.NET Hacker Room at Code Impact

If you haven’t done so yet, you should register for Code Impact up in Jacksonville on September 13th.

I’ll be hosting a new tradition in FL Code Camps a .NET Hacker Room.  A .NET Hacker Room is a unique experience that will allow you to see and play with some of the latest hardware technology.  

This room will offer things like
- Internet of Things
- 3D Printers
- Quad Copters
- Windows Galileo
- Robots
- Netduino's
- Oculas Rift (V2)
- More!

Also throughout the day, come in for 10-15 minute lightening talks on the above topics.

See you there!

-twb

DataBinding 101 – AppCamp Materials

On June 20, 2014, I will be presenting on DataBinding for your applications at 2014 AppCamp Tampa.

And here are the completed demo files

 

-twb

Sarasota Hackathon and Mashup

Join the Tampa crew as they head down to Sarasota for some much needed attention.

On Saturday January 18th, 2014 for 10AM to 4PM, we’ll be holding a Hackathon and Mashup at the ComCenter Lakewood Ranch (Florida Room).

ComCenter Lakewood Ranch - Florida Room
9040 Town Center Parkway
Lakewood Ranch, FL 34202

It will be a very informal setting and schedule but that doesn’t mean you won’t be in for a treat of some awesome content.

In addition to having a great open environment to get help with the apps you are working on, we’ll have some lightening talks to include things such as Azure Mobile Service, Getting the most out of Nokia Maps in your Windows Phone application as well as other useful information applicable for building Windows Phone and Windows Store applications.

Afterwards, we’ll unwind at the Cock-N-Bull and continue the technology discussion.

Hope to see you there!

-twb

Announcing S.M.U.G. Dev - Class of 2014.3

Today I’m happy to announce that S.M.U.G. Dev has been picked up for it’s 3rd Season.  If you don’t know what S.M.U.G. Dev is, it’s the Southern Most User Group – Developers.  S.M.U.G. Dev is part geek retreat and part code camp that is completely free for it’s attendees.
We have our annual meeting the Thursday prior to the South Florida Code Camp http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp/ which happens to fall on February 22, 2014 next year.  Mark your calendar and make travel arrangements to make it down to Conch Republic better known as Key West FL, for S.M.U.G. Dev on February 20th, 2014.

Tentative Schedule

Wednesday February 19th 2014

• 1PM - Annual Kick-Off Lunch at Sloppy Joes
• 3PM-6PM - Group or Individual Site-Seeing
• 6PM - ? – Kick-off Ceremony, last year was Joe’s Tap House

Thursday February 20th 2014

• 8:00 AM - Breakfast
• 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM Morning Sessions
• 12:00 PM -  Lunch
• 12:30 AM – 4:00 PM Afternoon Sessions
• 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM Down Time/Site Seeing/
• 5:30 PM Annual Sun-Set Picture at Mallory Square
• 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM After Party
• 9:00 PM – ? After-After Party

Friday February 21st 2014

• 10:00 AM Breakfast (we won’t walk 5mi this year Kelvin :) )
• Caravan and Travel to Speaker Party for South Florida Code Camp.

More details to follow to include available sponsorship packages and call for speakers!
We filled up last years venue and will need to find something bigger for this year.  If you are interested in joining me for a “scouting” mission to Key West sometime this fall, please email me at kevinw@software-logistics.
Come join us and help make S.M.U.G. Dev – Class of 2014.3 the best event to date!
-twb

Windows Phone Developer Days 2013

Come join us at the Tampa Microsoft office on October 18 from 9AM to 5PM for a full day Windows Phone Event.  The format will be a hackathon with some great prizes such as the latest Nokia phones along with some 15/30 minute tutorials on how to leverage some of the powerful features available on the Microsoft stack to get the most out of your investment of time while developing Windows Phone Apps.  These tutorials will include such things:

• Getting Started Breakout
• XAML Tips and Tricks
• Game Maker
• Portable Class Libraries to target both Windows Phone and Windows 8/8.1
• Azure Mobile Services
• Background Agents
• Live Tiles

If you're a veteran Windows or Windows Phone developer or just getting started, you'll be sure to pickup something new and have a fun time doing it.

