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Archive for the ‘Talks’ Category

Dallas TechFest 2011 (Kinect code and slides soon)

21 Aug

I had a lot of fun at Dallas TechFest this year as both a speaker and a participant.  This was my first year to speak at Dallas TechFest and I was both humbled and honored to be selected.  Much thanks to the event organizers for putting together such an excellent event.

I find Techfest exciting for many reasons, one of which is that it takes place at the University of Texas at Dallas.   Due to this my audience was a mix of personalities from freshman students to PhDs to professional developers. 

The code focused talk I gave was entitled “Connect with your Kinect”.  On a technical level the talk demoed broad API functionality found in the beta SDK of Microsoft Kinect.  On a deeper level I sought to inspire developers on the potential of this device and get their interests perked.

I was happy with the reaction to this talk.  I think the audience left enthused and I felt some real energy in the room.

I promised to post some code here, but I have been asked to expand the talk and give it again at the Dallas C# SIG group in about two weeks.  Because of this, I’m going to do some code cleanup and post it shortly there after.  Stay tuned!

 
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Posted in Kinect, Talks

 

Code and Slides from my C# Influences Talk

09 Apr

This morning I gave a talk at the North Texas PC user group on influences to C#.  This group is steadily going through the teach yourself C# in 24 hours book.  This talk gave a glimpse of things to come for that group.

It’s hard to believe that C# and the .NET framework are decagenerians.  Over that time C# has been influences by  academia, innovations in other languages, and the evolution of hardware platforms.  This has made C# a very big language with lots of varied paradigms at work.

This talk discusses some of those influences and ties them back to specific language features and innovations.

 
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Posted in C#, Talks

 

Slides from my SMU Consulting Career Talk

12 Mar

A couple of students asked me to post slides from my SMU presentation on careers in consulting. My slides tend to be more visual than text so I thought I’d break it down a bit as well.

I had two purposes to this talk.  Chris Harper (HR Manager at Sogeti) asked me to talk about the Velocity project and the work we did at Broadlane from a technical perspective to explain what a consulting project looks like.  I also wanted to try and convey some of the benefits I get from being a consultant and working at Sogeti.

Velocity was an excellent project built by an extraordinary team.  Not every project is going to be a Velocity.  Yet the more agile methods taking hold in the industry, the more Velocities I think we’ll all have a chance to participate in.

The first couple slides show Velocity.  I then moved on to talk a bit about agile methods.  Then I discussed some of the core technologies that made up Velocity.  I concludes with some reasons to look at consulting as a career and some book recommendations.

I enjoyed giving this talk and meeting some of the impressive teachers and students at SMU.

 
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Posted in Talks

 

MVVM Smack Down Videos Now Online

12 Dec

In November myself and some friends presented an “MVVM Smack Down” at the North Texas Silverlight User Group.  We did a head to head comparison of Prism 4, The MVVM Light toolkit, Caliburn Micro, and Jounce.  It was presented with a bit of friendly banter and was meant really to enlighten, compare, and contrast more than to judge the various frameworks.

The videos are available here:

 

For many of us this was our first technical presentation in front of a public audience.  There was areas for improvement and I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but I think all things considered it went fairly well.

I also wanted to give a special thanks to Shawn Weisfeld for recording the sessions for INETA (and all the sessions he records).

 
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Posted in MVVM, Silverlight, Talks

 

Code and Slides from Introduction to Silverlight Talk

11 Dec

This morning I gave a talk called “Introduction to Silverlight” at the North Texas PC User Group.

WhatIsSilverlight

 

I had a great time giving this talk. Silverlight is the most fun technology Microsoft has created (Well, after the Xbox of course).  I enjoy having the opportunity to share that fun with others.

Get the codes and slides here: Intro to Silverlight.12.11.2010.zip

 
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Posted in Silverlight, Talks