quote:
PLEASE read the following message and consider being an attendee, a sponsor, a volunteer, or all three:
GLUGnet, the Greater Lansing User Group for .Net, is announcing their third Lansing Day of .Net (LDODN) event on Saturday June 25th at the Okemos MI offices of TechSmith Corporation. The last LDODON event was held two years ago at the MSU Breslin Center and was a huge success.
This FREE event includes lunch, beverages, snacks, prizes, and a BBQ cookout after a full day of educational sessions on software craftsmanship and the newest .Net technologies.
LDODN prides itself on doing something unique at each event. This year we will have an inflatable slide in the parking lot if you want to take a break from the sessions for a little fun. During the BBQ after the event, we will have a dunk tank to raise money for the Lansing Impression 5 Science Museum.
If you wish to attend, registration is limited to 150 attendees. Register soon at http://www.dayofdotnet.org/Lansing/2011/Register.aspx.
If you or your company are able to help sponsor the event, contact Joe Kunk at joekunk@gmail.com. We are urgently looking for cash sponsorship to help defray the conference expenses as well as prizes and swag for the attendees. A sponsor prospectus and invoice form can be downloaded at http://s3.amazonaws.com/Glugnet/LDODN_2011.zip
If you are able to volunteer to help prepare for the event or for a couple hours during the event, please contact me for a volunteer task list and schedule.
GLUGnet is a 100% volunteer non-profit Michigan corporation dedicated to Microsft .Net oriented education and networking. Anything you can do to help contibute to the success of the Lansing Day of .Net on Saturday June 25th will be GREATLY appreciated.
Hope to hear from you soon!
Regards,
Joe Kunk
This year there were 5 charites that were lucky enough to be selected:
I was on a team with my co-workers at Quick Solutions, Inc. We were privlidged to get to work for the charity Pets Without Parents. The team updated the current plain static pages to a SiteFinity backed CMS solution. We have some training with the charity so currently the new site isn’t live for the public yet but it will be soon.
It was a wonderful weekend and I had a great time. If you’re in the area please think about helping out next year!
]]>I don’t think about these things all the time, just on days like today. The sky is overcast and I’m sitting at home alone. I’ve just finished loading the dishwasher in my townhome, which I’m pretty sure was installing in the early 90’s as it has about as much cleaning power as if i set my dishes outside to be washed by the rain. I hear the rythmic sounds of the washing machine doing a load of work clothes. I smell and taste the baked bbq chips, the bag tells me baked is better for me, I’m eating. I see my adorable black cat Evi curled up sleeping away this late afternoon.
Our sences really are a magnificent thing aren’t they. There is so much to experince in our world. It’s downright astonishing how so much of our lives we take these simple things for granted. Such a shame really.
And I contemplate…
Be it fate or devine intervention two people were brought together and as a result of their meeting I was created, you were create, we were all created. Stop every once in a while and think about that simple point. You exist! There was a point in time at which you didn’t. You were in the most literal of terms, nothing. However, now you are here and you will always be here. Even after we die, we will have placed our mark on this world and it will forever be changed becuase of us.
I’m not trying to inspire you to greatness or convince you that you need to “change the world for the better” I meerly am pointing out that whether you cure cancer or just manage to raise 2 kids by yourself by working at a dinner for 10 hours every night, the very fact that you exist means you are making changes to this world. Just becuase one won’t be written about in the history books doesn’t make that person any less important. They are both important, it’s just the perspective you or I take.
Fame, money, sucess, importance, beauty, strength, winner… these are all just words, yet we attach significance to them, we convince ourself that these are things that we much attach to ourselves, to strive for. It’s all phony bullshit people, yet even myself I live for these things. You can’t help but do it. Society teaches us these things from the moment we are created. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying its bad, it just is what it is. And that’s my just my take on the situation that is life.
