This month in Florida is going to be my 2nd TechEd ever and I’m sure the best by far. The number of things I get to do is staggering:

• I get to work the Telerik booth for my first big show. We’ll be launching not one but two completely new Telerik products. Fun!
  
• Since the Telerik Ultimate Collection has been nominated for the Best of TechEd, I get to give a dead-run 15-minute demo to the judges with fellow Teleriker Michael Crump.
  
• Also with Michael, I’ll be giving the 30-minute “Telerik + Blend: Better Together” talk in the Microsoft Visual Studio booth showing off how 3rd party controls work inside the newest Blend for building Metro style apps on Windows 8.
  
• The first chapter of the Metro/JS book I’m writing with another fellow Teleriker Brandon Statrom is being printed and bound in a limited quantity for the show. Stop by and get your signed copy!
  
• I get to be one of the Speaker Idol judges every day at lunch.
  
• I’m sure there’s at least one podcast recording in there, too, somewhere…

There are lots of great data talks at PDC 2010, all of which are available for online viewing:

• Code First Development with Entity Framework
  Jeff Derstadt, Tim Laverty
  Thursday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Creating Custom OData Services: Inside Some of The Top OData Services
  Pablo Castro
  Thursday, 3:15 PM-4:15 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Enabling New Scenarios and Applications with Data in the Cloud
  Dave Campbell
  Thursday, 4:30 PM-5:30 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Scale-Out Database Solutions on SQL Azure
  Lev Novik
  Friday, 2:00 PM-3:00 PM (GMT-7)
  
• Building Offline Applications using the Sync Framework and SQL Azure
  Nina Hu
  On Demand
  

DSL Developers Conference
applied topics in domain specific languages

April 16-17, 2009, Microsoft Campus, Redmond, WA

This year’s DevCon for DSLs has 25% more attendees than any other previous DevCon. In this economy, I’m amazed by this.

And it’s not just people from the US or even the Pacific Northwest. Not only do we have people from all over the country, but folks are coming from Canada, the UK, Scotland, France, South America and one attendee, Tomas Petricek, a student at Charles University, is coming from the Czech Republic.

Apparently even more people have registered for the DSL DevCon than I thought. If you’ve sent a registration notice and having heard back from me, then you aren’t registered. Please register again or email me directly: csells@microsoft.com.

Magnus Christerson, the Vice President of Product Management from Intentional Software Corp, founded by Charles Simonyi, is giving the very last talk at the DSL DevCon, so make sure to stick around!

Also, seats are filling up FAST, faster than any of the other DevCons. Make sure to register now if you’re coming! And don’t forget, it’s free!

Apparently there is quite a bit of pent up demand for this conference, as there were more than 50 session proposals for only 12 slots and we’ve already filled half the seats with just pre-registrations.

Sessions include an M deep dive by Paul Vick, DSLs in Groovy by Guillaume Laforge, DSLs in Eclipse by Markus Voelter, a functional vs. dynamic DSLs smackdown by Ted Neward, a DSL for Pixel Effects from Adobe and last, but certainly not least, giving the keynote for the entire conference, the undisputed Duke of DSLs himself, Maaaaaartin Foooooowler-er-er-er!

There’s been such a flood of DSL DevCon talk proposals that I’ve had a hard time keeping up (although feel free to let those nice folks in Eclipse, XML, Java and Unix land if you know who they are!).

Also, there’s been a huge amount of interest in attending the conference itself and some folks even worry that the conference will sell out before they can register (the first five DevCons have all sold out and those cost money!), so they’ve been asking me to put ’em on a list. I’m still working out the logistics with the nice Lang.NET folks, but if you’d like to pre-register for the DSL DevCon, drop me a line and I’ll put you on the list. It will be my job to make sure that anyone that pre-registers gets to go.

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some Domain Specific Language (DSL) related topic? It doesn’t matter which platform or OS you’re targeting. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re an author, a vendor, a professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased toward the latter). We’re after interesting and unique applications of DSL technology and if you’re doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I’ll be taking submissions ’til February 9th, 2009, but don’t delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

This year, we’re thinking very hard about putting the Lang.NET conference and the DSL DevCon at the same venue (the research center on the Microsoft Redmond campus) in the same week. The idea is that people interested in general-purpose language design and development can come to Lang.NET and the people interested in domain-specific languages can come to the DSL DevCon and for folks interested in both, the DSL DevCon will start right after Lang.NET, so folks can stay a little longer and come to both. Also, the conference chairs on both conferences will make sure to keep the content unique across the two conferences.

