This spring Microsoft released a lot of new developer goodness, especially around web development.  Things like ASP.NET MVC 3, Webmatrix, Razor, IIS Express 7.5, Entity Framework Code First, SQL Compact 4, NuGet, MVCScaffolding and more.

This presentation concentrates on the items included when you install Webmatrix: the Webmatrix development environmant, IIS Express, SQL Compact, Razor.  We'll take a tour through Webmatrix and discuss where and when we might want to use this lightweight web development too.  We'll check out IIS Express and NuGet and SQL Compact.  And dig into the Razor view engine.
Presenter
Cam Combs is a software developer, co-leader of the South Sound .NET User Group and Membership Mentor for the Pacific Northwest region of INETA.  Cam enjoys trying out new technology, is susceptible to 'new shiny' syndrome and blogs at CoderIncomplete.com. read more ...

Bobby Johnson presenting on testing tools:

"I'll be presenting on the current crop of unit testing tools that I use. Starting with a basic testing library NUnit, focusing testing on behavior with BDD helpers to NUnit, creating fakes with NSubstitute, building test objects with NBuilder and finally focusing your assertions with Shouldly."

Bobby is a software developer with Milliman building actuarial modeling software for the insurance industry.

Brad Jennings on AppHarbor:

"Appharbor makes is easy to deploy and run in the cloud. If you know how to use a dvcs(mercurial/git) system then appharbor is there to make your life easier. I will go over the very basics of using appharbor for your projects."

Brad comes from Salt Lake City, UT. He is currently living in Washington working for Hp as a Team Lead. When not working he is enjoying the change of scenery Washington brings. He can also be found lurking on sites such as github and twitter under the pseudonym bivvo or at bivvo.com.

Chris Bilson on a grab bag of tricks and technologies:

Chris will talk about a few tricks he's learned around automating things like Windows Azure, using Psake, virtualization for developers, and other things, time permitting.

Chris is a developer at Milliman, where he develops actuarial modelling systems for life insurance clients around the world. read more ...

With the introduction of the Dynamic Language Runtime in .NET 4.0, a whole new world of programming possibilities have been added to our developer toolbox on the same scale as the addition of Linq. We are only just beginning to see applications in the wild. In this presentation, Bobby will explore the evolution of the C# syntax over the last decade with in the context of what dynamic actually means. Then move on to basic concepts of metaprogramming that are now available for use. Finally, a few demonstrations of some of the bleeding edge frameworks that are beginning to take advantage of dynamic like Simple.Data, NancyFx & DynoPhile.

Bobby Johnson recently joined Milliman, where he serves as Captain Awesome.  He is a regular contributing member if the local South Sound .NET Users group and ALT.NET Seattle , speaker at Seattle & Portland Code Camps as well as contributor to many open source projects. Bobby maintains a blog, frequently tweets and plays entirely to much World of Warcraft. read more ...

Walt has talked to a lot of developers who are creating Windows Phone 7 applications. Some do it because they love the platform and have a strong vision of what they want for their mobile applications. Others see the WP7 landscape as a green field opportunity and hope to cash in on the exciting new device. But what happens after you written your last line of code and are ready to market your application?

You have to set a price for your application and get it on the marketplace. So can you make money as a Windows Phone 7 developer?

The answer is yes, but you have to know what you are doing

 

This talks shows you the various ways to sell your app, including tips on pricing, whether to create trial versions or make free ad supported applications. Lots of real world stories and sales numbers during the evening.

As an added bonus, learn how to instrument your code so you can see what features your users love and what features they avoid and the reason analytics are important to improving your application.

Walt Ritscher's enthusiasm for crafting software interfaces blossomed early, first surfacing while coding on a borrowed computer. Now he travels the world speaking at software conferences and teaching a diverse portfolio of programming topics. On the consulting side, he works with customers like Microsoft HP, Intel, and Intuit and enjoys being part of the Wintellect consultant group. He writes for several publications, including CODE Magazine, TechTarget and is featured as the Silverlight video author for Lynda.com.

His current UI obsession includes Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and WPF APIs. His blog can be found at blog.wpfwonderland.com. Walt is also a MVP and the author of the free Shazzam Shader Editor read more ...

Based on feedback by the group who attended last month's meeting, Paul will be going over development in the cloud.  What questions do you have about developing apps with Azure?  Do you wonder about complexity?  Do you worry about security?  What about the cost?  Didn't Amazon's ECS just fall on its face a few weeks ago, is Azure any safer?  How is Azure different from the other cloud computing options being offered?

Bring your questions and your curiosity to the Olympia Center this Thursday at 7 pm.  We've got door prizes and networking opportunities, come geek out with us. read more ...

Microsoft worked with the open-source jQuery team to contribute support for templates to the jQuery library. You can use jQuery Templates, for example, to format and display a list of products in the browser. In this session, you learn how to take advantage of jQuery templates in your ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications to build applications that are more responsive and interactive. You also learn how to use advanced features of jQuery Templates such as composite templates and wrapped templates.

Stephen Walther is a former Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft ASP.NET team. While at Microsoft, he worked on ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery, and the ASP.NET framework. Stephen is the author of ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed and ASP.NET Unleashed. His company www.Superexpert.com provides ASP.NET MVC 3 training and consulting. read more ...

“Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily - leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.” - Martin Fowler

Bobby will show us a sample of the continuous integration system at Russell Investments and discuss it’s goals and benefits. He will then introduce you to the tools used to create the system and demonstrate how to quickly set up a CI process in your own shop with no cost to your business beyond a little time.

Topics covered and demonstrated: Source Control, Project Structure, Build Scripts, Setting up a CI Server, Executing a build including running unit tests automatically every time someone commits a change to source control.

Bobby Johnson is a Senior Software Developer with Russell Investments and is directly responsible for developing high quality, maintainable applications that allow Russell to manage millions of dollars worth of investments and remain a major player in the investment sector. He is a regular contributing member if the local South Sound .NET Users group and ALT.NET Seattle , speaker at Seattle & Portland Code Camps as well as contributor to many open source projects. Bobby maintains a blog, frequently tweets and plays entirely to much World of Warcraft. read more ...

If you are .NET developer you’ve probably seen the mobile phone templates in Visual Studio. Perhaps you’ve even created a few trials apps over the years to learn about the Microsoft’s mobile application platform. Mobile development, at least on the Microsoft Mobile platform, has always felt like a distant cousin to ‘real’ application development. Starting this year Microsoft is making a crucial break with the past and is getting serious about competing in the IPhone dominated market. Windows Phone 7 is new start. It’s flashy, fun, and sports the new Metro interface. It’s easy to create applications for this lively new device in Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend 4 and it leverages the popular Silverlight and XNA programming platforms. This session provide a broad overview of the Windows Phone 7 platform and programming environment.

Speaker Bio

Walt Ritscher's enthusiasm for crafting software interfaces blossomed early, first surfacing while coding on a borrowed computer. Now he travels the world speaking at software conferences and teaching a diverse portfolio of programming topics. On the consulting side, he works with customers like Microsoft HP, Intel, and Intuit and enjoys being part of the Wintellect consultant group. He writes for several publications, including CODE Magazine, TechTarget and is featured as the Silverlight video author for Lynda.com.

His current UI obsession includes Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and WPF APIs. His blog can be found at blog.wpfwonderland.com. Walt is also a MVP and the author of the free Shazzam Shader Editor. read more ...

We had a sudden cancellation of our speaker this evening due to a family illness, so Paul Mehner has agreed to be our speaker this evening. Paul will talk about some new material that he has been working on for Windows Azure Data Storage. Migrating your data to massively scalable cloud storage. read more ...

Get a Solid Start in Scrum
Saturday, January 22, 2011 from 12-3pm
Olympia Center Room 101
222 Columbia NW, Olympia, WA

You do NOT need to be a developer to benefit from this class. The class is for anyone working on projects that want to increase productivity and reduce cost. Through a combination of lecture and small group exercises, we will get an overview of developing software in an Agile way, with an emphasis on Scrum. We will discuss and play with the Scrum framework for project development, touch lightly on XP engineering practices, and the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM tool. These work well together, but you will see how you can use Scrum independently of the engineering methods and tools you choose.

If Olympia Schools are closed due to inclement weather, class will be cancelled. Otherwise, it will be held. Light refreshments will be served. Class is open to friends of South Sound NET. Please RSVP Ruth Walther at (800) 691-7140, or ruth@superexpert.com.

Ruth Walther is a certified Professional Scrum Master. Ruth Walther worked with Microsoft to successfully deliver several highly-visible projects including the Community Starter Kit, the Issue Tracker Starter Kit, and the Microsoft Mobile Website. For her contributions to the ASP.NET and Visual Studio communities, Microsoft awarded Ruth with the Microsoft Visual Studio MVP award. She founded the first .NET user group and she was User Group Relations Committee Chairperson for the International .NET Association (INETA).
 read more ...

The presentation
For December's SSDOTNET event, Chad would like to bring developers in the community up-to-speed on some techniques and tools for working with Silverlight in the real-world. Topics of discussion and demonstration will include working with Offline Silverlight applications, leveraging Silverlight-based data-management software, unit-testing your Silverlight code, and deployment strategies. Chad is open to discussing other topics of interest during the session to ensure everyone goes away with knowledge about how to utilize Silverlight appropriately within their applications.

About the Presenter
Chad Stoker is the President and Chief Technology Officer for CodeSmart Inc. CodeSmart Inc is a local Olympia-based software consulting company that focuses on everything that's innovative. Chad Stoker has been a frequent speaker at the Information Processing Management Association (IPMA), South-Sound Dot Net Users Group, and other events. Chad Stoker also provides training on Silverlight programming and Android Smart-Phone Application Development.  When he's not busy at the office, Chad likes to let his kids run amok. read more ...

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 read more ...

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. read more ...

