We had a blogging contest for the installfest that we had on Tuesday the 17th in Milwaukee, WI.  The installfest was held in conjunction with the Wisconsin .NET User's group and was also a holiday party.  You can read about the event and the contest in my previous post entitled "Installfest Fun".  Tonight I had my wife Jodie pull a playing card from a deck to determine the winner (based on the order of comments on the post, not counting my comment or the people who left more than one comment).  I am pleased to announce the winner, Ellen Dettwiler won the Zune 80 GB device.  You can check out her blog post:

http://ellenrdettwiler.spaces.live.com/default.aspx

This is Ellen's first ever blog post and hopefully it will kick start her blogging career.  I mentioned during the event that if you had a Live ID, then you had a blog at Live Spaces.  Ellen took my advice and posted an entry and won the contest.  Ellen, contact me and we will make arrangements to get you your Zune.

My favorite feature contest

I mentioned in my previous post that Dave Bost would be announcing the "My favorite feature of Visual Studio 2008" blogging contest.  Unfortunately, Dave did not get a chance to post the contest before the Holidays.  Please check back on his blog after the holidays, but in the mean time start working with Visual Studio 2008 so that you will be all ready to create your blog entry.

Tonight was the Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest / Holiday party in Milwaukee, WI in association with the Wisconsin .NET Users Group.  I would like to thank all of the people who helped out with the event, but I would especially like to call out the folks at Direct Supply for lending us their location to host the party, Scott Isaacs for his continued leadership, Brennan Stehling and Gerry Heidenreich for all their help in running a great event.  Also thank Centare for helping fund the food at the event.  KForce, Fullhouse Interactive and Apress all pitched in with some great prizes that were given away during the night.

Rather than me drone on and one about how great the event was, Dave Bost and I thought it would be fun to run a blogging contest.  If you were at the event and you create a blog entry talking about the event or you post photos from the event, add a comment to this blog post.  All valid comments posted here before midnight on Friday night will be entered to win a brand new Zune 80 GB model (now with podcast support!).  Note: I moderate comments, so your might not show up for a few hours, have no fear.

Not at the event?  You can still enter to win a Zune 80.  Check Dave's Blog tomorrow (Wednesday the 19th) where he will announce yet another contest to  to win a Zune 80 GB model and you did not have to be present at the event to enter this contest.

Hope you had fun at the event!

Note:  This entry was updated after being posted to correct some of the hyperlinks

This last week in both Downers Grove, IL and Indianapolis, IN we had these great holiday party / Visual Studio 2008 installfests in conjunction with the Chicago .NET User's Group and the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association.  This was a great event where we gave away free fully licensed copies of Visual Studio 2008 as a thank you to the User Groups.  Both of these events "sold out" within hours and there was huge demand from people who did not get in before the registration closed (we seem to have found a real market for free copies of our software - maybe the open source guys are on to something). 

The best part of the event was the holiday toy drive that we had in each of the cities (we called it "Toys for Tots" originally, but each user group decided who in the local community to work with to distribute the toys, it was not necessarily the official toys for tots group).  We asked each person to bring a new un-wrapped present that could be given to someone in need.  We sweetened the pot by having a raffle for everyone who brought a toy (or made an onsite cash donation) where we gave away an xbox 360.  The response was overwhelming.  Dave Bost and I fully intended to count the number of toys that were brought in, but they came in too fast.  A Downers Grove we literally overwhelmed the toy donation bin that was set up in the office.  Indianapolis did equally as well in the number of toys brought in.

Note: The Wisconsin .NET Users Group was supposed to have their installfest in Milwaukee, WI last week, but it was postponed to this Tuesday due to the bad winter storm.  They will also have a toy drive.   The event is sold out, but you can come for the party and be on the wait list to get a copy of the software (and bring a toy of course!).  Register for the wait list at: http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=123247.

Not the only opportunity to give

I attended the Web414 meeting on Thursday night and they had a different, but similar fund raising opportunity.  Gabriel Wollenburg's (aka HeyGabe) wife in association with Rogers Memorial Hospital adopt a family every year.  They are trying to raise enough money to buy the young girl in the family a Nintendo DS and the learning software that you can buy for it to help her with some developmental issues. What a better way for a technology oriented group to help out.  Gabe is collecting donations at his blog: http://writelarge.com/donate.

