Brian Sullivan

Everyone on my blogroll is taking the opportunity of the new year to take stock of 2009 and make public plans for 2010, so I thought I would join in.

In 2009, I made an effort to start speaking a little bit more.  I spoke at my first code camp, the Northwest Arkansas Code Camp, on the Harding and LSU campuses for recruiting trips for my employer, as well as the Baton Rouge .NET User Group.  I hope to continue ramping that up in 2010.  I’m presenting at my home meeting, the Shreveport .NET User Group, later this month, and I have a trip scheduled to the northwest Arkansas area in March.  I’d like to make it down to southern Louisiana at some point, too; the guys down in Lafayette and New Orleans in particular need some love.

I also need to step up in promoting the SDNUG this year.  I felt like I was able to kind of coast for a lot of 2009 with our current set of attendees, and didn’t really make as much of an effort as I could have to make more people aware of the group’s existence.  I’ve already begun to remedy that this year by seeking out area software companies and making phone calls, which will hopefully yield some more members.  I need to get on top of speaker scheduling, too, both within the group and without.  There are several group members that I think would make great presenters, I just need to convince them that it’s a good idea!

I want to start blogging more, as well.  One post a month just isn’t where I want to be.  I think having a regular schedule will help with that, so I’m pledging right now in public to post something on my blog at least once a week.  That plan may take a hit when my daughter is born in February, but I’m going to give it my best effort.

I think something else that may help with blogging is having an area of focus.  I’ve really been interested in application lifecycle management lately, especially after all the stuff I saw at PDC, so at least for now, I think I’ll focus on Team System and TFS for a little while.  I’ve been listening to the back catalog of Radio TFS, which has been great, and I plan to seek out other additional resources for ideas. I’ve recently installed TFS on a virtual machine to play around with, so hopefully that will lead to some ideas, as well.

I hope you had a great 2009; here’s to 2010!

Last night the Shreveport .NET User Group hosted our resident developer evangelist from Microsoft, Zain Naboulsi.  He gave a presentation that gave us a little taste of what’s in store for Visual Studio 2010.  Some very cool stuff; I especially like the dump saving/loading and the ability to tear off code tabs for better multi-monitor use.

More important than the presentation, though, I think, are the ideas Zain has for moving our group forward.  The evangelist territories were recently rearranged so that Zain is the evangelist for the state of Louisiana.  You can expect better communication and coordination between the user groups in Louisiana, including aligning our meeting dates so that we can make it easy for a speaker to make a tour through the state and catch most of our meetings.  I’m also looking forward to seeing what we can do to make sure the word is out about our group.  One of the biggest challenges we’ve run into is making people aware that our meeting exists and that it can be a great free resource for developer education.

I look forward to seeing what comes of some increased attention toward our group from Microsoft!