Bryan will cover LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML with the primary focus of moving financial information to XBRL for presentation to the Security and Exchange Commission.

Speaker bio:
...Bryan Hiebert is a programming hobbyist and enthusiast. From the inception of Microsoft Windows he has watched the operating system and development tools/environment become what they are today. A prior systems analyst, he has worked with open source systems including FreeBSD, Suse Linux and Apache and programmed in C/C++, Prolog, AWK, tcl/tk and PHP. He now focuses his efforts on .NET development. read more ...

Microsoft has a history of colossal successes and failures. As the Windows Phone 7 release approaches, it's sure to be big (reports say the marketing alone will be a $400 million affair), but will it be a success? Early reviews are positive, but can a company miss the mobile boat by 3+ years and still make a competitive product?

Join local Silverlight expert Erik Mork as talks about what Windows Phone 7 is and what it means for developers and consumers. We'll discuss its phenomenal strengths and shocking weaknesses. We dive into the new user interface paradigms the phone uses. We'll also look into a comparison of developing on Windows Phone 7 versus iOS. But most of all, we'll examine one company's view of what the future holds for Mobile.

About Erik Mork

Erik is a Microsoft Silverlight MVP and Microsoft Silverlight Insider. His consulting company does premiere design and development for desktop and (increasingly) mobile platforms. He and his team are dedicated to crafting fantastic user experiences on a variety of platforms. read more ...

Synopsis:
Like many folks, I started out with simple unit testing after the fact and eventually proceeded to Test-Driven Development. As I have ripened in age and (hopefully) experience I have started to see the need for something beyond TDD, BDD, STDD, DDD, etc - something that works at all levels of a project and for all project roles - developers, testers, managers and customers included.

In this talk, I'll tell about my own journey and where I think we need to go if we want to move beyond nominal "Agile Development" to real mastery. Along the way, I'll illustrate with bits of NUnit tests (including some new features) as well as some other testing approaches."

Bio:
Charlie Poole has spent more than 30 years as a software developer, designer, project manager, trainer and coach. After a long career in the government sector, he began working independently in 1996 with clients ranging from Microsoft to government agencies to internet startups.

Charlie's technical background is long and broad. In recent years, he has specialized in C++ and C# development in cross-platform settings. He has worked with the .NET framework since its inception, is one of the authors of the NUnit .NET testing framework and contributes to several other Open Source projects.

"For the past ten years, Charlie has worked as an Agile coach and
trainer. He is a familiar presence at Agile and Open Source events and is one of the founders of the Agile Open Northwest conference."

 read more ...

Synopsis:
There’s a lot of talk of “agile development” these days but it can be hard to decipher the alphabet soup of acronyms you run into: DRY, YAGNI, SRP, OCP, DIP, LoD. It’s hard to be agile if you don’t understand the basic concepts so this talk will cover the fundamentals of agile software development principles and introduce you to some of the guiding lights that direct how we build software.

Bio:
I’ve worked for Microsoft for over sixteen years as a developer of testing tools and other applications in the Office division, Microsoft Game Studios, and now in Engineering Excellence. I got bitten by the agile development bug a few years ago because it solves long-standing problems in software engineering. I found that a good grasp of the underlying principles and concepts is essential to executing well on an agile development strategy.

 read more ...

Have you been waiting with anticipation for the next version of Entity Framework ? There's a lot to see in the new EF4. From a much improved designer, to foreign key support, POCO, lazy loading and more. If you have been using EF, you'll want to see what's changed. If you have shunned EF, it's time to take another look. The list is long so we'll look at the 10 things that I find most noteworthy and are available. (Note that some new features won’t be available until Beta 2 is released so cross your fingers that it’s out in time for this presentation.)

 Julie Lerman is an independent consultant and .NET Mentor who has been designing and writing software applications for 20 years. She's also the author of Programming Entity Framework, an O'Reilly book that was published earlier this year.  Julie is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker. She is a prolific blogger, a frequent presenter at technical conferences in the U.S., Canada, and even some far reaches of the world and author of articles for MSDN Online, MSDN Magazine and other well-known technical publications. Julie presents on a wide variety of topics including ADO.NET, Web services, Tablet PC development, and other aspects of just getting your .NET applications to work the way you want them to. Julie lives in Vermont where she runs the Vermont.NET User Group, is a board member of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance, and a member of the Champlain College Software Engineering Advisory Board. You can read Julie's blogs at www.thedatafarm.com/blog and http://blogs.devsource.com/devlife/content/daily_work/.


Meeting Specifics
October 8th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)
All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 Click the link below to download Julie's Powerpoint presentation

 read more ...

 

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Please join us on Thursday, November 12th for a presentation by Eric Lee on "Common Anti-Patterns in Legacy Code & How to Work Your Way Out of Them"


About the Presentation: One of the most dreaded phrases in software engineering are the words “legacy code”. You know what that means: old, nasty code that gives you ulcers and makes you tear our your hair. In this presentation we’ll swap horror stories, discuss ways to make legacy code a little more manageable, and learn some principles that will help you avoid writing legacy code of your own.

About Eric Lee: I’ve worked for Microsoft for over fifteen years as a developer of testing tools and other applications in the Office division and in Microsoft Game Studios. I’ve inherited multiple legacy systems during my career and have had to suffer through the resulting pain. I’m sad to say I’ve probably also written a legacy system or two. As a result I have some opinions about the sorts of things that makes code either maintainable or a legacy nightmare.

Meeting Specifics
November 12th, 7 - 9 pm
Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW)
All attendees are eligible for the prize drawings. Past prizes have included technical books, passes to Devscovery, copies of Visual Studio, Vista, Office 2007 and more.

Don't forget to let your friends and co-workers know about this meeting.  Feel free to forward this email and/or direct them to www.ssdotnet.org for more information.

 read more ...

Team Foundation Server is Microsoft’s premier Application Lifecycle Management platform that includes their newest and most robust source control system.  Team Foundation Server is much more than just source control however the capabilities contained within the source control features are vast compared to Visual Source Safe.  How do you move from VSS to TFS and take advantage of all that TFS has to offer?

This presentation will describe moving from VSS to TFS and demonstrate many of the features available in this new source control system from Microsoft.

Speaker Bio

Larry Guger is the Director of the Microsoft Practice for the local professional services firm Online Business Systems and a Microsoft MVP for Team System.  In these roles Larry gets to play with the latest tools coming out of the Developer Division from Microsoft as well as be the architect on .NET development projects for Online Business Systems’ clients.  Larry also spends a lot of his time thinking about and trying out various agile and lean project methodologies and works on incorporating Visual Studio Team System into those methodologies in a pragmatic and effective manner.

Larry really enjoys working with different client organizations helping them leverage Visual Studio Team System as effectively as possible.  You can follow his blog at http://continuouslyintegrating.blogspot.com/

 read more ...

Ever wonder about how you can leverage Silverlight for your projects to make truly Rich Internet Applications a reality? Join Chad W. Stoker, President and Chief Technology Officer of CodeSmart Inc to learn about working with WCF & ADO.NET Data services using Silverlight 3.0 in addition to the following:

    * Working offline with Silverlight,
    * Necessary design patterns for Silverlight 3.0,
    * Consuming SharePoint Services (WSS) for Document Management via Silverlight,
    * Dynamically adding XAML and lazy-loading Assemblies to your Silverlight apps,
    * How to make custom Templates in Expression Blend 3.0,
    * What's a 'jelly button',
    * and utilities galore!


Chad Stoker will walk you through the new platform and give some practical advice on what things you should consider when diving deep into Silverlight for your next application.

 read more ...

Azure is a "cloud services" platform hosted in Microsoft data centers.


The Azure platform provides highly-available and dynamically scalable on-demand computing and storage. The Azure platform includes several modular services such as Live Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, Dynamics CRM Services, and .NET Services. Developers can utilize these services individually or together to create applications. This session will teach you how to begin using the Azure .NET Service development tools with Visual Studio to build services hosted in the cloud.

The Presenter

For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group, one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the International .NET Association (INETA). Paul currently specializes in .NET technologies for state government business systems. He has also provided community college instruction on .NET software development, and is an active trainer at software community events such as Code Camp.

Prior to being reborn as a .NET protagonist in 2000, Paul's experience included over 20 years supporting many flavors of the UNIX operating system. Paul began his early computing career in 1977 on a homebuilt breadboard computer with 256 bytes of RAM, 12 toggle switches, 9 light emitting diodes, and an RCA CDP1802 microprocessor.

 read more ...

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of building and testing the application under development. Usually right after each and every check-in. CI grew out of the agile software development community but can add value to almost any project. This talk will describe the basic approach to CI and also some other practices teams can adopt to get even more out of their investment in CI. The talk will also cover the Microsoft patterns & practices team’s experience with CI and show some of the likely cost savings of adopting this practice on your team.

Speaker Bio

Ade Miller is currently the Development Manager for Microsoft’s patterns & practices group (p&p) where he manages several agile teams executing on a variety of projects. He also lead the development of the p&p Web Services Software Factory: Modeling Edition. Before joining p&p Ade was a developer and then a Development Lead on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and 2008.

Prior to joining Microsoft Ade worked in a variety of development environments including start-ups, consultancy and web publishing. His primary interest is in improving the way people develop software. He spends much of his time trying to figure out what being “agile” really means. Ade is a regular speaker on these topics, he also blogs and writes about his experiences. Ade received his BSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Southampton, UK.

 read more ...

Event Overview
Miss MIX or want a refresher? Join us for MSDN Events Unleashed: The Best of MIX!

What’s New in Silverlight 3?

Are you interested in building business-focused Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?  Would you like to take advantage of 3D in the browser, but assume it is too hard?  Have you wanted to take a Silverlight application offline?  Then this session is for you.  We will explore and illustrate the new features of Silverlight 3, including the following:

·         Support for perspective 3D

·         Offline Support

·         .NET RIA Services which simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms

 

Building Web Applications with Windows Azure

This session will begin with a brief overview of Azure and discuss some of the announcements made at MIX.  We will then illustrate through demo how to build a Windows Azure application from the ground up.  We will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage, how to host services, web pages and Silverlight components, as well as how to deploy your solution to the cloud.

