Leadership and people skills are the focus for this upcoming quarter's ArcReady tour.

 

Professional Patterns on the Job

You're smart. You deliver. What more could your company want from you?  Why don’t they come to you for the big technical decisions? Why won’t they listen to your proposals? It seems like everyone has an agenda and they’re doing everything they can to kill your great ideas.

Join us this quarter as we focus on the soft skills that architects need to master. Learning these skills will boost your emotional intelligence and help you become a more professional, well rounded contributor. You’ll gain insight into the architect’s role as leader, influencer, and business professional and learn how to leverage your position to become a positive force within your organization.

 

Session 1: Mastering the Soft Skills
In this session, we’ll discuss key interpersonal skills and how they can affect your projects and career. We cover how to positively connect with humans, how to participate in and influence the business processes you support, and how to transcend your technical role and maximize your connections with all members of your organization.

 

Session 2: Organizational Dynamics
This session examines the dynamic nature of large organizations – their structures, decision making processes, and political landscapes. We’ll discuss the goals of key business and technical decision makers and their influence on architects and software projects. We’ll conclude with some strategies for maximizing the soft skills from Session 1 to ensure successful outcomes for your projects and career.

Please register using the links below and join us for this great event:

Nov 4    Omaha, NE 

Nov 6    West Des Moines, IA

Nov 12  St. Louis, MO

Nov 13  Overland Park, KS

Nov 20  Minneapolis, MN

I'll be speaking at the St. Louis .NET User Group tonight. Here's the abstract for the talk:

 

Introduction to 3D Gaming

Ever wonder what it takes to put together a blockbuster 3D game? Wonder no more. In this talk, we’ll discuss game theory as it relates to today’s gaming industry, examine the essential components of a 3D game, and survey the roles and specialties involved in making a AAA title.

 

Please come out if you're interested in gaming and what it takes to create a blockbuster title.

 

Update:

Thanks for the great turnout everyone. This was one of my most interactive presentations ever!

 

Here are the slides and a link to SlideShare if you want to download the deck.

I'll be speaking at the Kansas City .NET User Group this coming Tuesday night. Here's the abstract for the talk:

 

Advanced Object-Oriented Programming - Laws, Principles, and Idioms with .NET

Ever heard of the Law of Demeter? How about the Liskov Substitution Principle? This talk introduces key object-oriented laws and principles currently used in our field and provides guidance for their use when building applications on the .NET platform.

 

Please come out and join us if you live in the area.

 

Update:

Thanks to everyone for attending last night. Great meeting! Here are the slides and a link to SlideShare if you wish to download them.

 

With all the planning for Microsoft’s new fiscal year, our event schedule has been off to a slow start but we're finally getting the gears moving. This quarter’s ArcReady talk will be about architecting large scale distributed systems using all the latest technologies. We'll be showing off a great new architecture analysis technique that I think you will benefit from greatly on your projects. It’s some of the best architectural guidance I’ve ever seen come out of Microsoft.

 

Events will be held in 4 cities across Microsoft’s North Central District.  Please join us for one of these free events.

Minneapolis, MN September 16, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

Omaha, NB September 18, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

Kansas City, MO September 23, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

St. Louis, MO September 25, 2008 9:00am – 11:30 am

 

Hope to see you there.

Wow, what a great event today. I'd say we had over 500 developers in attendance for the developer track and the excitement level was very high. We had a lot of great questions and I hope everyone was able to see something new. Thanks again for attending this special event.

 

As promised, I've uploaded my slide deck to my skydrive. Here are some links directly to the demos and resources I used for the talk:

Simon Guest's UX IQ

Mix08 - the site was down during the presentation, but back up now. Great XBAP + ClickOnce example

Microsoft Sync Framework demos - webcasts straight from the dev team

Obtaining record changes from SQL Server 2008

 

I also want to thank the Kansas City .NET User Group for their warm welcome after the show and a special thanks to Jeff Julian for extending the launch out to the community with his Overview of Visual Studio 2008 talk.