Quick Catch Up - New Gig, New Focus, MVP Summit, TechEd 2008!
Okay. Here's a few long overdue house cleaning items:
1. VSLive! Austin - Nov 14, 2007 - my presentation on the .NET 3.0 LIVE! Track went very well - Putting it all together with .NET 3.0: Presentation, Services and Workflows. I finally got to see some of the heavy hitter presenters - Billy Hollis, Ken Getz, Mark Michaelis, Richard Hale Shaw, PDSA, Inc and Michael Stiefel.
2. New Employer - Back in March, I switched employers! I am now a Technical Specialist for The Revere Group, an NTT Data Company. Where I have been focusing primarily on public facing web sites utilizing the .NET Enterprise Content Management System - Sitecore CMS. The last project with my previous employer was deployed the week before I left, utilizing MOSS 2007 for the public facing web site, for the National Professional Paintball League. I definitely feel invested in all the projects that I worked on and hope them, the company and my past co-workers continued success.
3. MVP Summit 2008 - An opportunity that could not be passed up. Seeing the keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer, plus all the break-out sessions with the product teams, etc, it was definitely priceless. I even tacked on an extra day for the World Wide User Group Management Summit, just wish I could've made the ALT.NET conference that was going on that weekend as well. One thing that amazes me is how many people have said they want to be an MVP. How do you become one, etc. Even after giving them some brief advise with some of the simplest things to do, nothing - just lip service. The MVP Summit itself is worth it. Get involved in your communities.
4. Tulsa's first annual School of Dev! - After having our first successful TulsaCodeCamp on March 10, 2007, I decided to come up with something new and exciting. Who knows maybe someone will start repeating it, like what's happened with the TechFest events. <hint.. hint> I can provide hosting for anyone who wants to, since I built the SchoolofDev.com site with that in mind from the beginning using WSS (Windows SharePoint Services - will skin it later). If you missed it, take a look at the Agenda, Speakers and over $130,000+ worth of prizes that were given away. Thanks to all our Sponsors. Every attendee could even get Continuing Education credit from Tulsa Community College!
5. Microsoft TechEd - I have had the honor of having my session selected for the Developers Office track - How to Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as an Application Development Architecture: Not your typical Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) development and deployment. Having worked on small projects all the way to large public facing social networking sites, you too can learn how MOSS is much more than just an Intranet-in-the-box solution. It can be utilized as the application development architecture of the future. It offers tremendous time savings for development and deployment. Learn the best practices for setting up your server architecture for redundancy and high performance. Learn the pain points to watch out for as well as all the short cuts to make your next Web application ready for prime time.
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About dwalker
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.