Big Design Week starts Monday, and we’re thrilled to announce that our own Caleb Jenkins has been asked to help present on Wednesday’s workshop! He’ll be digging in to the dicey topic of UX and Agile with Brian Sullivan and Jim Carlsen-Landy. We’re looking forward to hearing how these three present together. They all come at Agile and UX teams from slightly different angles. Jim has managed UX teams for a couple of years at a company that was an early adopter of agile practices, and Brian will be walking through hands on techniques to get scrappy with your UX research, design and deliverables.

Caleb will be focusing in on some of the misconceptions that exists between the agile and UX worlds and specifically how teams can scale Scrum with UX teams. It’s going to be awesome! Check out the full week’s schedule, and if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time to register.

See you there!

We’re excited that Caleb will be speaking in Tulsa tomorrow at the Tulsa School of Dev.

He already blogged about it; he’ll be speaking on “10 Reasons Your Software Sucks” and then round things out with with “Taming the Legacy Code Beast”. These are both information packed talks with real word strategies to learn from.

Be sure to register now and then check out the other sessions. It’s going to be a full day! Make sure you stop by and say hi!

Jared Spool published a great article yesterday titled “Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams”.

Jared talks briefly about proliferation of agile approaches in software design and user experience (UX) design and contrasts that to the Big Design Up Front approaches of the past, he then goes further in describing, not only User Stories, but several other layers of UX design and how each layer differs in scope and purpose from the other layers.

we frequently saw the successful teams talking about these other layers all through development. When a team member would produce a deliverable or design sketch that wasn’t quite matching the direction that the other team members imagined, the team would step back and talk about the other layers, trying to figure out where the disconnect came from. Because the team established the layers together, based on research they jointly conducted, they found it easy to collaborate on creating coherent experiences that regularly delighted their users.

It’s a great read, and I highly recommend heading over to the UIE site and reading the full article. You might also consider subscribing to the UIE podcast BrainSparks.

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If you’ve never heard Jared Spool speak live, he’s a great presenter and is always thought provoking and memorable, our chief mentor will be presenting at the same conference as Jared in July, The Big (D)esign Conference is July 14th – 16th – Hope to see you there!

Proaction Mentors provides a number of strategic services for your company and development team.

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As Caleb pointed out, this year our friend Jay Smith has taken on the goal of spear heading a Community Leadership Town hall at the Tulsa Tech Fest.

What is a Community Leadership Town Hall? Jay’s post summarizes it well

The evening will be filled with discussions about issues, ideas, and solutions regarding creating, maintaining, and growing user groups and technical communities.   This will be a highly interactive night where everyone will have a chance to suggest a topic and voice their opinion.

Bring your questions, ideas, issues, and willingness to share to the Community Leadership Town Hall – Tulsa.

We know that it’s no small task to pull so many different leaders together, provide content for everyone and keep all of the participants engaged. We’re looking forward to attending and participating! Hope to see you there.

This Friday Caleb will be presenting at the 5th annual Tulsa Tech Fest. We’re excited to continue our involvement in the greater technical community, as an INETA speaker Caleb has presented at User Groups all over north America since 2005. This is an exciting time and a fun event packed with multiple tracks, check out the complete agenda, we’re sure that their will be something for everyone! Caleb will be presenting on “10 Reasons that your software sucks (and how to make it better)” and “Real World Windows Phone 7 Development with Silverlight” – both of these talks are a lot of fun and we can’t wait to catch up with everyone there. Be sure to stop by and say hi!

Caleb at the 2007 Tulsa Tech Fest

Custom workshops designed to impact and improve software development

These topics are suitable for special developer events, stand-alone sessions or combined as custom workshops and mentoring sessions.

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Architect on retainer was created to meet the growing needs of smaller development shops that have ongoing coaching, process improvement & architectural guidance needs, and to serve larger organizations that maintain a minimal .NET investment and therefore are not able to justify this role on a full time basis. This program has a fixed, base price and a minimum 9 month commitment and includes up to 3 days of architectural services each month. Typically this involves an evaluation of your environment, coding practices and procedures, followed by monthly workshops to target specific areas of improvement with direct mentoring.

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Architect on Retainer was specifically designed for organizations that have lead architectural and mentoring needs but are not ready to justify a full time senior position. This is common with smaller development teams and larger organizations that might happen to have a minimal .NET investment.

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Here are the slides from the presentation that Caleb gave at the North TX Silverlight User Group yesterday.

If you can make it to Tulsa next month, we’ll be there to hear Caleb give an enhanced version of this talk at the Tulsa Tech Fest on November 12th. This is the 5th year of the Tulsa Tech Fest – it’s always a packed event and a lot of fun. If you can make it, be sure to stop by and say hi!
We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Recently I was working with a client to debug an issue that they could only reproduce in production (I hate those). Unfortunately, this was the sort of error that was sporadic and unpredictable – so hooking up a debugger and waiting wasn’t much of an option. Fortunately, Microsoft’s Debug Diagnostic Tool can be used to automatically grab an IIS Memory Dump during certain scenarios (like crashes and hangs). Normally, memory dumps aren’t the kind of things that .NET developers go digging in to. Well never fear my .NET developer friend, let Tess from the Microsoft debugging team show you the way!

This is a great presentation that Tess Ferrandez gave at 0reDev last year on Debugging .NET Applications with WinDbg. After you’ve watched her presentation be sure to check out the rest of her full blog, especially her post on using CMDTree then go read John Robbin’s post on Debugger Markup Language (DML).

Now you are well on your way to being the Memory Dump Ninja that I always knew you were!