I blogged about our first Silverlight coding contest at Sogeti a few weeks ago and congratulated our winner on his Silverlight coding prowess. Now I’ve two more very worthy winners to announce, which makes me feel a bit like a virtual game show host. On that note, the following winners should step up to take a bow:

• Sam Heck @ Hitachi Consulting
• Jason Menezes @ Capgemini

Each winner qualifies to receive an InnerWorkings subscription ($1,500 value) and a shiny new Xbox 360 from Microsoft. Not bad for a few hours of expert coding time tweaking VideoBrush and MediaElement in a sample Silverlight application, eh?

You can pit your own Silverlight skills against our code checking engine by taking the following Drills from our catalog — topics covered include creating a simple Silverlight control, layout and formatting text, and using brushes. These Drills also cover drawing 2-D shapes, using animation and transformations, and MediaElement and VideoBrush:

• Silverlight Fundamentals using Visual Basic
• Silverlight Fundamentals using Visual C#

And now a bit of background on each of our winners…

Sam Heck (pictured right) is a senior consultant at the Custom Development Practice in Hitachi Consulting. He lives in Baton Rouge, LA where he earned bachelor degrees in computer science and biochemistry at Louisiana State University. In his spare time, Sam enjoys hiking, kayaking, watching sports (and configuring his new Xbox 360).

Jason Menezes is a software developer at Capgemini, based in the company’s Mumbai offices. He’s been working for Capgemini for 18 months, spending most of his time on a core implementation codenamed the Assurance Project. Jason is always keen to learn new technology, and Silverlight was high on his list. Jason really enjoys playing computer games as a hobby and will no doubt make good use out of his new Xbox!

Congratulations to all our latest winners on their well earned prizes — don’t forget to leave some time for learning .NET in between your Xbox sessions, folks!

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For those of you that have simply run out of space and time in your first life, I sympathize. Or maybe I empathize. At any rate, I’d encourage you to check out C# Day on Second Life.

InnerWorkings has teamed up with Michael de la Maza from DRC, Microsoft, and the SLDNUG to offer this virtual event for C# developers.

A full schedule of the event can be found on the SLDNUG website, but we’d like you to join us at Visual Studio Island on Saturday February 16th, 2008 in Second Life. If you’re interested, register now while the event is still open.

You should note that this is NOT another boring lecture-based event for developers — the focus is heavily weighted towards active participation. That approach should sound pretty familiar to all you InnerWorkings users out there!

There will be a short demo of the InnerWorkings product at the very end of the day, and we’re giving all participants 3 hours of free training on Object Oriented Development Fundamentals from our catalog:

• Creating a new class by extracting logic from a form
• Defining an interface
• Creating an abstract class
• Implementing the Liskov Substitution Principle
• Replacing inheritance with delegation
• Replacing an error code with an exception

Here’s a sneak preview of the event on Visual Studio Island - you don’t want to miss out on this one. There’s even a virtual cocktail party to get you in the mood. So come out and show your support for C# Day in Second Life. Enjoy…

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Over the years I have used several productivity approaches, from goal-driven/top-down (e.g. Steven Covey’s First-Things-First quadrants) to more reactive/bottom-up (e.g. David Allen’s Getting Things Done).
I have also used more tactical approaches, such as the 48 minutes rule, which I always find surprisingly effective, particularly when I know I can work for some time uninterrupted.

To beat my worst procrastination habits however, I’m now using another set of productivity weapons: David Seah’s The Printable CEO tools.
In the last few months I started measuring where my time goes during my work day. It is always a good idea to know where you are, before taking corrective actions and get where you want to go, don’t you think? Armed with my trusted TimeLeft countdown, every fifteen minutes I tracked my activities (and distractions) in the Emergent Task Timer. After a while I got pretty used to it.

The form that really got my attention, however, is the Concrete Goals Tracker. David suggests a brilliant motivational approach which comes from his experience in the gaming industry: every time you complete something worth doing, you award yourself points.
In the last couple of years I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on motivational patterns emerged in game development and it is amazing to realize how simple things like adding a score to value our activities can trigger some of the most primitive mechanisms of our brain.

