If you're interested, the folks from geekSpeak have made available a recording of yesterday's show - Contextual Collaboration using Unified Communications.
Thanks to the geekSpeak hosts, Glen Gordon and Mithun Dhar. I really enjoyed being on the show and am a big fan of the format.
I'm going to be a guest on MSDN geekSpeak this coming Wednesday at 2pm CST, the topic is Contextual Collaboration Using Unified Communications.
We're going to discuss how to communications-enable an application by going through a couple of demos that we built for this year's UC track at TechEd in Orlando:
- Office Communicator Vista Sidebar Gadget
- WPF Presence Controls for Office Communicator (used in the gadget demo)
Both projects are intended to be samples and will be made publicly available (including source code) after TechEd 2008.
I'll be going through the source code and digging into how to use the Office Communicator SDK in a project.
geekSpeak format
The geekSpeak format is pretty cool; there are no slides, just questions from the audience which end up driving the direction of the session.
I'm involved in some user group events, and getting the audience to interact can be like pulling teeth! Maybe the fact that the audience submits their questions via LiveMeeting has something to do with it ...
Regardless, it's refreshing to participate in a user-driven session instead of talking at your audience from a pptx deck!
Office Communicator Vista Sidebar Gadget
The gadget I'll be showing was built in WPF and provides functionality such as:
- Creating list of Favorite 5 contacts
- Dynamically calculating who your Top 5 contacts are
- Retrieving voicemail from Exchange
Here's a screenshot of the gadget docked in the sidebar:
If you can't make the live broadcast time for the show, all the shows are archived for later viewing. I'm looking forward to hijacking a conference room here and and hanging an "on the air" sign at the door :)
When I first heard about TECH Cocktail, I was surprised to see that such an organization even existed in Chicago - I didn't realize that there was such a vibrant technology community here!
TECH Cocktail has done a bunch of mixers in Chicago and has recently expanded to other cities. They're putting on the inaugural TECH Cocktail Conference on May 29th here in Chicago.
There's a nice lineup of speakers, and Jason Fried from 37 Signals is giving the keynote. I'm looking forward to that one, I'm a big fan of what 37 Signals is doing and really enjoyed reading about their take on software development in Getting Real.
