As part of the ACT Fly-In this year, I was recently given the opportunity to go to Washington and meet with some of our law makers to discuss several issues in the IT arena. One of them is an issue I’ve been discussing with people for a while way before this event, and that’s the issue of spectrum shortages. I had some good discussions with several congressmen, senators, and staffers and thought it’d be good to touch base on it here. For those of you that think this may not affect you, let me tell you that it already has and you’ve even made it every-day topics of discussion and argument. Our daily discussions of dropped calls, cellular dead-zones, and slow wi-fi is certain proof that the problem of bandwidth is alive and well and most certainly getting worse. As we move into the 4G era, towers are needing to be upgraded and even new ones built.  But the development of the physical infrastructure is useless without the invisible commodity that rides on it, and this is spectrum. Put simply, spectrum is a frequency range that is used by wireless communication. Also known as Wireless Spread Spectrum, it consists of the frequency range 3ghz and 300ghz with its availability is limited and its usage assigned through licensing. It’s considered a national resource, and because of that, subject to governmental administration. Such administration and management is necessary to limit what’s known as radio spectrum pollution. Since 1934, authority for spectrum management is granted to the President for any federal use and to the FCC for all domestic use. Companies with spectrum assignment are the regulators for that frequency and have been known to “sit on it” even when not in use. This lead to congress passing the Spectrum Act requiring spectrum licensees to share spectrum and participate in wireless broadband spectrum actions. As I stated earlier, though considered a national resource, it unlike water and gas because it is reusable.

The government incentive auctions have allowed for unused spectrum, much of it held by over-the-air broadcasters after the switch-to-digital, to be released and “purchased” by licensees willing to light it up. This is a win-win situation because the current licensees of unused spectrum profit from the auction proceeds, and it opens up new business opportunities for new services. These “new services” are us, the app developers. The apps we’re writing today are more connected than ever. It’s funny how for a long time, I taught developers how to write architect apps for disconnected use, but that’s becoming more and more difficult with the requirements users (and customers) are placing on “the cloud”. We’re going to see our bandwidth problems gets worse before they get better as more and more applications that require the internet in their core usage are developed. This is ever-so-evident in today (and tomorrow’s) tablets. Nearly every application uses the cloud in one way or another. Media streaming from cloud storage versus local storage will be the next big challenge. Devices are offering no on-board memory increase in favor or more and more cloud storage. Apple’s iPad is on its third iteration and its maximum capacity has remained the same since its introduction. Apple themselves say the play to open the iTunes Match service to video by the end of this year. This will result in a enormous weight on the carrier lines, making the need for more spectrum activation even more critical.

The incentive auctions should continue but not hindered by unnecessary regulation in the interest of a “level playing field”. And the FCC should readily approve spectrum deals that are in front of them, like Verizon’s bid to buy out and build out spectrum from the cable companies. It shouldn’t lay dormant. If purchasers of unused spectrum have the capacity to contribute to the marketplace, provide innovation, better coverage, and more jobs, they should be allowed to do so. Getting in the middle of this can literally bottleneck the Internet and the cell-lines, and today this is not a trivial thing. There is a way to get involved and get your opinion heard on topics that are important to you. Gone are the days where we need to run to the library to use the encyclopedia to research something. Everything we need is literally at our fingertips, but to remain at all our fingertips, the technology must be allowed to grow and progress and not be stalled by people with incomplete information. ACT offered me the unique opportunity to actually discuss this with the people that make our laws. What this taught me was that we don’t have to be a “cast the vote and walk away” people.

Time will tell if our discussions will result in success, but I for one was impressed for how I was received; even in offices for which I was not a constituent. I try to be optimistic in our system of government, despite the partisan ship that does and will always take place, and despite whether or not I agree with what certain parties are doing. My frequent travels abroad constantly reaffirm that optimism. This one topic was of particular fascination to me when I first educated myself on it, and became a constant interest as I followed the legislative actions covering it. I do feel it is one that affects everyone in the technology business and when it comes to infrastructure construction, innovation, and application development, it affects the country as a whole.

Funny how 10 years ago, I was reading publications and listening to sessions by many of the people that today I have the honor and pleasure of calling my friends. It’s been a hell of a ride being active in the .NET community and I owe a lot of the beginnings of that to INETA. Traveling around the country, speaking at user groups and meeting many, many talented developers (some of whom have become friends of mine) has been one of the highlights of my community involvement. It was another good friend of mine, Bill Wolff, that introduced me to INETA and since then there have been a number of good people involved. Nancy, Scott, Rob, Chris, Trish, Lori, and many others. All of them made the organization a big priority in their lives and careers and it thrives today because of that collective effort. And it’s not just about the fun I and others have had as speakers; many user groups owe a lot to INETA for their support. I hope the organization continues to be the glue for the symbiotic relationship between those who run the groups and those who speak at them.

