Victoria .NET Dev Association Monthly Meetings

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"

December Pub Night

nolanzak — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:17:00 GMT

Join us Monday December 10th for a Pub Night at Swans. The night will be an informal networking opportunity with no pre-set schedule or presentation. Just come and hang out, have some good food, good beer, and chat with other local devs.

Date: Monday, December 10th 2007
Time: 7-9:30pm
Cost: $5 per person to cover the cost of the room, includes food and a drink or two (see below)
Place: Swans Hotel, Collard Room (the small private room between the pub and the restaurant)

Food and Drink: A bunch of appy’s and drinks (beer and pop) will be included, plus cash bar at Swans

Due to room capacity, we can only take a maximum of 50 people for this meeting, so please register early.

Bring your questions for the Developers Association or any .NET development-related questions, there will be a good number of .NET experts in the room!

How to register: Please send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the Subject “December Pub Night”.

November Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:07:00 GMT

UPDATE: Don's slides and content are here: www.vicdotnet.org//Content/DonKiely-ASP.NETDebugging.zip

Don Kiely - Advanced .NET Debugging

Don Kiely, MVP, MCSD, MSDE, is a senior technology consultant specializing in developing desktop and Web applications that integrate databases, Microsoft Office, and related technologies, using tools including SQL Server, ASP.NET and XML. Don trains developers and speaks regularly at industry conferences, including TechEd, VSLive!, DevConnections, and others. He earned a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of Colorado, but fortunately learned the error of his establishment ways. In his spare time he roams the Alaska wilderness by foot, dog sled, skis, and kayak, with his dogs Mardy and Izzi.

Title: "Power ASP.NET Debugging"

Description: The debugging features in Visual Studio are a marvel of the modern software world, with rich support for data visualization, customizing objects to improve debugging, and many other features. Far too often, however, developers fall back on the familiar Step Into and Watch window to solve problems, tediously stepping through line by line by line by…. And even if you use other debugging features, often the problem is that these features produce far too much information, making the debugging experience more of a data mining excursion than a logical approach to problem solving. During this session we'll explore many of the new and improved debugging features in Visual Studio 2005, including standard and custom features, how to customize an object to help with debugging, some of the more obscure debugging windows and framework debugging classes, and how to make ASP.NET debugging far more productive.

NOTE: Some of the tools and concepts in this talk are available in WinForms applications, but the focus is primarily on ASP.NET technologies.

Intended Audience Skill Level: Intermediate / Advanced

Topics:

What’s new, cool, and underused in Visual Studio 2005?
Customizing debugging for specific objects
Write your own debugging visualizers
Setup and debug client-side and resource file scripts
Advanced tracing with TraceSource
Using assertions in ASP.NET

Date/Time: Tuesday November 13th, 2007 from 6:30-9:30pm

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

Note: We have moved to a new room! We've been having problems getting the key for our evening meetings, so to keep things simple we are moving to the main floor of the same building.

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "Nov 13th Event"

October 2007 Monthly Meeting

steveclout — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 01:54:00 GMT

This is a reminder that in two weeks the Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Rod Paddock!

Important Note: The meeting date in the last newsletter is wrong! The correct date is Wednesday October 10th.

Rod Paddock is president and founder of Dash Point Software, Inc. DPSI is an award winning software company based in Seattle, WA. Dash Point Software specializes in application architecture, development and software training. Clients include Six Flags, First Premier Bank, Microsoft, The US Coast Guard and US Navy. Rod is also editor in chief for Code Magazine (http://www.code-magazine.com/) and has written numerous articles and books on software development.

Rod can be contacted via his web site http://www.dashpoint.com/ or his blog http://blog.dashpoint.com/

Title: Ajaxing your Application

Description: Last Year Microsoft released a set of ASP.NET Ajax extensions. These extensions enable you to add Web 2.0 Style features to your ASP.NET Applications with little or no effort. In this session you will learn how to create new ASP.NET Ajax applications, how to incorporate Ajax into existing ASP.NET applications, what happens when you incorporate Ajax features into your web forms and overall how you can make your web forms smoother and more interactive. You will also learn how to incorporate the controls provided by the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit.