 

MVC 1.0 vs ASP.Net Webforms

Have you heard about the new ASP.NET MVC  framework from Microsoft and wondered what it was all about? Are you curious whether this replaces ASP.Net WebForms?  Well in this session you will learn how to use the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern to take advantage of your favorite .NET Framework language for writing business logic in a way that is de-coupled from the views of the data.  In addition, we will talk about the pros and cons of both MVC and Web Forms, how to determine the best choice for a specific project, various techniques and patterns used to build MVC applications vs. Web Forms applications, and the implications for using each approach.

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Threat modeling is an engineering discipline you can use to help you identify threats, attacks, vulnerabilities and countermeasures that are relevant to your particular application and its environment. The threat modeling activity helps you to:

• Identify your security objectives.

• Identify relevant threats.

• Identify relevant vulnerabilities and countermeasures.

Come see how you can identify your threats to build more secure systems.

Speaker Bio

Justin Goodhart is the Lead Developer and President for Chestnut Level, Inc.  He also works for the Department of Social & Health Services (DSHS) as an Information Technology Specialist.  Over the years he has worked with Threat Modeling on projects for the Internet and Internal networks to reduce their susceptibility to being cracked, and encourages other developers to see how they can improve the security of their applications.

 read more ...

WCF Security

WCF developers frequently ask questions about how to best secure their services. In this session, we will cover many of the common scenarios from intranet to internet and the appropriate WCF bindings and configuration that should be used to secure them. We'll write code and supply configuration to secure the transport channel, the message, or both through WCF bindings, and we'll inspect the message traffic to verify that we have achieved our security objectives.


Bio
For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group, one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the International .NET Association (INETA). Paul currently specializes in .NET technologies for state government business systems. He has also provided community college instruction on .NET software development, and is an active trainer at software community events such as Code Camp.

Prior to being reborn as a .NET protagonist in 2000, Paul's experience included over 20 years supporting many flavors of the UNIX operating system. Paul began his early computing career in 1977 on a homebuilt breadboard computer with 256 bytes of RAM, 12 toggle switches, 9 light emitting diodes, and an RCA CDP1802 microprocessor.

 read more ...

This presentation will describe the core concepts of  Dependency Injection (DI), first described by Martin Fowler in his article Inversion of Control (IoC) Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern.

 The presentation will highlight the benefits of Dependency Injection including:

    * ·         Creating classes that are easier to unit test in isolation
    * ·         Promotes loose coupling between classes and subsystems
    * ·         Adds potential flexibility to a codebase for future changes
    * ·         Can enable better code reuse

 Bobby will also be sharing simple and fun examples on how to use DI along with a real world example of its use in a web-based application.

 

BIO

Bobby Johnson is a Senior Software Developer at Alliance Enterprises, a performance management software company based in Lacey, Washington.  As an avid enthusiast of Agile methods and a self proclaimed code monkey, Bobby is currently focused on overseeing the  implementation of Agile techniques like DDD, TDD, CI into Alliance’s software and quality engineering processes.  Prior to joining Alliance, Bobby worked at the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries as a  Development Specialist.

To find out more about Bobby and his technical misadventures visit his blog at www.iamnotmyself.com.

Pizza will be provided by Alliance Enterprises, bring your own beverage.  Thanks, Alliance!

 read more ...

Seattle Code Camp will be held November 15-16, 2008 at the DigiPen campus in Redmond

Code Camp organizers are currently looking for speakers.  If you hit the code camp site at https://seattle.codecamp.us you will see that there aren't any sessions or tracks listed at this point.  That's why you should consider presenting, to help fill out the schedule and help continue this excellent tradition.

This is a great venue for presentations. If you have something you are passionate about but have never done any public speaking we encourage you to give it a try.  If you are an experienced speaker this is your time to get involved in your local community and share some of your experience.

Alternatively if you have no desire to get up in front of a bunch of developers and impart your wisdom we could still use your help.  Please promote this code camp by posting it on your blog, emailing it to interested friends and co-workers and encouraging your friends and coworkers to submit sessions.

Finally if you plan on attending please head to https://seattle.codecamp.us/register.aspx and register so that they can get some idea of the required space and food needs.

 read more ...

This presentation will be rescheduled.

 

Continuous Integration and Defense In Depth: Experiences at Microsoft

Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of building and testing the application under development. Usually right after each and every check-in. CI grew out of the agile software development community but can add value to almost any project. This talk will describe the basic approach to CI and also some other practices teams can adopt to get even more out of their investment in CI. The talk will also cover the Microsoft patterns & practices team’s experience with CI and show some of the likely cost savings of adopting this practice on your team.

Speaker Bio

Ade Miller is currently the Development Manager for Microsoft’s patterns & practices group (p&p) where he manages several agile teams executing on a variety of projects. He also lead the development of the p&p Web Services Software Factory: Modeling Edition. Before joining p&p Ade was a developer and then a Development Lead on Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 and 2008.

Prior to joining Microsoft Ade worked in a variety of development environments including start-ups, consultancy and web publishing. His primary interest is in improving the way people develop software. He spends much of his time trying to figure out what being “agile” really means. Ade is a regular speaker on these topics, he also blogs and writes about his experiences. Ade received his BSc and PhD in Physics from the University of Southampton, UK.

 read more ...

Today, it is difficult for applications and frameworks to meet an open-ended set of needs. Building in extensibility allows third-party customization, however there are many challenges in doing so. The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new extensibility model in the .NET framework that addresses many of these problems. It provides as simple declarative model for application developers and extenders. Come to this session and get an overview on what it is and what it will do for you.

About Glenn Block:

 Glenn is a PM for the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. Prior to Microsoft, he worked for 10 years in various startups and ISVs wearing many different hats all related to developing software. Glenn has been writing code practically since the time he learned how to ride a bicycle. When he's not writing code, he's working on ways to build better software through learning good software design principles and methodologies. Glenn is a geek at heart and spends a good portion of the rest of this time spreading that geekdom through conferences, and the community through groups such as ALT.NET. When he's not working and playing with technology, he spends his time with his wife and four year old daughter either at their Seattle apartment or at one of the local coffee shops.

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ASP.NET MVC: What it is and why you care (or not)

 The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is a new web development framework that sits next to the existing ASP.NET WebForms framework. Rather than attempting to abstract away the Web, MVC embraces the web programming model. The result is a very different experience for writing web apps on the .NET platform. In this talk, we’ll look at what the MVC framework is, the basics of how to use it, why it exists, and how to decide whether to use it (or not).


Bio:
Chris is a developer on the Microsoft patterns & practices team. He started his obsession with computers in third grade with an actual teletype taking to a mainframe. The job has gotten rather easier since. He’s worked in embedded systems, shrinkwrap software, developer tools, consulting, and as a developer trainer before joining Microsoft. His current projects are as dev lead / architect for Microsoft’s Enterprise Library, and consulting software designer on the ASP.NET MVC framework.

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From its beginning, Microsoft has been working to change how we write and think about code. Many C# developers today continue to use only the original C# 1.0 features, frequently unaware of the features introduced in C# 2.0 and 3.0, or unsure about how or when to use them. This fast-paced session examines every new feature of C# which changes the way we write code. The effect of this whirlwind tour is to appreciate the evolution of a modern programming language, understanding where we came from and how and why we got here. The tour culminates with the dramatic introduction of a new declarative, data manipulation feature, Language Integrated Query (LINQ), but there's a lot to see along the way. Fasten your seatbelts and don't blink: we're going for a wild ride!

Speaker Bio

Stuart Celarier is a Microsoft MVP on Connected Systems and a software architect working on online banking systems at Fiserv (formerly Corillian) in Portland, Oregon. He is a frequent speaker at regional .NET user groups, Code Camps, and other events. He's chaired Birds-of-a-Feather tracks at several major Microsoft conferences on behalf of INETA. He has spoken at the South Sound .NET Users Group on two previous occasions: Identity and CardSpace in 2007, and Service Oriented Architecture in 2005. Stuart blogs on technology at http://visualstuart.net.

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Once again Microsoft has created a new data-binding model for developers. This new binding framework permeates every corner of WPF and provides a simple and consistent way to synchronize elements and data. Any WPF element that implements a dependency property is bindable to a data-source. You can create data charts by binding shapes to an XML file or enhance your UI by binding a slider control to the current location in a media file. In WPF most of your binding can be written declaratively with XAML which simplifies the binding process. In this session you’ll learn the four cornerstones of WPF binding , ponder the BindingExtension element and see how to handle binding errors. I’ll explain how to handle data validation and show how to convert your data with custom type converters.

Walt Ritscher has trained thousands of corporate developers during the last ten years. An active speaker, his teaching schedule has taken him throughout the world providing developer training at corporations, universities, and software conferences. He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market including early adopter .Net courses at Microsoft Press. Walt is currently consulting and teaching .NET, Silverlight and WPF classes for Wintellect. Walt's industry expertise has placed him on various national technology advisory boards. He is also deeply involved in the local developer community — founding the .NET Developers Association in Redmond, WA. Walt has accumulated plenty of experience as a developer —is currently a Microsoft MVP, and a member of the Silverlight Insiders and WPF Disciples. As a web programmer he has worked numerous projects including; EPA sites and the Microsoft Community Starter Kit.

Walt blogs at WPFWonderland and previously at Thinking About Code before WPF seduced him during this past year.

 

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Learn how to build scalable ASP.NET applications by using the ASP.NET thread pool as efficiently as possible. Learn how I/O operations can be potential scalability killers and how to properly write your code to take advantage of asynchronous I/O and page processing. In this session we will learn how to leverage ASP.NET’s three asynchronous (and largely undocumented) programming models: asynchronous pages, asynchronous handlers, and asynchronous modules.