Please register at: https://tpawp8102013.eventday.com

Tampa Microsoft Office
5426 Bay Center Dr.
Suite 700
Tampa, FL 33609

-twb

December Tampa Bay NETMF Meeting and Hackathon

When: Meeting - December 20, 6PM-8PM, Hackathon December 21st, 9AM-?
Where: Tampa Microsoft Office, 5426 Bay Center Dr. Suite 700, Tampa FL, 33609

Monthly Membership Meeting

This December we are going to turn our focus to having your small embedded device such as a Netduino communicate to the the Internet.  We will also be looking at the Electric IMP.  Something on the very cutting edge, but also something very cool!

This months geek shopping list

1) Electric Imp and Dev Breakout Board
2) Netduino Plus 2 or Ethernet Shield (Ethernet Shield will attach to your standard Netduino and will require a bit of hacking to get working.  We probably won’t be covering this in our meeting)
3) WiFly and XBee Shield add WiFi to your Netduino, again we won’t be covering this in the meeting but isn’t that difficult to connect and configure.  I’d be happy to answer any questions on this via Email.
4) Pen Type Multi-Meter really helpful once you really start getting into this stuff.

To register for this event, please click here.

NETMF Hackathon

In addition, as a bonus this year, Bill Reiss and I are going to be hosting the Tampa Winter Games and NETMF Hackathon all day on Friday December 21st at the Microsoft office in Tampa.  As we have seen in our nightly meetings, two hours is just enough time to get started with this stuff.  Why not make a full day of it and hang out with some like minded folks getting your “geek" on.  The format will be a couple of talks to kick the day off, you’ll get to hear Bill (great speaker!) get you going on developing games on the Microsoft Platform.  I’ll also give a brief talk on something cool that runs on a very small processor.  Then throughout the day, we’ll have a series of lighting talks to cover small bits and pieces of both gaming and microelectronics.  The primary intent of these events are really just to hang out and work on some cool stuff, along with your peers that might be able to help you if you get stuck on certain areas.  I’ll probably be working on my NiVek QC1 along with some cool new 32 bit hardware and my Windows 8 Ground Station. 

I’ll bring my collection of Netduino Shields and other assorted electronics for folks to play with.

To register for this event click here.

Both events should be a blast, hope to see you there! 

-twb

Files for Windows 8 Direct3D Overview

On November 27, 2012 at the Windows 8 Developer meeting, I gave a very high level overview of DirectX 3D.  This demo included how to render simple triangles as well as how to create a model and render it as a mesh in a Windows Store Application.

 

Hope to spend more time on this in the near future!

-twb

Announcing SMUG Season II

I’m happy to announce that SMUG (Southern Most User Group, Developer Edition) will be happening again this year in Key West FL before the South Florida Code Camp.  SMUG is part mini-Code Camp and part Geek Retreat.  Everyone who attended last year had a great time and commented it’s an event not to miss!

Here’s is our tentative agenda, venues to be announced in December:

February 6, 2012

• 4PM Registration Starts
• 4PM – 7PM Meet and Greet/Welcome Activities
• 7PM – 9PM Dinner
• 9PM – ? Social Activities

February 7

• 9:00AM – 9:15AM – Key Note
• 9:30AM – 12PM Technical Sessions
• 12PM – 2:00PM Annual Lunch at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaretville on Duvall street
• 2:00PM – 4:30PM Technical Sessions
• 4:30PM – 4:45PM Closing Statements
• 5:00PM – 7:00 PM Open, Social, Sight Seeing, Key West Sunset Celebration
• 7:00 PM – Dinner and Social Activities

February 8

• 9:00AM Annual Breakfast at iHop in Key West
• 10:00AM Caravan travel back to Miami for South FL Code Camp

If you are interested in attending, please sign up at http://smugdev2012.eventbright.com

If you are interested in speaking please send an email to beth@bethyork.com with an overview of your topic. We will probably only have one track so depending on the number of speakers we may limit talks to 20-30 minutes.

Speakers will get a highly coveted SMUG speakers shirt, and all attendees will get T-Shirts.

Note – last year sponsorship was light so plan on covering most of your meal, lodging, Travel and entertainment expenses.  If you are interested in sponsoring, please let kevinw@software-logistics.com know.  We’ll be working on getting some discounted hotel rates, but feel free to make your own reservations.

-twb

Tampa Bay NETMF Hacking Group

Announcing Meeting Number 2 of the Tampa Bay NETMF Hacking Group.

