As I sifted through my inbox for my daily VB-Insiders list email reading the other day, I wandered how many of those VB MVP’s and insiders shared their thoughts, knowledge and random comments on Twitter as well.
I decided to send out an email to the VB-Insiders distro asking everyone who had a twitter account, and who wanted to be listed on this Tweeps List to send it to me. The response, and you can see from the list below was great. (For the record, there were a few who still felt that twitter was pointless and a waste of time; I still cannot disagree with them 100% – who knows, maybe someday I will.)

Yesterday afternoon Hal Hayes and I were invited to speak at the SharePoint Technology Conference hosted and organized by the SharePoint User Group DC (SUGDC).

The event was packed with sessions hosted by leaders and top professionals in the Microsoft SharePoint space. I was quite honored to be invited to speak, and if that wasn’t enough, I was speaking more on behalf of DotNetNuke rather than SharePoint.

Just the other day we had a customer with the exact same quote: “Show us how you did that, so we can do it in-house”… and the following video, although an obvious exaggeration, depicts what I am beginning to see more and more; is this a sign of the economy, or…? Well, you decide – I just thought this was too funny to not share.

While the first half of 2009 is almost behind us, there is a lot more community work left to get done. As I try to arrange my life-work-community schedule I see that I have quite a busy couple of months coming up yet.

I am still waiting for responses from other community leaders and events such as the SDN/Open Force Europe, so I won’t list those here just yet. Meanwhile, here is what I’ve got lined up.

Earlier this year the Microsoft Visual Basic team conducted several interviews with VB MVP’s. I just received an email from Lisa Feigenbaum that my interview was posted on the Visual Basic Team’s website.

Check out the interview here and learn just a tad more about what I do, and why I LOVE VB.

The June Capital DotNetNuke User Group event promises to be yet another great meeting chuck-full o’great insight and information. DotNetNuke module development still remains one of the most requested event topics. On June 17th, Chris Busse will demonstrate how to mash-up external Web 2.0 web services with your modules to provide right user experiences.

On June 26th, I will take the stage once again at the Regional SharePoint User Group. I will be joining Hal Hayes in a battle that from the looks of it may rival “David and Goliath”. The event topic is labeled as follows:

Prepare for the battle of the titans! Which platform is right for you? Each one has its uses depending on the audience.

If you are interested in watching this battle in real-time the register for this event and join on on June 26th between 3:00PM and 4:00PM.

MSDN road shows are FREE events organized and managed by the Microsoft Developers Network to educate, train, and share knowledge with everyone and anyone interested. I particularly like this event as it is a one day event packed with lots of valuable information. I’ll be attending the event in Reston, VA on June 2nd.

I was recently working on implementing Twitter integration features to the DotNetNuke Blog Module (I’ll write up the details about these features in another blog entry) when I quickly ran into the requirement of having to shorten the blog entries’ URLs. As you may or may not know, Twitter requires that messages be less than 140...

Read More »

Today Joe Brinkman announced the official OpenForce ‘09 Call for Speakers.

Apart from being excited about the event and what it has in store, I particularly liked the way the topics were split into 4 simple and concise categories:

Development Design Administration...

Read More »

PimpThisBlog.com is a place where you promote, publicize and socialize your content.

Don’t be fooled, this is not yet another social bookmarking website, although it may look and feel that way to you. It's a simple to use and effective way to get your content noticed and FAST. All you have to do is let PimpThisBlog.com know that you have content that you wish to publicize and it’ll "pimp it" for you. PimpThisBlog.com will share your content, by syndicating it to various RSS readers, it will tweet your posts on Twitter (make sure you follow @PimpThisBlog to see how that works), it will tell Google that there’s new content to crawl, post the status on FriendFeed, and on and on… In no time at all your web traffic will grow faster than ever before.

...

Read More »

Yesterday I wrote about how the Microsoft P&P folks released a QuickStart and Tutorial in Visual Basic, and today I happy to say that the Silverlight team has followed suit by adding Visual Basic code samples to their toolkit in the March 2009 Release…

Read More »

Traditionally Visual Basic has been missing from the Microsoft Patterns & Practices’ (P&P) QuickStarts and tutorials. The P&P team has received lots of feedback on that and I am pleased to say that they listened. The P&P team, has now released VB versions of the QuickStarts, Hands-On Labs, and How-to Topics! …

It’s about time I wrote a little bit about my experience at my very first MVP Summit, so here I am.

First of, so much went on, and so much was learned, that I could not possibly cram everything into one single blog post… well I could, but then it would be too tedious for me to write and for you to read. So what I plan on doing is to write a series of blog posts, each about a specific event that I felt was worthy of a post. The first in the...

Read More »

At last month’s Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) meeting we had the pleasure of having Tom Kraak give us a great presentation on Search Engine Optimization with DotNetNuke.

...

Read More »

I am very pleased to announce yet another exciting Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) event. Next week, on Wednesday February 18th, 2009, Seablick Consulting’s very own Tom Kraak will be driving down from Connecticut to give us an Intro to Search Engine Optimization with DotNetNuke.

...

Read More »

Earlier this month my company launched PimpThisBlog.com. PimpThisBlog.com runs on ASP.net MVC, a SQL Server database and combines a number of online third party services, such as Gravatar, Re-Captcha,...

Read More »

I am pleased to announce the publication by Wrox Press of Wrox Blox Done in 60 Minutes:  Building a Custom DotNetNuke Membership Provider by yours truly.

In this publication, I put down into more detail the topic which I presented at last year’s OpenForce08 / DevConnections conference. In this eBook (Wrox Blox) I demonstrate how to build and configure the DotNetNuke (DNN) Membership provider without modifying any core DotNetNuke (DNN) code.

When Windows Beta (Build 7000) was released to the public, I rushed to download  and install it on a Virtual PC. I was very impressed with what I saw, and it proved to be much more stable and usable than I had anticipated. Today I decided to take the proverbial plunge and install Windows 7 on my main laptop. So far all the apps that I use on a daily basis seems to be running fine except for a little snag I ran into when I needed to join a last minute...

Read More »

If you live in the Washington DC area you cannot help but be consumed with the constant news about the presidential inauguration and related events. Never have been so many streets been closed, and never has the anticipation of the attendance of million people been so high.

With that being said, and although I am not looking forward to the chaos that the inauguration promises to bring, I am very excited to have Joe Brinkman, DotNetNuke Corp....

Read More »

I was invited to attend an all-hands meeting this morning at company called SMBLive. I had the pleasure of working at SMBLive until last year as their CTO.

CEO, Matt Howard, gave a great presentation on his 2009 vision and goals for his company's products and services. To put it in context, SMBLive has developed...

Read More »

Family, friends, colleagues, and business partners,

I can’t think of a better way for me to start 2009 than by thanking everyone for their support and encouragement over the past year. I received word on January 1st that I have been selected as a 2009 Microsoft MVP, which is a great honor for me.  It seems like a long time since I first began work in this field, and while I grew to love my work and enjoy the community I entered because of it, I never dreamed I would get an honor like this! …

Sometimes, inspiration hits when you’re away from your desk. However, you don’t have to miss out on blogging about it!

With the new DNN Blog Module (version 03.05.00) and it’s support for the metaweblog API, there are a variety of tools and technologies that make it easier to blog. One in particular is the ability to blog via email with a service like Blogmailr (www.blogmailr.com)....

Read More »

OpenForce '08 has finally come to an end :-( and I am now back home in Northern Virginia (Washington DC area).

While at OpenForce, between the presentations, manning the DotNetNuke Community booth from time to time, and meeting a lot of great people, my work backlog begun to pile up.