MADdotNET News

September 8th: Agile modeling with Visual Studio 2010

mail@lancelarsen.com — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:39:58 GMT

Agile modeling with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack

We will start with a quick discussion of the history of UML, agile development, and modeling tools in the Microsoft world. Then we will cover the basics of UML modeling with VS 2010, covering class, layer, dependency graph, and sequence diagrams. Finally, we will talk about establishing an agile modeling and development workflow with forward and reverse engineering using the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack.

Bio: Gary Pedretti taught himself to program on a TI-99/4A in grade school when he endeavored to recreate his favorite video game, Centipede, in TI Extended BASIC. Somewhere later in life he realized he would have had more success with a compiled, not interpreted language. In his teenage years he was saddled with an Amiga Persecution Complex. Gary now has over ten years experience in enterprise-level IT focusing primarily on Microsoft technologies. His specialties are application architecture, SOA, WCF, C#, middle-tier development, data-tier development, and database administration. He is an MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer 2.0/ASP.NET Developer 3.5/Web Developer 4.0, MCDBA 2000, and a Certified Scrum Master. His hobbies and interests include home theater, record collecting, fine dining, and writing about himself in the third person. He blogs at http://Blog.GaryPedretti.com/.

OData Deep Dive with Chris Woodruff (July 7th)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:29:59 GMT

July 7th 2010
1 pm – 5 pm
Herzing College, Madison WI
http://bit.ly/MadisonOdata

Abstract
The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol for sharing data. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in a way that is far more powerful than currently possible, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem increases its overall value.

OData is consistent with the way the Web works - it makes a deep commitment to URIs for resource identification and commits to an HTTP-based, uniform interface for interacting with those resources (just like the Web). This commitment to core Web principles allows OData to enable a new level of data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.

OData is released under the Open Specification Promiseto allow anyone to freely interoperate with OData implementations.
In this talk Chris will provide an in depth knowledge to this protocol, how to consume a OData service and finally how to implement an OData service on Windows using the WCF Data Services product.

Agenda
· Introductions (5 minutes)
· Overview of OData (10 minutes)
· The OData Protocol (45 hour)
· 15 minute break
· Producing OData Feeds (1 hour)
· 15 minute break
· Consuming OData Feeds (1 hour)

Bio: Chris Woodruff (or Woody as he is commonly known as) has a degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University’s College of Engineering. Woody has been developing and architecting software solutions for almost 15 years and has worked in many different platforms and tools. He is a community leader, helping such events as Day of .NET Ann Arbor, West Michigan Day of .NET and CodeMash. He was also instrumental in bringing the popular Give Camp event to Western Michigan where technology professionals lend their time and development expertise to assist local non-profits. As a speaker and podcaster, Woody has spoken and discussed a variety of topics, including database design and open source. He is a Microsoft MVP in Data Platform Development. Woody works at RCM Technologies in Grand Rapids, MI as a Principal Consultant.

Woody is the co-host of the popular podcast “Deep Fried Bytes” and blogs at www.chriswoodruff.com. He is the President of the West Michigan .NET User Group and also is a co-founder of the software architecture online portal nPlus1.org.

Woody has worked in many arenas throughout the years, including healthcare, manufacturing, publishing, promotion execution and the automotive industry. He has experience with starting and running new ventures, including past work with technology startups. Woody continues to develop his expertise by learning & developing new technologies to better meet the needs of his clients, while devoting his free time to improving the development community at large, and giving back to the community in which he lives.

Recommended Audiences:
Solution Architects, Software Developers, Developers, Architects

Multi-Touch and the User Experience - Travis Feirtag (Wed June 2nd)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:30:45 GMT

We've come a long way since the DOS command prompts when they were the most popular way to interact with your computer... Once the mouse went mainstream in the 1980s, we started interacting with our computers in a whole new way. I believe that multi-touch is the next big step in our user experience with machines. Microsoft has given us development tools and libraries to build engaging user experiences for our applications. Manufacturers are shipping devices with multi-touch features built-in. For my presentation, I'm going to talk about the touch interfaces on Windows platforms including Windows 7, Windows Phone, Zune HD, and .NET Micro Framework. I'll show you how to write code to access the touch events in your .NET applications.

