Rune Grothaug from Microsoft and NDC has interviewed Scott Hanselman with questions from the Norwegian .Net User Group! Scott will do the keynote at the Norwegian Developer Conference this year and will also have sessions on IIS7 and ASP.NET MVC.

If you want to attend the first ever Norwegian Developers Conference you should keep an eye on this site: http://www.ndc2008.no/ They will start to sell conference passes from 1st of March and I will definitely be in the virtual cue. Unofficial rumors say that a two day conference pass will cost around 3000 Norwegian kroner (about $500 or €380). B.t.w. I wonder what the url will be next year? ;) Hopefully they'll get the www.ndc.no domain by then. Looks like it's not used for anything else than sponsored links (that's why I'm not linking). Someone probably whispered that MS is involved in the conference and their dreaming of an insane price for the domain, which their probably going to get... yea right!

The 27th of February Anders Norås will come and have two presentations on Domain Specific Languages (DSL). First we only planned one, but when I asked Anders if the presentation would be strictly .Net he suggested having two presentations, one on .Net and one on Java :) I thought this was a great opportunity to get the two local communities in Bergen together under the same roof. Sometimes there is sessions that is not directly connected to a technology platform and these types of presentations are great for joining forces and share experiences. Hopefully NNUG will visit JavaBin next time something like this comes around.

I will post more info about the sessions later and if you're a member of NNUG you will get the meeting invitation shortly. The same goes for JavaBin members.

Really looking forward to this and I hope to see you there.

Mark 17th and 18th of July June (Programutvikling's event site mention both June and July, but June is the correct month) in your calendar. Microsoft Norway and Programutvikling has managed to attract some great names. Check this out: Scott Hanselman, Roy Osherove, David Chappell, Mats Torgersen, Rafael Lukawiecki and Mary Poppendieck! Is that a great line-up or what? I wonder if they got this idea from my Developer Conference in Bergen post? ;)

For now there's not much information out there, but you'll definitely hear more the coming months. Rune Grothaug's blog from the Microsoft DPE team is a great source for events in Norway. Programutvikling has the event on their site here.

In my previous post about Developer conference in Bergen I said some not so nice things about the .Net community in Bergen (also called criticism). After today's meeting I take it all back. Everybody that showed up today proved me wrong. On previous meetings we were satisfied if 20 people showed up. Actually 20 people is/was our goal for average attendance for 2008. So what happened today? 43 people showed up to see Erik Leivestad and Thomas Eyde talk about Agile Project Management and Test Driven Development! For a time there I was worried that we didn't have seats for everybody. I really hope that this is the new norm at NNUG Bergen and not just a onetime incident.

We also did a quick survey before we started the meeting. We asked how many project managers and how many developers was in the audience. To my surprise almost everybody was developers. I was thinking that because of the Agile PM talk we might have attracted a different type of crowd than we usually do, but that was not the case.

The second question was how many was here for the first time. About 50% of the crowd raised their hand. This was not a surprise for me since I checked the statistics the day before, but it's nice to get it confirmed :)

The last question was how many will come to the next meeting, and that was depressing. The response was 3-4 hands at best. I guess you where thinking: "let’s have this meeting first and see how it goes" :)

A big thank you to everybody that showed up today and a special thanks to Erik and Thomas for spending their spare time to educate us about agile processes and tools. It's really awarding to see a big crowd showing up when you've spent a lot of time (without getting paid) getting speakers and subjects that you hope people will like and find interesting. Finally I hope to see you on our next meeting the 27th of February. Until then, happy coding!

During my involvement in NNUG I've been playing with the thought of having a developer conference in Bergen. Funny enough I first started to consider this when we had some problems getting people to come to our NNUG events. I couldn't figure out why Bergen had such a low participation when other (smaller) cities in Norway managed quite good. I've also got reports from Microsoft saying that MSDN Live didn't do to well in Bergen either. Is this just how it is in Bergen? We just don't want to get our hands on new knowledge? Or is there so much info on the web that we don't see the need for meeting up in person? Maybe Bergen is just the worst city in Norway to be a developer? We just go to work to get our paycheck and don't really want to be bothered with updating our knowledge unless forced to? I don't think so and sure don't hope so! My impression is that the Java community in Bergen does not have the same challenges.

We will of course always have Mort though (see Jeff's articles here and here). Maybe Bergen is just overloaded with Morts? ;) However, I think a dev conference in Bergen has something to offer him as well.

So why do I want a dev conference in a city where developers don't participate in their local .Net community? First of all it's because I don't think the above is true. I think there is a lot of great developers and companies in Bergen working with development that would both see the benefit and be proud to host a dev conf in their city. Second, I think NNUG will benefit greatly from this and raise the visibility around the .Net community in the city. Thirdly, I have too much free time on my hand so I'm looking for something to do in my spare time (kidding).

