2017 Year in Review: MSDN Blogs & Speaking

CC 2.0 image courtesy Jon DeCamp on Flickr

With the new year upon us, it’s always worthwhile to reflect on the previous year. Here are some statistics about my contributions to MSDN blogs and my speaking engagements.

Getting started with Curah!

I must admit that I had never heard of Curah! from Microsoft until a few weeks ago. Now that I have created my own account and played around with it I can see the potential of it.

Curah! allows you to “Curate the web and share what you know,” according to Microsoft. It is a portal to both share and discover collections of technical content. The premised is simple. You sign in at http://curah.microsoft.com with your Microsoft account and create a profile. Your profile and picture act as a sort of advertisement for your curations. People can look at your background to see if you have knowledge of the areas you are curating.

A curation is designed to target common user questions. It contains a title, description and tags. It also has links to websites, blog posts, videos, infographics, and basically anything else you want to share with others on your topic. You can include whatever you think people will need to learn about the subject. The links can be resources that you used to learn or they can be items you wish you knew about when you were learning your subject.

Curations are easy to create and once they are published become a collection of annotated links available for all to see. Your name remains on the curation. I created three curations easily enough and they were published in no time. I focused on topics I knew well and in the end I built curations on Application Insights, Azure eBooks, and .NET User Groups in Ontario. All of my curations can be seen under my profile.

If you only wish to use the site for technical content research then you do not need an account. You can search for any topic and it will scan curations by description and title. You can also filter curations by their tags.

So, give Curah! a try – either if you are looking to find a resource or if you would like to create your own curations to share your expertise.

Cloud Camp Kitchener slides

On Sunday April 12, 2015 approximately 15 enthusiastic attendees came out to Cloud Camp Kitchener. The event was held at The Tannery in downtown Kitchener and it was a chance for developers to learn more advanced topics related to Microsoft Azure. The event was co-hosted by Microsoft Canada and Canada’s Technology Triangle .NET User Group (CTTDNUG).

Along with myself, there were presentations by Microsoft MVPs Lori Lalonde (@loriblalonde) and Tom Walker (@Tinytoot). As well, Microsoft Technical Evangelist Adarsha Datta (@AdarshaDatta) also spoke.

I was tasked with wrapping up the day and for my session I chose to speak on Azure Data Storage. I wanted to give attendees a more “breadth than depth” approach to storage. I created my slides from a combination of the Data-Platform and Data-Storage slide decks in the Microsoft Azure-Readiness/DevCamp repo on GitHub, while adding additional material from a slide deck of David Chappell’s (@DChappellAssoc).

If you would like a copy of these PowerPoint slides I have published them as a downloadable file through Dropbox: Azure Data Storage.

They are also available for viewing and download through SlideShare: Azure Data Storage.

You can also find these links, as well as more information about my previous public speaking engagements, on my Speaking page.

Please contact me if you have any follow up questions from the event. My Twitter information is also available on the slides.

London Azure Camp slides and demos

On Saturday November 15, 2014 I was invited to speak at the London Azure Camp hosted by the London .NET Developers group in London, Ontario, Canada.

The group is led by Tom Walker (@Tinytoot) and his team of volunteers as they try to spread the word about everything .NET in the City of London.

Alongside Tom and myself, there were presentations by a trio of Microsoft MVPs: Lori Lalonde (@loriblalonde), Andrei Marukovich (@amarukovich) and Julien Stroheker (@Ju_Stroh).

Tom invited me to speak on both Microsoft Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Media Services.

My slides are based on the Azure Readiness Content provided my Microsoft. However, these slides have been scoped down to my session and the notes field of each slide has been expanded with additional content.

I have published my PowerPoint slides as downloadable files through Dropbox: Cloud Powered Mobile Apps with Azure | Build end-to-end video experiences with Azure Media Services.

They are also available for viewing and download through SlideShare: Cloud Powered Mobile Apps with Azure | Build end-to-end video experiences with Azure Media Services.

As well, I have zipped up my demonstrations and added them to Dropbox. In this file you will find the step-by-step notes to re-create the demos plus all of the code snippets. The zip file also contains the PowerPoint files listed above.

You can also find these links as well as more information about my previous public speaking engagements under my Speaking page.

Please contact me if you have any follow up questions from the event. My contact information is also available within the slides.

London .NET Developers Windows Azure Cloud Camp presentation slides and source code

On Sunday March 16, 2014 I was invited to speak at the Windows Azure Cloud Camp hosted by the London .NET Developers group in London, Ontario, Canada.

This group is led by Tom Walker (@Tinytoot) and his volunteers as they try to spread the word about everything .NET in the City of London.

Tom invited me to speak on Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) and how it could be used in conjunction with Windows Store apps. In my presentation I showed how to use WAMS to add storage, integrated authentication and even Push Notifications to Windows 8 Store apps in literally minutes. I also did some server side scripting and talked about the API calls you can use to populate Live Tiles for your apps.

I have published my slides as a PowerPoint file through Dropbox. They are also available for viewing and download through SlideShare.

As well, I have zipped up my Visual Studio demonstrations and added them to Dropbox. In this file you will find the step-by-step notes to re-create the demos plus all of the code to paste in.

Please contact me if you have any follow up questions from the presentation. My contact information is also available within the slides.

My Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development presentation slides

Last evening (October 17, 2012) I did An Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development presentation to an enthusiastic crowd of about 40 people. The group was comprised of members of both the KW Android Developers meetup group and the iOSKW meetup group. The evening focused on mobile application development for all four mobile platforms – iOS, Android, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 7.

During my presentation I did a quick overview of a Hello World application. I then did a deep dive into Guelph Open Data – an open data application I built that also uses Bing Maps.

I have published my slides as both PowerPoint and PDF. They are also available for download through SlideShare. Finally, they will also be accessible from the menu bar under More | Files of each meetup group’s site as soon as they are posted.

October 31, 2012 update: The video of my Hello World presentation has now been posted to my YouTube channel and Monolith Interactive’s YouTube channel. The iOS, Android and BlackBerry 10 Hello World presentations are housed here as well.

Please contact me if you have any follow up questions. My contact information is available within the slides.

My CTTDNUG presentation slides and source files

I have published my slides and source files on An Introduction to Configuring and Extending Umbraco CMS from my presentation to Canada’s Technology Triangle .NET User Group (CTTDNUG). The slides are also available on SlideShare.

Please contact me if you have any follow up questions.