Seen here :
Skills Matter is pleased to announce London Agile Month, a month full of courses, free In-the-Brain Sessions and conferences featuring agile expert Venkat Subramaniam, pragmatic programmer Andy Hunt, Agile & Scrum experts Craig Larman, Martine DeVos, Tamara Sulaiman and Roman Pichler, Frank Cohen on Automated Testing, Gojko Adzic on TDD and Eric Evans on Domain Driven Design!
Link: London Agile Month on SkillsMatter
Just got an email from my friend Peter Laudati at Microsoft telling me about a great sounding event in NYC this weekend - the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter. Peter blogs about it here:
At the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter, we’ll give you a quick tour of the framework, then peel back the layers and dive deeper into how it works. As part of that, we’ll spend time discussing the design and development practices that lead to the creation of the MVC framework. By the time you leave, you’ll have enough knowledge to get fired up and start building web applications with it.
Sign up for the event here. (Free lunch included).
At the closing keynote of the 2008 Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference in New York, I announced the finalists and winners for the first Lab49 WPF in Finance Innovation Contest:
The Grand Prize winner was Szymon Kobalczyk: 
The two Finalists were Jacob Carpenter: 
and Jobi Joy: 
while the Honorable Mention went to Paul Hounshell: 
These applications can all be downloaded from my SkyDrive account:
(link)
Everyone was very impressed with the level of innovation and creativity displayed by these entries. Congratulations to everyone, this was a great competition.
Lab49’s table at the 7th annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference was a crowd favorite. I like to think it’s because we’re great people, but perhaps the fact that we had the grand prize to our WPF in Finance Innovation Contest (an Alienware 7500) showing off the contest finalists:
In this show I chatted with Tim Vercruysse, Director - Software Development, Citi/Lava Technology. We discussed the unique challenges that he faces, being in the financial services industry, and how they differ from what most people mean when they talk about "user experience". Tim also talked about the main benefits - beyond user experience - that he sees from Silverlight and WPF. Last, we wrapped up with a discussion of what developers in the financial services industry need to learn in order to stay relevant in this demanding environment.
Listen to the podcast here (Quicktime file link)
I’m here at Mix08 where I’ve signed on as a guest blogger and podcaster for Zoom-In Online. You can see all of my posts here:
So far I posted a couple about the keynote, including Ray Ozzie and Dean Hachamovitch (General Manager for IE) with plenty more to come.
I’ve heard from a number of contestants who are working on their entries but (work/family/vacation/scrabulous/etc) has gotten in the way and they’d like a bit more time. Well, we’ve heard you, and we’re extending the submission deadline until March 10th.
That gives you plenty more time (including TWO extra weekends) to work on your entry before submitting it.
If you’ve already submitted something, don’t worry, you can use the extra time to improve your entry; you can keep submitting new versions right up until the deadline.
Don’t delay, get cracking! No excuses now…
The 6th Annual Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference is coming up soon - March 12-13 at the New York Marriott Marquis. The theme of this year’s conference is High Performance Computing, a topic near and dear to my heart.
The conference, as always, is free to attend. Register here.
ps - Lab49 is a Platinum Sponsor this year and in addition to a very cool talk on distributed data caches, we’ll have a special, never before seen, cocktail ready at the reception for you to try out.
Our WPF Contest has gotten a huge amount of interest not only from those in the U.S. but from many around the world. In the face of incredible demand, we have now updated the contest rules, eliminating the previous restriction to residents of the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
So, all you residents of South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Antarctica 
- open up your keyboards and get cracking! Deadlines are approaching.
Ok, this is cool.
This morning, we are announcing the first-ever "WPF in Finance Innovation Contest". WPF has enormous potential in finance, to affect the way we visualize and interact with the complex, fast-moving sea of data within the industry. To help spur innovation within this new area, we’re holding a contest with great prizes, challenging developers to build interesting new applications to visualize and interact with financial data.
We’ve got an amazing panel of WPF luminaries to judge the entries. We’ve lined up over $15,000 in prizes for the winners and early entrants. And the top 3 finalists will get to appear on stage at next year’s Microsoft Financial Services Developer Conference to showcase their app to the world.
So, we’ve done our part.
Now go do yours - sign up and submit your entry.
Here’s what we discussed at today’s meetup:
Also, a special bonus link! Steve Ballmer sells Windows 1.0
My chat with Joe Cleaver & Joe Rubino has now been posted here. Have a listen, it clocks in at around 40(!) minutes, so sit back & enjoy.