So what do you think my dear reader? Is there room for a dev conference in Bergen? Would you come? And even better, would you volunteer to make this a reality? I'm volunteering now, but I need some helpers... :)

You might state that we already have a developer conference in Bergen and you would be right. It's called Roots, but I'm thinking about a different kind of conference. Roots is an international niche conference around OO (Recent Object Oriented Trends), but I want a general Norwegian (Nordic) dev conf. Even though I'm a .Net guy and would like .Net tracks, I also think there is room for Java and agile tracks.

And to all of you who have been going to NNUG regularly I apologize. The criticism in this post is to everyone except you ;)

MSDN Live is again visiting Bergen. This time February the 5th to be exact. Topics are WPF, Entity Framework, ASP.net futures, MVC and SQL Server. Find the complete agenda and sign up here.

When I was at Øredev I wrote two ([1][2]) blog posts about the conference, and these got picket up by Øredev Project Manager Michael Tiberg. Yesterday I found this in my email box:

I really think this is a good way of letting the community know that they listen.

If you've ever been to one of Roy Osherove's talks you've probably heard him do one of his songs at the end. It's very funny and the crowd loves it. There are two videos at YouTube from TechEd Barcelona 2007 you can check out to see what I mean. Notice the guy behind the podium on the second video? That's Pavel Kapustin, co-worker of mine in CMA Contiki :) I think he got Roy's book for helping him out with the PP decks.

Every Build You Break

Reflection song

Update: Added links.

Update2: Link to XAMLPad

Some notes about conference conditions

My last day at Øredev. I’ve had a setback. I’m unable to attend the testing tracks that I want because it’s just too freaking cold in that room. This is true for Test, Project Mgmt and Architecture tracks as well, which is at the same area. I had to go to a .Net track (which is normal room temp) and drink a bucket of tea to get my blood flowing again. And I live in Norway, f%&#ing close to the North Pole! They should defiantly do something about this! I saw Michael Tiberg (Øredev PM) today and was thinking of telling him, but he looked very busy, so I didn’t. I regret it now though.

Sessions

First one that morning (in a freaking cold room!) Testing on Agile Teams by Jonathan Kohl. He basically told his story as a tester and test lead on agile projects and his related experience. He had struggled with getting acceptance of doing testing on agile teams because of their unit testing approach, which they thought was enough. I totally agree with Jonathan that it’s not. Software is not used by computers (not exclusively at least), and can hardly be fully tested by computers. We need human testing in order to find logical errors that computers are unable to discover. Not only that; I don’t believe that you can cover all areas with automated testing. It would be nice if he had been more specific in certain eras, but he had a lot of ground to cover and I understand why he didn’t.

The second session was LINQ by Eric Meijer. I only attended the first 15 minutes, because it was totally not as expected and I had to make some phone calls as well, so can’t really say much about this one.

Back into the cold area (which got slightly warmer) for Holistic Outsourcing by Matt MacGregor. Lot of good reasons for not outsourcing IT competence. I almost felt sorry for Matt and his company for what they’ve been through during their outsourcing process. Interesting subject, but have to keep most of my notes and thoughts for myself for now, because we’re outsourcing as well ;) One of my conclusions though was: Avoid fixed price/time contracts so that the company you use don’t get hung up in your specs and use it as an argument for not delivering the functionality you really want. Change in requirements will be costly if you do.

It was now time for another talk by Jeff Sutherland (PM with Scrum). Very similar to his previous talk, only slightly changed to target PM’s. Personally I’ve read and watched a lot of Dr. Sutherland’s work before, so nothing new for me. Key points:

• Why do software companies as the only industry in the world tolerate such a high failure rate on projects before taking action? Solution: Scrum.
• How do you bid for fixed price projects when you are Agile? You need to do the same upfront work as in waterfall projects (estimate, spec, document etc), but force the client to be a part of your process (e.g. review meetings, priorities etc).
• Government projects are often regulated by government rules forcing waterfall processes.
  

Last session of the conference for me was Advanced development with WPF and Silverlight by Stefan Wick from MS. I was expecting advanced development, but got 20 demo’s of Silverlight implementations. I was cool though! He showed some apps with XAML only, in XamlPad. Personally I took notes about ScaleTransform and Xml Data Binder which I have to look more into.