So a lot has evolved and changed over the years in the formula that defines the interaction between the groups and the speakers, but one thing has remained. INETA is still the primary user group support mechanism out there. I still get to travel around and speak to great developers around the country and sample what they try to pass of as pizza (they forget I’m from Jersey).

Happy anniversary INETA; may the next 10 years be even better, even though pizza outside of Jersey will probably get worse.

Until next time…

I’m headed to the Visual Studio Live conference in Las Vegas on Sunday. I'll be doing a full-day precon on WCF on Monday then two WPF talks on Tuesday.

If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hi !

Update:

Nice blog post from an attendee: http://bejabbers2.blogspot.com/2011/03/inaugural-devready-event-on-mvvm.html

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A big thank you to all who made it out to the DevReady MVVM events we put together on the 19th and the 21st in the Microsoft Philly and NYC offices!

The turnout was fantastic and the feedback I’ve seen so far has exceeded my expectations.

We had five sessions set up and they went as follows:

1. XAML: Achieving your moment of clarity
2. Programming with MVVM
3. Programming with MVVM – Advanced Topics
4. Platform Reusability with MVVM – also known as “How MVVM saved my butt and how laziness came back to bite me”
5. Intro to Prism – previously “Leveraging Controls to Build XAML-based applications”

The first three sessions were done by me in what can be construed as a very painful delivery process, but not because of the sessions. A couple of days before, I woke up with an inflamed nerve in my left hip and I was in pretty intense pain for a while. I was walking with a cane and was popping Alleve like Dr. House pops Vitaken. By the time the first event (Philly) came around, I was better but nowhere near 100%. Luckily it was offset by a beautiful day on Thursday and I got to ride from Jersey down to Philly Intl. with the top down, seriously raising my mood.

What was I doing in Philly Intl you ask? That gets me to the most important point regarding these events. I was picking up a friend of mine who’s an evangelist for DevExpress. DevExpress graciously put up the sole sponsorship for both these events and provided everyone with both breakfast and lunch, along with several product licenses. On top of that, they flew Seth Juarez out to deliver one of the sessions, during which Seth also demonstrated the power and versatility of using DevExpress tools in WPF and Silverlight while also teaching attendees how to use the Prism framework.

Dani Diaz, the Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Philly area delivered the fourth session at both events. Dani did a terrific job showing everyone how to take what I had just taught them and reuse it among a desktop and Phone 7 application.

Also, a great thank you to my own Developer Evangelist, Peter Laudati, for putting together all the tedious logistics at the NY offices. Anyone who has ever tried to throw an event in any Microsoft office knows that it is not a trivial process logistically and kudos goes out to both Peter and Dani for grabbing the bull by the horns on this one.

We’ve already received requests for repeating this event in other regions, possibly starting with the Capital Area, so DC here we come.

Once again, thank you to all involved in the events and thank you to the attendees for making it so much fun and putting up with my bizarre and sometimes unorthodox sense of humor; and most of all thank you to Developer Express, without whom these events could not have taken place.

Stay on top of the DevReady web site. There you can find out about more events and also about exactly what the DevReady concept is.

My session material for both these events can be found on the Downloads section of this site. The rest can be found on the DevReady web site.

Until next time…

I’m running two events in the northeast called MVVM DevReady coming up this month.

The first one is in Philly (Malvern actually) and will run on Saturday the 19th of March.  The second is the following Monday, the 21st, in the NYC Microsoft office.

Both events are FREE of charge but registration is limited and is quickly filling up.  We just put up the registration site yesterday and are more than half full already.

I will be giving the first three sessions, with the local DE giving the fourth, and our sponsor providing the last session of the day. These events could not have been possible if not for our sponsor, Developer Express.  They are not only covering event expenses but are flying out one of their chief evangelists, Seth Juarez, to present the session personally.

The registration sites are:

3/19/2011 - Philly: http://devready-estw.eventbrite.com/

3/21/2011 - NYC: http://devreadynyc.eventbrite.com/

Get your development skills ready for MVVM (Model View View Model Design Pattern) and build some exciting applications for WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone. In this all day event you will learn everything you need to know to get start with MVVM. We will start with the basics and end with some more advance topics.