Topic: The Windows Azure Platform - Dispelling the Haze

With any technology, the how's are as important as the why's. So in this session we will cover not just the technical aspects of development on the Windows Azure Platform, but also what cloud computing is and how it can compliment and extend your on-premises solutions. You'll leave with a basic understanding of the tools the Windows Azure Platform makes available too you (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, Azure AppFabric) as well as how to identify opportunities to which they can be applied.

Speaker: Brent Stineman

Brent's nearly 20 year career has spanned platforms from the mainframe to mobile devices and industries from manufacturing to entertainment software. He started working with the Windows Azure Platform during its CTP phase and is now focused on helping fellow IT professionals explore the promise of cloud computing. Brent is also one of the inaugural Microsoft MVP's for the Windows Azure Platform.

Topic: What's New in the .NET 4.0 BCL

With the release of the 4.0 version of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2010, there's a lot to take in. In this talk, we'll narrow the focus to the additions to the Base Class Library (BCL), which includes tuples, numerics, I/O, parsing, collections, and other various goodies.

Speaker: Jason Bock

Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic (http://www.magenic.com), a Microsoft MVP (C#), and an INETA (http://www.ineta.org) speaker. He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the Twin Cities Code Camp (http://www.twincitiescodecamp.com) and runs the Twin Cities Languages User Group (http://www.twincitieslanguagesusergroup.com). Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.

 

Topic: Become Comfortable with WCF Systems Design

WCF is rapidly gaining popularity as a tool to create modern web services, but can it help you accomplish more? In actuality, WCF is a framework designed to help you develop robust service oriented applications and systems. Many developers find themselves suddenly tasked with building a system using WCF and can become overwhelmed with the scope of the WCF Framework. Fortunately, WCF is easily embraced when theres an overall understanding of how the capabilities are organized.

In this presentation we'll first cover the capabilities of WCF and how they align to currently well known integration strategies. Next, we'll consider some common challenges you'll encounter when developing enterprise applications and systems with WCF. Lastly, we'll learn a few of the common scenarios you'll find yourself working with in the real world.

Speaker: Joshua Ramirez

Joshua has over 10 years experience as a software engineer and consultant. He's passionate about crafting highly integrated enterprise applications and service oriented systems. Joshua is currently a senior consultant with ILM Professional Services and has worked with firms across the Twin Cities such as General Mills, US Bank, Lender Processing Services, and others.

 

Download slides from Joshua's presentation here

Topic: Build an ASP.NET MVC App using CSLA 4

CSLA .NET is one of the most widely used open source development frameworks for Microsoft .NET. ASP.NET MVC is an increasingly popular technology for building web applications. These two technologies fit together very nicely, and in this session you’ll see how to build a web interface over a rich business domain object model created using CSLA 4.

Speaker: Rockford Lhotka, Magenic

Rockford Lhotka is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic, a company that specializes in planning, designing, building and maintaining your enterprise's most mission critical systems.

Rockford is the creator of CSLA .NET, one of the most widely used development frameworks for Microsoft .NET.

He is the author of numerous books, including Expert 2008 Business Objects. He is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. He regularly presents at major conferences around the world - including Microsoft PDC, Tech Ed, Visual Studio Live! and VS Connections.

Rockford has worked on many projects in various roles, including software architecture, design and development, network administration and project management. Over his career he has designed and helped to create systems for bio-medical manufacturing, agriculture, point of sale, credit card fraud tracking, general retail, construction and healthcare.

An Introduction to jQuery with ASP.NET MVC

jQuery is an extremely popular and fast growing Javascript Library that focuses on cross-browser support and simplifying the act of writing client-side scripting. This small Javascript library packs a big punch for HTML developers looking to add increased client-side functionality to their web sites. jQuery features simple HTML DOM element selection and traversal, event binding, CSS manipulations, animation, and AJAX functionality.

jQuery also boasts an extensibility aspect with a very large implementation base. You can easily find a jQuery library to achieve many different web functions that you may already be looking for.