 

I’m thinking it’s time for another DevCon. I know it’s been a while since the last one (in fact, I hear there was some kind of petition to have another one? : ), so we’re long past due.

This one will be on all things data-driven, model-based and/or DSL enhanced. I’m thinking March or April of 2009.  Who’s interested?

I’m thinking about doing a DevCon before the end of the year (likely October) in a pleasant environment (likely the Skamania Lodge) on a topic that’s *not* XML or Web Services based (we’ve done that topic to death). The soul of the DevCon will remain the same, i.e. to cut away all the unessential conference baggage and concentrate on why we’re spending time at a conference in the first place — the talks by industry experts and experienced practitioners.

If I organized such an event, would anyone come?

Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.

P.S. I imagine the DevCon come back in time, but it may well be a while…

125 attendees and speakers from 6 countries (US, Canada, England, Malaysia, Netherlands and Peru), 21 states and 60 companies, ranging from vendors to expert practitioners and even a few poor souls trying to learn XML. 24 hours of talks and events spread over two days. 44 bloggers and 247 blog entries about the event itself (not including warm-up to the event or my own blog entries), nearly all of which were over-whelmingly positive, including one eWeek piece and one entry from Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems that called me “a charming, welcoming, amusing guy.” (I didn’t pay him a cent, I swear! : )

 

Here. Holy cow! I knew people liked the DevCon, but I’ve never seen a blogging response like this

Here. I got so tons of positive feedback during the DevCon

At 4:13:02pm, the Applied XML Developer’s Conference has sold out (again). Eric Hayes, the VP of Development from You Software, Inc. was the last lucky attendee. Welcome, Eric!

Wahoo!

As is always the case, tons of things are coming together at the last moment for the 5th DevCon:

• Received Tim Ewald’s flight arrangements so that I can pick him up on the way to the conference
• Don “XML” is going to make sure that Tim Bray gets to the Portland Nerd Dinner and to the conference in time for his keynote address
• T-shirts on their way
• Proceedings printed and in my garage
• Maps printed so that I can find my way (haven’t been there in years and years)
• Brothers Sells excited about the extra days off from school so that they can hang at the Skamania Lodge (although I’m pretty sure they’re expecting to be able to play their Gameboys the entire time : )
• Microphones, podium, projector and project screens arranged for speakers
• Wireless Internet access and power arranged for attendees (and speakers)
• All but a handful of seats filled in our expanded space (8 seats left)
• Rory giving away a free conference registration on his site

Tim wonders whether he should let the ’softies attending and speaking at the Applied XML Developer’s Conference have it or not. I say, give us both barrels, Tim!

Here.

Don sent his new talk abstract my way this morning:

Rory is giving away one seat to the Applied XML Developer’s Conference. He’s asking three questions before Friday and drawing from anyone that can answer all three. Question 1 and question 2 have already been posted.

There are still a hand full of seats left if you’re like to purchase one.

Here. If you’re going to be checking into the Skamania Lodge for the DevCon by 7pm on Tuesday, 10/19, please join us for the Anticipation Reception for all attendees and speakers. If you decide to hang with the Portland Nerd Dinner

Here.

Don got a last minute bug to write on a completely different topic. I just got the slides this morning and they’re different than anything I’ve ever seen from Don (which is saying a lot). The new title of the talk is “ws-islands” and while I have no abstract as yet, I’m still very much looking forward to the talk for the psychedelic effects of the slides alone (I asked him to be careful not to cause seizures in the audience).

I can’t get Sam to reply to my emails, so I’m hoping he’ll see this post: Sam, can I get the status of your DevCon slides? They were due Monday. Thank you.

Here. If you haven’t made your hotel reservation for the Applied XML Developer’s Conference

Here.

After only 5 weeks of registrations, the Applied XML Developer’s Conference has sold out. With 4 weeks of registrations left to go, we’ve gone back to the venue for extra space. It’s not much extra space, though, so if you want a seat, you should register expeditiously.

Here. Neetu Rajpal, a PM

Here. This is the 5th DevCon that I’ve thrown and I’ve never

Here. Whoa. I guess there was some pent up demand for the Applied XML Dev.Conf.

Here.

Every year it gets harder to pick speakers for the DevCon. This year, I had 4x the number of submissions for which I had available slots. So, while it’s hard for me to pick, it makes for a fabulous line up for attendees:

If you haven’t yet submitted your abstract to the Applied XML Developer’s Conferences, don’t wait much longer; I’m only accepting submissions ’til the end of June, 2004.