I’m just here philosophizing on existance. I just can’t help but find it so amazing and mind boggling that I exist. Every day i will interact with probabbly hundres of people. I will talk to them, I will see them walking on the sidewalks, I will drive with them on the asphault roads and highways. Right now I’m sitting on my couch in my living room writing this, in all probability 20 feet away in the mirrored townhome connected behind me, someone sitting on their couch too. I have no idea what that person is doing, we will probabbly never meet but we are now connected for all time. Our connection is as simple as the fact that we both exist.
Life is complex, life is simple. Life is confusing, life is clear. It’s all dependent on your persepective at the moment you are in. I’m not here to give you advice so don’t try to read to deep into this… hold on a minute here… seriously pandora, I love your music service but the constant ads suck and are distracting. Sorry what was I saying… or right! Don’t try to read too deep into this post. I’m just feeling very fluid today and without even thinking I started writting this thought stream down for whatever silly reason.
Then like a puff of smoke all that philosophical daydreaming passes away, stupid ads breaking my daydream! The washer has stopped so it’s time to do another load of laundry.
And that’s alright by me.
]]>I’m sure you’re probably asking yourself, what is a VM based development environment? Well simply put the idea is to do use VM software such as; VMWare Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, Microsoft Virtual PC to create one or more virtual computers in which you install and use your development tools.
There are many reasons you might want to move to a VM based development environment.
Experimentation
My primary development environment is setup using Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) with Visual Studio 2010 Pro and SQL Server 2008 R2 (x64). What if I decide I want to try doing some development using the free and open source MySQL database? Well I guess I could install all that on my machine and hope it doesn’t have any compatibility issues or screws up my computer. However with VMs I can easily clone my development environment and install MySQL safely in this copy. I can verify that it causes no issues and develop within that new system for whatever projects I want to use MySQL for. If I get bored or decide I don’t want to use MySQL it won’t hurt one bit to just delete the entire VM.
Portability
Do you use many different computers? I know I sure do! I have my work PC, my home desktop and my laptop. If I’m using VMs to host my development environment I can keep the VM on an external USB drive and as long as I can install the VM software on the computer I’m at I can start up and use my development environment any ware, any time.
Testing
Besides just installing your development tools in a VM you can setup separate environments to test your software in different platforms. Want to see how your app works on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Linux? Not a problem when you can setup multiple installs inside separate VMs. Plus most VM software allows you to setup what are called snapshots. Snapshots allow you to save the state of a VM and rollback changes at will. I won’t go into details about all the power that provides but it’s something you should look into because it is a great feature!
Security & Privacy
Are you a consultant that works for many different clients? I’m sure at some point you will end up working with a client that goes overboard with security. You know the type, they require you use a special VPN client and it won’t let you log into the VPN if you don’t have a specific required anti-virus software. The power of virtual machines allows you to make a complete copy of your development VM and then you can install whatever required software you need for that client.
Plus as an added benefit you can tell your clients that the code you work on will be secure and private in a dedicated development environment that no one but you has access to and will not be shared with any of your other clients. Most software a company has is private and very valuable. I’m willing to bet letting a client know that the all their code, documents and files will be kept in secure and private environment will go a long way to showing you are very professional.
Freedom
This one I admit probably isn’t exactly the most upstanding of reasons but I’m not going to lie and say it’s not a valid one I think about.
Are you stuck at work using Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005? Well there’s a good chance your work PC is probably also a horribly slow hunk of junk too. If however you have some decent hardware you could setup a VM at work so you can run your favorite OS and dev tools. No one has to know, we’ll keep it just between you and me. I promise!
Of course, unless you are a one man dev shop, you need to be good and make sure the work you do is still compatible with other developers using old tools. Some might call it job security but I call it being an inconsiderate ass if you develop software that can only be recreated with your toolset.
Hopefully this short post has brought some new ideas about Virtual Machines and their benefits for developers. Take a look at one of the free VM offerings, install and start playing around.
Best of luck!
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Oh well it’ll be fine in a few weeks time.
Honestly I can’t remember the last time I had a fully shaved face and it’s quite scary. I’ve become very accustomed to having facial hair. This is going to be one very strange experiment.
So here is day 0 to show what I looked like before I shave tomorrow.
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!
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