This morning, I thought I could use this system at home to help me focus on the tangible things I can do in preparation to my next talk.
Here is my first draft:

Don’t worry if you don’t quite understand some of the items I have written for now. It will all become clearer in the next few weeks. Let’s just say that these are relevant to my talk. The actual deliverables (slides and narrative) are worth 10 points, the goal supporting activities are worth 5 or 2 points, the attitude 1 point.
So what do you think? Would a system like this work for you? In my case, I have absolutely no doubts!

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The InnerWorkings R&D team in Dublin is just emerging from the weeds of revising our catalog of coding challenges to support Visual Studio 2008 RTM. Converting our learning material and sample code from its native VS 2005 to VS 2008 was no trivial matter, but it’s clear that our customers demanded the change. Many of you have already made the switch to VS 2008 exclusively, while others are playing with it and seriously considering a permanent move soon.

Since RTM, we’ve seen very strong interest in our newest .NET 3.5 coding challenges — this tells me that developers are already starting to retool their skills for .NET 3.5 and the latest VS IDE release. That’s not a huge surprise, as we’ve seen many solid enhancements and new VS 2008 features to attract developers’ attention. From the popular LINQ, to AJAX integration and improved WPF support, VS 2008 has plenty of enticements built into the mix for .NET developers.

Under Soma’s guidance, Microsoft’s Developer Tools division furthered the momentum by releasing VS 2008 RTM ahead of time (shock, horror). Developers have enjoyed several months of Beta 2 exploration, followed by months of ’soft-launch’ access to VS 2008. The official marketing blitz happens in late February and early March, but there’s clearly no need for .NET developers to wait until then! This happy circumstance for Microsoft developers only made the need for InnerWorkings to convert our catalog more urgent than ever. I suppose it is true to say that when Microsoft sneezes, small ISVs like InnerWorkings get a cold!

During the conversion project, our R&D team prioritized the WCF, WPF, and WF material due to a serious compatibility problem which prevented developers from completing these challenges in VS 2005 if VS 2008 was installed. Needless to say, that was a bit of a showstopper for us!

I’m told that the team worked especially hard on the WCF conversion, due to all the impressive new WCF features that VS 2008 provides. The team still has a few loose ends to tie-up with VSTS and Enterprise Library 4.0, but rest assured those Drills are in the works for VS 2008 users. Check out our catalog for all the newly converted Drills and please keep the feedback on your experiences with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 flowing.

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A close friend of mine who works as a developer in a geographically distributed team, recently told me, with extreme frustration, that our profession is doomed and it won’t be long before we will all lose our jobs.
“We just translate user requirements into code”, he said. “Companies see IT as just a cost, we just can’t compete with India and China on a price basis”, he added.

Almost every time I travel to the US I hear stories of IT projects outsourced to India or to some other country abroad. Despite the reported mixed results, the trend is set to continue and it is beginning to extend to Western Europe as well.
Are we going to lose our jobs in the foreseeable future? I seriously doubt. Call me naïve, but I never regarded my job as an expense, although admittedly our financial department may beg to differ

My friend is right about one thing though: we can’t compete on a price basis. To survive, we need to get hungry again and learn how to deliberately think better, since creating new value is the only basis for competition left to us.

Besides, developers who are not cheap but consistently create opportunities that make or save their employers lots of money are, indeed, an investment. Furthermore, if we consider how hard it is to bring projects to success, investing on people who simply can’t fail is actually a fantastic investment.

But who and where are those talented few? Are you exceptional? Am I? Silence in our head. Let’s contemplate this possibility together for a moment… LOL, nice try! Perhaps we can work on refining our skills and try harder though :-).

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Microsoft’s MVP network of technology specialists has always struck me as a good idea. According to the MVP site, Microsoft created the Most Valuable Professional designation to “thank individuals for their exceptional contributions to technical communities worldwide”. With about 3,500 MVPs around the globe, it’s a small but extremely influential group of independent technical community leaders. My good friend Wikipedia has some juicy history on the ups and downs of the MVP program, including its near demise in 1999. Live and learn…

Despite their dependence on Microsoft for existence, MVPs are not an homogenous or orderly group. In fact, part of their appeal is the sheer diversity and no nonsense commitment to the developer community and software ecosystem. Numerous incidents in the past point to the group’s objective nature and the weight of their collective opinions — anyone remember the Classic VB petition incident for example? Not a group to be trifled with by anyone, I’d say!