Panel Debate

This was cool. Andy Hunt, Matt Gibbs, Kevlin Henney and Dan North where discussing accidental complexity. You could ask them questions by writing it on a note and pass it to one of the “conference helpers”. I got my question debated :)

First impression

I didn’t go to TechEd this year and thought I’d try out this conference in Sweden called Øredev (www.oredev.com). The agenda that I found on their website was pretty good. I really liked the tracks:

• Java
• .Net
• Methods & Tools
• Embedded Systems
• Architecture
• Test
• Project Management
• User Experience
• Case Studies
• Future & Trends
  

Should be enough to choose from for conference lasting two days :) It was difficult to choose which sessions to go to though, but for me it was really nice to have something else than MS related sessions to go to.

The Conference

The welcome speech and introduction by Øredev Project Manager, Michael Tiberg (and someone else that I don’t know who was), was not very impressive and kind of gave it all a bad start. It might be me being used to very fancy welcome speeches in other conferences, but these two guys was mediocre to say the least (or maybe it was just bad English). Anyway, Andy Hunt (the keynote speaker) is experienced and I soon forgot all about the shaky start. His presentation was good. He’s a funny guy (at least he was today) and gave us a walkthrough of the history of computing and development. Always nice to know where your roots are.

Feedback

The way they handled feedback at Øredev was quite nice. On your way out from the session you picked a card (green, yellow or red) that you drop in a bucket. Red is of course not good and green is, and I leave up to you to decide what yellow is.

Lunch

What can I say… Handouts of food, nowhere (at least not dedicated) to sit down and relax while eating, cold conference hall (had to put on my jacked to not freeze my but off). Not impressed.

The talks

The first session I had decided to attend was Model View Controller Framework by Matt Gibs, but this got changed with something else (at least they renamed it) and I decided in the last minute to go to Dynamic lang. for statically typed minds by Niclas Nilsson. This was quite good. I’ve not looked much at the dynamic languages out there yet (except from what I’ve read), and this was a nice introduction that gave me a bit of insight into the different ones. Niclas compared static typed languages to dynamic languages and showed the differences by examples. He also talked about the influence dynamic languages have had on C# and Java with extension methods, LINQ etc.

Next session up was Testable Architecture by Ron Jacobs. It turns out that Ron couldn’t make it for some reason (probably liked TechEd and Barcelona too much and decided to stay), so Michael Feathers and Dan North jumped to the rescue. Those two guys pulled that one off nice! They only got asked to do the presentation the night before, but that didn’t seem to bother them. They did the session like an interactive discussion panel (like they did here), and it gave me good value. One of my takeaways from this session was that I have to read Michael’s book about legacy code.

Next up was Implementing and extending VSTS. Not very impressed, though the two presenters (Mattias Olausson & Peter Blomqvist) have created a project on Codeplex which is the result of their implementation of VSTS. It wasn’t that it was bad, but they’ve could have done much better.

ParallelFX: Concurrency Library Ext. by Joe Duffy. I decided to go to this to see what MS has done and are thinking around parallel processing. I got an idea of what they’re doing and which problems they address. I would like to see this being implemented it the CRL somehow and automatically kick in when needed, but I guess that is the same as having threading work the same way, which is not very realistic. My point is that I just don’t want to be bothered by this. I just want my code to execute it the fastest way possible, making use of as all processors power available. Joe also briefly mentioned PLINQ and showed how it’s related to what they’re doing. To sum up: Parallel.For and Parallel.Do

What to Test and When by Udi Dahan. I believe that any good tester should be able to break an application within 10 minutes. Udi is no different and managed to crash Power Point not once, not twice, but tree times! The poor conference guy had to restart his machine every time. This interrupted the session a bit and was not planned (as you might be tempted to think). Anyway, Udi managed quite well and I got a few ideas and suggestions along the way. I’m looking forward to implement some real testing where I work (in addition to unit testing that is).

Last session of the day was The Agile Enterprise by Jeff Sutherland. Don't think I was the main target for his talk (more CTO, CEO, COO stuff), but I just had to see Jeff in real life and say hello. He is after all the founder of Scrum together with Ken Schwaber. During his talk I still managed to come up with a few new ideas for our team, even though it wasn’t really related to anything he said. This is just a typical example of how your mind get motivated and constantly come up with new ideas at conferences like these.

The wait is almost over. At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced the release date of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. Check out the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

On Wednesday NNUG Bergen was lucky enough to get Einar Ingebrigtsen to speak for us. He held a great session about XNA and some game dev history. Einar did game development for about 8 years and then jumped to business development. His background was perfect to highlight some of the similarities between the two. Especially interesting was the similarities around layering.

Einar is involved in many things and one of his latest projects is Game Camp. On November 23rd Game Camp will kick off with a great agenda in Oslo. Go here to check out the agenda and registration.

Another thing Einar has been doing lately is creating a 3D engine for Silverlight called Balder. As you may know Silverlight is a subset of WPF and one of the things they removed was the 3D stuff. But that didn’t stop him. Check out his 3D project over at CodePlex. To see the engine in action, check out this demo.

