Industry thought-leader David Chappell is making a four city tour during the month of May.  He will be presenting on "Understanding Software + Services: A Perspective".  David does a  fantastic job covering S+S and gibing insights into how that influences architecture of today's software.  He will also talk about the tools and guidance Microsoft is providing in this area and how you can leverage that when developing S+S solutions, including "in the cloud" services. David is a fantastic speaker and has an engaging style that is also easy to understand.  Seats are filling fast so don't wait - register today. Friend and colleague Denny Boynton was the driving force behind this - way to go Denny.

David will be speaking from 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM in the following cities on the following dates:

Location
Date
Registration Link

Southfield, Michigan
May 13th
[register]

Bloomington, Minnesota
May 15th
[register]

Downer's Grove, Illinois
May 20th
[register]

Houston, Texas
May 22nd
[register]

David is Principal of Chappell & Associates in San Francisco, California. David has been the keynote speaker for dozens of conferences and events in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Australia. His popular seminars have been attended by tens of thousands of developers, architects, and decision makers in forty countries. David’s books have been translated into ten languages and used regularly in courses at MIT, ETH Zurich, and many other universities. In his consulting practice, he has helped clients such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Stanford University, and Target Corporation adopt new technologies, market new products, train their sales staffs, and create business plans.

In this edition of Spaghetti Code, I sit down with Jon Stonecash and talk about Object Relational Mapping.  We start off with an overview for those new to ORM, and then start to look at the various solutions, challenges, and ways to get started.  We also chat about Microsoft's forthcoming Entity Framework and get Jon's opinion on how that effort is looking so far and what still remains to be done.  All in all a very informative interview - thanks Jon!

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Which one to talk about first?  Hmmmmm, I will go with the new baby on the block.

ILM steps up to the plate again by getting a Minneapolis Silverlight/WPF User Group started. From the announcement

This user group is dedicated to anyone who is interested in learning all about SilverLight, WPF, Expressions, and XAML. We intend to provide a healthy mix of deverloper and designer focused presentations and discussions, and will meet once every month. If you are interested in hearing about the upcoming events then you can join the group at http://www.ilmservice.com/silverlight/Membership.aspx

The other piece of great news is the Jason Bock has the date for the next Code Camp locked in! Code Camp 5 will be held on Oct. 11th, 2008 at the New Horizons.  Special thanks to New Horizons for letting the Code Campers use their facilities for this great event.  Make sure to register now!

Magenic will be hosting a great event on using WPF and Silverlight to build next generation UIs.  The event will be at the Microsoft Office in Bloomington, MN on Thursday, April 24th.  For details and registration, click here.  The official promo blurb below:

Join Rockford Lhotka, creator of the popular CSLA .NET framework, and Anthony Handley, user experience specialist at Magenic, as they walk through the process of creating a next generation user experience on top of an n-tier object oriented business layer.  Leveraging their latest project, they’ll show you what is easier and harder than expected.

Featured Products/Topics: Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation

Recommended Audiences: Technology Executives, IT Managers, IT Professionals, CIO, CTO, IT Directors, Solution Architects, Software Developers, Technical Decision Makers, Developers

Some of you may have been heard the announcement at MIX that Microsoft will be creating SQL Server Data Services - basically on-demand data services in the cloud.  From the official SSDS site...

SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) are highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing web services. Businesses use storage resources as needed transforming large upfront capital and operations expenditures into much smaller on-demand costs.

Some cool stuff to be sure.  It's is on-demand, virtually unlimited storage capacity, and its all wrapped in nice REST and SOAP interfaces along with a ready-to-use code library (C# and VB, but with XML as the primary wire format you can go to town with the language/platform of your choice).  At the time, Microsoft was just announcing its intention to deliver this type of service in the future.  Well, the future is getting here pretty quick and you can sign up now to be one of the participants in the closed beta.  You can get some more info about SSDS at the Project Astoria site. 

I interview Rocky Lhotka and Shannon Braun, to luminaries in the Microsoft development world, to discuss their thoughts and impressions of the recent Microsoft MIX Conference held in Las Vegas at the beginning of March.  MIX is Microsoft's premier Next.Web/Web 2.0+ conference that features a "mix" of technology, design, and business topics.

Rocky and Shannon both attended MIX and we spend almost an hour discussing the conference, technology, Silverlight, WPF and more. 

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Yep, it's true.  If you can't make it to a launch event near you, you can now attend one via Second Life.  Heck, even if you attended a launch in person its probably worth checking out the launch in Second Life.  Hit up Zain's blog post with all of the relevant details and session agenda.  There is some stuff you want to do prior to attending, even if you are a Second Lifer already (or at least that is my impression - I have a hard enough time managing one life so I am a newbie when it comes to SL stuff).

Robert has been an ASP.NET and .NET guru in Minnesota for a long time.  He has spoke at conferences all over the country and has participated in community stuff in the Twin Cities whenever we can drag him up here. ;-)  I happy to say that the folks out in Redmond have finally recognized the great work that Robert has been doing and have now made him an ASP.NET MVP!  Way to go Robert.  You can check out Robert's blog here.

From the Apache POI web site...

We are currently working to support the new Office Open XML file formats, such as XLSX and PPTX, which were introduced in Office 2007.

Good news if you need to work with OOXML from the Java world.