Date/Time: Wednesday October 10th, 2007 from 6:30-9:30pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to mailto:event@vicdotnet.org?subject=Oct10thEvent with the subject heading of "Oct 10th Event"

See you there!

May 2007 Monthly Meeting

bmckin — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:24:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes back speaker John Bristowe from Microsoft.

About John: John Bristowe is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada based in Calgary, Alberta. John is an experienced speaker and frequently presents Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) events across Canada. Prior to joining Microsoft, John was a member of the Microsoft Regional Director (RD) and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) programs.

Title: "The Exciting Adventures of the Microsoft Application Platform Developer"

Description: At the meeting John will demonstrate how the .Net Platform provides a foundation for building data-driven applications and Web sites. Specifically, this session will examine some of the tools and technologies available for developers including Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals and examine some of the exciting new features of ADO.NET.

Date/Time: Tuesday May 1st, 2007. Doors open @ 6:30pm Talk from 7:00pm - 9:30pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event at: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032330937&Culture=en-CA

See you there!

April 2007 Meeting - New Presentation Topics

bmckin — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:57:00 GMT

Don Kiely had to cancel but we're going to have the meeting with two topics from local speakers:

1) Jason Kemp on Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development and unit testing are becoming an increasingly popular discipline in the software industry. There are all sorts of advantages to unit testing that will save you time in the long run, so you can do a job in 16 hours but bill for 40. Who can argue with that? We'll cover what unit testing is, how to do it for a simple class, the .NET unit testing tools (NUnit, TestDriven.NET, NCover, ReSharper) and some tips and tricks for testing maintaining your test suite.

2) Brian McKinnell on Application Virtualization

You’ve probably heard of, or are using, virtual machines for some of your development. Application virtualization is the same idea, except it’s only the application, not the entire O/S. In this talk you’ll hear about Microsoft SoftGrid, an application virtualization technology that is all about:

- how to get your rich client .NET applications (or any other app), deployed quickly

- not having to worry about application compatibility problems like conflicting DLLs

- running multiple versions of the same application on the same PC.

We hope to see you there!

If you previously registered for Tuesday’s event and are still interested in attending, could you please re-register for the event.

Intended Audience Skill Level: Intermediate

Date/Time: Tuesday April 3, 2007 from 6:30-9:30pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "Apr 3rd Event"

See you there!

April 2007 Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:15:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Don Kiely from Alaska!

Title: "Power ASP.NET Debugging"

Description: The debugging features in Visual Studio are a marvel of the modern software world, with rich support for data visualization, customizing objects to improve debugging, and many other features. Far too often, however, developers fall back on the familiar Step Into and Watch window to solve problems, tediously stepping through line by line by line by…. And even if you use other debugging features, often the problem is that these features produce far too much information, making the debugging experience more or a data mining excursion than a logical approach to problem solving. During this session we'll explore many of the new and improved debugging features in Visual Studio 2005, including standard and custom features, how to customize an object to help with debugging, some of the more obscure debugging windows and framework debugging classes, and how to make ASP.NET debugging far more productive.

NOTE: Some of the tools and concepts in this talk are available in WinForms applications, but the focus is primarily on ASP.NET technologies.

Intended Audience Skill Level: Intermediate / Advanced

Topics:

What’s new, cool, and underused in Visual Studio 2005?
Customizing debugging for specific objects
Write your own debugging visualizers
Setup and debug client-side and resource file scripts
Advanced tracing with TraceSource
Using assertions in ASP.NET

March 2007 Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:14:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Phil Weber from Portland Oregon!

