 this is Christian Buckley with another MVP Buzz Chat interview and I'm here this morning with Jim. Jim, hello. Howdy. Thank you for inviting me. Well, Jim, for folks that don't know you. I know you're a newer MVP. Why don't you give us the the entire history in like a minute of Jim Wilcox? Alright, so it's kind of funny actually. I was thinking about this. I met my first MVPs back in 2012 and it realized that they were actually all named Chris. You and Chris Bortlich and Chris Bowen. Bortlich wasn't an MVP though. He's the Microsoft guy but he's one of those people like if they would expand the program because there are certain Microsoft people like Bortlich who go above and beyond on the community side. I mean it's not part of their job description the stuff that they do the support for the user groups and for like in our space like the SharePoint Saturday events and and the sequel Saturdays and all of that like there's Gennady and Bortlich and and now Erick Harlan you know just things like the folks like that that just do a tremendous amount for the community. Absolutely. But anyway back to you. Sorry, yeah. Who do you work with all that kind of stuff? So I'm Jim Wilcox. I'm a go-by-the-moniker at the Granite State Hacker. I've been working with the community for gosh you know probably about a decade at this point. Right now I'm with Insight Digital Innovation. We're a consulting company formerly known as Blue Metal. A lot of people know Blue Metal Architects. But I'm a .NET guy. Any opportunity to do C-Sharp especially with a compiler that's that's kind of home for me and and I've been having a lot of fun lately with a little bit of all kinds of stuff from a little bit of mobile, a little bit of desktop, a little bit of Azure cloud services, functions and that sort of thing. And interestingly enough a little bit of a rebirth in legacy .NET framework stuff because now there's this cool path forward to .NET Core and all that stuff. So we're seeing a lot of modernization in terms of bringing .NET framework up to .NET Core and getting it ready for new .NET 5 stuff coming down the pike which you know is very exciting. You know it's really interesting there. Well actually let me first ask. So your MVP is in what? It's in developer technologies. It's so developer technology space. And I was trying to was going to liken it to like you know like the US version of the office like a joke about you know where I think Jim was making fun of Dwight for like a what is the latest that's happening with the thousands year old karate? You know what new changes have happened? It's almost like I think like that was some of the old technologies like the .NET like what exciting things are happening with this old? It's like tell me about cobalt. What are the exciting things happening with cobalt? There are always interesting things going on with some of the older technology. So coming what's happening for folks that aren't following what's happening with .NET Core? So with .NET .NET Core it's all they're trying to bring it back together again and you know because for the past few years it's been a little bit fragmented and a little bit of an unclear story. But they're really bringing everything back together again. It's like getting the band back together and everybody's pretty excited about it. It's all the things that you loved about the .NET framework stuff combined with all the new stuff that people love about Windows 10 functionality that you couldn't get in the .NET framework is now kind of converging on this new thing that they're coming out with very shortly called .NET 5. So what kind of stuff are you out actively presenting on into these topics talking about it or is it like brand brand news? It's going on as we speak and so you're not yet out. So no actually a lot of it's fairly well known. I've been doing presentations. Actually I'm fairly diverse. I do presentations about Uno platform which is not just converging all of everything into C sharp and .NET and all that stuff but making it so that you can target iPhone and Android as well. I've also been talking about but framework stuff so artificial intelligence and chats and a little bit of teams integration and that sort of thing. So that's how I'm kind of keeping myself in the office world and gosh what else. I still love to tell about what's going on with the language details like C sharp as a language. They keep on adding features and functionality to it and I always love to have the opportunity to tell people about new syntax and functionality that's coming along in the C sharp language but you get to take advantage of much more expressive syntax that you can do a lot more powerful things than you could before. So well you know and we were talking of course so I participated in the so the Granite Bay user group kind of online stuff. You guys are getting together. How often are you getting together online now? So I've been doing the Granite state code review nightly literally every week night since everything went virtual for the coronavirus stuff. Other than that I host meetups as a normal rule a couple of times a month and then you know events in and beyond that is as often as they arise. So and those are everything from Granite state code camp to you know teams Thursday New England to SharePoint Saturdays that I've been working on for years out here in the New England