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Chad Stoker, long time South Sound .NET member, will be presenting information on the
challenges and opportunities of developing applications for mobile devices.

Summary:

By 2012, over five billion wireless devices will be Web-enabled, including cell phones, notebooks, cars, media players, consumer electronics and toys. Web users and applications will go mobile. Agencies must become experts in mobile Web development for a wide range of employee and consumer applications. Find out about the future of FLASH, JSON, Silverlight, and AJAX on mobile devices and more!

What attendees will learn:

    * Cross-browser detection, new WC3 Standards, and why there’s a new “Browser War”.
    * What are “Native” Mobile Applications and why do they impact my hardware decisions?
    * The REAL power of Mobile Technology… Offline data collection! (featuring the MS Synchronization Framework)
    * How should agencies decide which mobile Web devices and technologies to support?
    * What is the future of Mobile Web technologies? AJAX, JSON, FLASH, Silverlight… and more.
    * Development, Debugging, Troubleshooting… which tools get your organization to the finish line?
    * How will your Project Plan be impacted by Mobile Technology considerations and should you worry?

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Now with Pizza!  Cayzen Technologies (Formerly Coraxis) will be supplying pizza and beverages for this meeting.

Erik Mork is a Silverlight consultant out of the Portland area and a Principal at Silver Bay Labs.  He and his wife produce Silverlight podcast show called Sparkling Client.

Erik presented on Silverlight 1.0 in July of 2007.  He returns to give us a look at the new Silverlight, version 2.0, just released in Beta in conjunction with MIX08.

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Data Enhancements in Visual Studio 2008
Visual Studio 2008 offers a number of features that make it easier to build both 2-tier and n-tier data applications. This session will cover the following: • Using the new TableAdapterManager to manage updating of related table. No more having to write the code make sure child rows are deleted before parent rows. Now, it’s automatic. • Using ADO.NET Synchronization Services to maintain a local copy of data that doesn’t change often, such as lookup tables, and then synching that data with the server version. • Automatically separate DataSet code from TableAdapter code. Today, you must do this by hand if you want to use the DataSet Designer and build an n-tier application. Or you can have VS 2008 do it for you. • LINQ to SQL classes and the Object Relational Designer. The LINQ to SQL classes provide a way to map a database model to an object model. You can write the code yourself, or you can use the Object Relation Designer and drag and drop tables and stored procedures from the Server Explorer.


Speaker Bio
Robert Green is a Senior Consultant with MCW Technologies. He is a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio Tools for Office. Along with Ken Getz, Robert has co-authored AppDev’s Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 and Windows Workflow Foundation courseware, and appears in the video training for these courses, as well. Robert is a member of the INETA Speaker Bureau and has been a frequent speaker at technology conferences. Before joining MCW, Robert worked at Microsoft for 8 years, as a Program Manager on the Visual Basic product team and as a Product Manager for Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual FoxPro.

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CODE TRIP OLYMPIA EXPO!

Three Hours, Three Speakers

Come out to the Thurston County Fairgrounds on Monday night and get 3 hours of great information on new and exciting technologies from Microsoft and other sources.

Adam Kinney  will present information on Silverlight 2.0.  Woody Pewitt  will talk about Internet Explorer 8 and the Code Trip Bus Cam.  Jason Mauer  will take us Under the Hood of the code Trip, explaining the technologies used on the bus and on the website.

Thousands of dollars worth of software will be given away from Infragistics (NetAdvantage for .NET), Telerik (RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, RadControls for WinForms, Telerik Reporting,Sitefinity CMS), Identity Mine (Blendables Essentials Mix) and copies of CodeRush by Devexpress.   Along with all of that goodness, there will be some foam Code Trip Buses and Code Trip Laptop sleeves given away.  Free stuff and free high quality presentations -- you don't want to miss this.

To answer a question posed by some of you, sorry, no food this time, but grab something on the way out to the fairgrounds and stuff your face while while Jason, Woody and Adam stuff our brains full of new and shiny information.

 

Monday, April 14, 2008
6:30 PM to 9:30 PM
 Olympia is the last stop for the Code Trip before the end of the line in Seattle. In partnership with the South Sound .NET User Group, they'll be pulling out all the stops and unleashing a technical tour de force at the Thurston County Fairgrounds.

 Location

Thurston County Fairgrounds
Expo Hall
3054 Carpenter Rd SE

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Summary:
 
"Relational databases and Object Oriented design sometimes conflict with each other making it somewhat difficult to make use of each technology the way they were intended. NHibernate is the *bridge* between these two technologies so that DBA's can manage and tune their database effectively and OOP designers and developers can manage their object model they way they need to and then use NHibernate to map these together.
 
This session will be an introduction to NHibernate and some of its features for mapping the object model to the database model. The demonstration solution will be made available after the session for those that would like to play around with it. We will explore the tool using a well known domain: Bug Tracking!
 
NHibernate (www.nhibernate.org):
NHibernate handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database. Given an XML description of your entities and relationships, NHibernate automatically generates SQL for loading and storing the objects. Optionally, you can describe your mapping metadata with attributes in your source code.
 
NHibernate supports transparent persistence, your object classes don't have to follow a restrictive programming model. Persistent classes do not need to implement any interface or inherit from a special base class. This makes it possible to design the business logic using plain .NET (CLR) objects and object-oriented idiom."
 
Bio:
 
"Fred, a Technical Lead with Sierra Systems Inc. and head of their in-house Microsoft Solutions Development group, advises clients on Microsoft Development approaches and best practices. He has been working in the industry for more than 10 years with varying technologies (Java, .NET) and roles from Developer to Architect. Fred has been active with the local community presenting at South Sound .NET User Group and the IPMA conferences."

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Windows Communication Foundation – REST with WCF

WCF is widely described as Microsoft’s implementation of the WS-* communication stack. This characterization is limiting though, as Microsoft has positioned WCF to be the communication framework for Windows. That means that WCF must also support communications that are not based on WS-*. This session introduces non-WS-* messaging support supplied by the .NET 3.5 framework such as JSON, RSS, ATOM, and POX. If you’re building asynchronous AJAX enabled web sites and services to support them, you won’t want to miss this talk!


Speaker Bio:

For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group (http://www.ssdotnet.org) , one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the INETA  (http://www.ineta.org). Paul is the principal of Soundex Information Systems, Inc. (http://www.soundex.com), an Olympia, Washington firm specializing in .NET architecture and technologies for state government business systems. Paul is the author of Wintellect’s Mastering Workflow Foundation curriculum, a subject which he teaches in addition to Wintellect’s Mastering Windows Communication Foundation class (http://www.wintellect.com/Training.aspx). Paul is also a frequent presenter at developer conferences such as Devscovery (http://www.devscovery.com), and community events like Code Camp.

Prior to being reborn as a .NET protagonist in 2000, PaulR17;s experience included over 20 years supporting many flavors of the UNIX operating system. Paul began his early computing career in 1977 on a homebuilt breadboard computer with 256 bytes of RAM, 12 toggle switches, 9 light emitting diodes, and an 8-bit RCA CDP1802 microprocessor (http://www.cosmacelf.com).

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WPF: Beyond Styles and Templates

Windows Presentation Foundation provides a wealth of features and functionality. There are numerous features that a developer can take advantage of to speed development time. In this talk we'll discuss using several areas of WPF in creative ways. Topics to be covered will include:

    * Using attached Dependency Properties to add behavior to elements
    * Using Routed Commands to enable a great designer/developer workflow with custom controls
    * Using the ICommand interface outside of the Routed Commands framework
    * Using the Dispatcher when loading data on a background thread


Speaker Bio:
Josh Wagoner is a software engineer/architect at IdentityMine (http://www.identitymine.com). IdentityMine is a development firm located in Tacoma that specializes in WPF user experience development. IdentityMine has been working with WPF for approximately 4 years now and Josh has been doing WPF development for 3 years.

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 Many people have already heard of the Castle Project [http://castleproject.org] and some of the major subcomponents: Monorail, ActiveRecord, Windsor. Whether you use these things or not, Castle has build up a compelling array of supporting components and libraries that are relatively easy to use from your application - even if you're not using the rest of Castle: Dynamic Proxy, an NVelocity fork, Scheduler, FlexBridge, and other things not directly associated with Castle. In addition, a lot of the Code is so well written, you just feel smarter after having read it. Let's take a look at some of these things, how you can leverage them, and what the code looks like.

Chris is a developer at Russell Investments in Tacoma, where he helps build line of business applications to improve financial security for people.  Chris is also a regular South Sound .NET attendee and has presented in the past.

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Thu. Dec 13th 7:00-9:00 / Oly Center / Charlie Poole and NUnit
There are many reasons why organizations would select using NUnit as their unit testing tool of preference, and even more reasons why you might be interested in the evolution of NUnit version 3.0. Charlie Poole has created a vision statement and discussion list for the new version of NUnit, and many of us have been actively attempting to work out the details of what should be included and what should not.

Join us on Thursday December 13 at the Olympia Center to get your NUnit testing questions answered and find out Charlie’s thoughts on a new version of NUnit (v3.0) as well, and a variety of other interesting topics.

Charlie Poole is an independent developer, consultant and trainer and based in the Northwest. He is an experienced XP coach and an author of several open source development tools including the NUnit test framework for .NET.

Charlie is actively involved in a number of agile conferences and is one of the organizers of Agile Open Northwest, to be held in Seattle this spring. His technical background ranges from mainframes to modern systems. He is currently working on a mix of client projects using C# and C++.