This presentation will focus on getting you started with jQuery development and how you can use it with HTML, CSS, and Images to create some very neat effects with relatively little effort. In addition, we will discuss the ways that you can leverage jQuery with ASP.NET MVC to increase both your user and developer experience.

Viva-la-Highlighter!

Brad Candell is an application and web architect with IDEXX Laboratories in Eau Claire, WI. Brad has been developing software and web applications within the Microsoft Ecosystem over the past 15 years, now focusing primarily in C#, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WCF, Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, and MEF.

When not immersed in code, Brad enjoys spending time with his wife and three children, camping, restoring antiques, or making sawdust in his woodworking shop. Read more about Brad at www.BradCandell.com and follow Brad on Twitter - @bradcandell

Topic: ugMix

 Jeff is going to review some of the highlights from the MIX 2011 conference. He'll also be demonstrating his elite ninja skillz with a presentation of features in the upcoming Silverlight 5. Prepare to witness TEH AWESOME! Be sure to reserve your seat, but you'll only need the edge!

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.

Topic: Creating Custom SharePoint Service Applications 101

SharePoint 2010 includes a new facility for moving intensive processing from the Web Front End servers to load-balanced application servers, all thru SharePoint Central Administration. A Service Application Farm can even be configured to allow other Farms to offload their processes to a centralized and/or dedicated set of application servers. However, with over a dozen moving parts, Service Applications can be quite overwhelming to create. In this talk, Todd will simplify the process so that everyone can be successful implementing a Custom SharePoint 2010 Service Application.

Speaker: Todd Bleeker

Todd Bleeker, Ph.D. and MVP, is an industry leader in Microsoft-centric software development, specializing in SharePoint products and technologies. Todd is an innovative, resourceful, and competitive technologist with an intense desire to excel. Todd joined Mindsharp in 2004 as co-owner and CTO to help establish the strategic technical plan for Mindsharp's educational and consulting assets. In addition to writing and teaching cutting-edge SharePoint training courses for Mindsharp, Todd also architects innovative assets that help Mindsharp's clients improve their content management capabilities.

Todd has been awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft for his contributions to the SharePoint Server Platform and community. He has authored or co-authored several books on Microsoft's integrated suite of products and he is a regular contributor to Web sites such as Microsoft TechNet. Todd is a frequent speaker at key conferences such as Microsoft TechEd, where he recently presented on Web Services and MCMS.

 

 

 

 

Todd has nearly 15 years of architecting revolutionary solutions for small and large corporations including:

• Built innovative customer service solutions for Procter & Gamble.
• Pioneered new technologies that revolutionized transportation logistics systems for Fingerhut.
• Shaped the disease management tools for United Healthcare.
• Drove the human capital procurement vision for itiliti (now PeopleClick) to an internationalized, commercial-grade, global solution.
• Managed all offshore software development operations in New Delhi, India as the CTO for IPCS.
• Architected the software that Air Canada uses to track roughly $30 million of annual in-flight cash sales in 2003.
• Helped the State of Minnesota webify and manage over 40,000 pages of systems documentation using SharePoint Team Services.
• Implemented a MCMS POC for the Bank of Montreal on behalf of Microsoft Consulting Services.

Todd holds an MBA and Ph.D. in Management Information Systems. In his spare time, Todd loves to soak up whatever technology Microsoft is churning out. He also enjoys spending countless hours in Minnesota with his wife and six "high energy" children.

 

Please Note! The August meeting will be on the 15th of the month... not the usual day.

Topic: ASP.NET MVC

In this introduction to ASP.NET MVC 3 we'll see how to use Microsoft's newest web framework in building an application. Along the way we'll see the new Razor view engine, the NuGet package manager, the Entity Framework 4.1 "code first" framework, and unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery.

Speaker: K. Scott Allen

Scott Allen is the founder and Principal Consultant with OdeToCode LLC, and a member of the Pluralsight technical staff. Scott has over 18 years of commercial software development experience across a wide range of technologies and a platforms. He has worked with Fortune 50 companies as well as start-up ventures, and is a speaker at conferences around the world.

Scott has been working on the upcoming book Professional ASP.NET MVC 3.