To register for the event, please go to http://tbnetmf1211.eventbrite.com

Our second meeting will also be held at the Microsoft Office in Tampa on November 21st at 6:30 PM.  This meeting will be in two parts, the first part going from 6:30-8:00 and will  be lecture/hands on.  The second part will be Show-and-Tell as well as freestyle hacking on your hardware.  If you did something cool between the meetings, come prepared to share!

After a brief recap/intro for any new members, this meeting we will explore basic communications and digital signals with your Netduino .NET Microframeworks device.  Although we will be using a NETMF device the same basic principles will apply to other microcontrollers

• Serial Data Communications to a Host Computer
• Serial Data Communications between two NETMF devices
• Controlling a Servo

Here’s a relatively cheap shopping list of parts to help support your geek habit that will be useful for this meeting:

• Netduino – ~$35.00
• USB to Serial Adapter – ~$15
• Breadboard Jumper Wires – ~$5
• Servo – ~$15
• Breadboard – ~$5 (optional)
• +9V Power Supply ~$7 and +5V adapter ~$10 (optional but will allow your Netduino to run stand-alone)
• Misc. Electronic Components (optional, includes jumper wire and breadboard) ~$13
• Misc. Electronic Components – Mega-Pack! (optional, includes jumper wire, breadboard and a ton of other stuff) ~$23
• Saleae Logic USB Logic Analyzer (very optional, but very cool) – ~$150

Next month, we will be exploring options for getting these small devices on the internet.  Then in January, we will be looking at the Arduino.  Anyone with experience with this want to present?

Hope to see you there!

-twb

Tampa Bay – .NET Micro Framework Development Group

Today I’m announcing the first meeting for the Tampa Bay – .NET Micro Framework Development group on Thursday October 18th, 2012 at the Microsoft Office in Tampa.

If you’re interested in learning more about controlling hardware for software, even if you have no experience, please join us!  You can read more about the .NET Micro Framework.
These will be the primary goals of the first six months or so of the meetings (which are open for discussion):

• Setting up development environment, the hardware and software you will need.
• Very basic digital electronics, how to flash an LED, how devices and components talk together.
• Communicating with a Windows 8 and Windows Phone front end.

These meetings will be part “lecture” where we’ll discuss some basic concepts and potentially do some hands-on exercises as well as “show-and-tell” that will let folks do quick demos of fun stuff they are working on.
To start out with, we will be working with the first generation Netduino, so if you are interested in hands-on participation, you might want to order one of these before coming to our meeting.
Even if you have zero experience, but have an interest in this kind of stuff, please come and join us!  It really is an awesome experience bringing hardware to life with the software you write.
RSVP Now
-twb

Visual Studio 2012 Launch Party

Join me at Software Logistics, LLC headquarters (otherwise known as my residence) on Saturday September 29, 2012 for a Visual Studio 2012 launch party beginning at 1PM.  There might be a little geeky presentation but for the most part this will be a social activity with families encouraged to attend.  Bring your bathing suits as well!

For those of you that I told that the XBox 360 did indeed play games in 3D and you had a slight doubt, here’s your chance to see it for your self, VERY COOL!

1847 Lago Vista Blvd.
Palm Harbor, FL 34685

Phone: 727 455-0530

View Larger MapDriving Directions

Hope to see you there!

-twb

Kinect and Windows Phone Playing Together

Links for South Florida Code Camp Presentation

Link to source code and slides:
http://new.efficientcoder.net/2011/10/windows-phone-and-kinect-playing.html

Link to Video:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Kinnect-and-Windows-Phone-Playing-Together

-twb

Announcing SMUG Dev’s 1st Annual Meeting in Key West

On Feburary 16, 2012, we will have our first annual meeting of the “Southern Most User Group Dev” or “SMUG Dev” in Key West Florida.  This is timed to coincide with the South Florida Code Camp in Ft. Lauderdale.

