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Fritz’s Theorem on Conferences and Shoes

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Something has been bugging me all week here at Tech Ed: there is an amazing number of ‘good looking people’ wandering around the conference floor. Now, that normally wouldn’t be a bad thing, if you have good looks, then go ahead and strut your stuff. But you see, most of these people are ‘sales people’ or you may more commonly hear them referred to as ‘booth babes’.

When I attend a large conference, I make it a point to wear comfortable shoes. Why? The volume of walking that I do from session to session is absolutely killer on my feet. I leave these events and always have fresh blisters on my feet from the enormous amount of walking that I do. These ‘booth babes’ do no walking at all…

Comfortable Shoes

Hence my theorem: If you are not wearing comfortable shoes at a technical conference, then I don’t really want to speak to you. You don’t have the technical knowledge that I want to exchange ideas with. It’s fine for you to attend, bring attention to your company, and attract a group of people. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not intimidated or upset with your presence. I just have better things to do with my time.

For those organizations that hire more than 1 to operate their sales booth on the expo floor, you are communicating to me that you have NO technical content, and NO technical experts that want to talk to your future customers. That’s okay too, you’ve just made my choice in selecting vendors much easier.

I have two daughters that I want to mature and enter a technical industry and be successful. These stereotypes and chauvinistic practices are a bit sad for me, as I don’t want them to think they need to be compared to the ‘booth babe’ There are many strong women in our field, and those are the women that I want my girls to be like. These women are smart, happy, successful, and most of all: wearing comfortable shoes

Perhaps I spoke too soon

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After I wrote the post yesterday “Is this my last Tech Ed as an attendee”, I had no idea what would happen next.  In the 2 hours that followed, the final round of the “Speaker Idol” competition took place.  As a result of this round, I qualified to be in the competition finals.  So, I think I’m on the right track here:  I might not be at Tech Ed 2013 in New Orleans as an attendee, but rather as a Speaker!

This was an exciting result for me, as it places me in the top 4 speakers in the competition.  Not to be overly critical, but some conference attendees relayed to me that my speaking skills were better than the instructor in some of the sessions that they attended at this conference.

All in all, great news.  I’ve refined my original presentation and will have video and results to post later today.

Wish me luck!

Is this my last Tech Ed as an attendee?

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I think this will be my last Tech Ed as an attendee.  I’m growing a bit impatient with the content available.  Please understand, that I consider myself a bit of an ‘alpha geek’ who follows MSDN, Channel 9, and many of the Microsoft bloggers on a daily basis.  Hence my problem:

Why should I spend my time at Tech Ed in developer content sessions that I have already seen online?  Additionally, the number of developer focused sessions at Tech Ed North America 2012 this year is significantly smaller than the number of IT focused sessions.  I am embarrassed by how little Asp.Net developer content and Windows 8 content is available.

If Microsoft REALLY wants to push the app store model, why aren’t they training us to deliver that content at the HUB of their training year?  On the TechEd website, when I search the session catalog by product there are ZERO sessions on Windows 8!

 Don’t get me wrong, I love Tech Ed as a show for junior to mid-level developers to learn a LOT at.  It is an absolute blast to meet and talk with all of these technologists that I have tweeted with over the past few years.  That interaction is INVALUABLE.  More than anything else, getting some face time with people like David Starr, Peter Provost, Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin have absolutely made my visit to Tech Ed a pleasure and valuable experience.

I just think that I may have outgrown the content at the show, and my talents would be more effectively used in presenting some more topical content or assisting in hands-on-labs when I return to this conference.

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Here is the video of my presentation of QUnit-Metro at Tech Ed NA 2012 in Orlando.  This talk was given as part of the first heat of the Speak Idol competition.  I placed second in my heat, and have an outside chance of qualifying for the finals on Thursday.

Announcing QUnit-Metro!

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As I started learning about writing JavaScript apps for Windows 8, I progressed through a few sample projects and found my way easily.  After all, I’ve been writing HTML and JavaScript for the past 10 years…  this shouldn’t be difficult.  I did however find that my practice of Test Driven Development to be nearly impossible to achieve.  You see, out of the box, Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 do NOT provide for unit testing your JavaScript.  However, if you opt to write your app in XAML, unit testing is available.

This was unacceptable, so I went to the drawing board.  I dug up my favorite unit test framework, QUnit and started to work with QUnit to test my sample Windows 8 projects.  Alas, QUnit expects to run in a browser and have full access to the DOM.  For those of you who have not developed a Metro app yet, you will find that DOM manipulation is very hard to do.

So, <TimAllenVoice>I re-wrote it!</TimAllenVoice> I have forked QUnit 1.5 and added some bindings to get it working in the Metro environment.  The result is something that I call “QUnit-Metro”.

By the time this post is published, I will have presented the framework at Tech Ed 2012’s Speaker Idol competition.  This is a very exciting time for me, as I have never presented at Tech Ed before.  Sure, I’ve done Code Camps and local user groups, but never anything of the size of Tech Ed. My hands are trembling with excitement as I type this post from the conference floor, mere hours before the competition starts.

I will post screenshots, a starter tutorial, and a quick screencast showing the framework over the next day or two.  For now, check out QUnit-Metro at:

http://bit.ly/QUnitMetro

Thanks for reading…. and I’ll update you with more Metro and Unit testing goodness over the next few months.