Not a guilt trip - but donate anyway

I honestly wrote this blog post because I believe in giving back whenever possible and it warms my heart when I see people give so generously and so selflessly.  I am not trying to "guilt" the people who read this blog into donating to these causes in particular.  Give to whatever cause you feel is appropriate and give as much as you personally feel you can (up to and including nothing).

Like most people, I hate spam e-mail.  But at the same time I want people who stumble upon this blog to be able to easily contact me without having to go through a contact form, I want them to be able to use their own e-mail client and for them to know my e-mail address (radical thought, eh?).  I have noticed a lot of people having their e-mail address on their blogs or web pages in various forms.  I suspect that depending on the form of the e-mail that they publish they get various amounts of SPAM.  So this blog post is a test to see how much spam I will get by throwing out e-mail addresses in various obfuscated forms.  I know this blog is crawled by several search engines and some other bots (that I have no idea what they are), so I hope that this is a valid test.

John.Smith@larryclarkin.com

John.Jones@larryclarkin.com

Julie.Smith@larryclarkin.com

Jeff.Smith AT larryclarkin.com

Julie dot Jones at larryclarkin dot com

Jeff.Jones@NoSPAMlarryclarkin.com

[My Last Name] period [My First Name] at the domain of this blog

I will report on the results a couple of times, once after 7 days and once after a month.  I am interested to see what happens.

 

 

I am an Architect Evangelist a title that brings me all kinds of ridicule.  My wife is constantly making fun of me for the Evangelist part of the title.  She says that when I go to meet with customers that I should be wearing a white suit, a white shirt and a white tie.  I bet she also pictures us having events like our ArcReady program in tents like the old time southern evangelist used to do.

I have been asked quite a bit about my title, "Architect Evangelist" (The Evangelist part of the title, the ribbing I get over the Architect part of the title I will save for another blog post).  The most recent questions have ranged from concerns about it being based on the religious evangelist (and the concerns are on both sides of the argument)  I also get the flat out "You are a what?" or "What do they do?" or my recent favorite "What do they grow?".   I figured that I had been asked about it enough to put some thoughts down about it.

If you look up evangelist in a dictionary you will find that there are numerous definitions, many of which are tied to the original Evangelist Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, but I like to point towards the definition "a person marked by evangelical enthusiasm for or support of any cause".   I also like the phrase "publisher of glad tidings", which in some dictionaries is phrased as "anyone who brings good news".

Guy Kawasaki is the person that many people point to as the first technical evangelist and he pretty much invented and perfected the role of Evangelist.  Guy was an evangelist for Apple way back in their first heyday, right after the Macintosh was released.  He wrote one of the best blog posts ever on The art of Evangelism. 

Sales Guys, Storm troopers or both?

A couple of weeks ago the team that I work on got to have a panel discussion with some folks in Austin, TX.  The panel was on how we (as Microsoft Evangelists) can work better with the community.  At one point one of the panelist described us a "Visual Studio Salespeople" (I am paraphrasing a little bit, but the gist of it is there).  The example he stated is how when we are talking to customers we will never mention nHibernate, because it is an open source and non-Microsoft product.  I was personally put off a little bit by it at first, but I did understand where he was coming from.  I am not on quota, I get paid the same salary no matter how little or how much Microsoft product people buy, so I am not the classic sales person by definition.  I do try to inform people about the value of Microsoft's products (particularly the development platform), so that kind of makes me a salesperson.  I do consider myself a sales person for the products that you can not buy from Microsoft (like Silverlight and the .NET Framework), so that would make me a rather lousy salesperson.  And as for the comment about nHibernate, I told the gentleman the truth - I love talking to customers about nHibernate, because that shows me that they have committed to our development platform.  I get worried when customers are talking about Hibernate.