Bio: Travis is a senior .NET consultant working in the MidWest for over ten years. He lives with his wife and four kids in Lake Mills, WI. He is known online as : http://therobotgeek.net When he's not spending time with his family, he enjoys writing code, tech articles, blogging, robotics and multi-touch projects.

MADdotNET .NET Lunch & ALL.NET

mail@lancelarsen.com — Wed, 19 May 2010 15:45:06 GMT

Most everyone should know ( as these notices were already sent out on the maddotnet google groups lists - if you're not on them sign up now! - maddotnet-announcements AND maddotnet discussions ) - but I want to be extra thorough and make sure everyone is on the same page... so...

1) The .NET Lunch -AND- ALL.NET the meetings are TODAY!

2) IMPORTANT IMPORTANT IMPORTANT -- .NET Lunch is in a different location for today, it's at @ 11:45 at VINTAGE BREWERY on Whitney Way (formerly JT Whitneys).

3) We have ONE guest speakers at the .NET Lunch, and TWO guest speakers tonight!

For the .NET Lunch Wally Markovic from IO Technologies will be out to discuss Development Skills in Demand, Certifications, Resumes for IT Consultants, and more! Wally will also be at our ALL.NET meeting tonight! So thanks to him for the time and resources he's presenting to the group!

ALSO -- very very cool -- at our ALL.NET meeting -- were were able to bring in Albert Pascual (http://alpascual.com), a Microsoft MVP, talk about about Silverlight 4 goodness and improving developers performance. Read even more details on the topic below -- I'm very eager to learn what he has to offer!!!

_______________________________________________________

.NET Lunch Guest Summary ( by Eric Selje )

Our guest speaker is Wally Markovic, who is a recruiter at IO Technologies in the Chicago suburbs. Don't worry...he's not here to recruit anyone (necessarily). He's going to speak about the software development industry from his perspective however, and I think it will be very interesting.

- Development Skills in Demand: .Net is such a broad range of skills - which areas are seeing the most demand? Silverlight? Sharepoint? WPF? Or is the demand trending toward more vendor-independent solutions?
- Certifications (PMP, CISSP, MCTS, etc.): Important? Useful? Rubbish?
- Resumes for IT Consultants: Helpful hints to ensure your skills are properly reflected on your resumé. What should you NEVER put on there?
- Preparing for Interviews: The do's and do not's of interviewing.
- Security Clearance: What does it mean? What does it get you? Will that bong hit from 2004 preclude you from the high paying job that requires security clearance?

_______________________________________________________

ALL.NET Guest Summary ( by Travis Feirtag )

...Please join us at the ALL.NET meeting on Wednesday, May 19th to hear Albert Pascual (http://alpascual.com), a Microsoft MVP, talk about Silverlight 4 goodness and improving developers performance.

How refactoring your ASP.NET to Silverlight will save you money. A company can avoid having to purchase hardware by putting the money into refactoring their ASP.NET applications to Silverlight 4 and save money in the process.

•         Recompile the ASP.NET Applications to .NET 4 to be used in Silverlight 4
•         Re-designed the Web Forms UI to XAML to improve user experience.
•         Move the business logic to Silverlight to use the client’s CPU instead of the server. The Silverlight tier is doing all the heavy lifting.
•         Cache the data in the IIS layer to avoid round trips to the database, yet process it in Silverlight to avoid using the server CPU. Cache the XAP files as well.
•         Use isolated storage for the data to avoid calls to the server.
•         Demo: Write the same hell world application, once in ASP.NET and once in Silverlight and run those both on a load test to see how they perform.

