A busy couple of months
As anyone that reads my blog will know, it has been neglected even more than usual over the past couple of months. I thought I’d share with you some of the things I’ve been up to during that time. Note: This is a bit of a long post.
Tech SummerFest
While sitting at the table early one morning in a Bed & Breakfast in one of the wine growing regions of South Australia, I came up with the idea of running a road show around the small capital cities to help promote a new formed company I set up with fellow MVP, Peter Ward. As a newly formed company with limited resources, much of the “leg work” for the road show was shared by Peter and I in addition to our existing work. This included marketing and promotion, brochure design, travel and venue booking, registration and payments, event web site, etc etc. The list goes on.
The events have been run now in Hobart (population ) and Adelaide (population ) and were both very successful in meeting our goals. While the number of attendees wasn’t large, those that did come along had only very good feedback about the event including;
- Very good, well presented, knowledgeable presenters
- Good. Labs well written with complete steps
- I found it very informative and entertaining. Definitely gave me some things to think over for work.
- Very informative – learnt lots
Following the success of the Tech SummerFest in Hobart and Adelaide, we have announced dates for another four events in different venues in Australia and New Zealand.
| Venue | Week commencing | |
| Brisbane | 16th March 09 | |
| Hobart | 23rd March 09 | * Second event with new content |
| Perth | 20th April 09 | |
| Auckland | 18th May 09 | |
| Wellington | 25th May 09 |
You can keep up to date with what’s happening with Tech SummerFest on the event web site at www.techsummerfest.com
New VSTS/TFS courses
I have also been busily writing a number of new courses focusing on Team System. These will be available either through a soon-to-be-published public schedule or on-demand for organizations wanting to run these in-house. The courses are being proofread for final updates now and the course outlines are with the graphic guy to make them look good.
VSTS ESSENTIALS SERIES
- VSTS Essentials (2 day)
- VSTS Essentials for Project Managers and Business Analysts (1 day)
- VSTS Essentials for Database Professionals (1 day)
ALM ESSENTIALS SERIES
- Moving to Scrum with VSTS (2 days)
WORKSHOP SERIES (On-site only)
- Developing custom reports from TFS (1 day)
- Build process enhancement workshop (1 day)
Presentations
Over the past month I have also been busy delivering presentations for a number of Australian user groups. Here’s a list of the session I have delivered.
- “A Lap Around VSTS2010” for Adelaide .NET Users Group
- “First look: VSTS2010” for QLD VSTS Users Group
- “A Lap Around VSTS2010” for QLD MSDN Users Group
During the last month I have also delivered 4 in-house presentations on VSTS 2008 & 2010 to various companies in Australia.
A new company
Over the last few months, I have been busy with Peter Ward setting up a new joint venture. This new company called Portal Synergy has been created to focus on providing professional services and training in the Microsoft SharePoint market. For anyone that has setup a new business with a limited number of resources, you’ll know that it takes an enormous amount of time to do it right. Between Peter and I we formed the company, registered the domain name, setup email and a web site, setup bank accounts, arranged credit card merchant services, arranged a booth at TechEd Australia, applied for trademarks, created marketing material, etc, etc. This extra workload has meant many things like my blogging and newsgroup activity have been less than usual over the last few months.
US Trips
While not specially limited to the last month or so, I have managed to make four trips to the US this year.
- Microsoft MVP Summit, Seattle, WA
- Microsoft Tech Ed Developers 2008, Orlando, FL
- Microsoft TechReady 7, Seattle, WA
- Microsoft Professional Developer’s Conference, Los Angeles, CA
For 2009, I already have two trips to the US booked and paid for and another one in the planning. Look’s like my travel won’t be slowing down any time soon.
With all the buzz about to burst free from PDC next week, it’s a great time to jump onto your Twitter account and add a new Twitter feed to MicrosoftVSTS. This Twitter account has been setu pby some of the VSTS team and will be running hot with news and happenings as they happen.
Today I was downloading some very large files (~700Mb each) using a Microsoft tool called the File Transfer Manager. I kept on eye on the progress and was on my fourth file when the computer froze for some completely unknown reason. I gave the machine 10 minutes to get over itself but this didn’t change anything. Anyway, I hit the reset button and waited for it to restart itself. After it was finished booting I looked in the download folder to see if I managed to get the last file through before the freeze and to my horror there was only ONE of the 700Mb files in the folder.
I ran the emergency recovery process and pointed to my download folder. It quickly found the files I feared I had lost and gave me the option to recover the files. By default it wanted to copy the recovered files to a folder called “Recovered_Files” which I left on the desktop. After a few minutes, the program said it had recovered the files. I crossed my fingers, doubled clicked the folder and inside were my files in pristine condition! YES! Now I don’t have to wait while I re-download that 1.4Gb again. Well done Diskeeper Corp.