I’ve already gotten a ton of abstracts, including submissions from folks like Sam Rub, Tim Bray, Tim Ewald and Don Box, but that doesn’t mean that your talk won’t bubble up to the top; as much as I like to have the polished speakers, I like even more to have the folks from the trenches.

Here.

I was recently asked to characterize the attendees of a typical DevCon and this is what I said:

Don suggested that I change the topic of DevCon5 to XAML or some other topic. So far, the DevCons have run the course of topics from ATL to Web Services and then to Applied XML/Web Services.

My primary concern when throwing a DevCon is that there is a sufficient user base of the technology that it’s more than a vendor show. Even the original ATL DevCon only had a few MS employees and one MS talk. The rest of it were practitioners and experts from outside the big house and that makes for a better conference, imo.

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some applied XML or Web Services topic? It doesn’t matter which platform or OS you’re targeting. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re an author or vendor or professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased towards the latter). We’re after interesting and unique applications of XML and Web Services technology and if you’re doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

I’ll be taking submissions ’til the end of June, but don’t delay. Passion and a burning story to tell count twice as much as anything else.

Here.

Here.

Here. Either I was way behind on part 1, or I’m way ahead on part 2, but here it is. Enjoy.

Here. Part 1 of Don’s day #2 keynote from the Applied XML

Here. If you didn’t get to come to the Applied XML

Here.

Here.

Here.

Dave Winer’s Keynote:

• Users care about you software working, not *how* it works
• Users don’t want to be controlled
• As developers, “we’re very impressed with the complexity that we can understand”

Don Box:

• “No one that gets laid actually replaces the CPU in their computers anymore. And, since they don’t get laid, they can’t reproduce and natural selection will take it’s toll. Likewise, objects are not meant for field replacement.”
• Building on abstractions means that the abstraction needs to be kept constant
• the wire is god. schemas are relative to your needs. the same XML instance doc can be many different schemas in a pipeline
• I missed why the abstractions in a service-oriented architecture are somehow better than those in an object-oriented architecture, except that maybe SOA abstractions are courser grained, but that can be true of OOA, too, can’t it?

Brian Jepson:

• WAP is just another XML format to product that exposes your data to WAP-enabled devices, e.g. phones
• Very cool to watch Brian control his presentation via his cell phone (nothing to do with XML, but very cool never the less). He was using a Mac and didn’t know if a niche OS like Windows had apps that did such things (although he did find this that might work)

Here.

Here. Rory Blyth seems to be keeping track of who he’s eating with and who he meets in the rest room, so clearly, a must read. : )

Here. Don’s blogging the Applied XML

Here. I’m posting this using the wireless access from the room where the Applied XML

Here. With Dave Winer on the side of RSS

Here. Today is the deadline for the Applied XML

Here. If you’re waiting

Here. The message board for the Applied XML

Here. Colin Bryar, Director of Amazon.com Web Services & Associates, will be giving an in depth talk at the Applied XML

Here. Microsoft’s suite of XML

Here. I’ve been buried in Applied XML

Here. In addition to the *mountain* of abstracts I’ve gotten (more than any DevCon to date), several bloggers have had things to say about the upcoming DevCon: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/4/30/133950/971#xmlroadtrip (includes a poll for his abstracts) http://www.larkware.com/Articles/TheDailyGrind62.html http://aspnetweblog.com/posts/6141.aspx http://dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com/archives/003064.shtml http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox/default.aspx#nn2003-04-28T06:42:55Z

Here. Tentatively schedule for July 10-11 in greater Portland, OR

Here. Can’t be at the DevCon? Check out Brian Jepson’s talk-by-talk coverage on his blog. I’m sorry if you can’t be there, though. We’re having a blast!

Here. Register now for the Web Services DevCon, October 10-11 in greater Boston, featuring Don Box, Tim Ewald and keynote speaker Sam Ruby. In addition to amazing talks by Microsoft’s Web Services Program Manager, Keith Ballinger, and IBM

Here. Stoyan Damov, the Grand Prize winner in the

Here. Spend a Day With .NET

Here. The final line-up of Web Services DevCon East speakers for October 10-11 in Bedford, Mass has been posted. The quality of the talks was so high that we had to forgo one of Don’s proposals to get in all the good stuff. If you can only go to one web services conference this year, this is the one that’ll pack it in nice and tight!

The video recordings of the Web Services DevCon are now available. Enjoy!