OKC WCF Presentation - Torch Passed!
I had a great time presenting Beyond Web Services to Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF .NET 3.0) last night for the Oklahoma City .NET Developers Group. They were very receptive and eager to learn. Presenting to people like that makes four hours on the road worth it. I was floored when Keith Nicholson was making announcements to hear that as of that night, he is no longer the President of the Oklahoma City .NET Developers Group. I know the group is in terrific hands, those of Raymond Lewallen and the rest of the new team. I know our groups (Tulsa Developers .NET and Oklahoma City .NET Developers Group) will work even more together in the future and I am expecting great things from them all.
One thing that still amazes me is how many people had never heard of WCF. Microsoft does a great job of educating and spreading the word very early of the new technologies they have coming down the pipe. Over they last several years they have done a terrific job of getting them out early thanks to their beta versions. More and more companies are developing against these Beta technologies earlier. It makes the most sense. Why spend your time developing something that will be out of date by the time it's completed? If you're not tapping into these trends you are missing out on many golden opportunities.
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.