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Tue. Dec. 11 6:30-9:30 / Oly Center / Visual Studio 2008 LoadFest
Registration link: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032360762&culture=en-US

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This presentation is about one developer's journey and evolution in style regarding JavaScript. It covers a number of issues, such as:

* The transition from "script-block" based development towards
multi-file JavaScript.
* The benefits and drawbacks of JavaScript-centric patterns like
script loaders and bundling.
* A primer on JavaScript Templates, Unit-testing for and in JavaScript
and "MVC" in JavaScript

The goal is to introduce the audience to prevalent techniques for JavaScript development. It assumes a introductory level knowledge of JavaScript development in the browser. It is a tools-biased presentation and the recommended libraries are a reflection of the presenter's own experiences. Your mileage and preferences may vary.

Bio:
Jeff Olson is an ASP.NET Developer by day and recreational nerd the rest of the time. He enjoys experimenting with new technologies and ideas for delivering rich, interactive user experiences. His infrequent blog posts and summary of Open Source contributions are located at http://olsonjeffery.github.com .

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November 8th / Paul Mehner WCF: Practical Service Orientation

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October 11th -- Paul Mehner and Windows Workflow Foundation

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The dramatic increase in online fraud threatens to drive business and other high-value information exchange off the Internet. Microsoft, working with the software security industry, has created CardSpace, an identity system that encompasses current and future security systems, using open standards so that all vendors and platforms can participate. CardSpace allows a website to authenticate users in a highly secure manner, and prevents users’ information from being compromised by phishing sites or other malicious online attacks.

Microsoft's Identity Architect, Kim Cameron, has formulated a set of Laws of Identity that describes conditions that must be present for an identity system to achieve success and wide adoption. We'll examine the Laws of Identity and how these "laws" are upheld by CardSpace, and how we enabled a website to use CardSpace.

Speaker Bio

Stuart Celarier is a staff software engineer at Corillian Corporation (now part of CheckFree), a leader in online banking software in Portland, Oregon. He works on systems that demonstrate new technology and new functionality, and he is the company lead on version control and Subversion. Stuart is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows Server System -- Connected System Developer. His involvement in community includes co-director of Portland Code Camp, chair of the Birds-of-a-Feather track at Microsoft conferences, and speaker at user groups, code camps, and conferences. Stuart blogs at
www.ferncrk.com/blog/ read more ...

Microsoft's vision of service-orientation is realized through .NET 3.0 technologies, such as Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. View the technologies available for creating, exposing, and consuming powerful enterprise applications. See how the Web service software factory can be used to quickly automate your development process, and to convert your existing Web services to WCF. Examine powerful business process management applications using BizTalk Server 2006 and Windows Workflow Foundation. Want to become a power player in the field of Service Oriented Architecture? John will show you where to begin.

About the speaker:
QuickLearn's John Callaway has more than 9 years of experience developing enterprise-level applications and teaching advanced courses based on Microsoft products and technologies.  Prior to joining QuickLearn as an instructor, John worked as a independent Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) delivering C#, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, SharePoint, Commerce Server, and BizTalk Server classes across the U.S.  Since joining QuickLearn, John has developed a number of Microsoft courses including Host Integration Server, BizTalk Server 2004 and 2006, and SharePoint Server. John is also the original developer and primary instructor for the BizTalk Deep Dive training which has been taught to over 1200 students worldwide.  John regularly teaches BizTalk and SharePoint training to developers and systems engineers all around the world. John was also the lead author for the Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004 partner certification exam. read more ...

In July, on the 12th, Erik Mork will come and dazzle us with Silverlight.  Erik gave this presentation twice at the recent Porland Code Camp, and both presentations were well attended.  Come see what all the hype is about.
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Long-time C++ developers used templates for years.  Even crusty old C developers used the C Preprocessor to handle similar, repetitive programming tasks.  VB 6 and .NET 1.x developers have never had the benefit of templates; however, with the release of .NET 2.0, all flavors of .NET developers can now take advantage of generics Microsoft's .NET implementation of templates. Although, there are many new capabilities introduced by generics, it is unlikely most developers have dipped deeper into the generics arsenal than strongly typed collections. 

Colby will give a brief overview of historical implementations of templates, will discuss types of problems solved by templates, and will provide plenty of practical examples of the way templates (now generics) can make the life of a programmer simpler (more errors at compile time, less errors at runtime). 

Colby Cavin is a software engineer for Marshall and Associates (www.marshallgis.com). Marshall is an Olympia based software firm specializing in the integration of asset management systems and ESRI mapping systems. Prior to Marshall, Colby developed software for the electronics PC board industry, and wrote video games for the military. 

Currently, Colby is concentrating on finding the shortest path between where he is and the moment of elightenment wherein he is able to say he understands all of the new technologies facing him in today's software engineering workplace.
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Chris Bilson is presenting his Portland Code Camp talk "Automate Your App with PowerShell" for us on May 10th.  Chris is a SSDotNet member and a developer at Russell Investments in Tacoma WA.

".NET Developers haven't always had a good story for automating their applications the way COM developers did (i.e., windows scripting...no seriously.) Now with PowerShell, the ability to automate is back and it's got zazz! In this talk we'll go step by step into how one app was automated, from just loading assemblies and calling methods, to adding some polish with psh-friendly APIs and scriptlets."
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The next version of ADO.NET will present a host of new ways to interact with data in your .NET applications. The Entity Framework provides for abstracted access to your data, client-side views and schemas, and mapping of data to objects. You'll be able to build queries on the client side against your own views and schemas using Entity SQL and LINQ. LINQ can also be used to query datasets in memory. It's an exciting new set of capabilities and this session will take a look at the current state of the upcoming ADO.NET and its Visual Studio integration tools.

Julie Lerman is an independent consultant and .NET Mentor who has been designing and writing software applications for 20 years. Julie is well known in the .NET community as a Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider and INETA Speaker. She is a prolific blogger, a frequent presenter at technical conferences in the U.S., Canada, and even some far reaches of the world and author of articles for MSDN Online, MSDN Magazine and other well-known technical publications. Julie presents on a wide variety of topics including ADO.NET, Web services, Tablet PC development, and other aspects of just getting your .NET applications to work the way you want them to. Julie lives in Vermont where she runs the Vermont.NET User Group, is a board member of the Vermont Software Developers Alliance, and a member of the Champlain College Software Engineering Advisory Board. You can read Julie's blogs at www.thedatafarm.com/blog and http://blogs.devsource.com/devlife/content/daily_work/. read more ...

2007 Mar 8 read more ...

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Getting started with Windows Communication Foundation. read more ...

With ten services launched and more on their way, Amazon Web Services provides developers access to inexpensive, scalable web-based business solutions and infrastructure.

Amazon.com opened its technology and product vault in 2002, via Amazon Web Services, to allow developers the ability to construct powerful applications using the resources the company spent ten years and over $2 billion developing.

Jinesh Varia, Evangelist for Amazon Web Services, looks at real world examples of how developers have utilized Amazon Web Services’ open APIs to develop exciting, profitable businesses. Jinesh will also demonstrate the newly launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) which allows developers to build a virtual computing environment in minutes and only pay for computing usage.

This session will also explore other innovative integrations of Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Simple Queue Service, Amazon Mechanical Turk.


PRESENTER JINESH VARIA, EVANGELIST, AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Jinesh Varia is focused on furthering awareness of web services and inspiring developers to create innovative applications using Amazon Web Services. Jinesh also helps developers on a 1:1 basis and help them implement their own ideas using Amazon’s innovative services. You might find him at the local code camp and involved in all the geeky things that happen in web 2.0 world.
Prior to joining amazon as evangelist, Jinesh was involved in XML Standards-based firm, UBmatrix as a XBRL Solutions Architect and Enterprise Team Lead working on various financial services projects. He was also lead developer at Penn State Data Center, Institute of Regional Affairs. Jinesh is originally from India and holds a Master’s degree in Information systems from Penn State University. He plays tennis and loves to trek.  read more ...

Microsoft quietly slipped a powerful build automation tool into the .NET 2.0 release. MSBuild is a task based build engine that automates the steps needed to create your application. It easily performs critical jobs such as: running automation tests, creating installers, generating documentation or CHM files, and file management. Although it is completely integrated with Visual Studio, it's even more powerful when you learn how to modify the build files yourself. You'll learn how to extend MSBuild with your own custom tasks. We'll also look at several open source libraries that extend MSBuild with interesting tasks: creating zip files, uploading files to your production server via FTP, working with source control servers (VSS, Subversion, and Vault), updating SQL Server databases, writing to the registry and running FXCop. During this session you will see how to exert maximum control over your build process.

PRESENTER
Walt Ritscher has trained thousands of corporate developers during the last ten years. An active speaker, his teaching schedule has taken him throughout the world providing developer training at corporations, universities and software conferences. He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market including early adopter .Net courses at Microsoft Press. Walt's industry expertise has placed him on various national technology advisory boards. He is also deeply involved in the local developer community — founding the .NET Developers Association in Redmond, WA. Walt has accumulated plenty of experience as a developer — he is fluent in database, component, and win-forms technologies. As a web programmer he has worked on numerous websites including ; the EPA, Microsoft Community Starter Kit.  read more ...

Server-side programming is dead. The future is on the client. In this talk, Stephen Walther -- the author of the best-selling book on ASP.NET -- explains why the days of the ASP.NET Framework are numbered.

You are introduced to the Microsoft Atlas framework. You learn how to write applications with Ajax-Script and take advantage of client-side Atlas controls. You learn how to use the Atlas framework to build database-driven Ajax applications. In this talk, you also learn how Atlas compares to other Ajax frameworks

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Business Rules Engine of Workflow Foundation read more ...

How many times has a vendor told you "Sure this app is safe. We use encryption." But is it possible to really know whether the app is safe without performing a full analysis? Yes, there are some red flags that you should look out for. In this session, Jesper Johansson shows you how. We cannot make application penetration testers out of you in this short time, but we can at least teach you about the glaring holes you should look for. We cover how to perform analysis on common off-the-shelf (COTS) software, such as enterprise services, Web sites, any application that talks to database servers, and other software. We can't tell for sure that an application is safe, but we can at least point out some ways it can be blatantly unsafe. Having that level of confidence is an integral part of your risk management strategy in order to Protect Your Windows Network. read more ...

