Victoria .NET Developers Association

May Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:51:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Greg Young on Wednesday May 21.

Greg is co-founder and CTO of IMIS, a stock market analytics firm in Vancouver BC. With over 10 years of varied experience in computer science from embedded operating systems to business systems and everything in between, he brings a pragmatic and often times unusual viewpoint to discussions.

In his spare time you can often find Greg on experts-exchange.com where he runs the .NET section of the site, writing articles for InfoQ.com, speaking at local .NET groups throughout the south eastern US and now the pacific northwest, or floating upside down through rapids in his kayak.

Title: Re-thinking the Relational Database Management System

Description:

This talk will focus on the past, present, and future of Relational Database Systems and data storage/retrieval.

Databases were created in a time that had very different parameters to what we have today, so should we continue to use them like we always have? A lot of technical resources have changed since the first databases. Things like:

The length and distribution of a running transaction
Ratio of resources like disk/memory/cpu to network bandwidth
Personnel changes
Total cost of ownership

Its time we re-think the RDBMS as the centerpiece of our applications. Tools like OR mappers, while helping domains become the behavioral centers of our applications, still force us to deal with an impedance mismatch that gives little benefit. This session looks at our current architectures and identifies new approaches for us to deal with these issues in a more scalable, reliable, and behaviorally centric manner.

What happens when we remove the OLTP RDBMS? We can use architectures including SimpleDB, prevalence layers, or move to an additive only distributed architecture (can be scaled massively to millions of nodes in a consistent fashion). How can we get ourselves out of the everything-is-always-consistent model we have become dependent upon because it is provided by databases? Do we want to?

Topics include:

How the OLTP RDBMS is currently failing us.
Command and Query Separation.
Importance of the life cycles of objects.
Introduction of SLAs to the ubiquitous language.
Introduction of business value.

Intended Audience Skill Level: Intermediate / Advanced

Date/Time: Wednesday May 21, 2008 from 6:30-9:30pm (talk starts at 7)

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS125 see map NOTE: This is the big room across the lobby from the regular room

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "May 21st Event"

April Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 18:08:00 GMT

Mark Miller is a C# MVP with strong expertise in decoupled design, plug-in architectures, and great UI. Mark is Chief Architect of the IDE Tools division at Developer Express, and is the visionary force behind productivity tools like CodeRush and Refactor!, as well as the DXCore extensibility layer for Visual Studio. Mark is a member of INETA, a popular speaker at conferences around the world and has been writing software for over two decades.

Title: "The Science of Great UI" and "High Speed Development in Visual Studio with CodeRush and Refactor Pro"

Description: (Mark has decided on two short sessions, rather than one long session)

The Science of Great UI - Explore the how and why of great UI. If you believe you’re not an artist, that UI is merely subjective, or that a great UI is not worth the effort, then this session is for you. We’ll learn how to measure UI quality, covering user models, entry points, orienteering and discoverability, with tips and code samples for the WPF and .NET developer sprinkled throughout. Regardless of whether you’re building WPF applications or the traditional WinForms or Web ones, you’ll learn how to reduce visual noise, lower barriers to entry, enhance clarity and in general make your applications a pleasure to use. It’s all about making your customers happy, and this session will show you how.

High Speed Development in Visual Studio with CodeRush and Refactor Pro - Get an introduction to powerful developer tools for Visual Studio. We’ll start with CodeRush templates – they’re a lot like code snippets on steroids, and show how easy it is to exploit them for significant productivity gains. Then we’ll look at other features designed to make code creation easier, faster, and more efficient, and finally wrap up the session with a focus on refactoring while you code.

NOTE: Mark is a very "high energy" individual. The content of this talk will be aimed at an intermediate- to advanced-level developer, but regardless of your skill level be prepared to drink from the firehose!

Intended Audience Skill Level: Intermediate / Advanced

Date/Time: Tuesday April 1, 2008 from 6:30-9:30pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS128 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "April 1st Event"

Free Web Hosting for all Code Camp Attendees!

nolanzak — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 02:44:04 GMT

We are happy to announce that all attendees will be able to sign up for 2 years of free ASP.NET hosting, courtesy of Microsoft Partner Verio.

Specs of the hosting are:

- Windows 2003 Server, IIS 6.0
- .NET Framework 2.0
- AJAX-enabled
- ADO.NET-enabled
- SQL Express and MS Access databases supported

Code Camp Registration Open

nolanzak — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:01:22 GMT

Registration is now open for the code camp on January 26th. The registration page is here: http://www.victoriacodecamp.com/Registration.aspx

Code Camp Blog

nolanzak — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:09:14 GMT

If anyone out there is interested in following along with the code camp planning and speaker topics/content, check out the new code camp blog: http://victoriacodecamp.com/blog/

There's already a couple posts by different speakers asking for feedback on what you want to see them present.

Code Camp Poster Available

nolanzak — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 02:20:00 GMT

Download the new poster for the 2008 code camp in pdf form here:
http://www.victoriacodecamp.com/poster2008.pdf

Code Camp 2008 Announced!

nolanzak — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:37:00 GMT

Here is the schedule for the upcoming Code Camp on Saturday, January 26, 2008!

The schedule is not yet final, but all of our speakers are confirmed!

$171 plus food raised for The Mustard Seed Food Bank

nolanzak — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 04:04:00 GMT

The MSDN Premium Subscription raffle draw raised $171 plus about a dozen cans of food for the Mustard Seed food bank! See the official donation receipt here: http://www.vicdotnet.org/Content/Receipt_MustardSeedDonationDec06_2006.jpg...(read more)