Fall Conference Schedule

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.

Duane presenting at HDC15

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:

Level Up with PowerShell, Brent Stewart

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.

Practical Patterns for the Progressing Programmer, Brent Stewart

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.

Double Down with DevOps, Duane Newman

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.

Co-Founders Speaking at KCDC 2015

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.

Nebraska Code Conference 2015

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.

KC .NET User Group: Level Up with PowerShell

IMG_4701_thumbMonday 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.

IMG_4699_thumbWe 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.