More on Windows Workflow Foundation read more ...

Mr. Fred Hirschfeld a Technical Lead with Sierra Systems, Inc. and head of their in-house Microsoft Solutions Development group, advises clients on Microsoft Development approaches and best practices.

 

This session is intended for the participants to openly discuss current issues being experienced today around the Microsoft .NET technologies with a focus on the ASP.NET application area and .NET 2.0.

 

Mr. Hirschfeld will introduce the session with some possible topics of discussion and then facilitate discussion on other topics of interest to the group.

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Developing web based applications is full of challenges and pitfalls: session state, view state, post backs, control trees, and page lifecycles. How many times have you heard the dreaded, “I clicked refresh and it debited my account twice!?!?” A number of people have come up with clever ways to simplify web apps. Some don’t actually make it more complicated. Let’s talk about one framework, Monorail, some of the things it brings to the table, including it’s ultra-simple data-mapping API, ActiveRecord, and finish off with a discussion about database unit testing.
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What makes a software architect?  Is it just a really advanced developer or is it a genuinely different discipline with different skills required?  How does a developer become an architect? Should a developer set their sites on this goal?  With the globalization of software development many people are looking at their career path and asking questions like these.  In this presentation, Ron Jacobs, the host of The Microsoft ARCast show, discusses the answers to these questions and more.
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Jeff Levinson is a Solution Design & Integration Architect for the Boeing Company. He’s been developing software professionally for just over 10 years. His main focus is .NET and Microsoft technologies in an enterprise environment. In his free time he speaks to users groups, mentors high school students and teaches developers .NET. He holds the following certifications: MCP, MCAD, MCDBA, MCSD, MCSD.NET, SCJP and Security+. He is currently in the last semester before completing his Masters in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Jeff has also written two books on .NET and several articles for Visual Studio Magazine. His second book is titled, “Pro Visual Studio Team System” (Apress 2006). read more ...

Chad Stoker has put together a presentation on how to work with, deploy to, and ultimately use the new features in SQL Server that leverage the CLR. Some of the topics covered will be a basic overview of HOW to setup a CLR Stored Procedure, how to Deploy the SPROC once you've compiled the assembly, how to strong-name the assemblies, and other topics.

 In addition to discussing Stored Procedures, Chad will also be highlighting the use of User-Defined Functions, User-Defined Types, Aggregates, and Triggers... all in the context of CLR integration.

 Join him! CLR, .NET, SQL... It is quite possibly the coolest!

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Speaker: Steven Fiore, Partner Technology Specialist, Microsoft Presentation Title: Microsoft Technology Roadmap Brief Session Description: The Microsoft Technology Roadmap is a high level overview of where Microsoft is now and where it is going across virtually all of its products and technologies. Gain a quick understanding of all the major Microsoft technologies and how they fit together. Discover the industry trends and challenges Microsoft is most concerned about, and what they are doing to address them. Learn about the business value new products will provide. Gain insight into the release dates of exciting new Microsoft products and learn what you can do today to help get your organization ready. Degrees/Licenses/Certifications Held: Bachelor Computer Studies University of Maryland, Masters of Software Engineering Seattle University, Microsoft Certified Solution Architect, ITIL Foundation Certified, Member IEEE and ACM Other pertinent information you would like to be given: Steven has 20 years of experience with an emphasis on Enterprise Architecture, modeling (data, object, business, etc), software development, risk management, facilitation, quality assurance, and process improvement. His background includes experience with both .NET and J2EE architectures as well as both commercial and open source platforms. He competed against Microsoft while working for Novell and worked with Microsoft architecting part of Microsoft.com and contributing to 3 Microsoft certification exams. He has spent the last three years focusing exclusively on the public sector.  read more ...

Please join us at our next user group meeting on January 12 at the Olympia Center (222 Columbia NW) from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. I haven’t prepared a formal presentation, and I don’t have a guest speaker lined up, so it will just be us exploring technology together. I have been very interested in Windows Workflow Foundation, and I would like to explore this technology with my user group friends.

“Windows Workflow Foundation is the programming model, engine and tools for quickly building workflow enabled applications on Windows. It consists of a WinFX namespace, an in-process workflow engine, and designers for Visual Studio 2005. Windows Workflow Foundation is available (currently in beta) for both client and server versions of Windows. Windows Workflow Foundation includes support for both system workflow and human workflow across a wide range of scenarios including: workflow within line of business applications, user interface page-flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite work

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Is NUnit Dead? No way! read more ...

The Missing LINQ

What’s missing in your code? Probably a lot of “plumbing” code if you’re using LINQ. The LINQ project is the codename for some of Microsoft’s most innovative language features for both C# and VB.NET. These features encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. LINQ will undoubtedly make our lives as developers a lot easier. This session will introduce LINQ, describe some of the technologies behind LINQ, and then dive into a series of code demonstrations.

 

Tim Shakarian has been a Developer for about 8 years. Tim has been working almost exclusively with .NET since Beta 2. His development expertise covers web applications, smart clients, services, enterprise components, and database design. He also has a passion for agile development methodologies. Tim is currently a Solutions Developer at Avanade Inc. (http://www.avanade.com), the world’s premier technology integrator for Microsoft solutions in the enterprise. Tim is commonly referred to by his peers and coworkers as "TSHAK" (tee-shak).

 

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Please join Chad Stoker and Paul Mehner at the Olympia Community Center this Thursday, October 13 from 7:00 to 9:00 PM where we will explore Microsoft Communication Foundation (codename: Indigo). Indigo is the new service oriented communications backbone that will supersede current web services technology (it's backward compatible with current web services, but it has way more to offer). As this is an emerging technology, we'll try to keep the presentation informal and low-key. This won’t be a marketing presentation--Chad and I will have plenty of live code samples and real-world scenarios to demo and discuss.

Paul began by discussing the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture and how Indigo will apply. Chad finished up by presenting numerous examples on how to setup Indigo as well as fielding questions on the topic. read more ...

Developers have been doing Unit Testing since the beginning (well…most developers…) “Test Driven Development” takes the skills and techniques developed over the past 30-odd years and packages them into a nice portfolio. For .NET developers in particular, there are many powerful tools available to bring automated unit testing into your normal workflow. In this presentation, I’ll show some of the tools and techniques I’ve learned about. You’ll see how automated unit testing improves quality, but that this is just a side benefit to the tremendous time savings you get from automated unit testing. Be prepared for an action packed evening of test driven excitement!

Chris has been a professional windows developer since 1994, working in a wide variety of industries, including industrial automation and control, education, entertainment, government, financial, and justice. He lived in Taiwan for 7 years, where he spent the early part of his programming career and met his wife. He is currently working as a contractor at Frank Russell Investment Group in Tacoma. He is an MCSD in .NET and an MCDBA. Feel free to contact him at cbilson@pobox.com. Download slides and sample code: read more ...

Local user group member Mike Clark presented COM interop with VB6 applications. read more ...

Come out and join us this Thursday, July 14 from 7:00-9:00 PM at the Olympia Center for “Versions Gone Wild!” where I will dive deep into the ubiquitous assembly versioning problems that often snag the Enterprise Visual Studio Developer. I will show you strategies and solutions to alleviate the problems and I will unveil several secrets that most developers probably aren’t aware of. We'll start will simple examples of basic shared components and demonstrate how assembly versioning works. We will build up from that starting point to components that can be shared and versioned across an enterprise. This topic effects even ASP.NET web developers who sometimes believe they are immune because they use xcopy deployment! If time permits we may also touch on what’s new in Whidbey assemblies.  read more ...

Hans Hoffmann from Microsoft will present Developer Roadmap Hans will cover the follwowing - Microsoft Future Products Roadmap Dyanimic Systems Intiative Infomation Worker Futures Server Platform read more ...

In this session, Jeffrey will address some of the more controversial issues surrounding the .NET Framework and code written for it. First, we’ll examine how (and if) managed code and your intellectual property can be protected from others. Second, we’ll address how much faster manage code can run if you use Microsoft’s nGen.exe tool. Third, we’ll examine how much slower managed code as compared to unmanaged code. This talk will give you more insight into haw the .NET Framework works and a number of interesting demos and tools will be shown.  read more ...

Slides from SOA Jumpstart presentation given at IPMA Forum read more ...

In this presentation we’ll be walking through new features of C# and VB in the .NET Framework 2.0. This is specifically about syntax; whiz-bang IDE features will be kept to a minimum. Come learn about the new abilities you’ll be able to take advantage of in the next release of .NET.

About the Speaker Jason Mauer is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft covering the Pacific Northwest. He recently switched to his current role from his previous one as a development consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services, where he specialized in .NET application development and SharePoint development for the past four years. Jason can be found online at www.jasonmauer.com or through email at jmauer@microsoft.com .  read more ...

The ASP.NET 2.0 Framework introduces a new feature set for managing application security. In this session, you will be introduced to the new security features of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. You will learn how ASP.NET uses the new Membership API, Role Manager and some new security server controls to provide a more elaborate security infrastructure. You’ll also learn how all of these features work together in your applications.

Bio: Tom Krueger has a continuing history in software development, enterprise architecture, and consulting utilizing Microsoft technologies. For the past year he has been working as a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft in the Smart Client and .NET Compact Framework areas where he recently implemented a .NET Framework 2.0 solution. He is also a principal in Blue Pen Solutions, a technology consultancy that helps to automate your business through Mobility, E-Business, and Systems Integration solutions. read more ...

Campfire chat... without the fire. I (Paul) was unable to line up a speaker for March so we're going to keep our meeting low-key and informal. Bring your questions and .net stories and we'll share. I also have good swag! read more ...

