Paul and I invite you to brainstorm with us on future SSDotNet presentations.  What topics should we focus on, which presenters?  The economy is tough right now and that means many of us are scrambling even more than usual for our next contract and/or worried that our skills aren't what they need to be to retain and advance in our careers. 

So we want to hear it from you.  What skills do you see as necessary to job retention and advancement?  There are always lots of new and sexy technologies coming out, which ones are gonna get us somewhere in our jobs? 

The State Government is getting stingy, where should we be looking for jobs?  What skills, technologies and behaviors are going to help us to get those jobs?

Please come and give us the benefit of your experience and observation.  We want South Sound .Net presentations to be useful, helpful and interesting to our members, that means we need to hear from you.

If you absolutely cannot make it to the meeting, please email Paul and I with your ideas:

Paul (paul@soundex.com), Camey (camcombs@speakeasy.net)

Thank you, we hope to see you there this Thursday, 9/9, from 7-9pm, followed by a gathering at the Fish Tale.

The C# language is very much alive and changing to meet the on-going demands of developers. The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 release ushers in C# 4.0, bringing a new set of features in the way of named and optional parameters; co- and contra-variance ("yeah, whatever *that* is," I hear you cry); COM interop; and dynamic language support. We'll look at these features in action in working code, and how they make you, the developer, more productive than ever before. And, yes, I will explain covariance and contravariance in a way that you can understand, remember, and come to love!

Stuart Celarier
Stuart Celarier is a software architect and technologist in Portland, Oregon. He is a Microsoft MVP on Connected Systems and member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. Stuart is a frequent speaker at .NET user groups, code camps, and other professional events, and has chairs the Birds-of-a-Feather track at PDC and TechEd North America conferences. Stuart is a director of the Portland Code Camp and serves on the Software Association of Oregon's Developer Forum steering committee.
Email: stuart@visualstuart.net