area. So yes. I mean because I know you had a full plate of events and things going on pretty much across the board is all that stuff are they because not some events are postponing or canceling and rescheduling out in advance. We were talking about last night like you have Mark Radley's the event that his team is putting on the North American Collab Summit in Branson, Missouri and that got pushed out to September. And so they're everybody's like crossing their fingers of whether people will even show up in September depending on what the new normal looks like. And I had an event as I was talking the first week in June over in Germany. So that was the the European Collab Summit that's going on but other events like our beloved MVP summit your first one. Yes. So had you booked flights already. Yes we had. In fact I still have my tickets on point all I'll figure out what to do with them. You know I'm looking forward to getting out to visit the Seattle area again someday soon. But yeah. Yeah that's that's rough for for those that aren't aware to this. So the MVP summit is an annual get together of all the MVPs and from all over the world. And so it's pretty amazing to see you know three or four thousand people for a week. And I think it's that I don't know how many actually show up but it feels like more but then because you have all the Microsoft people around and basically we get to go deep insights and ask questions and get to road map walkthroughs and tons of NDA stuff. But it's it's not even the content. I mean there's always so much you learn from that. And then of course share our personal and our customer experiences back with Microsoft. So it's it's a really powerful tool for them to collect information and validate theories on where products are going and road maps. All that stuff. But also of course to connect with each other and develop relationships and business partnerships and all that kind of stuff. So you can't do a lot of that online. Most of that. Yeah. Yeah. That's that it's rough. Yeah. I love the opportunity to represent the Granite State back to Microsoft. So you know that's that's awesome as far as I'm concerned. There was some nice opportunity to connect at MVP Summit online. We did it all in teams of course. And the nice part about that was that you know when when somebody says something at a live event you know it's it's very immediate. There's there's no real opportunity to catch up with it afterwards. But when somebody says something online it sticks around and you have the chance to to catch up with what people were talking about. And that sort of thing. So I do appreciate that aspect of the online part of it. But but at the same time there's there's nothing like you know actually being face to face with people and in a room full of like-minded individuals is always an opportunity that you don't want to miss but you know there's well that we've had that and I'm sure I would love to get your feedback too is that that's been to the problem with a lot of user groups. I mean across the board you hear of of regional user groups where their numbers have been going down and down and down. And part of that is driven by you know the topics that you're covering and and of course you get the diehards of the people that participate every single time. But for for new folks it might be a big-name speaker that you bring in or a topic that's something that's that's groundbreaking topic or brand new and bleeding edge and they want to hear more about it. You know the it's difficult with all that happening the you know there comes a downward trend of user groups and more and more people moving things to online. What's been your prior to all of this before this all happened with COVID-19. What were you guys doing? Were you moving to more of an online or were you still doing the face-to-face on a monthly basis? So I tended to want to stay face-to-face just because I see lots of you know there's lots of pre-recorded content and that sort of thing. But the FaceTime is is something that you just kind of can't really miss out on. You can't you can't go back and do it again. You can't watch it later. You know and and that adds value to it in and of itself. So so I was kind of feeling a little bit like we had lost some of our attendance because for a while we were doing things online and people would just kind of stop attending you know they they'd say all right I'm gonna catch it when I get home okay well I'll catch a recording well all right maybe they won't you know I've fallen victim to it myself where I intended to be you know part of some online thing and and missed out and ended up just saying all right I'll catch the recording and you know someday I will and I mean but what's the what's the answer I mean what's the what's the right mix of data do you have any thought I mean purely your opinion what's what what are what's the way to handle this what should user groups be doing. So right now there's there's just no choice and the nice part about that is is that you know we're experiencing what that's like in the in the coronavirus isolations just seeing you know what it's like to have these these user group meetings we're not really recording them you know they're they're just you know get together see how reform yeah yeah yeah and and in this particular case it's really more about just having the human