Topic: .NET, Design Patterns and Legacy Data The presentation will cover how the .NET technologies and design patterns are used to access legacy data maintained in Adabas. This involves an actual production application that was deployed in production last November, 2004. The focus will be on the .NET software architecture and design. Depending on time, a simplified but working prototype of the application will also be demonstrated.

Speaker Bio: Edison Cheng has been laboring in IT for over 20 years. He has worked with different platforms and technologies and in various industries. Most of his work has been in applications development with concentration at the enterprise level. Over the last 12 years, he has mostly worked as a solution architect and technical project lead. Unlike other speakers, he has never written a book and has no hope to do so. He has not published any articles and never will. Although he has been a guest speaker several times, but he never got invited back. He has no claim to fame whatsoever --- not even 15 minutes worth. His hobbies include reading, basketball and golf. After investing some money on Transcender, he finally obtained the MCP.  read more ...

Abstract: There is a huge movement in the software industry towards Web services and service-orientation. What is the essence of a service? What values do services provide to a software organization? How do you organize and combine services into systems that realize the full benefit of service-orientation? These are increasingly important issues for developers and architects working on the .NET Framework. Today you create Web services using ASMX. Looking forward to Indigo - the communications pillar of Longhorn - service-orientation is at the core of all communication. That will profoundly change on how software is architected, designed, implemented and deployed. Service-oriented architecture can guide your use of Web services today, and prepare you for understanding and creating tomorrow's software. Bio: Stuart Celarier is a consultant, course author and instructor in Portland, Oregon. He recently served as technical lead and author of a Web services course for Microsoft. Stuart is also editor for the Longhorn Developer FAQ on MSDN and the International .NET Association (INETA) User Group Liaison for the PacWest region.  read more ...

The second part of our September meeting. A .NET Tools extravaganza! Introducing the most useful tools in .NET development. NDoc, NUnit, Red-Gate ANTS Profiler, CodeSmith, Reflector, DbgClr, fxCop, NMock, and a few more as time permits. You may even win a copy of ANTS Profiler courtesy of Red-Gate Software!  read more ...

Visual Studio 2005 – Express, Standard, Professional – What are these new versions?

Visual Studio 2005 Team System – Architect, Developer, Tester and Team Foundation Server

Visual Studio 2005 Resources, Recent Announcements and Product Roadmap

Robert Satterwhite is a Microsoft .NET Developer Evangelist in the Microsoft Industry Solutions Group. He has been working for Microsoft for 2+ years and has been in the computing industry for 19 years. He worked for Attachmate, Oracle and Vignette prior to joining Microsoft. As a Microsoft Evangelist he presents and demonstrations the Microsoft Application Platform, .NET Framework, Visual Studio .NET and other developer related products offered by Microsoft to customers. Robert currently lives in Kirkland, Washington and enjoy skiing, hiking, biking and camping when he's not sitting on airplane traveling to visit customers.  read more ...

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A .NET Tools extravaganza! Introducing the most useful tools in .NET development. NAnt, NDoc, NUnit, Red-Gate SQL Developer Tools Bundle, CodeSmith, Reflector, DbgClr, fxCop, NMock, and a few more as time permits. You may even win a copy of SQL Developer Tools Bundle courtesy of Red-Gate Software! read more ...

Ever wish you could launch Visual Studio.NET and go “File|New Enterprise?” Well, you can’t just slap [WebMethod] on your existing stuff and go to market. Web Services and WS*.* have turned out to be the biggest buzzwords since ActiveX – let’s really dig in technically and find out what’s going on. We’ll look at: The Primordial Ooze that we called CSV files up until XML Schemas today The Internals of XSD.EXE and the XmlSerializer We’ll ILDASM and Reflect(or) our way through System.Web Examples of replacing XSD.EXE with your own generated code Exactly how Visual Studio.NET promotes Microsoft’s view of The Matrix, and how you can be more like Neo, and less like Neo’s cube-mates and co-workers. How to use Web Services in any context, and how to promote Interop with other languages. How to sniff SOAP on the wire and why you should care How XSD Types map to CLR Types and how to deal with the NULL problem How WSE applies to you, and how to CYA as we wait for Indigo. BIO: Scott Hanselman is Chief Architect at the Corillian Corporation, an eFinance enabler. He has over a decade of experience developing software in C, C++, VB, COM, and currently VB.NET and C#. Scott is proud to have been appointed the MSDN Regional Director for Portland, OR for the last four years, developing content for, and speaking at Developer Days and the Visual Studio.NET Launch in both Portland and Seattle. Scott was in the top 5% of audience-rated speakers at TechEd 2003 in Dallas. Scott also spoke at the Windows Server 2003 and VS.NET 2003 Launches in 4 cities. He's spoken internationally on Microsoft technologies, and has co-authored two books from Wrox Press, and is currently working on a third. In 2001, Scott spoke on a 15-city national tour with Microsoft, Compaq and Intel featuring Microsoft Technologies and evangelizing good design practices. Scott has also spoken at VSLive, and was made a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET in 2004. His thoughts  read more ...

Using Exception Handling with the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library. Enterprise Library is a major new release of the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Application Blocks, which are reusable software components designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Enterprise Library is composed of the following components: Configuration Data Logging Exception Handling Security (AuthZ, AuthN, Profile) Crypto Tooling (external and VS) Tim will provide a preview of Enterprise Library as a whole and then delve into the details of the Exception Handling Application Block. Tim Shakarian has been a Developer for almost 7 years and has been working exclusively with.NET since Beta2 and MSSQL Server since version 6.5. Tim is currently a Solutions Developer at Avanade Inc. (http://www.avanade.com). He is working on a partner program with Microsoft to develop enterprise class reusable .NET components for a project titled "Enterprise Library".  read more ...

Stephen Walther presented how to use client side JavaScript in custom web controls to a packed room of enthusiastic developers. read more ...

Paul explained the theory behind exception handling and demonstrated how to properly construct try/catch/finally code blocks. Custom exceptions and IDisposable code patterns were explained and demonstrated. read more ...

BIO: Chad Stoker is an Application Developer currently focusing on the area of Security. He is employed by the Dept. of Labor and Industries where he is heavily involved in a “Shared Security Service” project. Chad specializes in Enterprise solutions for Government agencies and has provided such solutions for over 2 years. Chad is originally from the Olympia area and has a strong interest in the local Development community which inspired him to offer his take on the new WSE 2.0 specification provided by Microsoft. Chad hopes to educate as many as possible about the benefits of Secure Services and SOA. Instead of taking a detailed look at all the ways that WSE 2.0 allows us to secure Web Services, Chad will be focusing on the Service Extensions that allow a SOAP communication within NT Services, Executables, and of course, Web Services. Chad will be providing specific examples on how to use the "INPROC", "TCP", and "HTTP" channels. Chad will also be describing SOAP Receivers, Senders, Clients, and Servers. An overview of the security issues of the Original WSE specification and how the new 2.0 specification resolves many problems will also occur.  read more ...

Videos from PDC Event read more ...

Are you looking for a new techniques and software solutions to manage the often complex build process associated with multi-project .NET development? Development and testing environments are often configured to more closely approximate a production environment. Security models of n-tier systems can be difficult to fully duplicate on a single developer’s workstation. This can be problematic because once your executables have been promoted to a new environment they can be very difficult to debug without using the Visual Studio debugger… unless you know about a particularly valuable .NET Framework SDK tool. At our February 12 meeting, Paul Mehner will demonstrate the basics of setting up and using the free configuration management tool “nant” to manage project assembly dependencies, automate unit testing and documentation tasks, build zip and MSI packages, and make environmental promotions in a structured and reliable manner. Paul will wrap up the evening by demonstrating tools, techniques and secrets of how to remotely debug your code on development and testing servers without installing Visual Studio read more ...

Shadowfax” Reference Architecture for Service Oriented Applications Service Oriented Architecture is the latest architectural wave that is sweeping the world. The question people are asking is “How do I implement SOA today using .NET?” Shadowfax is the answer to that question. In this session we will be discussing this groundbreaking reference architecture and how you can get involved in helping to shape it today. Bio: Ron Jacobs is a Product Manager for Platform Architecture Guidance at Microsoft  read more ...

Jean-Francois Gagnon’s presentation on how to use the CVS source code control system from Visual Studio was welcomed by meeting attendees who were searching for viable alternatives to Visual Source Safe. JF explained the significant performance benefits of remotely using CVS over Source Safe. He then showed us how to obtain the software components and get it set up.   read more ...

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Due to a busy schedule I haven't arranged a speaker for the South Sound .NET User Group on October 9. The meeting will be a more casual and impromptu one as a result. I'll put together some .NET materials and members can bring their own discussion topics. I've got a little swag to give away too!  read more ...

Use of design patterns has become a requirement of object-oriented application design. Now that Microsoft's development platform is entirely object oriented, Microsoft developers are learning and using design patterns, many for the first time. Design patterns deliver solutions. With design patterns, you have a way to take a good idea from one application and use it in another, without necessarily copying the code. Come learn how to discover and use these reusable object oriented techniques in your software development. Your .NET app will be more maintainable, more flexible, and more elegant as a result. We will discuss what design patterns are, how to learn them, how to use them, and what they do for you. Bio: A. Nicklas Malik has spent 23 years in software development on a wide array of platforms, from mainframe, to Unix, to OS/2, to Windows. A former Microsoft MVP, and the co-author of two books on Microsoft technologies, Mr. Malik has spoken at regional and national technology conferences. He is employed as a Solutions Architect for Sierra Systems Group, a publically traded software integration firm with offices in Olympia.  read more ...

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There are over 9 million mainframe applications still in use today. The need to reuse and repurpose these applications within the .NET framework is at an all time high. This session will cover mainframe application integration, specifically highlighting the differences and requirements for data, transaction, and application level integration. In addition, Williams will perform a live demonstration against a mainframe system using ClientSoft's .NET tools to transform a closed, monolithic legacy application into .NET components and web services Bio: Brad Williams is the project leader for .NET technologies at ClientSoft. He has over 13 years of developing enterprise software on cutting edge technology platforms. His development experience spans ASP.NET, C#, HTML, Java, XML. Prior to ClientSoft, he has developed solutions for companies like Fiserv and Computer Associates As a special benefit to those attending, ClientSoft will also raffle off four $50 gift certificates for Amazon.com  read more ...

someday... read more ...

Jason Celestine will discuss Enterprise Architectures and demonstrate YADA (Yet Another .NET Architecture). YADA inspects SQL Server metadata and allows business objects to be generated from your data source. This "remoting" based architecture makes extensive use of OOP. The tools of YADA make extensive use of XML and XSLT. I'm not pretending to be the Information Minister of Iraq when I say that this meeting will likely be one of the most useful and informative of the year ;-). Please come out and support our local user group speakers. See you all there! -- Paul  read more ...

Code from our Olympia pizza party speakers will be coming soon! read more ...

Dave Thorson - Leave your ASP.Net and your WebServices at home as we discuss rich client n-tier development with .Net. Topics to be covered include, deploying a Hello World WinForm to the world, expanding Hello World across the tiers. Using interfaces with remoting and serializing your objects across http. Time permitting, Dave will demonstrate the WinForms application portal framework that he's developed and is placing into service at an existing client site. read more ...

Charlie Poole - Extreme Programming (or XP as it's usually called) was initially developed to help small teams with rapidly changing or uncertain requirements develop software quickly. These days, only three years after the publication of the first book on the subject, it has evolved in surprising ways and is being used on larger and more complex projects. While "pure" XP may not be compatible with every environment, it can offer insights into programming and project organizaton for just about everyone writing software. This talk will cover the key XP values and practices, with a focus on tools available to assist in using XP in a .Net environment. Charlie Poole is a local software developer, consultant and trainer who is active in the XP community. He learned about XP a few years ago when he was able to use it to revive an ailing project. As a former government IT worker, he has a special interest in the process of introducing XP in that environment. He is the the president of the Seattle XP Users Group, cofounder of the xpAdoption mailing list and one of the developers of the NUnit testing framework for .Net. read more ...

Charlie Poole - In recent years, unit test frameworks for use in various languages and environments have become very popular. NUnit is an open-source test framework for .Net. It is loosely modeled after the popular JUnit framework but makes use of custom attributes to make a better fit in the .Net environment. The talk will cover NUnit Basics What unit-testing is and why it needs to be automated. A quick look at available frameworks. How to write simple unit tests with NUnit. Advanced topics - depending on time and interest Using interfaces, inheritance and mock objects Testing user interface code. Testing multi-threaded code. Cross-language and unmanaged code testing.
Charlie Poole is an independent developer, consultant and trainer working in Western Washington. He is the president of the Seattle XP Users Group and one of the developers of the NUnit framework. read more ...

Paul Mehner will talk about the three team development models for Visual Studio .NET proposed by Microsoft, and will supply you with information that will be useful in determining which model makes the most sense for your organization. Paul’s talk with cover how source safe integration with visual studio works in vs7, how to setup visual source safe for group-wise development. How to structure solutions and projects – and the implications of different choices. How to establish project dependencies and build orders in your solutions. Which files should always be checked into source safe and which should never be. The importance of folder structures; The build and promotion processes; And the “how’s and why’s” of having an automated nightly build process  read more ...

Bill Vaughn, will present a condensed version of his day-long ADO.NET workshop. He'll spend an hour or so discussing the new ADO.NET data access paradigm Microsoft has just invented—almost from scratch. When he's done you’ll understand the new object model and new disconnected hierarchical approach to memory-resident data. You’ll have a better understanding about what you’ll need to do to migrate your applications, or better yet, rebuild them from scratch. He’ll also talk about skills and give you a feel for what your team of developers is going to have to learn and how long it should take to get them up to speed. It’s going to be a full evening… Want to get a head start on the discussion? Check out his new book "ADO.NET and ADO Examples and Best Practices for Visual Basic Programmers (Second Edition)" ISBN: 1-893115-68-2 or Examples and Best Practices for C# programmers.  read more ...

Jeffrey Richter is a cofounder of Wintellect, a training, debugging, and consulting firm dedicated to helping companies build better software, faster. He is the author of Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming (Microsoft Press, 2002) and several Windows programming books. Jeffrey is also a contributing editor to MSDN® Magazine, for which he authors the .NET column. He has been consulting with Microsoft's .NET Framework team since October 1999.
Abstract: This talk explains how compilers produce metadata and how this metadata is used by the CLR to resolve type references. In this talk, we’ll walk through the process of building an assembly and discuss how the CLR locates dependant assemblies avoiding the need for the registry. Then, we’ll discuss how to create and deploy shared assemblies containing shared components. Finally, we’ll discuss how to version these assemblies without adversely affecting the application’s behavior making “DLL Hell” a thing of the past. read more ...

Paul D. Sheriff is the President of PDSA, Inc. http://www.psda.com, a Microsoft Managed Partner in Southern California. Paul is the MSDN Regional Director for Southern California, and has three books on .NET. "ASP.NET Developer's Jumpstart" from Addison-Wesley co-written with Ken Getz. His other two books are eBooks and can be purchased at the PDSA web site at www.pdsa.com. Contact Paul directly at PSheriff@pdsa.com.

This session will cover how to create an ASP.NET application that gives you the best in flexibility and features. You will learn the best uses of the Web.Config File, Creating a Base Page Class and creating a Data Driven Menu System among other topics such as: Effective use of User Controls, Frameless web pages, Using User Controls, Creating a data driven menu system, Creating a Base Page Class, User Tracking, Centralized Error Handling This will be a very interactive session and Paul will build an application from scratch right in front of your eyes! read more ...

Eric Lippert from Microsoft presentation on .NET code security read more ...

Jeffrey Richter, Jason Clark, Keith Pleas, Walt Ritscher, and Paul Mehner square off over VB.NET and C#. This heavyweight event sponsored by the Seattle DotNet User's Group, the South Sound DotNet User's Group, and the Seattle VBDA, brought leaders in the field together to discuss the merits of VB.NET versus C#. Each side had 20 minutes to present their case with a 20 minutes rebuttal. Hint: Paul is a C-Sharpie -- in case you couldn't tell from his slides. read more ...

Zane Thomas on Socket programming and transferring objects over sockets using Microsoft.NET. read more ...

Paul Mehner will present "AFRS.NET" a web service built to demonstrate the many benefits of web services in state government. Paul will show how the web service was constructed, and the industry standard XML data that it produces. He will then show how incredibly simple it is for another agency to use the business logic of this web service in the construction of their own Visual Studio 7 applications. read more ...

Stephen Walther presented an overview of databinding to database data within the ASP.NET Framework. He discussed how to bind data to basic ASP.NET Web Form controls such as the DropDownList and RadioButtonList controls. He then examined how to use the rich features of some of the more advanced controls in the Framework. He also explained how you to use the Repeater control to format data from a database, use the DataList control to create interactive menus, and use the DataGrid control to sort and page through database data. Stephen Walther is the author of Active Server Pages Unleashed, SAMs Teach Yourself E-Commerce Programming with ASP in 21 Days, contributor to ASP.NET: Tips, Tutorials and Code. He is at work on a book on Visual Studio.NET, and has recently completed ASP.NET Unleashed. read more ...

The group speaker for February 2002 will be Jason Celestine who has built a very cool Web Publishing Photo Gallery in ASP.NET. Jason's design allows files to be dragged onto a file system where a service (we can now write NT style services with DotNet), using a file system notification event automatically weaves the images into the website by generating thumbnails, web sized jpegs, and the web pages to encapsulate them. This is really nice for a no-fuss way to quickly publish big digital camera images where people can see the thumbnails online and optionally see the larger or full sized images by simply clicking on a hyperlink. The thumbnails and web image sizes are all generated using the DotNet imaging object. Meeting attendees will see samples of building multithreaded applications, use of file system notification, use of the Imaging Object, building Windows NT/2K/XP services, and ASP.NET web pages. read more ...

Mehner/Celestine/Thorson will investigate the copy of Visual Studio 7.0 that shipped this week. Come down and see it for yourself. We will explore the new IDE together at the January meeting. read more ...

Dave Mainer from Avanade will present "An Introduction to the .NET Configuration Framework" read more ...

Kurt Cagle provided a fairly comprehensive history and introduction to SVG (Structured Vector Graphics). read more ...

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The next monthly meeting of the South Sound DotNet User's Group will be September 20, 2001. The topic for the meeting will be "Anatomy of an ASP.NET Website: The IBuySpy Portal" and will be given by Paul Mehner The IBuySpy Portal website provides many quality examples of how to build an efficient and secure ASP.NET site. It's a great place to get started with ASP.NET.  read more ...

Kurt Cagle gave an excellent presentation on XSLT covering: What XSLT is all about, Putting Things in Context - XPath, Template Tricks, Parameters, Variables and Node-sets Processing XSLT, and Extending XSLT  read more ...

Mehner XML for .NET read more ...

Mike Pizzo provided a superb presentation and question and answer session on ADO.NET. read more ...

okay... so nobody kept notes of this meeting? read more ...

Tres Henry, Senior Web Software Design Engineer on the .NET Adoption Team, will be joining us this month to give us a comprehensive overview of ASP.Net, including web services, security, and session state management. We are very excited about this months meeting, and are hoping for a record turnout, so please feel free to invite anyone you think would be interested. read more ...

Visual Basic 6.0 Developer preparation for .NET - Mehner; Deterministic Finalization (runtime garbage collection). What it is, and why you may need to know about it - Celestine; Live Code: C# Sample Application demonstration Michael Clark

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2001-01-11 2nd User Group Meeting

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The first South Sound .NET User Group meeting.

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