Here’s a rough schedule of the full day events:

• 1:00 PM – Meet at Sloppy Joes for Lunch
• Afternoon –Site Seeing/Exploring or *cough* co-work *cough* *cough*
• Dusk – Sunset celebration at Malory Square
• 7:30 PM – 1^st Annual SMUG Dev Meeting:

Speakers:
Nikita Polyakov, Local Developers

Topics:
1) “Radical Change in how we consume software”
2) “What it’s like to develop software in paradise (by Local Developers)

Location:
Katie’s Cottage
Ambrosia Key West Tropical Logging
622 Fleming St.
Key West FL

Adult Beverages and light snacks will be provided sponsored by Software Logistics, LLC

9:00 PM - ?? – Activities on Duval Street, potentially involving adult beverages.

For more information and if you plan on attending contact Kevin D. Wolf kevinw@software-logistics.com or sign up at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2556380202

Hope to see you all there!

-twb

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for 2012

In 2012 I’ve again been awarded an MVP as a Windows Phone Development professional. 

The last few months of 2011 have been very busy with client commitments and it looks like both January and February will be as well.  Once I meet my commitments, I’m going to be turning my focus to figuring out a real-world strategy for the vision Microsoft has been projecting for the past few years “3 Screens and the Cloud”.  With a hopeful beta of Windows 8 sometime in the first half of the year, Windows Phone 7.5 and the latest XBox 360 dashboard update there are a lot of things are going to be converging to create an eco-system like no other.  My focus will remain on mobile devices, however having the software we build provide a cohesive experience across all the three delivery platforms with the cloud as a common denominator makes things very interesting.

Also, I have very high hopes for Windows Phone this year, especially after looking at upgrading my HTC HD7 to an HTC Radar on the T-Mobile Site.  It was very interesting to see the ratings on the phones.  First up was the Samsung Galaxy S II with a whopping 9 reviews.  Then a Blackberry with two whole reviews, a couple of SIM cards which we can throw out but then the HTC Radar with 106 reviews and as you can see they are almost all 5 stars.  So not only a very high review but a considerable number of folks are buying the devices!

Until we meet again!

-twb

Windows Phone and Kinect Playing Together Materials

Attached you can find my materials for my Windows Phone Developer talk 

 

New Short URLs for Florida Developers WP7 Apps

If you are registered on the FL App Developers Site http://www.flwp7.com we have a new feature available to you. 

Here was the problem…you were out and wanted someone to download your app or you wanted to put a link to it on some printed marketing material.  In the past you had to enter the big old Zune based URL like zune://navigation/?phoneAppId=b7522342-4235-a532-be54-13bc43ef1423 which was pretty much impossible to enter correctly.

With this new feature available to you from the Florida Developer Community Site, you can create smaller, more friendly URL’s that can easily be entered to bring people to your application.  For example with the URL http://flwp7.com/cs you’ll be brought to the market place page to download ContactSwap. 

To use these, make sure you and your apps are registered as a developer at http://www.FLWP7.com.

Then simply when entering your applications information, specify a few letters to create the unique URL at the bottom of the page.  For ContactSwap I entered the code CS:

This will allow anyone that navigates to http://flwp7.com/cs on their phone to be brought directly to your app on the marketplace.

While you are on the www.FLWP7.com site, make sure that you browse the apps that all the local folks created and download a few and check them out!  Support your local App Developer =D.

-twb

SWFLDG – Windows Phone 7 Garage – A fun trip!

On Thursday June 24 DevFish (a.k.a. Joe Healy) and I packed up for a journey to visit John Dunagan and his totally awesome .NET developer group in Fort Myers/Naples Florida to do a Windows Phone 7 Garage meeting.  It turned out to be an _interesting_ trip to say the least.  Before the trip I tried to convince DevFish to stop off at Nervous Nellies a really nice watering hole on Fort Myers Beach.  This plea was unsuccessful (and the primary reason why were in time for our meeting) so we continued on down I75.  Somewhere AFTER we Daniels Parkway where we would have turned for Fort Myers Beach, my truck began pulling to the left, I pulled over and ended up with the following.

No problem, I figured, I’ve got a spare and the jack and tire iron that came with the truck, we’ll be fine.  Well no…when I bought the truck it had those little 1” high tires with sparkling chrome wheels…for any of you that know me, that just ain’t my style.  I had the dealer put back on the original tires, but they must have kept the other lug nuts.  The &(&(!$#$% tire iron didn’t fit the lug nuts on my truck.  Normally I keep a speed wrench and hydraulic jack in the bed of my truck, but the prior weekend I had hauled some stuff and cleaned it out, I put the spare back in but not my jack and tools.  Luckily a Road Ranger passed by and we were able to get his assistance with the right sized wrench.