Synopsis: How to save money by moving from ASP.NET to Silverlight 4 In the presentation I would show the attendees how by refactoring not rewriting their ASP.NET application, they can save money in hardware and bandwidth. Refactoring ASP.NET application to Silverlight will go step by step of what it takes to recompile a ASP.NET library to .NET 4 to reuse it in Silverlight 4, how to rewrite the UI in XAML instead of WebForms an move all the business logic to Silverlight. By moving all the business logic to Silverlight the client’s CPU is the one doing all the heavy lifting instead of the server. Using WCF RIA Services you can call into the server to consume data, however the processing of that data can be done in Silverlight and LINQ instead of the server. The presentation will also go over the server caching data as well as Silverlight XAP files to avoid as much as possible for the IIS server to have to do some ork, the ASP.NET application becomes just a via for Silverlight to consume SQL data with a few WCF RIA services. I would show the attendees how to architect a solution to minimize the deployment of hardware to scale and with only one IIS server you can support 10 times the amount of users that previously using ASP.NET. I would not show just the typical benefit of better and more responsive UI, I would also show the monetary benefit of moving to that platform. As we go over the architecture of deploying a solution at that level, will also show how easy is for the development team to maintain, deploy changes and updates. Using Isolated Storage as a way to avoid round trips to the server. In the presentation will stand two solutions, one in ASP.NET and another in Silverlight in front of the audience and run a load test to compare the results.

Re-MIX - Clark Sell (Monday, May 10th)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:16:47 GMT

Did you miss the Microsoft MIX 2010 conference? Well let's have a fun chat about MIX. With so much stuff covered in those 72 hours, it's just impossible to try and cover it all in less than 2 hours. If you're looking for slides then this isn't the session for you. We are going to take a technology tour for a few of the technologies that were making all the buzz on the floors of the MIX conference.

Clark Sell
Name a role in the software industry, and Clark has probably played it. He started as a Y2K tester and has since worked as a developer, lead, "build monkey," solutions architect and product manager. His professional sweet spot however, lies in designing and building software solutions that make life easier – there's no chance for boredom and constant opportunities for growth. Clark is MCSD certified and received top Microsoft honors with the Circle of Excellence Award. He's a graduate of Western Illinois University and before joining Microsoft in 2005, he served as a solutions architect at Allstate Insurance Company. As a senior developer evangelist and Visual Studio team system ranger, Clark brings a good dose of humor and a zest for life to the podium. You can hear Clark's technical musings on "The Smackdown" at DeveloperSmackdown.com and The Thirsty Developer podcast – or find him getting grease under his nails in the garage. Clark's a muscle car fanatic who's currently finishing a body-off restoration of his 1970 Chevrolet Camaro. His website is csell.net.

More...

MADdotNET Hands-on-Lab Series: Windows Phone 7 - Building the Future of Mobile (Monday, May 10th)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:26:15 GMT

Reserve your Limited Spot - Register Here!

Windows Phone 7 development took center stage at Microsoft MIX 2010 and for good reason, it's a major initiative at Microsoft incorporating some of the most exciting technologies!

Windows Phone 7 and the Windows Marketplace will rival or surpass the the revenue potential that the iPhone brought to the market.

So what is the MADdotNET Hands-on-Lab Series? Attending a presentation is great - but you never learn as much as you do when you actually sit down and start coding. So, it's not required - but we highly encourage everyone to bring their laptop, their enthusiasm and to sit down with us to start hands-on-coding.

Specifically we will take a look at building your first Silverlight and XNA application on the Windows Phone 7 Emulator and hopefully beyond. We will also touch on the Windows Marketplace and the huge potential to Monetize your development efforts and getting your applications out to the public.

This event is taking place at Herzing College – same place as our normal meetings – in room #120.

See you there!

Schedule:

10am-12pm: Prep -- Clark, Dave, Travis, Chris and I ( and potentially a few others that I can call on to help tutor others ) will sit down and go through the labs. Please let me know if you would be interested / available to be one of my lab leaders.

