Maryse and I are very happy to announce the dates (March 8-12, 2010) of our next event.  This DevTeach event will be a Special Edition and a Limited edition. Let me explain: It’s a special edition because we are doing it in the Microsoft Canada Headquarters conference center in Mississauga with special speakers and it’s a limited edition because we are limiting the registration to 240. But that’s not all. We are also reducing the price by $249 and we are keeping our early bird discount.  Combine this with the possibility to register to a pre-conference or a post-conference you really get the best training with the finest speakers for a really good price.

Right now we are looking for speakers and if you have been speaking, we encourage you to submit your sessions. The deadline to submit is December 4^th. Check out the tech chair team and the track we are covering at this link.

http://www.devteach.com/TechChair.aspx 

When you attend a conference you have the chance of seeing a dozen of sessions.  Some aren’t  exactly what you expected others are right on. And once in a while you are lucky to see a presentation that meets all of your expectations and more.   That happened to me on Tuesday when I attended  Jacob Sebastian’s session called ‘’ Create powerful XML Schema collections to validate your XML documents ‘’. Creating validation for XML is very confusing and complex. You can get intimated by this task very quickly. Jacob designed a 75 min. session that covers this complex subject in a very simple way.  That’s understandable because Jacob spend a year on writing a book about the subject. See this link for h is book.

On www.amazon.Com

Many developers need this skill  and I asked Jacob if I could use his material to teach this subject in my local User group. Jacob agreed so I will work on creating my own session on this subject. I hope I can show this to you soon. Below you can find a Picture of me and Jacob.    

Jacob Sebastian, Paul l.,Jean-Rene Roy

Check out Jacob Blog: http://beyondrelational.com/blogs/jacob/ 

I’ve been attending this conference since 2004 but it’s my first time there as a speaker. The event is a first class style conference and the attendance  here is 2 266. The session that I presented was ‘’What is MS Sync. Frame work’’.  What’s cool is that some of the guy’s of the developing team of the Sync. Framework  attended my session. For those that fallow the Sync. Framework 2.0, the CTP came out in October 2008 and the release version came out October 18^th , 2009. When I prepared this session it was one year ago with the CTP. What the guys from MS pointed out is that MS released many new features since CTP including provider to sync with Oracle. Now if you want to know more about all the new cool features about the Sync. Framework take a look at the Home of Sync Framework link below.   

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/default.aspx

On Saturday, October 24^th 2009, the .NET community of Montreal is organizing a full day of training on Silverlight. This training will be very good because  it will be done by five leading speakers in the industry. Laurent Duveau and Dominic Sévigny from RunAtServer are leading this initiative with Louis-Philippe Pinsonneault and Pascal Groulx.  Guy Barrette (Montreal RD) is also joining this fantastic line-up for this full day of training.  All speakers that I unmarred and respect very much. You will learn how to build business applications with the Expression and RIA Services suite.  This is a unique opportunity for the French speaking developers form Montreal, Quebec and Ottawa. To attend this you must be a member of the .NET Community of Montreal. If you are not a member you will need to pay 25$ to become member. In my book this is a very good deal. But do not wait to register, space is limited to 222 seats and 50% are already filled.

This is the information link:Click Here
This is the registration link::Click Here

After doing this popular BI Booth Camp in Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa DevTeach is now doing it in Toronto (Oct. 15,16) at the Regency HYATT. Business Intelligence is one of the top most IT priorities and is increasingly pervasive within organizations large and small. Business Intelligence touches many aspects of our daily lives, from enhancing our online and retail shopping experience to the healthcare we receive. BI also impacts the quality of decisions that business leaders make. This 2 days (Oct. 15-16,2009) boot camp has been designed to give you a head start in Business Intelligence practice. You will acquire fundamental knowledge of Business Intelligence and dimensional modeling along with understanding on how to use the various Microsoft technologies to implement a BI solution. By SQL Server MVP Rushabh Mehta.

Check this link: http://www.sqlteach.com/specialevent.aspx

The IT community of Ottawa organizes an award night every year to recognize the ones that make a differences in their community. This year DevTeach received the partner of the year award.  It’s really nice to receive this recognition and it shows how much our support makes a difference.  We didn’t do more in Ottawa then in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver but the guy’s in Ottawa went out of their way to recognize what DevTeach does for the community.  At DevTeach we call this support ‘’nourishment’’ to the communities to help them grow. The Montreal community is the one that we’ve been supporting since 2003 and it’s the biggest and most active IT community in the country. We hope that in the future we can continue to support  all the Canadian IT communities. Thanks to the Ottawa IT community for this award.   

James Kovacs and friends are running the Canadian versions of Alt.Net. When I met James at DevTeach Montreal back in December we agreed that it will help the attendees and the Lead for the Alt.Net if we have this event the next weekend after DevTeach. Most of the Lead for Alt.NET Canada are also speakers at DevTeach and there T&E is already paid for anyway. The same is true for attendees of DevTeach and since it’s over the weekend, attendees won’t miss any work. Alt.NET is a free event but you need to register. The registrations will open on May 20^th.  We’ve managed to secure, with a registration code, 50 seats for the DevTeach attendees. This code will be sent to the them. If you are into Agile Practices you do not what to miss this event. It happens only once a year.

Alt.Net: http://altnetconfcanada.com/home/index.castle 

DevTeach: http://DevTeach.com

Last weekend I was presenting at the Ottawa Code Camp 2009.  I organized it with many friends and we managed to pull this one off for the second time. There was 12 sessions and 130 attendees. We learned many things and we had fun at the same time. John Hansen was the official photographer of the event and he did a fantastic job. You have to check his pictures.  If you’re looking for the source code of my presentation go to http://ottawacodecamp.codeplex.com/ You’ll find all the sessions code on CodePlex.

http://ottawacodecamp.ca/pages2009/AboutUs09.aspx

Yesterday, I did my first Web Cast for Microsoft.  I talked about the industry insights and trends for Architects (http://www.microsoft.com/canada/technet/iyc2009/ ) with Barry Garvin and Andy Nogueira. It was a lot of fun answering all the questions and giving my point of view on the subject.  130 attendees were online with us and that was very cool. Attendees can ask questions via a chat window but the only thing that was disappointing of this experiences was the fact that I couldn’t hear the attendees laugh at my jokes. Anyway, you can go back and listen to the recording at this link:   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/cc766596.aspx

Last Saturday, I was presenting at the Toronto Code Camp. It was jam pack with close to 400 attendees.  Some of the speakers came far has the UK and California.  The quality of the presentations was very good. I was there to present on MS Sync Framework but also I was there to represent DevTeach has one of the main sponsors of the event. The prize DevTeach was giving was a free registration to DevTeach Vancouver.  The winner ‘’Graham Holker’’ was very happy.  If you are living in Ontario and you missed this Code Camp come and see me next weekend in Ottawa.  I’m organizing one in that city with some friends and it will be very big too.  We’re expecting over 250 attendees. Get all the information at this link: http://www.ottawacodecamp.ca

I hope I’ll see you there.