Our Co-Founders are headed to Nebraska.Code() conference next week and will be presenting 4 sessions on Friday, May 20th. It’s a great opportunity for our team to share our experiences and give back to the community through speaking and we are pleased to have been selected to speak at Nebraska.Code() again this year.
Humanitarian Toolbox
In addition to speaking, Nebraska.Code() gives us a chance to contribute our skills to help others. The conference will be hosting the Humanitarian Toolbox project with a code-a-thon that will allow attendees to work on developing software tools to help with disaster relief around the globe. We are pleased to be able to contribute our time and skills to this great cause and hope to see many of our fellow speakers and attendees at the Code-A-Thon.
Speaking (Friday, May 20th)
Getting to Market Faster with VSTS
11:45 AM (Breakout B1)
Visual Studio Team Services is Microsoft’s next evolution of Visual Studio Online. Come see what is new and learn how VSTS can make your life better. We will examine the different modules available and look at a sample workflow taking us from project creation through deployment. Along the way we will look at how we can use VSTS to setup our source control, continuous integration, automated testing, continuous deployment and more. VSTS is a powerful tool, come see if it is a good fit for you and your team.
Practical Patterns for the Progressing Programmer
2:15 PM (Breakout A1)
Understanding software design patterns is critical for every developer who strives to be top-tier. Come join us as we explore some of the most common design patterns and discuss how you can leverage them to make your life easier. We will look at some real world code examples and learn to recognize common problems and how to use different design patterns to create elegant solutions. Learn to spot common anti-patterns and the pitfalls they bring. Join us and take the next step in your career.
Xamarin Forms: Writing one app to rule all your platforms
9:45 AM (Breakout B1)
Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone using this Open Source toolset.
Branded for Success
1:00 PM (Breakout D)
Everyone has a personal brand! The question is are you in control of yours, or letting others define it for you? What does your brand say about you? Are you a Coca-Cola, Pepsi or RC Cola? Brand isn't just a logo and website, it's your first impression on potential employers, clients, and even your co-workers. Let's take a look at the relevance of a personal brand in today's developer market and what you can do to take control of yours.
It's been just a short 2 weeks since the Heartland Developers Conference wrapped up and we are already looking forward to the St Louis Days of .NET in November.
Heartland Developers Conference
This year's Heartland Developers Conference was another great experience for us. Co-Founder Duane Newman presented a well attended session titled "Double Down with DevOps" and had lots of interaction from the audience. He talked about the value of embracing IT into your development process and how approaching IT operations from a developers perspective can impact your daily work life in a positive way. While there were many faces we recognized from past years we enjoyed meeting many new speakers and attendees. Our team is already looking forward to returning next year.
St. Louis Days of .NET
We are now in preparations for our next road trip. We will be heading to the St. Louis Days of .NET conference November 12th - 14th. It will be at the Ameristar Conference Center in St. Charles, MO. The great part about the meeting place is that once you arrive you never have to go outside until the conference is over (this can be a big deal in Missouri in November, last year it snowed). Both Brent and Duane will be presenting sessions this year. Brent will be presenting Level Up with PowerShell and Practical Patterns for the Progressing Programmer and Duane will be presenting Double Down with DevOps. We hope to see you all there.
Here are descriptions of the sessions we’ll be presenting:
Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool. In this session we will look at how PowerShell is built on top of the .NET framework and how you can leverage you existing skills to automate different aspects of your development/deployment processes.
Understanding software design patterns is critical for every developer who strives to be top-tier. Come join us as we explore some of the most common design patterns and discuss how you can leverage them to make your life easier. We will look at some real world code examples and learn to recognize common problems and how to use different design patterns to create elegant solutions. Learn to spot common anti-patterns and the pitfalls they bring. Join us and take the next step in your career.
Are you ready to ease your deployment pains while at the same time making yourself more marketable? DevOps may be a hot buzzword that will get recruiters on the phone, but it will do more for you than just increasing your resume appeal. Most of us aren't blessed with a crack IT team (if we even have one) to handle operations and we are stuck doing it all. Taking a developers approach to operations by creating repeatable automated tasks will save you time and headaches. We'll take a look at some of the popular tools available to you and go over tips and tricks that I've had to learn the hard way over the years. Would you rather spend an hour watching builds, copying files, and trying to remember all the config values to change only to beat your head against the wall because you didn't stop some service when you started, or just click a button and watch IT Crowd while your code is built, deployed and tested for you? That's what I thought.