Via Bob Familiar at the ReMix07 Facebook group, the content from the ReMix07 Boston sessions is coming online, there’s an RSS feed to stay on top of it here.
Yesterday I spent the morning over at Microsoft’s offices recording a podcast chat with Joe’s (Rubino and Cleaver).
We covered a wide range of topics within Finance and Technology and as always with those two it was fun and interesting as well.
When it’s available online I’ll post a link here.
Today I was a featured speaker at Microsoft’s Financial Services Industry Council, which is Microsoft’s premier industry-focused program for decision makers, architects and developers. The topic of the event was “User Experience in the Enterprise”. Microsoft’s David Isbitski led off with an overview discussion of the various ways that user experience matters in software development, including reduced training costs, user expectation, and elimination of mistakes. He’s a great presenter with a lively visual presentation style and did a great job outlining the big themes driving user interface innovation.
I then presented a deep dive into the ways that we are using new visualization technology such as WPF to cope with the rapid and wide-ranging changes taking place in financial services. From the increased complexity of markets and instruments to the rapid proliferation of electronic and algorithmic trading, an unprecedented level of data now flows past a user at a financial institution. My thesis is that only by re-examining the visual language of how data is presented and systems are controlled can we keep up, and even gain a competitive advantage. I showed several WPF and SilverLight samples and talked about how we at Lab49 are working with clients to help innovate while keeping things practical and focusing on business goals.
Overall the event was enjoyable and presented an excellent opportunity for many of us in the community to gather together and share ideas, war stories, etc. Thanks to Joe Cleaver from Microsoft for putting it together, and really showing the commitment Microsoft has to our industry.
I’ve just registered for the ReMix07 conference up in Cambridge October 7-9. Shoot me an email (daniel at lab 49 dot com) if you’re Boston-based and want to chat with a Lab49 founder. Otherwise, check back here for blogging and photos from the event.
I was up in Boston at the Software Development Best Practices conference last week; it was quite an interesting conference in that it was mixed up with many others, including .NET Rocks and Embedded Systems Conference.
In the center of the picture you can see the WPF GUI to our portfolio analytics simulation. Probably the highlight of the show was sneaking into the bowling/karaoke party put on across the street by the Flash Forward conference
I really enjoyed today’s Meetup. Changes from the July Meetup included:
I raised the idea of the group chipping in together to create a cool project we could demo but people said for the most part it just sounds like more work. Well, fine, I agree 
Went around the room and everyone gave introductions and mentioned briefly what they are doing with .NET. That actually touched off several interesting follow-on discussions, ranging from SharePoint and Windows Workflow Foundation to open source and individual projects. One of the questions that I recall was around the difference between BizTalk, Workflow Foundation, and SharePoint’s workflow tools; I mentioned that there are a few decent comparisons on the web. Here they are -
Brian Loesgen; Lamont Harrington; MSDN Article; Darren Jefford;
Ultimately we ended up spending the majority of our time talking about a few different and quite interesting tools within the Agile development context; Travis mentioned that his group is using Microsoft Team Foundation Server (which is not something I’ve personally seen in actual use before) and Scott Weinstein gave quite an interesting case for using mbUnit over NUnit. Both of these would be interesting topics for a full presentation at a future meetup IMO (hint hint!).
Thanks again for a lively discussion and I, for one, certainly learned quite a bit and look forward to our next meetup in September.
In case you haven’t noticed the garish badges on the right hand sidebar of the blog I thought I’d point out that the New York .NET Meetup Group and the London .NET Meetup Group are open for business.
ELEVATOR PITCH
Gathering .NET coders, hackers, enthusiasts, evangelists, and experts to meet and discuss about all areas of the Microsoft .NET platform.WHO SHOULD JOIN
Fulltime .NET practitioners only (no recruiters please!).BENEFITS
Show off your work to peers.
Get to know other smart developers.
Bounce around ideas and discuss trends.WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND
Rather than coming to *watch*, you should join this meetup to *participate*. It’s about sharing war stories; comparing tools and architectures; discussing the pros and cons of the latest tools and technologies; and generally a place to keep on top of the latest developments.
Lab49 is proud to sponsor and organize these events; we feel that they are providing a valuable community where people sharing an interest in .NET can gather to connect with others of the same ilk.
Loyal readers may recall that Lab49 sponsored Wiimbledon this past weekend.
The place was flooded with media attention and the event itself was quite fun and lighthearted. Here are a few stories from around the ‘net covering the event (and featuring yours truly):
MTV Overdrive
ABC World News Tonight
NYTimes BITS Blog entry
Here are my Flickr photos from the event.
