Presenting at the ASP.NET MVC FireStarter Event

No sooner had I completed this post about the somewhat unmanageable list of things I had committed to for Autumn, than I was contacted by Peter Laudati, one of our local NYC-area Microsoft Developer Evangelists and asked if I would be willing to speak at an upcoming ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event on October 3rd, 2009.  Largely because Peter, the other area Developer and Architect Evangelists, and Microsoft have been so supportive of our efforts to get the NYC-area ALT.NET user group up and running by providing us space and other logistical assistance, I didn’t hesitate to say ‘yes’ that I would contribute some of my time for this event.

What’s a Firestarter?

For those that don’t know, a so-called ‘Firestarter’ event is a one-day event (usually on a weekend so full-time employed developers need not ask their boss for time off to attend) narrowly-focused on getting attendees “from zero to 300” in a single instance.  The ‘300’ in that phrase is a reference to the idea that there are 100 (intro), 200 (intermediary), and 300 (advanced)-level courses in most universities and training programs.  Its obviously insane to think that any attendee could go from knowing zero about a topic to having enough ground-work laid to participate in a 300-level course in single day, but the underlying premise is that the sessions aren’t just limited to showing ‘hello-world’ type content with the technology but are designed to provide real-world knowledge such that attendees could reasonably be able to go out into the field and build something actually valuable out of the technology.

ASP.NET MVC Firestarter Agenda

You can find the detailed agenda here.  Make sure you click to expand the ‘Detailed Agenda’ link at the bottom on the event blurb on that page.

Location: Grand Hyatt Hotel, NYC

Unlike past such events that have been held (usually) in various Microsoft offices around the country, this one is instead going to be held in a hotel ballroom/meeting room in midtown Manhattan.  This is for two reasons: 1) the NYC Microsoft offices are presently under renovation, making them unsuitable to hold such an event and 2) this Firestarter is being promoted / supported by Microsoft’s corporate team so there’s more publicity, press, and visibility around this event than past regional Firestarter events.

I have preliminary information that there are already some 250+ registered to attend, so if you are interested in coming to the event, I recommend registering ASAP as follows..

Register to Attend

To attend the event (and registration is of course on a first-come, first-serve basis), visit this page and sign-up.  The event (as with all Firestarters) is free and requires the commitment of only your time to attend.  Note that despite the speakers that are listed on the registration page, rest assured that yours-truly will indeed be presenting at several of the sessions.  Thanks to the magic that is corporate deadlines for submitting content to be posted to MS-controlled websites, I’m guessing they had an internal submission deadline to meet when planning the event and just went with last year’s ASP.NET MVC Firestarter presenter list.  Trust me, I’ll be there, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as they say (though who the heck knows why they say that…???).

Register to Watch in Real-Time if You Cannot Attend!

Unlike other events where if you cannot attend due to schedule (or geographic!) conflicts you had to wait until a recording of the event was posted on-line after the event had ended, this event will be broadcast over the Internet live in real-time, permitting remote attendees to acquire the content and participate in the Q+A sessions remotely.  Knowing Microsoft, this would all presumably happen via one tremendous LiveMeeting session supporting audio, video, and live chat (for questions from remote attendees), but I frankly don’t know the exact mechanism they have in mind just yet.  I’m sure there are more details when you register to attend the event remotely here.

What’s this ASP.NET MVC Thing All About?

So if you have been wanting to get your head wrapped around this new, alternative ASP.NET framework for architecting web applications for .NET but just haven’t been able to find the right time to dig in, I’d urge you to register to attend the event (either in person or remotely).  If nothing else, trying to broadcast it over the Internet in real-time should make for an interesting experience for all concerned 🙂

Hope to see you there (one way or another~!)