If you know DevFish at all, you know he just couldn’t let this folly go without giving me a hard time.  More on this later.

So here I am pushing my tire into WalMart to get a new one put on.

And here I am pushing it back out, WalMart doesn’t carry tires for “real” trucks with 18” tires.  DevFish’s theory here was that I washed my hands after wheeling the tire in and jinxed myself as to them not having the tires.  Of course this just fed the fire as to him giving me grief.

Revenge of the Truck

So after DevFish giving me non-stop crap for the past 1/2 hour, my truck decided to say ENOUGH and decided to come to my defense!  BOOM after walking around the back of my truck, Joe’s shin came into full contact with my bumper hitch…

I was seriously torn, I’ve done this myself and I knew how much it hurt, I also knew how good it felt to have my truck stick up for me.

So, that was the end of my bad luck, I just had to pay Tires Choice $300 for the penalty of getting a flat tire.  You read that right, when it was all said and done $300 for a new tire…ouch!

That’s not all!

So it was then time to start our meeting.  DevFish booted up his main laptop and guess what?  Smoke started rolling out of it!  Ok that might be a slight exaggeration but his hard drive had some serious problems and he couldn’t boot it up.  Then he went to his backup machine, but that didn’t have a Power Point viewer on it…so after about 30 minutes of everyone sitting around while Joe tried to get his demo going, he moved to my machine and things worked fine.  Karma strikes again!  I knew better then to give him grief over this since I needed to drive home the next day, had an important call around noon and didn’t want Karma striking me with another flat tire.

BTW – I did the Mango talk and a small demo of something VERY cool, I’ll be releasing soon, these went well.

Happy Ending

The night ended well however enjoying a few pints of Guinness at a local pub.

I’m just worried about our next trip together where we are heading to Las Vegas before BUILD and driving across the desert to get to LA…wish us luck!

-twb

Mr. WolfBytes featured on GrapeCity Russ Cam – Episode 14 SQL Saturday #77

Earlier this month when I was up doing some Windows Phone 7 training and a Windows Phone Garage up in Pensacola, Russell Fustino of GrapeCity shot a little video at the speakers dinner, looks like it turned out pretty good!  My ugly mug was featured in the intro for the video =D.

-twb

Windows Phone 7 Training/SQL Saturday #77 – Pensacola

If you are attending SQL Saturday #77 and are interested in Windows Phone 7 development, you might want to plan on coming a day early.  I will be doing a full day of WP7 training.  We are going to start out from the basics and throughout the day cover a number of topics you’ll need to know to build apps for the real world.  Also I’ve got a number of topics I’m going to cover, but we will have some flexibility in the material, so be sure to bring your real world questions and problems.

You can sign up here.

Then on Saturday, Joe Healy and I will be hosting a Windows Phone 7 Garage where we will provide our experience to help you get a leg up on building your app.

As an added bonus we will be giving away a free production Windows Phone and a copy of Visual Studio 2010.  All you need to do is show us some progress on a WP7 app during the event and you get a raffle ticket to be entered in the drawing.  As an added bonus if you attend my training on Friday, you will receive a bonus ticket to be entered into the drawing, so come to my training, start working on a phone app, have a good time and have a chance to win some awesome goodies! 

Of course there will be plenty of swag to give away.

Hope to see you there!

-twb

ByteMaster – WP7 Tribute App

Joe Healy the local Microsoft DPE of DevFish fame needed some way to learn a new tool for creating WP7 without any code called AppMakr.  As he said:

Kevin's a WP7 (and fruit and android) dev in Florida, deserving of his own tribute app. Yet he doesn't have one. So I'm building it for him. I was going to build one for myself, but hey, that's cheesy.

So the ByteMaster Windows Phone 7 Tribute App was born!

You can read about his experience here.

As you can see from the downloads from last month, a number of people are actually downloading it.  Not sure if that says something about the content or the person that wrote the app.  My guess is the later.

Anyway if you are interested in using this tool, be sure to check out his follow-up post on getting the app submitted.

BTW – The main pivot of the application is my recent blog posts.  If you are reading this in the app, we’ll see if it causes some sort of memory leak from the self referential recursive nature of this post .

-twb