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Mindscape at TechEd New Zealand 2011

For New Zealand folks, TechEd 2011 is next week and Mindscape will be there en masse — we are even hoping to lure Jason away from Monster Hunter to join in the fun. We don’t have a stand this year but we will be around the conference floor — well, if you can count the local pubs and sake bars as part of the conference floor — or you can catch us at the following sessions:

• A practical developer’s introduction to F# (Thursday 09:00)
• Tools I use to improve my development (Thursday 15:10)
• The WCF Web community — REST, jQuery and WebSockets (Thursday 16:30)
• Kick starting your Web development with ASP.NET 4.0 (Friday 11:55)
• Making asynchronous programming easy (Friday 13:55)
• Dynamic and metaprogramming in .NET 4 (Friday 15:10)

We always love to meet customers and fellow developers so if you run into us then do say hi!

And while we’re here don’t forget Code Camp 2011, the Sunday after TechEd. Jeremy will be giving a couple of talks there so don’t miss it!

The serious bit

Since we’ll be pretty busy at TechEd, there’s likely to be some delay in responding to forums posts between Tuesday 23 August and Monday 29 August. Please be patient — we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Code Project Virtual Tech Summit: Free WP7 Controls

A short note to let you know that Mindscape is sponsoring the Code Project Virtual Tech Summit on Mobile Development. There’s some great tracks on Windows Phone 7 development as well as tracks for Android, iPhone and mobile web development. It should be a great event for all those who attend it and it’s absolutely free.

We’re sponsoring the event by providing a free Phone Elements license to every attendee – that’s a great number of WP7 controls that we’ve just released worth $299!

Read more about it from the source and sign up here.

Free software for user groups

Mindscape has always been very community oriented – many of the team speak at local user groups, Code Camps, Tech Ed, Unplugged events and so on. We’ve also been active in sponsoring community events like the Super Happy Dev House, NH-Day, Girl Geek Dinners and more. It’s time to do more however and we’ve been really pleased with the joint success we have had in helping user groups. Part of doing more is helping spread the word that we do want to help :-)

Our primary sponsorship method is to provide free software as prizes for user groups. We typically target Microsoft related user groups as our products are all in that space. So if you run a .NET/Silverlight/WPF/SQL Server/Microsoft Bob/C# user group, get in touch!

In retrospect, perhaps the Microsoft Bob user group was not quite ready for Ivan’s ‘Whirlwind Tour of LINQ Expression Trees.’

How does the process work for user groups?

Step 1: Get in touch
Email usergroups@mindscape.co.nz to tell us about your user group. We’re always keen to actually know the user group leaders and help them out in any way we can, so ping us an email and we can discuss what works for you.

Step 2: Eh? What?
There is no step 2. These are not the droids you’re looking for. Once we’re talking, we’re pretty quick to nail down our sponsorship based on your user group’s needs and organise how to provide the software.

What software do you provide?
We typically provide one free license to one of our products (excluding the Mega Packs) for each meeting. This works well because the folks running the event can choose a product that suits the audience. For example, if the topic is Silverlight related then our Silverlight Elements suite would likely go down well.

We also provide free software for speakers. Speaking for the first time in particular is really hard, we understand that, and we know user groups need a continuing stream of speakers in order to thrive. So to encourage people to take the leap, we offer a Mindscape Mega Pack — that’s every single developer tool we produce — to the speaker at each event.

Can you do me a favour?
Have you been to a local user group or do you know somebody involved in one? Please forward them a link to this post as we’d love to be connected with more user groups around the world. We currently sponsor about 15 user groups globally — and we want more right away :-)

Happy coding!

Mindscape @ TechEd NZ 2010 Videos

Can’t get enough Mindscape action? Want hours and hours of footage to watch alone at home in the dark?

Microsoft have hosted the sessions that Jeremy, Ivan and I delivered at Tech Ed New Zealand this year so grab a family sized bucket of chicken, kick back and enjoy:

• Jeremy talking about bringing the web to life with JQuery
• Ivan gets his parallel programming face on with Parallel Extensions
• Ivan discussing the benefits of using the right language for the job
• Ivan talks about the new features in C# and VB.NET 4.0
• Ivan deep dives into LINQ and how it actually works
• Jeremy and John-Daniel talking about ASP.NET MVC 2 & 3
• John-Daniel discussing the business of software [NSFW :-]
• John-Daniel speaking as part of a .NET CMS presentation
• John-Daniel in a short chat with Nigel Parker about ASP.NET MVC

Happy coding!

TechEd NZ 2010 – The “Ivan” Factor

The Mindscape crew were up in force at TechEd New Zealand this week presenting on a number of development related topics. We had a lot of fun and all enjoyed the great vibe that the Microsoft team put on for us this year*

I wanted to extend a big congratulations to our very own Ivan who walked away with the honor of the best talk of the conference for his most excellent session on the Parallel Extensions (and he even got a second session in the top 10 with his Deep Dive into how LINQ works**). Clearly everyone enjoys his clarity of thought, witty presentation humor and his ability to really inform his audience about the topic at hand.

Ivan presents at Tech Ed – Photo by Ollie Dale

Here are some choice quotes from the #tenz twitter stream regarding Ivans talks at TechEd:

@nzben: There definitely needs to be an “Ivan” factor on room allocation at #tenz.50+ people overflowing from NZ4.

@seanrcross: #tenz top tip. When going to Ivan Towlson talks, go early. Standing room only again

@kiwipom: Ivan needed a bigger room for his #tenz session http://yfrog.com/eu1ntgj

* – Some more than others, although going against the punters odds JD did not pass out on the conference floor this year
** – I may have to yield control over the LightSpeed LINQ provider now!