Snowball - The Blog

With this campaign, they want to put the people that are in the IT-trenches every day on a stand. I registered myself as well, so if you think that the community work I do (Visug, Community Day, my blog, sessions…) is worth a vote, click on me on this page: http://www.heldenvanit.be/nl/profiel/gill-cleeren

Thanks!

This month, you can meet me at the VBUG Spring Conference 2010 in Birmingham, UK. I’ll be doing a talk on Silverlight 4 and WPF 4.

Here’s more info on the event:

Thursday 29th April 2010

Our Spring Conference this year has the theme VBUG4Thought and takes place in the Midlands at the Heritage Motor Centre which is situated just two minutes from J12 M40 and is easy for you to find.

With the imminent release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net framework 4, VBUG4Thought celebrates and highlights these new products.
This conference is ideal if you wish to learn about the new enhancements, features and capabilities of VS2010 and .Net 4. The conference will also give you an overview of how you can apply these technologies in new or existing projects.
As usual, we'll be featuring key speakers from the UK and abroad in order to give you expert, impartial and informative advice.

We are delighted to have the following speakers:

Eric Nelson -  Building an Application for Windows Azure & SQL Azure
Gill Cleeren - Silverlight 4 tour de force, with a little WPF 4 sauce on top
Hadi Hariri - Real-world applications with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery
Dave Sussman - What you really need to know about .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010
Jon Skeet - Don't call us, we'll call you: an introduction to the Reactive Extensions to .NET
Josh Twist - Building an App Store for the enterprise with MEF and .NET 4.0

For full agenda click here

Hope to meet some of you there!

We did it. We officially did it. Community Day 2009 was a great success.

Here are some facts and highlights:

• 300+ attendees
• 13 sponsors
• 11 usergroups
• 20 sessions
• Many french fries

After looking at the evaluations, we can conclude that all our guests really enjoyed the event! Mark June 24th 2010 already in your agenda, it will be the day Community Day 2010 will take place.

I have already uploaded several powerpoint presentations to the Community Day website. The missing ones will be uploaded soon. Some pictures are available as well already. The slideshow can be seen here. More pictures will be uploaded soon.

We hope to see you all next year again!

Thanks to our sponsors, we have a great number of prizes we can give away at Community Day 2009. Here’s an overview (note that any of this can change still):

In the closing keynote, we will be giving away many, many prizes. Here's an overview:

• 1x MSDN Premium Subscription with Team Suite 2008 (1 year) (Sponsored by the Microsoft Regional Director Program)
• 1x Futjitsu-Siemens Windows Home Server (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium). More info on the Windows Home Server can be found here and here. 
• 1x Touch HD (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium) More info can be found here
• Bongo bons:
  Bongo Sterrenrestaurants 2009
  Bongo Charmeweekend 2009
  Bongo Weekend Ardennen
  Bongo Fietsweekend 2009
  (Thanks to all our sponsors)
• 1x Visual Studio Team Foundation Server NFR (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Visual Studio 2008 Professional NFR (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Visual Studio 2008 Standard (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• 1x Telerik Premium Collection developer license (Sponsored by Telerik)
• 6x Jetbrains .Net Productivity Packs (ReSharper & dotTrace) (Sponsored by Jetbrains)
• GFI licenses
• 1x TechNet Plus Subscription (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium) More info on Technet Plus can be found here
• 6x MSPress - Windows Application Development (Self-Paced Training Kit) (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• Several Visual C# 2008 Step by Step (Sponsored by Microsoft Belgium)
• Several 25x Visual Basic 2008 Step by Step
• 2x lichtblauw hemd met MSDN/TechNet borduring

Additionaly, we'll have the following to give away, thanks to Microsoft:

• TechDays 2009 bags
• TechDays 2009 DVD sets
• Expression Studio stickers
• TechEd 2008 DVD sets
• Heroes Happen Here books

Finally, in each session, Het Computerwinkeltje will give away a free book!

Yet another reason NOT to miss THE community event of the year!

Important information for people who still want to register but can’t at this point because the event is fully booked: we expect some seats to become available after we send out reminders, which is due this Wednesday or Thursday. So check back regularly.

As announced earlier, Community Day 2009 is coming! Mark Thursday 25th June in your calendar, as it’s the day you can get a full day of free training and sessions, all courtesy of the Belgian User Groups.

This third edition is a big step for us. For the first time, we are doing an entire day (whereas the 2 previous editions were half a day). We also moved to a new location, as the previous one became too small: we are now in Utopolis in Mechelen.

Since yesterday evening, I finished the website, it’s now live at www.communityday.be . Registration is again free, including food and drinks, BUT seats are limited, so register in time if you want to be sure you can be there!

Please blog/twitter/Facebook about the event. Below is some “blog bling” you can use for that!

I hope to see you all on June 25th!

Dear readers, I’m proud to announce officially Community Day 2009, the third edition of a full day of community driven content on Microsoft technologies. The event will take place on Thursday June 25th 2009.

For the first time, the event will be a full day of free sessions. Also new is the location: we have moved to Mechelen.

In the coming weeks, you’ll be able to subscribe on the Community day website (which is at this point not yet updated, but I’m getting to it…).

Spread the word! Community Day 2009 is coming!

Of the 12 sessions we hosted at our event, we recorded 9 and 6 of those are already online on Chopsticks (MSDN - TechNet).

Developer sessions:

Nieuwe Data Types in SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008: Why Upgrade - Top 10 Features

LINQ and the Entity Framework

ITPro sessions:

What's Coming in SCCM 2007 R2

Windows Server 2008: 10 reasons to upgrade

Exchange Public Folders vs SharePoint: The Battle

As promised, you can download my slide deck and demo's for the Silverlight Deep Dive session I gave at Community Day .

Demos
Slide deck

I hope you enjoyed the session (apart from the heat wave that struck the room...)!

Phew, Community Day 2008 is a fact! The event, which is now probably the biggest community driven event in Belgium, was a tremendous success. Nothing went wrong (apart from almost having one or two beamers short), the speakers and sponsors were happy and I have heard nothing but positive comments from the attendees.

The same night, Ilse Van Criekinge and myself decided that we will organise Community Day 2009, so version 3 will be happening, probably again at the end of June 2009. We will start the event organisation again in January.

I have just finished uploading the images, the intro video (that got everybody laughing) and the (almost complete list of) slide decks.

Only thing left to do is saying thank you. Thank you to the attendees, sponsors and speakers. Thank you to the people of the several user groups that helped out. And thank you to Ilse, we are a great team

See y'all at Community day 2009!