1pm - 2pm: Event Starts -- Overview of Windows Phone 7 Series, WP7 Emulator, Marketplace, etc
2pm - 3:45pm: Hands-on-Lab: Windows Phone 7 Silverlight
4pm - 5:45pm: Hands-on-Lab: Windows Phone 7 XNA

6pm - 8:30pm: MADdotNET Presentation Meeting – different topic, but certainly invite everyone to stick around!

Reserve your Limited Spot - Register Here!

Succeeding With Agile & TFS 2010 (March 3rd)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:30:08 GMT

Update – we’ve moving our “Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008” to June 2nd as we were very fortunate to be able to get Chad Albrecht to come and present on the very exciting topic of TFS 2010 & Agile Development! Thanks go to Travis for being willing to get bumped out to the much warmer month of June!

So very much looking forward to…

Succeeding With Agile & TFS 2010: Making the transition to Agile can be challenging for even the most seasoned organization. Having good leadership and the right tools can make all the difference. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience Chad will be walking us through methods that can be used to avoid common pitfalls and using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 as an Agile platform. In this highly interactive session, Chad will demonstrate some of the new features of TFS 2010 as they relate to Agile estimation, planning, execution and measurement. If your organization is considering a migration to Agile or the TFS 2010 platform, you are encouraged to attend.

About Chad Albrecht: Currently the ALM Practice Director at Centare Group, Chad has built numerous successful companies and software development teams over his 17 year career. With extensive experience as both an executive and consultant, Chad is a strong believer in Agile SDLC techniques and the Kaizen corporate culture.

Blog: http://blog.chadalbrecht.com

PDC User Group Tour (Feb 3rd), .NET Lunch (Feb 10th), ALL.NET (Feb 17th)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:44:05 GMT

As you can see in 2010 MADdotNET has a LOT going on!

We have three events every month: the first Wed of the month being our in-depth presentation meeting where we have awesome presenters from Microsoft and other .NET professionals come and deliver full length presentations on .NET technologies, the second Wed of the month we just started getting together for .NET Lunches where we have great food and great conversations on all things .NET, and last but certainly not least the third Wed of the month we have our ALL.NET meetings focusing on Micro-Presentations where we encourage everyone to come out and bring their questions on projects they’re working on, want to work on, have seen and want to show off, etc. Come out - share and code with us!

Check out our “All Upcoming Events” calendar for the latest!

1) This month I’m very excited to have the PDC User Group Tour from Microsoft! And we’re giving away one copy of Windows 7 Ultimate! As well as ReSharper and Telerik licenses, and several more things in our raffle!

For all those (including myself) that didn’t make it out to the Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC) we’re very fortunate to have Microsoft provide the PDC User Group Tour – so if you didn’t get out to L.A., come see it in Madison!

Some fantastic new Technologies were unveiled at PDC and the following highlights that will be covered:

Silverlight 4
“3 Screens and a Cloud”
Azure
WCF RIA Services
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
Parallelism

And we’re very much looking forward to having Scott Seely back to present!

Scott Seely bio: Senior Technical Architect for SAVO Group (http://www.savogroup.com). He has written four books, most recently as co-author of Effective REST Services via .NET. When not sitting behind a keyboard, Scott can be found in northern Illinois spending time with his wonderful wife, three kids, two dogs, two frogs, and whatever other animals happen to be in the house

2) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is on Feb 17th!

As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your second wives (or husbands)... errr.. laptops -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

Specifically, I’ve been coding a “File Repository” application using Visual Studio 2010, Entity Framework 4 and SQL 2008 ( using FILESTREAMs ) – and want to share where I am with that and get feedback from everyone. So if you’ve worked with any of these ( or want to ) I’d love everyone’s input.

If you have anything in particular you want to share – bring it!

