Attention all  current and potential public speakers!  Are you a technical person with loads of great information to share with your peers? Do you get nervous speaking in front of crowds? Would you like to develop your public speaking, demonstration and group interaction skills?  Then DFW Technically Speaking is for you!

Led by some of our top local presenters, here’s a summary of what Technically Speaking will help you learn to do:

• Overcome public speaking nervousness by gaining confidence in your presentation skills
• Present technical ideas and speak more effectively at user groups or technical events
• Communicate your ideas more effectively using stance, gestures, movement, and voice
• Structure your presentations to emphasize and reinforce key points.
• Create visual aids and improve your use of them while interacting with your audience
• Target your presentations to match your audiences by use of research techniques

Featured speakers include:

• Dave Gunby –The successful speaker: Techniques for “Techies”
• Chris Koenig – Art of the Demo
• Caleb Jenkins – Gauging and engaging your audience
• Tim Rayburn – Let’s get started!!

The first Technically Speaking event will be held on March 27th, 2010 from 9am – 5:00 pm at 4121 International Parkway in Carrollton. The cost to attend is $50 per person, which will include a nice lunch. 

Seats are limited so sign up soon by going to http://technicallyspeaking.dfwnav.com or contact Teresa Burger at tburger@woot.com.

Our team bought cowboy hats for all of our MVPs in TX, OK, LA and AR (what we call South Central District).  These are a few of the first folks to get their hats yesterday afternoon at the MVP Summit kickoff meeting/mixer/meal. The bandanas say “MVP Summit 2010 South Central District”.  Rest assured, a good time was had by all!

It’s time to upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

While most people who tested Windows 7 have now moved to the final version, some are still running the Release Candidate. If you haven’t moved yet, it’s time to replace the RC. Starting on March 1, 2010 your PC will begin shutting down every two hours. Your work will not be saved during the shutdown.

The Windows 7 RC will fully expire on June 1, 2010. Your PC running the Windows 7 RC will continue shutting down every two hours and your files won’t be saved during shutdown. In addition, your wallpaper will change to a solid black background with a persistent message on your desktop. You’ll also get periodic notifications that Windows isn’t genuine. That means your PC may no longer be able to obtain optional updates or downloads requiring genuine Windows validation.

The RC has JUST been released – so get out there and get it!!!

http://bit.ly/1MuRz1

I recently released a new blogging platform for GiveCamp.org, but forgot to update the RSS feed back to Feedburner.  That means that any of you that have been subscribed to the feed there haven’t gotten any updates since it went live a couple weeks ago.  Sorry about that, but the problem is now fixed.

If you haven’t been over to GiveCamp.org lately, you should check it out.  Following the advice of a few friends, I switched the platform over to PHP on Windows using Wordpress.  So far, I’ve been really happy, although the plethora of plugins, themes and widgets, while at first seemed awesome, quickly became overwhelming. I finally did find a theme I liked, was able to customize it enough, and plugged in all the right widgets. I even added a map with all the known (and future) GiveCamp event locations that will get updated as the events evolve.

SO – back to the original topic of this post.

IF your feed reader recently found our new little web site at http://givecamp.org and you subscribed to the RSS feeds, it’s time to refresh your pointer because we’ve moved the RSS feed over to FeedBurner at http://feeds2.feedburner.com. If you have any trouble with the feeds, just let me know and I’ll do my best to fix your problem.

One of our own local smart guys, Zeeshan Hirani, along with his partner Larry Tenny, have completed work on their  book "Entity Framework Recipes”.  This book features learning EF 4.0 through real-world samples that go beyond just basic operations  the Northwind  – (from the Amazon site) “Armed with this experience, you will be ready to dive deep into Entity Framework, experiment with new approaches, and develop ways to solve even the most difficult data access challenges”.

The book is available for pre-order at Amazon for 16% off the cover price, so order yours today!

Amazon.com: Entity Framework Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (9781430227038): Zeeshan Hirani, Larry Tenny: Books

Looking for some fully detailed examples of how to get the most out of Microsoft development technologies?  the guys over at CodeFx have exactly the solution you’re looking for!  CodeFx is written by Microsoft Support Engineers based on the most common scenario-based questions they get asked about developing with Microsoft technology.  From the CodeFx web site:

All-In-One Code Framework code-name CodeFx delineates the framework and skeleton of most Microsoft development techniques (e.g. COM, Data Access, IPC) using typical sample codes in different programming languages (e.g. Visual C#, VB.NET, Visual C++). For instance, the code example ATLDllCOMServer shows the skeleton of an ATL in-process COM server as its name implies. Each example is elaborately selected, composed, and documented to demonstrate one frequently-asked, tested or used scenario based on our experience as support engineers. If you are a software developer, you can fill the skeleton with blood, muscle and soul. If you are a software tester or a support engineer like us, you may extend the sample codes a little to fit your specific test scenario or refer your customer to this project if the customer’s question coincides with what we collected.

As of July 30th, 2009, there were over 200 samples in the download, and they said they are averaging about 6 new samples per week.  I downloaded and looked at a couple of the samples, and they look really well done – well documented, typical scenarios in both C# and VB.NET that all developers can relate to.

I’ve decided to move my blog site off of MSDN, where it’s been since I started at Microsoft, over to a self-hosted version of Wordpress.  This will give me a chance to play a bit with running PHP on Windows, as well as give me some additional flexibility around site customization.  I don’t have a lot of customization here yet, but I’ve got some ideas on what I’ll be putting together over the next couple of weeks.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions, compliments, or criticisms, leave me a comment here on this post.  I would appreciate any feedback you might supply to help me make this blog better (and yes, I know, post more often and post some decent technical content!)