how my brain is wired. Andy does a great job of explain how a brain processes thoughts and stores memories in terms of metaphors of computers and technology.

The second part covered the many techniques for learning and helps walk you though examples of the pros and cons of each method. Again this was very insightful as I have never really thought much about how I learn and what processes are best for me.

Thanks to this book I now have a few different options for learning that I plan to try to find the one that works best for me to retain and use knowledge.

Go pick up a copy and sit down. It was such a fascinating book and I ended up reading it from cover to cover in only a few days. Once you get into it, if you are anything like me you will be so enthralled you won’t be able to put it down.

Open up your registry on the server and navigate to:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares]

Right click on the Shares folder and choose export

You will now have a .reg file that you can copy and install on the new server and have all the file shares and security settings ready to go.

One note to remember is this only works if you setup the file shares identically on the new server. You have to keep the drive letters and folders matching the old server.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt, David Thomas

This is one of my new top developer books. Far be it for me to tell you want to read or not read but I feel this is a must read requirment for any developer.

The topics that are covered range from dealing with “code rot”, software that is outdated and breaking, to the importance of testing.

The beauty of this book is that it isn’t your standard technology book. You won’t read this and learn a new language, framework or tool. In the book they cover so many important topics that are about being a better developer in general. Many of these issues are ones that people never think about yet if they did could improve the quality of their software and the happiness of their clients.

I plan to share this book with all my coworkers and I hope once you read it you will do the same.