3) .NET Lunch is @ Alt-n-Backs on the 2nd Wed of each month -- starting at 11:45. ( http://altnbach.com/ -- 2602 Whalen Lane Madison, WI )

Clark Sell from Microsoft's Presentation Tomorrow (Jan 6th) -- PDC Road Show in Feb -- and -- ALL.NET coming up on Jan 20th

mail@lancelarsen.com — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:24:53 GMT

Happy New Year to everyone!

We have quite a few exciting events planned for this coming year of 2010! Among them are...

1) First and foremost, our monthly meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is tomorrow!

We are very much looking forward to having Clark Sell out from Microsoft to speak at the meeting tomorrow -- joining Dave Bost, Clark is our new regional Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Wisconsin area -- Clark will be presenting a .NET technology overview on "MVC, WPF Printing, MEF" and more --- this will be a great broad overview of topics and will allow us to tap into Clarks years as a Microsoft consultant!

Clark's Bio: Clark has been with Microsoft for over 4 years and has now joined the has joined the Microsoft Evangelism team with a primary focus on Wisconsin! He's been with Microsoft since 2005 and comes from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) as a member of the VSTS Rangers (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/ee358786.aspx). Clark can be reached at csell@microsoft.com and you can view his blog at http://csell.net

Meeting Address: Herzing College -- Room #120 -- 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison WI 53718 ( Bing Maps Link )

Meeting Agenda

5:00pm: Networking with sponsors and members
5:30pm: Free pizza and soda
6:00pm: Introduction and start main presentation
8:00pm: Give away prizes and Wrap up meeting

2) Next month we're trying to firm up the dates for the PDC Road Show here in Madison --- tentatively we're looking at Feb 3rd ( Wednesday ).
There's a lot of anticipation for this -- so once finalized, will keep everyone informed.

3) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is coming up on Jan 20th!
As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your laptops -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

We had a fantastic presentation last month from the developer of PDO ( http://pdo.codeplex.com/ ) -- which was... "Persistable Data Objects for WPF is an ORM tool and application framework for developing data driven applications in Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). The code generation tool builds C# classes and SQL stored procedures that are fully LINQ queryable."

Presentations like these are invaluable learning lessons that show off the top quality developers that live and work in the Madison area! Awesome.

ALL.NET Meeting Tomorrow -- and -- Dev Lunch Tomorrow (12/16)

mail@lancelarsen.com — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:03:27 GMT

So even though the year is rapidly coming to a close - with tons of new technology from Microsoft coming out -- I'm very excited about all the opportunities to continue learning and applying the new technologies for 2010! We've got lots of awesome presentations on horizon -- and even a robotics competition in the works for 2010! So keep an eye on the schedule on the site ( www.MADdotNET.com ), and as exciting events materialize we will plug them in!

Tomorrow we have two events ---

1) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is tomorrow!

As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your second wives... errr.. laptops -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

Specifically, the topic of ORM's came up on our MADdotNET list ( which if you're not on -- go "Here to Sign up for the MADdotNET .NET Discussion Group" ) -- and I was asked to talk about Entity Framework -- so I will be briefly doing a show and tell on it.

Those that have other experience with other ORMs -- please bring code examples / your experiences.

If anyone else has worked with Entity Framework -- I know that I would love to hear your experience and see your approaches! Also, I'm just starting to look at Entity Framework 4 ( being released with VS2010 ) -- and looks like they've filled in many of the gaps -- so really excited to get to start digging into that more.

I also have an example of some cool SQL pivot code that I had to write for the project I'm on -- so time permitting I'll show that off
Meeting Agenda

2) But even before that -- Eric and Adam have setup a Dev Lunch @ Alt-n-Backs on the Wed the 16th starting at 11:45. ( http://altnbach.com/ -- 2602 Whalen Lane Madison, WI ) Even has a few books to give away as door prizes!

3) Lastly, very excited to let everyone know that either in Jan/Feb our Microsoft reps have put a lot of work into bringing the PDC Roadshow to Madison! As I get specifics -- you all will know!