connection seeing what we can you know what we can do to help each other out um ostensibly it's all about code but you know the reality is is that we're we're just trying to make sure that everybody's okay and and keep in touch with people that we care about um you know so that's that's what we're doing right now um going forward I I think uh it probably makes sense to come up with kind of a hybrid like um you know do these things maybe online occasionally and and then do them in person when you can when it feels like everybody wants to get together and have a slice of pizza and a beer or something maybe go from there so yeah we're we were thinking we were touring with the idea uh I was out kind of outvoted on it we're like we're sticking with the before all this happened of course with the monthly face to face which I get it the problem for me is where I am and the the time that we have our meetings we were holding from four to six uh and it could take 45 minutes to an hour for me to get to the location and then some traffic you'll get back and it was just so that was a big chunk of of that day and it was just a difficult day um to to to get out and and do that like Tuesdays and Thursdays are like my my busiest days of the week usually yeah because I just got you know client meetings stacked up and so to drive and spend all that time away from the home office and so I had suggested was a getting together quarterly so still doing that but uh getting together quarterly and doing a bigger push around that and then everything else online and we'll see I think because I think to your point this experience of being forced to be entirely virtual has given people that were reluctant to give it a try I think a taste of hey here's what could work and here's some things that we could be doing um I agree with you it can't be a hundred percent it just can't be um and they're they're I've always been an advocate for even if you're doing monthly face to face to do something different like on a quarterly basis have a breakfast get together with somebody on a topic but that were it's more social to do pure social no topics of doing like a share pint type thing where you know people to get together that are drinking not drinking and just congregate we did we did that always in Bellevue when I lived for 12 years in Seattle area and had some fantastic locations downtown Bellevue and we'd always get a great crowd of 15 20 people for those things just you know we'd publish it same day like hey we're gonna do this and people would show up flash mob social yeah but but it's important to have those connections and talk about other stuff than hearing somebody present and people different people usually the same people asking questions and things around it and just mixing it up and because you tend to see my experiences I'd love to hear yours but yeah that you get the regulars that show up with a you know some new people but you're generally the in-person events here in Salt Lake we'd get you know 20 people showing up um 10 of them would be the regulars and then there'd be 10 new people that we'd never see again every single time there's these new people that just show up and and they're usually topic driven speaker driven um and and so it's good to do that and then of course online you get you can have speakers from around the world you can and then you know you might have 10 15 people that are watching in real time and then hundreds of people that watch the recording you know within the next couple months so yeah yeah it's interesting stuff so so give it given the the state of things and where we are in events being shut down what do you have going on what's coming up are you doing webinars are you doing any talks uh actually uh we've got teams thursday new england that was originally supposed to be literally yesterday um yeah how'd that work out yeah yeah um it was on my calendar and i you know shed a tear yeah yeah but actually very much looking forward to to being a part of that it's going to be on june 3rd um as a virtual i expect a virtual event at this point because we've been talking about actually having it at in burlington uh you know burlington mass the and and and basically um you know at this point things look like they're going to be extended into into june who knows how much longer um we'll see but um hopefully it'll be there it'll be in person then that'd be great you know but uh reality is we're probably going to have teams thursday on a tuesday on teams so teams tuesday still still have that you know going for you yep yep so so people want to find out more about you like the active blogger where can they find you out on social what do you what are you active on and participating so i happen to be in twitter uh you can find me as granite state hacker there um i am also on uh linkedin i have a blog um called well it's part of granite state users groups which is an organization that i i um have to help manage finances for lots of different local events and uh that sort of thing and uh so we have a website and that's where i keep my blog and and all that stuff that's granitestateusersgroups.net so very cool well jim i really appreciate your time taking some time out on your friday and uh enjoy the weekend stay healthy stay safe and uh we'll talk to you soon likewise you too thank you so much and uh happy friday happy friday