Tennessee Technical Conferences: devLink and Codestock

There are two great regional conferences coming up this year in Tennessee: devLink and Codestock.


I was fortunate enough to work with John Kellar on devLink from the beginning and it is great to see how large it has grown. This year it is back at its original (and best IMHO) location at David Lipscomb University in Nashville. It has also grown to three days (August 13th to 15th) with a still unbeatable price of $100 ($75 for early bird registration). It is also a little unfair to call it a "regional" conference, since it draws people from all over the USA and quite a few from outside the country.


Codestock in Knoxville on June 26 and 27th, is headed up by Mike Neel and is in its second year. For $25 you get two days of national thought leaders, talented regional speakers, and great open spaces to discuss topics you are interested in.

You can follow these conferences on twitter at @devlink and @codestock. Both events have out a call for speakers, so get your abstracts in now to be a part of these great conferences.

Steve Andrews' List of Team System Twitter Folk

My devLink buddy, Steve Andrews, has posted a great list of Team System peeps and their Twitter IDs, blogs, etc. This is a great list and I am honored that Steve included me on it. Anyone interested in learning more about Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server, follow and subscribe to these guys!

Comfortably Scrum: How XP Are You?

There is a great post on InfoQ about an online version of a survey (much like the one I talked about in my How Scrum Are You? post) from the book The Art of Agile Development. This is a great book on XP and Sebastian Hermida did a great job adapting it to the web. The site is called abetterteam.org.

It's a short quiz totally from the team perspective. Once completed, they present you with a great report to show you your strengths and weaknesses. They match areas to practices than can help you improve your score. I ran through this several times thinking back about different projects and clients to get an idea of where I personally have been and grown my practices. They also have an option to track you results over time.

I'd love to take the Nokia Test and create a web application like this. If anyone has some free time to loan me, I'll do just that!.

Nashville ArReady Event, Friday, March 13, 2009 9:00 AM

Come one, come all to our quarterly ArcReady event in Nashville on Friday, March 13, 2009 9:00 AM. The topics is "Architecting for the cloud" with two sessions:

Session 1: Cloud Services

In our first session we will explore the current state of cloud services. We will then look at how applications should be architected for the cloud and explore a reference application deployed on Windows Azure. We will also look at the services that can be built for on premise application, using .NET Services. We will also address some of the concerns that enterprises have about cloud services, such as regulatory and compliance issues.

Session 2: Mesh and Live Services

In our second session we will take a slightly different look at cloud based services by exploring Live Mesh and Live Services. Live Mesh is a data synchronization client that has a rich API to build applications on. Live services are a collection of APIs that can be used to create rich applications for your customers. Live Services are based on internet standard protocols and data formats.

Go here for more information and to register for free. Seating is limited so sign up early. These sessions have great content and also provide an opportunity to socialize with other .NET architects in the area. We would like to get good, consistent attendance to keep events like this coming to Nashville, so please tell your friends and co-workers.

Visual Studio Team System Social Network Site: Team System Live

Chris Tullier has created a site on Ning.com called Team System Live. It has a great calendar of events for upcoming in person events, live meetings, web casts, chats, etc. all concerning VSTS and TFS. The are many TFS experts as members already. If you are interested in Visual Studio Team System or Team Foundation Server, sign up now!