Topic: Introduction to jQuery

jQuery is a newer JavaScript library/framework, backed by Microsoft with the inclusion in Visual Studio, as well as fueled by passionate, energetic jQuery Plugin developers.  Jessy Houle is excited to present an introduction to jQuery, covering Selectors, the Plugin architecture, and AJAX through jQuery (with MVC).

Speaker:

Jessy Houle is a Minnesota-based independent technical consultant and Web developer with 10+ years' experience leading Web-based and data-centric applications that have contributed to the success of client companies including GMAC, Allianz, General Mills, Best Buy, and Digital Marketing.

 
Jessy's passion for programming was sparked by the video games he played as a kid. He started his career with C and C++ applications, moving to VB and ASP, then on to VB.Net, C#, and ASP.NET, and most recently to ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, and Silverlight. He is also a fan of open source .NET frameworks like NHibernate, S#arp Architecture and StructureMap.

Jessy continues to build on his skills and can frequently be found at local meetings like TechMasters, the Twin Cities Developers Guild, Silverlight User Group, and .NET User Group.

 Download: Demos and Presentation

Title: A Special ugPDC Event!

This session will provide an overview of some of the major products and announcements that came of the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2009 held last November.  Topics to  be covered in this meeting include:

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

Come check it out and get up to speed on the latest news for Microsoft developers.

Speaker: Jeff Brand

Jeff has been with Microsoft for over 12 years, starting with the company soon after the release of Windows 95. While at Microsoft, he has been a consultant, an ecommerce specialist, and an enterprise technology advisor. Prior to Microsoft, Jeff was in the Air Force stationed at Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE where he was Chief Network Engineer (his pre-developer days) for the USSTRATCOM LAN. Today, Jeff is a .NET Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's North Central District. He lives in Minneapolis and often travel to the surrounding states of Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas. In his current role, he is responsible for working with developers and customers that are evaluating or using .NET and assisting in them in understanding and using Microsoft's developer platform.

Title: What's New In ASP.NET MVC2

In this session the audience will be exposed to what has changed in the ASP.NET MVC framework in version 2. During the presentation, an existing ASP.NET MVC application will be upgraded to MVC2 and features will be demonstrated. This demonstration will include the use of the new Data Annotations, Asynchronous controller actions, strongly typed input helpers, validation and more!. The session will end with an audience Q & A. An understanding of ASP.NET MVC is expected for this session.

Speaker: Donn Felker 

Donn Felker is an independent consultant with over 9 years of professional experience in various markets that include – entertainment, health, retail, insurance, financial, and real estate. He is a Microsoft ASP Insider, an MCTS in Web Client Development for .NET 2.0 and 3.5 and is also a certified ScrumMaster. He is the founder and coordinator of the Twin Cities Give Camp, leader of the Twin Cities Developers Guild and the founder of Twin Cities Pragmatic Beer. He is also a writer, presenter and consultant on various topics ranging from architecture, development in general, agile practices and patterns & practices. Follow Donn on twitter: @donnfelker or read his blog here: http://blog.donnfelker.com

Topic: High Speed, Low Drag: Driving Application Quality with Minimal Friction

Software teams are continually under pressure to do more in less time, to build higher quality and ever more complex applications on ever increasing ship cadences.  In this session we will use Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle tools to demonstrate how to deliver bugs that get fixed first time, every time; how to prevent regression with Coded UI Tests and Automation for Navigation; how to streamline build and application deployment using Lab Management and virtual environments; and how to identify the source and impact of changes even when developers “forget” to mention them.  Finally, we will spend some time talking about Microsoft’s own efforts to ensure the quality of our release and what we have learned through these efforts.

Speaker: Mark Mydland

Mark Mydland is the Principal Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft.  In the past 13 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries.  Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD).  During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance.  Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal.  In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month.  Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006.  Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991.  He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture.

 Download slides from presentation here.

Topic: Windows Workflow 4 – from Hello World to Real World in one hour

In this session, you will get a fast introduction to the programming model in WF4, and quickly move through several features, with a focus on using the technology in your applications. Invoke workflows from web forms and MVC applications; build workflow services, and create truly reusable components. See how WF fits in with the rest of the .NET framework with which you are already familiar.

Speaker: Matt Milner

Matt is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on connected systems technologies (WCF, Windows WF, BizTalk, "Dublin" and the Azure Services Platform). Matt is also an independent consultant specializing in Microsoft .NET application design and development. As a writer Matt has contributed to several journals and magazines including MSDN Magazine where he currently authors the workflow content for the Foundations column. Matt regularly shares his love of technology by speaking at local, regional and international conferences such as Tech Ed. Microsoft has recognized Matt as an MVP for his community contributions around connected systems technology. Matt blogs at http://www.pluralsight-training.net/matt

Topic: Modern Mashups – AJAX, HTML, Silverlight, Bing, WCF

This talk will explore what is now possible within the .Net web technology space to deliver compelling applications will exploiting existing web resources.  This presentation will focus on ways to include Silverlight in various ways into existing web applications, utilizing the HTML bridging to work with both the browser DOM and javascript.  Using the Bing API will also be demonstrated as well.