Topic: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Razor View Engine for MVC

In January, Microsoft released ASP.Net MVC 3. With it came a brand new view engine called "Razor." Razor was created to address some of the headaches involved in developing with MVC 1 and 2. In this session, we'll go over previous view engines, design goals for Razor and a breakdown of Razor's most important features.

Speaker: Vince Bullinger

Vince is a Senior .Net Devloper with Anytime Fitness and has an MCSD for .NET with C# who's been developing with Microsoft technologies for over five years. In his spare time, he likes to work on the house and yard, work out, play video games and learn everything there is to know about everything.

Topic: Do you have a test for that?

Testing code that works is hard and tedious. All the conditions and workflows you have to remember and create a test case for? Not easy. And I am not going to lie, it is not for the faint of heart. It requires fresh thinking, talking to others (business analyst perhaps) and discovery. But not doing so, has worse consequences. Staying up late on perhaps a weekend evening, figuring out a bug that happened which you did not think it could happen. That is even harder. In this talk, I am going over testing, continuous integration and delivery in .NET (or any framework, if you will, but focus and examples will be .NET, C#). I will talk about different types of testing, including unit, integration and acceptance, test frameworks, TDD vs BDD, getting things done, delivery. If you want to get some refreshers around and gain a few perspectives, come check out this session.

Speaker: Baskin Tapkan

Baskin is a software architect/developer with over 12+ years of experience developing solutions for the business. He is well versed .NET, particularly in MVC and web development, but his interests also include mobile development in Android, iOS and Windows “Metro” interface as well as the cloud initiatives in terms of storage and computing. He enjoys simple frameworks and languages which gets things done with the least amount of friction on any OS yet powerful enough to answer the business’ needs. His current blog is at tapkan.blogspot.com. Baskin also enjoys windy days on a kiteboarding/windsurfing, snowkiting, and biking depending on the season and wind situation. He travels to the Columbia River Gorge to get his wind fix on an annual basis since 2007.

Topic: Cross-Platform Mobile Development with C#

The introduction of the iPhone, iPad, and Android has changed the mobile computing landscape, and the impact these devices are making on corporate IT is no less significant. The mobile revolution is all about the apps, and expectations of both device capabilities and user experience have profoundly changed. Consumer owned devices are entering the workplace at an unprecedented level, and rather than the IT department dictating device choice the average worker is driving adoption. This seismic shift in the power structure of enterprise IT is creating a huge demand for cross-platform development solutions. CEO’s and CIO’s across industries have made significant investments in C# and .NET technologies. Mono enables C# developers to build applications for iOS and Android using the language and framework they already know, and the MonoCross MVC pattern helps them bring those applications to multiple platforms while sharing as much code as possible.

Speaker: Scott Olson

Scott (@vagabondrev) has spent the past 18 years building software and advising clients on the potential of software and mobility. He is a contributing writer for iPhone Life magazine, technical editor of iPad in the Enterprise: Developing and Deploying Business Applications, and his forthcoming book is titled Professional Cross-Platform Mobile Development in C#. He leads the development team at ITR Mobility, and throughout his career has worked with many of the Fortune 500 companies including Best Buy, Target Corporation, Medtronic, and Prudential Financial. He believes that what is happening in the mobile software industry today will change the way people write and use software.

Topic: Career Development

Do you know where you are heading with your career? Are you on the journey to somewhere or just getting by? Does your organization see the value you bring to the table? What are companies looking for? Jacquie will focus on career topics, with an interactive discussion. She will also provide the latest tips and tricks to help you “stay on track” so that your career doesn’t get derailed.

Speaker: Jacquie Garberg

Jacquie joined Benchmark Learning in August 2007 as a Career Development Manager. Jacquie’s passions include career coaching, mentoring and skill development. Additionally, Jacquie has a background in Career Counseling and Human Resources. Jacquie graduated from the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and maintains a GCDF certification. She is currently an active member with MN Career Development Association (MCDA), MN High Tech Association (MHTA) and serves on the iSeek Advisory Committee and IT Workforce Collaborative. Jacquie also advocates for individuals who have Autism as a member of the Autism Society and other related organizations.