A few people have contacted me asking about the Developer Dinners.  At the last dinner, I mentioned that we were going to try to move to a monthly cadence for the dinners.  I also mentioned that we were going to make recordings of the dinners available on demand so people outside of the Reston, Virginia area could watch the sessions. 

What’s up with the recordings?

I didn’t attempt to record the August dinner.  I hit some technical snags trying to record the October dinner live.  Therefore, I had to redeliver/record both sessions after the actual event.  I announced the availability of the recordings here.  Unfortunately, the only recording published so far is the August dinner on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2008/11/09/devdinnerondemand-overview-of-the-net-framework-3-5-sp1.aspx

My schedule and some failed attempts to record have made it difficult to get the ASP.NET MVC dinner session published.  However, I am happy to say, I finally recorded and edited the session.  I just have to prep everything and publish it.  This may take a day or so. 

James, the User Experience Evangelist on our team, held a Designer Dinner on Expression Blend 2 this week.  We had every intention of recording the event, but once again hit some technical snags.  I never realized recording and making the sessions available on demand would be so challenging.

The good news is that we are working with the facilities folks at the Microsoft Reston office to make parts of the recording process less challenging.  We’ve also learned quite a bit from our recording issues so we’re not as green anymore:).  Moving forward, our plan is to record the dinners live (including all the great Q&A from attendees). 

I am also working on a solution to make ALL of the on demand content (webcasts, screencasts, in-person events, customer interviews, etc.) from our team much more discoverable.  More on that to come…

The last developer dinner was in October, so what gives?

We decided to have a full day developer conference in December highlighting technology announcements from PDC 2008.  Therefore, we skipped the November and December dinners.  The details about the conference are here.  The recorded sessions from the event will be published.  However, only 2 of the 4 sessions will be live recordings (more technical snags).  Stay tuned…

We will have a Developer Dinner in January titled Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and Beyond.  The official announcement and abstract will be published soon.  Moving forward, we plan on moving to a monthly cadence for the dinners.  I can’t guarantee we will have one every month, but that’s the goal:).

Hopefully this clears things up.

My team is putting on a 1-day developer conference in Reston, Virginia on December 4th.  We’ll have four sessions:

What’s New with .NET Framework 4.0?

Introducing the Microsoft Modeling Platform (Oslo) and Windows Application Server Extensions (Dublin) for Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow (WF) Services

Windows Azure – An Introduction to the Microsoft Cloud Services Operating System

Overview of the.NET and SQL Services in the Azure Services Platform

We also plan on wrapping the day up with a general Q&A session.  I will present the .NET 4.0 and .NET/SQL Services session.  For more details and registration instructions visit:

http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/2008/11/19/microsoft-public-sector-technology-conference-december-4-2008-reston-va.aspx

My team delivers a monthly Developer Dinner for US Public Sector Partners in Reston, Virginia.  At the dinners, we give 90-120 minute developer focused presentations on recently released / future developer technologies.  We have had great success with the dinners over the years.  Much of the success can be attributed to Robert Shelton who began the series a few years ago.  Robert has since moved to a new team within Microsoft.  I have the pleasure of assuming responsibility for the dinners. 

There are two challenges with the dinners we’d like to solve.  First, they have become so popular that we have to cap registration at a number that will ensure we don’t have an overcrowded room. Second, only people in the DC metropolitan area get an opportunity to attend.  Our team is focused on all customers/partners that do work for the US Public Sector (Federal, State, and Local Government).  Clearly, there are more customers/partners in the US than just the DC area:).

Moving forward, all of our dinners will be recorded and published for on demand viewing.  We’ve already had two dinners this fiscal year., but unfortunately we weren’t able to record them.  However, I am in the process of recording and publishing both of them.  I’m just redelivering the content in my office in order to record them (without an audience).  In the future, you can expect these to be live recordings complete with customer Q&A.

How do you keep up with the recordings?

First, you can bookmark http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/pages/partnerdeveloperdinnerondemand.aspx.  This will contain a running list of all the recorded dinners.  The first recording is available now!

Second, I have created a DevDinner tag on the my team’s blog:

Browser: http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/archive/tags/DevDinner/default.aspx

RSS: http://blogs.msdn.com/publicsector/rss_tag_DevDinner.xml

I will make sure this tag is used only for upcoming dinner announcements, follow up links/downloads from presentations, and notifications when dinners are published.