patterns & practices Live!
A year ago, when I stepped into my current role on the p&p team, I knew that we created good content but we weren't doing enough to make our stuff consumable. I didn't like that we just threw it over the wall and assumed that customers would get it. Around that time, George Pulkitharra and Anthony Tsim from the MSDN Webcasts team paid me a visit and asked me if our team could do a couple of webcasts as part of the Architecture series. I think I suprised them when I not only said OK, but said we would do one a week every week. Same bat-time, same bat-channel. My code-name for it was “Must See p&p”, but I've stayed away from using that in any marketing materials lest the good folks at NBC come after me. :-> Anyway, with the help of George and Anthony, patterns & practices Live was born.
By all measures, it's been a success. I believe we have over 20,000 viewings and the number continues to grow. It's still a lot of work to coordinate this effort and I am far from perfecting the art of scheduling (for example, this week, we needed to reschedule), but we've gotten so much great feedback that it's been worth it. A lot of SMEs have used it as their secret weapon for user group meetings when they need to present on a p&p topic. Others use it as an easier way to evaluate a block. Ron Jacobs has been my MVP, hands down. The guy is a born speaker and one of my favorite guys on our team. I almost feel like the webcasts are my way of letting the customers get the same privelege I get when he swings by my office and we just talk tech. He's a great reason the program has been such a success. Larry Brader has been coming on strong--another really bright guy who loves to talk tech.
In October, to mark the one-year anniversary of patterns & practices Live, we were asked by the MSDN webcast guys to do a “Best of” week. In it, we would do a reprise of the most popular webcast topics for the patterns & practices Live stuff from some of our top presenters. This will probably be the second week of October and I am working on scheduling. Below are some of the topics that I thought were worth repeat performances along. I know Ron will be there and I certainly have my list of other candidates, but I want to hear from you. Any thoughts on new sessions, omitted sessions, potential presenters, etc. would be appreciated. Here's what I got so far:
- Kickoff + p&p Overview/Update
- Building Secure ASP.NET Applications
- Performance Modeling
- User Interface Process Block
- Logging Block
- Caching Block
- EDRA
- Enterprise Solution Patterns
- Integration Patterns
- Testing Patterns
- Test Driven Development
- J2EE Interoperability
- Logic Library's Logidex
- A forum similar to the one done at Tech and that we plan to do on August 19th
So let me know what you think. Is there something missing? Something not very compelling? Some speaker that you were a big fan of that we need to bring back? We'll probably do 10-20 sessions, so there's room for agenda growth and paring. Plus, we'll probably do giveaways for some of the people who attend a certain # of the sessions, so it works well to make sure we have no duds.
And don't forget to keep watching!
{Foo Fighters - There's Nothing Left to Lose}