There are some great upcoming Certified ScrumMaster courses through Agile University that can jump start your resume and give your skill set a competitive edge. December 9-10 in Santa Clara use discount code = SC15 for 15% off December 15-16 in NYC, NY use discount code = DECNYC20 for 20% off Also be sure to check out Writing Effective Use Cases by Alistair Cockburn and 360 Degree Agile Workshop by David Bernstein. Here are the course listings: Certified ScrumMaster Training Date: 12/9/09 – 12/10/09 Location: Santa Clara, CA Trainer: Hubert Smits – Rally Software Course Overview This two-day ScrumMaster certification course taught by Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Trainers provides everything you need to get started with Scrum. One of the largest and fastest-growing Agile project management frameworks, Scrum is a simple software management technique that has a small set of interrelated practices and rules, is not overly prescriptive and is able to produce productivity gains for software development teams almost immediately. This course shares time-tested practices for managing product backlogs, planning your releases and iterations (Sprints) and tracking and reporting progress. You'll learn how to plan and run Sprint Planning Meetings, daily Scrum Meetings, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives and more! On completion, participants are registered as Certified ScrumMasters (CSMs), which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, (www.scrumalliance.org) where valuable ScrumMaster-material and information are available exclusively to CSMs. Agenda • Introduction to Agile Principles • Introduction to Scrum Principles o Scrum Core Elements & Practices o Product Visioning o Roles & Responsibilities o Product Backlog & Release Planning o Sprint Backlog & Sprint Planning o Sprint o Daily Standup Meeting o Burndown Charts & Project Reporting o Sprint Review & Retrospective o The 59 Minute Scrum Participants of this course will be eligible to apply for 16 PDU's toward their continuing education requirements with the PMI (Program Management Institute) New York City, NY: Certified ScrumMaster Training Date: 12/15/09 – 12/16/09 Location: New York City, NY Trainer: Tamara Sulaiman – Rally Software Course Overview This two-day ScrumMaster certification course taught by Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Trainers provides everything you need to get started with Scrum. One of the largest and fastest-growing Agile project management frameworks, Scrum is a simple software management technique that has a small set of interrelated practices and rules, is not overly prescriptive and is able to produce productivity gains for software development teams almost immediately. This course shares time-tested practices for managing product backlogs, planning your releases and iterations (Sprints) and tracking and reporting progress. You'll learn how to plan and run Sprint Planning Meetings, daily Scrum Meetings, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives and more! On completion, participants are registered as Certified ScrumMasters (CSMs), which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, (www.scrumalliance.org) where valuable ScrumMaster-material and information are available exclusively to CSMs. Agenda • Introduction to Agile Principles • Introduction to Scrum Principles o Scrum Core Elements & Practices o Product Visioning o Roles & Responsibilities o Product Backlog & Release Planning o Sprint Backlog & Sprint Planning o Sprint o Daily Standup Meeting o Burndown Charts & Project Reporting o Sprint Review & Retrospective o The 59 Minute Scrum Participants of this course will be eligible to apply for 16 PDU's toward their continuing education requirements with the PMI (Program Management Institute) Cheers, Chase Doelling info@agileu.org Agile University

If you want the full gory details, check out the .NET Services team blog post here. What follows below are some of the things that I think are most crucial to understand both for new developers and for developers unfortunate enough to be in a position of having to migrate a lot of code.

In web application or software, very often we will need to present collected data to the users. Back in the olden days, data such as traffic statistics and clicking hits were presented through simple numbers or words, this method is plain and simple.

When you think of transparency, it’s typical to think of how a company communicates with it’s users. What may come as a surprise is the impact the actual users can have on transparency, and how the consumer can be the actual tipping point for your next sale.

This post introduces a great new jQuery plugin that allows you to easily transform your image lists into beautiful galleries with Flash-like zoom effects in them. It’s a simple but elegant way of giving your interfaces a nice little shine and at only 2KB in size, it’s both compact and surprisingly easy to use.

There’s no Architecture in Business Service Orientation ! There, I’ve said it, there are no two types of SOA. I am not trying to say that business-level service orientation doesn’t exist or isn’t valuable. However I am trying to say that labeling that SOA harms both Service Orientation at the business level and SOA (a.k.a. “technical SOA”)

In my company we're using Mule in all projects that require ESB. I was asked to evaluate some other ESB providers. Here is my first impression and first service assembly.

Sharing some of the great off-blog thoughts and advice from others who have been or may some day be converted to Gmail -- more than a few with whom I agree.

Do you want to use an API but you are too lazy to write your own code to handle the requests? If you code in PHP as I do, then you will definitely need these classes. By using the classes listed here you will be able of using a great number of web services with an easy and documented way.

Having trouble getting things done? Falling behind on deadlines? Here are some tips.

Google continues to expand its third version of the maps API to include features already in the second version. Most recently, they’ve added driving directions, which gives programmatic access to the routing data between two points. As with the rest of Maps V3, which was released in May, the team took a fresh approach, so some interfaces have changed.