The other comment I will hear quite often is that Microsoft Evangelists are like the storm troopers for empire.  We are in the field to make sure that everyone complies with the galactic will coming from the death star (or Redmond, WA).  I would say there is no truth to this, but Steve Loethen pointed out to me that is you re-arrange the letters in Evangelist, it spells Evil Agents (or Evil's Agent - depending on your point of view).

What does the typical week for an Evangelist look like?

First and Foremost, I must say that there is no typical week for an evangelist.  I can honestly say that once I got past my first couple of days at Microsoft, that there have been no 2 days a like.  However you can get a flavor for what a week as a Microsoft Evangelist can by by checking out my friend and colleague, Denny Boynton's recent blog post A Week in the Life of an Architect Evangelist.

Interested in becoming an Evangelist?

Shameless Plug - We are hiring.  There are currently openings for an Architect Evangelist and a Developer Evangelist in the greater Chicago area.  Let me know if you are interested in finding out more about the open positions or if you would like to pursue the positions.

A few short minutes ago Chris Bernard gave the PhizzPop Design Challenge teams their problem to tackle over the next ~58 hours.  Here is the challenge that they have to create a solution for:

Your Challenge is to come up with recommendations for how digital technology can help [An Airline] create unique experience on the Web and within the aircraft and take into account how we can connect with the world and devices that we use to do it.  Your solution should demonstrate innovations in planning or preparation activities or the personal activities that occur during travel.  Your general concepts should be inclusive and demonstrate 'thinking' if not functionality about both experiences.  Your solution may use any combination of web (ASP.NET, Silverlight) or application (WPF) components.

There is a lot more information in the 9 page packet, including a list of 3 personas that you are creating the solution for.

To go from the loosely defined problem to a concept to design to implementation in that short amount of time is going to be the toughest part of the challenge.  Kevin Marshall the team captain from Clarity Consulting is rumored to have brought in sleeping bags for his team.  It will be interesting to see the different trade-offs that the teams will be making over the next couple of days.

A story about a (mini) design challenge

This past April I got to attend an ASP.NET AJAX class put on by Fritz Onion of Pluralsight.  The class was about 2/3 designers and about 1/3 developers and all the stereotypes applied, I think everyone could easily pick out who was the designer and who was the developer (but everyone got along just famously).  A quick note: I am using the terms developer and designer as a broad stereotypes, there were lots of flavors of people in the room (architects, web designers, creative directors, etc.).  One of the neatest things in the class was a free form hands-on lab / contest.  Fritz gave everyone a starter application (which was a Netflix style web site) and told everyone to "go to town" on adding AJAX to the site.  At the end of the 2 hour lab anyone who wanted to submit their creation to the contest could.  In true American Idol style, Fritz and Dr. Joe narrowed it down to a few contestants and then the class voted on the winners.  2 solutions rose to the top: One by a developer and one by a designer. 

The developer's solution was the best technical implementation of AJAX that was possible in 2 hours.  Every page of the site was AJAXed up and he used several different techniques (Panels, Web Services, Control Extensions).  He spent his time focused on making the site really flow, but really did not touch any elements of the User Interface.  The designer spent his time improving the look and feel of the site, updating the CSS and adding DHTML animation effects (using the features of the AJAX Control Toolkit).  After 2 hours it did look very appealing.  There was only 1 problem: There was no AJAX on the site.  When it came right down to it the site itself was still using postbacks, there was no client side web service calls and other than using the stock components of the toolkit, no control extension. 

The designer won the contest "hands down".  Only a few people raised their hands for the best technical implementation.  This example shows the need for the PhizzPop teams to strike a balance between creating a pleasing experience and a technically accurate one and if you have to focus on just one on them, the pleasing experience should be where you invest your time.

Jeff Atwood just posted a blog article yesterday titled Presentation: Be Vain that talks about the need to focus on the presentation of the software.  Jeff's blog post focused on the shipping software, but I think it also applies to the design challenge as well:

Avoid creating software that's beautiful on the inside but ugly on the outside. Be vain. Make something that looks as good as it works. If you pay attention to the presentation of your software, you just may find the rest of the world is a lot more willing to pay attention, too.

Chris Bernard summed this up in this advice to the design teams:

"Things that are beautiful and that work are what seals the deal"