I've added a permanent news page for the Richmond .NET Code Camp to my site. It has news and information you'll want if you're a .NET developer in the mid-Atlantic region.

http://www.gotnet.biz/Blog/page/Richmond-NET-Code-Camp-News.aspx

Check it out!

I presented tonight (10 July 2008) to the Richmond .NET User Group. We had a pretty good turnout, I'm guessing 40 to 45 developers. I gave this same presentation at my office today as a dry run and as a training opportunity within the company. It's so good to see the developer community eager to learn. I've attached my slides and the three demonstrations projects I used in this post. I'll be giving this same presentation to the Charlottesville .NET User Group next Thursday (17 July 2008). The abstract we put on both user group websites follows:

Silverlight is a client-side technology. So it’s not really a part of your SOA strategy, right? You may want to think twice about that. SOAP and WSDL support are coming to the web desktop via Silverlight. And Silverlight has good client support for REST+ JSON/POX and RSS/ATOM-based web services, too. During this discussion, we’ll dive into data serialization, security and cross-domain access policy capabilities inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2. We also talk about the nuances and pitfalls of provisioning your web services for an Internet audience. This presentation will be heavy on coding, demonstration and interactive discussion.

Powerpoint Presentation (289KB)

Twitter solution showing how to invoke a cross-domain RESTful service by way of an in-domain SOAP service bypassing the cross-domain access policy problem. (842KB)

REST solution showing how to create RESTful services in WCF and how to consume RESTful services in Silverlight (307KB)

Silverlight syndication solution showing how to consume cross-domain RSS and Atom feeds using the SyndicationFeed class. (11KB)

If you are in central Virginia today (12 June 2008), be sure to join Andy Leonard, Ron Deskins, Mark Hudson and me for a roundtable discussion about SQL server. Andy, Ron and Mark are all great community leaders and they happen to be excellent SQL database architects. This will be a fun and informative meeting. Be sure to register using the link below. Here are the details:

When: Thursday, June 12th, 2008, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Social Time starts at 6:00 PM!

Who: Everyone! In particular Andy, Ron, and Mark.

What: This is going to be round table discussion facilitated by Andy Leonard, Ron Deskins, and Mark Hudson.  The topic is SQL Server, but other than that it is wide open.  Please post your comments to the board so we can get a lively discussion going at the meeting!  

I snapped this pic walking through the Books-A-Million store in Richmond, Virginia on 5 June, 2008. Sign of the times or a simple shelf stocking error?

For those of you in central Virginia, my friend Justin Etheredge is speaking to the Richmond .NET User Group this Thursday evening (6/5) at 6:30 p.m. EDT in the Markel Building’s first floor salon at 4600 Cox Road regarding:

Functional Programming Features of C# 3.0 

Justin’s one of the brightest, hardest-working people I know. Check out his blog. Come out and meet Justin and network with some other software developers in the community. You won’t be disappointed.

Oh, and did I mention that the victuals will be a la Maggiano’s Little Italy? Mmmmm……

My company is having an open house on June 4th, 2008 in Richmond, Virginia. Free tickets to see the Wailers concert at the SnagAJob.com Pavilion across the lake from our office. And did I mention free cocktails and heavy appetizers? Mmmmm. Here's the text of the invitation. If you are in Richmond on the 4th of June, please come out and have some fun with us.

YOU ARE INVITED TO OUR OPEN HOUSE
Time:
5:30pm-7:00pm
Location:
4880 Cox Road Suite 200
Glen Allen, VA 23060
RSVP to openhouse@snagajob.com by Friday, May 23

I did a presentation called "Profiling and Tuning LINQ Queries" for the Richmond Sharepoint User Group on May 8th. I had gotten so busy, I forgot to post the slides and sample code. Here it is.

Profiling and Tuning LINQ Queries.pptx (75.58 kb) - these are the PowerPoint 2007 slides

ProfileLINQ20080508.zip (27.96 kb) - this C# project builds a dynamic query against the Northwind database using LINQ to SQL, allowing the use of the SQL Profiler to be used to see the increasing complexity of the queries as criteria is added and data is shaped using increasingly complex anonymous types.

Here are my slides from the Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 talk concerning Silverlight.

Silverlight Version 2 - Hazzard - RCC2008.1 - April 2008.pptx (237.23 kb)

And here are some demo links that I used during the presentation: 

Deep Zoom
http://joestegman.members.winisp.net/DeepZoom/
http://www.neogeo.com/samples/SilverZoom/

Financial Management
http://www.cookingwithxaml.com/meals/financials/default.html

WeatherBug
http://sl.weatherbug.com/?zip=23060

Learning and Discovery
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/earlyamericas/readingartifacts/

Image Snipper
http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/ImageSnipper/testpage.html

Form Controls
http://silverlight.net/Samples/2b1/SilverlightControls/run/default.html
http://labs.componentone.com/Sapphire/

These are the slides and source code that I used in my Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 presentation called "Look Ma! No Proxy!". This presentation concerns the problems related to proxy generation for traditional web services development. In this presentation, I propose a model for the future where proxies are no longer needed, at least not pre-built proxies as we use today. A bit of dynamic code generation, some C# client code and a bit of IronPython to glue things together. Mmm, mmm, good!

Look Ma No Proxy by Kevin Hazzard.pptx (197.46 kb)

ProxyGen20080426.zip (818.56 kb)

I attended the Speakers Forum for the Richmond Code Camp on Monday evening. Tim Tatum presented a talk on Presentation Development and Delivery. It was very good. Tim put this together in an effort to get the speakers for the Richmond Code Camp 2008.1 to be prepared better than they have been in the past. Don't get me wrong, the presenters at the previous Code Camps in Richmond have been very good. But there's always room for improvement, right?

Tim brought a decade of experience teaching in the public school system and another decade of work in the IT field to the game and it showed. Very well done. We had an open discussion at the end where we opened up the floor to all sorts of ideas which was icing on the cake. If you want Tim to deliver this presentation to a group in your area, drop a note (kevin at gotnet dot biz) and I'll get you connected to Tim.

Another resource that's good on this subject is a new book by James O'Rourke entitled The Truth About Confident Presenting. I have it on my Safari Bookshelf and have been getting lots of good nuggets about prsenting from it, too. It's organized into 51 truths that you can bite off individually, treating it like a reference. I like that style of organization in any book. It's especially good for this subject. Here are the book details: