Getting Mobile with ASP.NET MVC4 and jQuery Mobile
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, March 21st
The number of users who primarily access the internet on their mobile devices will exceed those using a PC within the next 3 years. Is your site mobile friendly? Does it look terrible or does it even work on mobile devices? We'll be diving into a ASP.NET and look at what you can do today on your current website to improve your users mobile experience. Then we'll be looking at the awesome features in ASP.NET MVC4 and jQuery Mobile, and how we can leverage this next generation technology to enable developers to build a single solution that targets multiple platforms and form factors such as mobile, tablet and desktop devices!
Bio: Lance Larsen - President of Madison .NET User Group and Independent Developer!
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza
Knockout JavaScript! KO your Web UI for the WIN!
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, Jan 18th
Knockout is a JavaScript library that helps you to create rich, responsive display and editor user interfaces with a clean underlying data model. Any time you have sections of UI that update dynamically (e.g., changing depending on the user’s actions or when an external data source changes), KO can help you implement it more simply and maintainably. Perfect for integration into your current or new HTML5 websites!
Among other things, KO allows for elegant dependency tracking - automatically updates the right parts of your UI whenever your data model changes. And KO can be added on top of your existing web application without requiring major architectural changes!
Bio: Thomas Thorp - - one of Madison's own professional .NET developers and long time member of MADdotNET! Tom has a long track record of sucessful and challenging projects - the last of which he's heavily utiliized Knockout JS - and he's pleased to let everyone know what's he's learned along the way so you can get this exciting technology into your Web tool belt. :)
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza
Application Development with HTML5
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, November 30th
HTML5 is the biggest and most powerful HTML specification to ever come out of the W3C. Its roots come from a proposal to extend HTML4 to make it easier for web developers to create web applications. With more and more browsers supporting HTML5, ECMAScript 5 and other web standards, developers now have a strong web platform they can use to create a new class of application that is more powerful and interactive than ever before. What's in HTML5 that lets us take our applications to the next level?
Bio: Clark Sell | http://ClarkSell.info | @csell5 | Clark is a web evangelist for Microsoft based in Illinois. A Chicago native who can’t spell, Clark as a kid actually made his money building cars, getting grease under his nails. That art of building would later lead him to software development where he drinks the Web Development Kool-Aid. Writing code is what keeps Clark awake at night, while continually working on his craft and rapping with others over a few cold CORS. You can hear Clark muse about software on his podcast Developer Smackdown, or find his family cruising around in a 1968 Camaro SS.
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza
Build, Windows 8, and WinRT
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, November 2nd
At the 2011 //Build Conference Microsoft showed us a lot of Windows 8 as well as a new Windows runtime called WinRT. Windows 8 promises to be a fantastic modern operation system and WinRT is our link to all the great functionality baked into Windows 8. We will begin with a brief Windows 8 overview and move on to building applications in WinRT using C#, XAML, and JavaScript with a lot of code and discussion.
Bio: Damon Payne is a life-long geek, Microsoft MVP, father, husband, audio/video nut, atheist, philosopher, wine drinker, and short order cook who lives in the unexplored swamps near Milwaukee. Damon works mostly in the areas of Smart Client software (including Silverlight, mobile devices, and WPF), visual tools, and Solution Architecture; he also does web programming and has professional interests in parallel programming, agile processes, and requirements gathering. Damon is currently the Principal Software Architect at Big Hammer Data. You can find steady updates and detailed articles at www.damonpayne.com.
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza
The Ins and Outs of Caching in the Cloud
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, October 5th
The Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service provides a scalable cache for use in Windows Azure applications. In general, it is just a distributed, out of process cache. As such, it provides a key-value store that applications can query to retrieve, store, update, or remove data. Users can consume the cache explicitly or implicitly. In explicit usage, the cache provides the ability to ignore contention issues with a blind save to the store. One can also implement optimistic and pessimistic writer locks as well as single insert semantics. Typically, an application that explicitly uses the cache uses the cache aside pattern: look for data in the cache; if the data is there, use it; if not, lookup the data and populate the cache. Implicit users of the cache purchase a cache and then use a service that somehow integrates with the cache. In ASP.NET, developers can choose to store session state as well as page output in the cache.
Bio: Scott Seely is the president of Friseton, LLC (www.friseton.com). From 2002 to 2006, Scott was a developer on the WCF/Indigo team at Microsoft. Today, he is a Microsoft Regional Director in Chicago where he helps lead the Lake County .NET Users’ Group, organize Code Camps, and he speaks at user groups throughout the region. His community involvement has earned him a Microsoft MVP Award for Connected Systems.
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza
Developing high availability applications with CQRS
Presentation Meeting: Wednesday, June 1st
"The Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) pattern has recently been getting a lot of deserved attention. In short it involves separating, at least logically, the command and query infrastructures of a system. Through doing this CQRS promises a simpler design which will enable greater levels of scalability."
"...systems built following this pattern have been more flexible, simpler, and quicker to develop than had been achieved following more conventional ActiveRecord/DDD approaches."
Come learn when and why you should use this pattern in your development!
Bio: Jeff Carley has been a Microsoft developer in the Madison area for the past 10 years, the last 2 1/2 years he's worked for Yahara Software as a Senior Technical Consultant. He is interested in most things .NET and also enjoys dabbling with Ruby on Rails. When Jeff isn't coding he's usually golfing, woodworking, or buying technical books.
Where: Herzing University Madison ( 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison )
When: 5:30 - 6:00: Networking | 6:00 - 8:00: Presentation and Pizza