At InnerWorkings, we’ve been looking at ways to recognize the MVP group for their positive influence on the .NET development community for some time. Last December, a gregarious MVP by the name of Justin-Josef Angel contacted us. Justin proposed the excellent idea of putting together a special offer from InnerWorkings exclusively for MVPs – it took us about 5 seconds to decide this was an idea worth pursuing.

In the guiding hands of our whizz website team, the idea took shape quickly and appeared as a prominent story in our most recent iteration schedule. Justin promised to advertise the MVP offer to his network on a dedicated MVP newsgroup. Already we’ve had dozens of MVPs sign up for the free subscription, so kudos to Justin for spreading the word.

All this preamble is my long-winded way of saying that I have a nice public announcement for all MVPs. InnerWorkings is pleased to offer all MVPs a free subscription to our entire catalog of .NET learning challenges. Valued at $1,500 USD per annum, this free subscription offers MVPs access to 500+ hours of .NET training at no charge while MVP status is maintained.

Our catalog includes coding challenges on AJAX, ASP.NET, C# 3.0, CSS, Enterprise Library, LINQ, OO, Silverlight, SQL, VB 9.0, VSTS, WCF, WF, WPF, and more. Each MVP subscription includes access to our code checking engine, dedicated Personal Tutor service, and Safari Books Online to support each individual’s learning needs.

To view this offer, MVPs should visit our website at http://www.innerworkings.com/mvp. We ask all MVPs to include a link to your MVP profile page for authentication purposes. Once approved, MVP access to our catalog involves a simple self registration process and takes about 24 hours. One final note, please tell your MVP colleagues about this offer — we think they’ll appreciate it!

Rest assured that we haven’t forgotten all the other influential community groups out there. Let me know if you think we should run a similar program for Regional Directors, INETA user group leaders, or whomever. I can promise that we’ll consider each developer community group on its merits.

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I’ll be back to Stockholm in early April, delivering a talk at one of the main IT conferences in Sweden. For such a technology-centric event, it is quite fascinating to see an entire track dealing with the often neglected issues of people working together. We should really give the organizers a standing ovation for such a splendid decision.

My talk is titled “Passionate Teams and Cooperative Customers: Agile tales of creative customer communication“. I have the abstract here for your convenience:

“In this session, Claudio presents stories of effective collaboration, thinking tools and valuable insights that can transform “incompetent” customers and “arrogant” teams into unstoppable forces.

We are getting so used to complexity that we no longer notice it. To bring simplicity to our software however, we need to communicate effectively with our customers, distill their knowledge and bake it into our domain models. Yet, we focus so much on improving our technical skills that we often offer elaborate solutions to the wrong problems, unprepared to deal with a world where perception is far more important than logic.”

If you happen to be at the conference, make sure you attend my session! I bet you won’t be disappointed ;-).

The list of stars that will join me at the event is, quite frankly, a tad intimidating (see here).

I always wonder about what drives people to speak in public. Is it the genuine spirit of contribution? Perhaps the publicity and recognition that inevitably goes with it? Is it maybe the excitement of being on stage? It’s probably a combination of all of that and more; my biggest reason, however, is to confront my greatest fears: speaking in public is like Freddie Krueger, a pure nightmare becoming real. In fact, it is the preparation and the waiting for the moment of truth that drives me nuts. All my insecurities emerge all of the sudden, my entire body reacts, and I become absurdly anxious. Then again, once on stage, everything changes completely: I’m on a mission, I’m (over)prepared, I just can’t fail.

So, there you go. It is never easy and probably it will never be. I still haven’t won my fears at all, but the past rewarded me with really good memories (like when, a million years ago, I addressed a group of scientists at CERN for a whole week, for example), and the future will surely hold even better ones.

By the way, have you ever considered speaking in public? There is a good chance that your own community would love you to volunteer on a topic you feel passionate about. If you live in Ireland like I do, this is definitely the case. It takes a lot of commitment, but perhaps this year you could try. Just don’t let your fears eat you. People want you to succeed, don’t you know?

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