Speaker: Doug Nelson

 .Net Developer at Large – The number of years I have been coding is getting to be a really long time.  I enjoy using Microsoft technologies to solve tough problems.  I think Silverlight is an amazing platform and enjoy making people aware of what can be done with.

 

 

 

Demo code from presentation

No meeting for July, 2010

Topic: Beginning Functional Programming with F#

Tackling one of the latest .NET languages requires more than a keyboard. It requires a little background on functional programming, which isn't just another declarative language like C# or VB.NET. This presentation hopes to do just that, as well as, introduce F# to experienced .NET developers.

Speaker: Tom Fischer

Tom works as a software developer in the Twin Cities. His experience covers a broad range of Microsoft tools and technologies. And every so often he writes or presents some of the lessons learned along the way delivering solutions.

Title: Everything You Wanted to Know About Velocity But Were Afraid To Cache

Microsoft's AppFabric Caching (aka Velocity) offers a distributed caching solution, not unlike the popular "memcached" open source library. It allows you to increase scalability and performance by caching data physically (and logically) closer to the consumer. It can help you dramatially increase responsiveness of your apps and services, as well as relieve pressure on back-end resources. Come and here about the concepts and terminology, as well as deployment considerations, typical usage patterns, pitfalls, and more.

Speaker: Scott Colestock

Scott Colestock lives and works in the Twin Cities. He has been consulting for the past fifteen years, spending time in a variety of areas with performance and process as common threads. He is most recently a partner at Marcato (marcatopartners.com), which focuses on delivering agile coaching services. He is also a BizTalk MVP, performance engineering guy, and "Team Foundation Server + Scrum" resource.

Topic: MVVM in the Real World

The Model-View-View Model pattern has become the de facto architectural pattern for programs written with WPF or Silverlight. MVVM is a specialization of Martin Fowler's more general Presentation Model pattern developed to take advantage of the powerful data binding features offered by WPF and Silverlight. We'll go over the guiding principles of MVVM and explore the responsibilities of each layer to develop an understanding of the “How?” and “Why?” of MVVM to go along with the “What?” you may have seen before.

Speaker: Bryan Anderson

Bryan is an up-and-coming .Net developer currently focused on building amazing, performant WPF and Silverlight applications. He's passionate about teaching other developers all of the things he's learned about building applications in the real world and learning their lessons in turn. Bryan is currently a full time employee at ILM Professional Services.

 

 

 

Presentation slides and blog at: http://bryanmitchellanderson.com/2010/10/mvvm-in-the-real-world/  or download it here.

On the heels of PDC 2010 and some suprising news, we've changed the topic of the November meeting. Adam Groholski will host an open discussion around HTML5 and the death (alleged) of Silverlight and WPF and what it means for .NET developers. This and other PDC recap goodiness will be fair game. Come with questions, and share your own thoughts on the recent PDC announcements

Speaker: Adam Grocholski

Adam Grocholski has a great job at RBA Consulting in Minneapolis, MN where he has been working since 2006. Lately he has been diving into the latest UI technologies such as Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight as well as some more obscure areas of the .NET Framework (i.e. T4 and MEF). Adam also has a strong commitment to the local developer community. From founding the Twin Cities Cloud Computing user group, to speaking at the .NET and Silverlight user groups and code camps. Recently, Adam was named as a Microsoft 2010 MVP for his work in Client Application Development. When not working he enjoys spending time with his awesome daughters and amazing wife. You can catch up with his latest projects and thoughts on technology at http://thinkfirstcodelater.com, or if that's too verbose for your liking you can always follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/agrocholski.

Topic: Introduction to Silverlight Development on Windows Phone 7

Jeff has been with Microsoft for over 12 years, starting with the company soon after the release of Windows 95. While at Microsoft, he has been a consultant, an ecommerce specialist, and an enterprise technology advisor. Prior to Microsoft, Jeff was in the Air Force stationed at Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE where he was Chief Network Engineer (his pre-developer days) for the USSTRATCOM LAN. Today, Jeff is a .NET Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's North Central District. He lives in Minneapolis and often travel to the surrounding states of Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas. In his current role, he is responsible for working with developers and customers that are evaluating or using .NET and assisting in them in understanding and using Microsoft's developer platform.
 

Speaker: Jeff Brand

Take a look at how you can get started developing applications for Windows Phone 7 Series using the free downloadable tools that are now available. Starting off with an overview of the Windows Phone platform, we'll then cover the new application model, developing apps, leveraging services unique to the phone, and more. This session is very "demo heavy" with most of our time spent building an application that shows off the various phone features