Most of us are back from vacation and so are Norwegain .Net User Group in Bergen. Check out the agenda and register for the August meeting here: http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-August/

If you’re not a member of NNUG, go here to register: http://www.nnug.no/Profil/RegistrerDeg/

While I'm on it, you should check out the agenda for upcoming MSDN Live as well: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032343418&Culture=nb-NO

and if your a student or new to asp.net you should check this out the introduction to asp.net development.

Yes, it’s important to distinguish between the two. At the partner conference in Denver Kim Saunders (Senior Director, SQL Server Marketing) said that they launch SQL Server 2008 in February, but the actual release will be in Q2. And by launching they mean that they have all the marketing material and the final product information, but not the product.

As for Visual Studio and Windows Server I have not yet heard anything similar, so I'm still thinking 27th for these.

I'm in Denver at Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference, and I find it strange. The conference itself is not strange, but it's strange for me. I'm a developer/architect and not a sales guy. I'm used to devcons where the primary purpose is not to interact with as many people as possible, but to get your hands on as much information as physically possible. Here it's a total different game. The sessions are just not the most important. Making connections and meeting up with people you've been matched with by the conferencing tool is!

The first day I was the only attendant from my company since our COO arrived later that day. Because of this I was supposed to set up some meetings with potential partners. I just have to admit that this is so not me! So this brings up the question; what am I doing here really?

When I first got the opportunity to attend this conference my first thought was that this was not for me, but when I looked at the agenda and started to read a bit more about the conference I changed my mind. This was really an opportunity to get a different view of Microsoft technology and set it in another perspective. I think most devcons focus on the how, but at the partner conference its more the why.

Another difference with this conference is that there are actually women here! We tech guys are not spoiled with having many women on our conferences and I think that is really bad. I notice right away that this conference has a different tune to it just because of the mixed gender.

To sum it up I (surprisingly) can recommend this conference for tech people as well because of the overview you’ll get of the technology, but be prepared and bring your social skills! And don’t expect 400 lectures...

Update: PDC 07 is postponed! Check out http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/events/bb288534.aspx, which will announce the new date when it’s ready.

One of the highlights of the year for me is going to a devcon (developer conference). People I work with have asked me if I could recommend any events this year, so I wrote down the ones I knew about and googled for some others. Here’s the list I came up with:

• MEDC 2007 (Berlin June 25-26 (Mobile & Embedded))

• DDD5 (Reading, UK (1 day free event by the UK developer community groups) June 30)

• PDC 07 (LA, USA October 2-5)

• TechEd Developers Europe (Barcelona November 5-9)

• International Developers Conference (Vancouver (Canada) November 26-30)

There are defiantly more events out there, but these were the ones I found in 5 minutes. Hopefully one of these events will be of interest for you. Enjoy!

Just a reminder for MSDN Live in Bergen the 23rd of April. This time Microsoft have joined forces with Norwegian .Net User Group and me and John St. Clair are speaking at the last session of the day. I will talk about migration to WCF and John will do Debugging, Tracing, and Administration: Tips & Tricks. Here you'll find details about the "NNUG Agenda".

Great news! We have invited Christian Weyer from ThinkTecture to speak at NNUG in Oslo, Bergen and Kristiansand. I’m really looking forward to this. Christian is a well known speaker and especially known for his excelent expertise in SOA.

I had the opportunity to see him talk at TechEd in Barcelona last year, and this guy really knows his stuff. Come to our meeting in Bergen at May 30th and please tell all your friends and co workers!  For those of you not living in Bergen, he will also talk in Oslo the 29th and Kristiansand the 31st. More info will be available at NNUG later.

I’ve just registered for a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course in Oslo. The course will be held from March 28-29. See here for details.

The course is held by Danube Technologies, the guys behind ScrumWorks. If you haven’t heard about this tool I absolutely recommend you check it out. I like the simplicity of the tool, the ease of use and it’s free. In short it has a backlog and a sprint. To move items to a sprint you just drag/drop from the backlog into the sprint, as simple as it gets. They recently came out with a Pro version of the tool that is not free, but I haven’t tried this yet.

Don't forget to register for MSDN Live in Bergen 13. February! It's no surprise that Ajax and IIS 7 attract a lot of people to this event, so register now before it's full. You don't want to become the guy, who wasn't there, would you? ;) You can even pick up some Tips & Tricks for VS 2005. If this Tips & Tricks session is the same as at TechEd, you'll have to see it!

If you live in Bergen (Norway) and working with Microsoft .Net this is the place to be on Tuesday the 26th. And if you’re not you can always catch the same show in Trondheim (28th) and Oslo (October 9th). Go here to sign up.