Thanks to the Charlotte Guild and the Richmond .NET Users Group
I want to thank my good friend's Andy Leonard and Bill Jones on organizing some excellent Code Camps this month. I was able to give three presentations in Richmond on October 6th and another presentation yesterday in Charlotte. I also had more time to sit in on other sessions and labs in Charlotte since I only had one presentation to give, which I found very rewarding. I got to spend some quality time working with LINQ that I have been wanting to get into!
In Richmond I did a last minute presentation on ASP.NET Building Blocks, a discussion and demonstration of CardSpace and OpenId and finally a good introduction and demonstration of httpModules and httpHandlers. I had great responses from everyone and I love going to the Richmond area.
Yesterday I dusted off my ASP.NET performance tips and tricks presentation. The original talk worked out pretty good for a normal 75 minute time slot, but in the past year I have found some more useful items I wanted to share. But my allotted time was only 45 minutes yesterday, so I had so much more to offer. I think I will be splitting this one into two distinct presentations from now on. I got to spend my time showing how to do some more advanced data control and ViewState tricks to save bytes and increase perceived site speed. I got to do a quick demonstration of Fiddler and the ViewState decoder too. I even got to touch on using Cache to increase performance.
I also wanted to get into some of the Tracing tricks, pre-compilation and Yahoo's 14 points of High Performance Web sites. But oh well. There are so many things I could talk about to push the performance of a web application to the edge.
I do apologize for loosing my voice halfway through my talk yesterday. I forgot my water bottle and I have been fighting some allergies lately!
I mentioned Marcus Frind as someone every ASP.NET programmer should be aware. His site, www.plentyoffish.com is an ASP.NET online dating site that is one of the largest dating properties on the Internet. He is a great case study in the capability of ASP.NET, IIS and SQL Server. His Blog is Paradigm Shift. His ArcCast interview is on the Channel 9 site. He also did a really good interview with Shoemoney on his PodCast last summer, if you listen closely you will even hear me call in!
Right now I am planning on speaking at the November 17th Reston, VA Code Camp and March 1st Roanoke. We are in the planning stages of another Raleigh Code Camp in early February and I know Atlanta will be having a camp in mid-January if they hold to their schedule. I am also seriously thinking of attending the day of Silverlight in Reston on Nov. 3rd too.