I hope you are as excited about the 2015 Kansas City Developers Conference as we are. This year both Brent and Duane will be presenting breakout sessions. Additionally they will be presenting a brand new workshop on Xamarin.Forms development. It’s going to be a lot of fun and we hope to see you there.
Cross-Platform Mobile with C# & Xamarin
This full day 8 hour workshop will be presented on Wednesday by both Duane and Brent. We’ll be helping attendees get up and going writing their first cross-platform app using Xamarin.Forms().
Level Up with PowerShell – Brent Stewart
Thursday 9:00 AM – Room 3501D
Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool.
Xamarin Forms: Writing One App to Rule All Your Platforms – Duane Newman
Thursday 10:10 AM – Room 3501B
Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
Co-Founder Duane Newman had the honor to visit with STL Tech Talk’s JJ Hammond while at the 2014 St. Louis Days of .NET conference. Duane was speaking at the conference about getting started with Xamarin.Forms. The interview focused on how Xamarin is helping C# developers be productive in mobile development and the improvements that Xamarin.Forms offers.
Recorded on November 14, 2014, it was just recently rediscovered and posted for viewing.
Duane Newman - St. Louis Days of .NET 2014
We are excited to have the opportunity for both Brent and Duane to present sessions at Nebraska.Code() in just a couple weeks. If you are in the NE/KS area and are looking for a great conference to learn about new tech, network, and see some presentations from sought after speakers (like Mads Kristensen, Richard Campbell, Carl Franklin, and Pete Brown) you should consider attending NCC March 19th-21st in Lincoln, NE.
If you will be attending NCC we hope we get to see you in our sessions. We are both presenting on Friday (3/20) afternoon with Brent speaking at 3:30 and Duane at 4:45.
Brent will be presenting Level Up with PowerShell at 3:30pm
Time is a valuable and precious resource, and it seems there are never enough hours in a day. Come learn how PowerShell can empower you to be a more effective developer. We'll look at how PowerShell can be used to help solve common problems and examine what makes it such a rich and powerful tool.
Duane will be presenting: Xamarin Forms: Writing one app to rule all your platforms at 4:45
Are you seeking the Holy Grail of Write Once Run Anywhere app development? Then Xamarin Forms might be what you are looking for. This session will give you the information you need to understand Xamarin Forms and how it can be used to lower the friction of cross platform mobile development. You will see how easy it is to simultaneously create your app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
Monday night Co-Founder Brent Stewart delivered a great presentation at the local Kansas City .NET User Group on how PowerShell can improve your daily tasks. He introduced the core concepts of PowerShell and many common uses. He also dispelled some common misunderstandings about what PowerShell is good for and who should use it. After that he covered the naming conventions of CmdLets and some of the more common commands you will encounter. Then he went through a series of exercises showing the basics of scripting useful utilities developers can do with PowerShell. The talk was very dynamic and Brent kept the user group entertained with his wit and engaged in the talk, providing many opportunities for audience participation.
We love working with the user group as Co-Organizers with Lee and John but it is always a good feeling when we get to also have the chance to share the tips and tricks we’ve discovered over the years with our peers.
Slides and code samples from his talk can be found here.
Last week we attended the St Louis Days of Dot Net conference in the greater St. Louis, MO area. It was a great opportunity to network with other developers in the area and promote Alien Arc. They put on a great conference and we had a good time at the attendee parties/mixers.
But we were not just there as attendees this year. Co-Founder Duane Newman presented a talk on doing Cross-Platform Mobile Development using Xamarin Forms. Since this is a new topic he was asked to present it twice. He outlined the mobile market and the importance of distributing to all three major platforms to maximize your target audience and increase your potential ROI. He followed this up with an explanation of the Xamarin tools and how Xamarin Forms can be used to enable quick entry into the market with a cross platform solution with very high code and UI sharing between the 3 platforms.
The talk was a good experience for Duane and we received good feedback from the audience and had questions after both sessions. It was great to be able to share things we’ve learned with the community and hope to do it again soon.
One of our founders, Duane Newman, will be presenting at the upcoming St. Louis Days of .NET conference in St. Louis, Missouri. He will be speaking on Xamarin's new mobile UI offering: Xamarin.Forms. We encourage you to come to this great conference in the St. Louis area and stop by for Duane's session.