Planning is in full swing for the Fall 2010 Day of .NET (DODN) conference in Grand Rapids on Saturday October 23rd, 2010 at Calvin College.

The theme for this year is "Open to the Future". The theme combines two important trends in developing with .NET – "open" and the "future". On the "open" side there has been a lot of activity in opening up the platform, creating open source projects and libraries, enabling projects to work well in a mixed-IT environment, and opening up data to diverse applications. On the "future" side we see .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 which brings many new capabilities to the platform.

What this means for potential speakers is that there is a huge range of topics for you to consider. While this event is a "Day of .NET", speakers are encouraged to submit talks that span the spectrum of technologies being used in active development today.

This event is a great opportunity for new speakers and local speakers to get a chance to participate in the larger development community – come share what you have been learning and network with other speakers and participants.

In addition to having a set of planned ~1 hour talks, there is room available for open sessions. These can be from a 5-minute "lightening talk" to something longer that is of interest to an ad-hoc presenter and group. So if you have an idea for a session to be put on the schedule and promoted, please send it along ASAP. But if you also have something smaller, or that develops between now and then, please bring it along to the event and the organizers have a forum to share it.

Speaker submissions will be accepted between August 25 and September 18 and will have the sessions and schedule completed by the end of September for the event on October 23.

In a brief e-mail to grdodn10@live.com please provide your:

– Name

– Email

– Phone Number

– Twitter

– URL (Blog/Personal/Company)

– Brief Bio

– Session Abstract

– Session Level (e.g. 100,200,Advanced)

– Notes/Info (new presentation, done before?)

The current economic condition is hitting everyone pretty hard, even developers. For developers, part of the challenge in finding that next job is having the right, up to date skills. To help folks get those skills, Arnie Rowland and a number of other MVPs got together to pool MSDN subscriptions. This year, every MVP gets 3 MSDN Universal Subscriptions- 1 to use and 2 to give to worthy recipients. To pick a worthy recipient, an unemployed or underemployed developer needs to propose a software project for a non-profit agency, school, or church to be assisted by Project Phoenix. Arnie and his associates will then pick at least one project week to ‘fund’ with the MSDN Universal Subscription. A number of other companies joined in to offer more resources to help the selected developers make the most of this opportunity. Publishers have donated books and software companies have donated tools. I’m very proud that Pluralsight has donated a subscription to their .NET Training Library. I have created content for that library and am thrilled that an organization I am involved with is helping developers get back up to speed with current technology.

Project Phoenix is not a ‘free lunch.’ It supports the developers’ efforts so that they can gain from the work they do. I do recommend that you visit Arnie’s site to read all the details!

Here is the an example of one project that was funded:

Feed My Sheep: We are a community feeding program, that originally started as a 3 month summer project, one night a week we would provide a free meal for anyone who wanted to attend. We are in desperate need of a website in which we could post updates, have a calendar of volunteers and groups that will be serving each month and list special events.

Shortly after TechEd, my friends at Pluralsight put me in contact with DZone.com to create a WCF 4.0 RefCard. The requirement for the card was to boil down the essential things one needs to have available in order to program against WCF 4.0 into 6 pages of content. WCF is huge, so the challenge was to only include the really important stuff. Please take a look at the card. I’d love to hear your feedback.