Tulsa TechFest, Here I Come!

Hey everyone – I hope you’ve all had a chance to go out to the Tulsa TechFest web site and register for the upcoming event.  Registrations for the event are going strong, and we’re expecting another great turnout this year!  All you need to get in the door is bring is $2 or 2 cans of food to donate to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma or the Family & Children’s Services and you’re in.

For those that have been living under a rock, Tulsa TechFest is one of our premier community-led events in South Central.  Last year, over 1200 people attended 19 tracks of incredibly technical content over a Friday-Saturday period.  This year we’re hosting the event over a Thursday-Friday to better accommodate the working men and women of the Tulsa area so that they don’t have to give up their weekend to get access to this great content.

Here’s a sample of some of the great speakers and great content available this year:

• Opening Keynote - Chris Bernard, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist
• Closing Keynote - Rob Howard, Microsoft Regional Director, CEO of Telligent
• Opening Keynote -Brian Gorbett , Microsoft Architect Evangelist
• Closing Keynote - Jef Newsom, Microsoft MVP, Co-founder of Improving Enterprises
• Architecting Modern Distributed Applications - Phil Wheat, Microsoft Architect Evangelist
• Virtual Worlds and Virtual World Evangelism: From Here to Eternity - Zain Naboulsi, Microsoft Developer Evangelist
• Building services which rock! - Tim Rayburn, Microsoft MVP
• An Introduction to Behavior Driven Design - Raymond Lewallen, Microsoft MVP
• SEO: Designing Web Sites for Search Engines - Mark Watson, Leader of the Fort Worth Web Design Enthusiast Meet-up Group
• Tips for Improving SharePoint Performance - Dennis Bottjer, Microsoft MVP
• Becoming a .NET Jedi with Resharper - Ben Scheirman, Microsoft MVP
• SQL Server CLR Executables - Bill Vaughn, Microsoft MVP
• Better Application Design with practical loose coupling - Caleb Jenkins, Microsoft MVP
• Automation using Visual Studio Team System 2008 - Team Build - Ed Blankenship, Microsoft MVP

As you can see, there are a LOT of Microsoft employees as well as Microsoft MVPs and RDs joining the party this year.  But, Microsoft Technologies are not the only focus.  Check out the full agenda for more information about the rest of the featured Microsoft technologies as well as tracks specifically targeted at Architects, Designers, Project Managers and more!

For my part, I’ll be presenting a 2-part session this year on Data Binding, Templating and Theming in WPF and Silverlight 2.  We all know that the Silverlight 2 programming model is a subset of WPF, but how close – or different – are these three critical aspects?  Join me on Thursday morning to find out.  We’ll look in detail at the data binding features of both, styling, templating and more in a 2-part session on Thursday morning. 

I’ll also be helping the other guys staff our booth in the exhibitor’s hall.  We’ll have some Lego Mindstorms NXT robots as well as a couple of XBoxes on hand to entertain everyone between sessions and at lunch.  We’ve also donated a TON OF PRIZES for David to give away including a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition, a brand new Lego Mindstrorms NXT as well as a Boe-Bot, a couple copies of Rock Band 2, some software and a ton of books (literally a ton – they’re weighing the back of my van down now as I type this!).

See you there!

Technorati Tags: tulsatechfest,techfest,tulsa,event,mvp

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 07, 2008
  PingBack from http://www.easycoded.com/tulsa-techfest-here-i-come/

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  Looking forward to it!   Is Microsoft buying drinks?

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2008
  Possibly... I'm sure I can be talked into something :-)

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2008
  The comment has been removed