With nearly 20 years of software development experience, Phil Weber's client list includes Intel, Kaiser Permanente and Wells Fargo Bank. He has worked with VB since 1993 and .NET since 2001. In addition to serving on the INETA Speaker Bureau, Phil is a Contributing Editor to Visual Studio Magazine and has spoken at numerous conferences in the U.S. and abroad. He currently works as a technical instructor for Corillian Corporation, an e-finance enabler.

NOTE: Everyone who attends will get a free copy of Code Magazine (Jan/Feb 2007) and a DevExpress DVD with a trial license for every one of their products.

Title: "Great User Interfaces with .NET"

Description: Even the most beautifully coded application will flop if people hate to use it. And they will, if its user interface is not designed with their goals in mind. What makes a great UI? How can you apply the principles that work so well for the guts of an application to its front end? We'll examine specific techniques (with code!) that you can use immediately to reduce complexity for your users and improve your Winforms or ASP.NET presentation layer's efficiency and maintainability.

Intended Audience Skill Level: All levels

Topics:

What Makes a UI Great?
Know Your User: Using Personas to Create a Great UI
Message Box Alternatives
Tips for Managing Complexity
Remembering the User’s Preferences
Don’t Be a Data Nazi
Creating a Great Web UI
Recommended Reading

Date/Time: Tuesday March 6, 2007 from 6:30-9:30pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "Mar 6th Event"

December 2006 Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 18:31:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Microsoft MVP Rob Windsor!

Rob Windsor lives in Toronto, Canada and is a senior consultant with ObjectSharp Consulting and an instructor with Learning Tree International.

UPDATE: We will be raffling off one 1-year MSDN Universal Subscription at the end of the meeting! Come to the meeting with non-perishable food items or cash, and we will give you 1 draw ticket for every item or $1 you donate! All of the food and money will go to the local food bank in time for Christmas.

The MSDN Subscription contains development and test versions of almost all Microsoft software, plus extra help and support options. It’s worth approximately $1400US. More details here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718661.aspx

Come on out, enjoy some free food, a great presentation, help out the community, and potentially win a great prize!

Title: "Asynchronous Programming with .NET"

Description: It wasn't very long ago that only hard-core system developers worried about multithreading. Today, with multiprocessor machines becoming commonplace, nonconcurrent applications are at a disadvantage, unable to benefit from the computing power available to them. The .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 offered useful and powerful tools to help you build multithreaded functionality into your programs, but it's even better with the .NET Framework 2.0. From new synchronization primitives to the BackgroundWorker component to ThreadPool enhancements, this session will take you on a tour of what's new with threading in the .NET Framework 2.0 and show you how to change your current applications to help them make better use of multiple processors.

Date/Time: Tuesday December 5, 2006 from 6:30-10pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "Dec 5th Event"

Slides are now posted: http://vicdotnet.org/files/folders/slides/entry33.aspx

November 2006 Monthly Meeting

nolanzak — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:47:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes Mike Culver, Developer Evangelist from Amazon.com!

Mike Culver joined Amazon Web Services after almost eight years in evangelism at Microsoft, where he saw .NET move from a provocative idea to the preeminent development platform for serious development. During that time, Mike managed a team of evangelists in Microsoft’s Developer Division (and later in Developer and Platform Evangelism) that were responsible for a number of high-profile implementations of .NET, ranging from innovative Compact Framework applications for devices to complex mission-critical applications such as the City of London’s Traffic Congestion Project. As an Amazon Evangelist, Mike works in the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services. In that capacity he once again helps developers take advantage of cutting-edge technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications.

Title: "Developing Applications Against Amazon.com's S3 Web Services"

Description: What’s possible in a post Web 2.0 world? Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in. The presentation will provide an overview of Amazon's S3 Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how .NET developers are able to easily build managed clients for these services.

Amazon spent ten years and over $1 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched eleven services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 160,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services (if you think “shopping”, you’re in for a shock).

This session will focus on two things: (a) an overview of what Amazon has built to allow developers to innovate, and (b) show how you can build a Windows Explorer-style interface for Amazon's S3 storage service, using Visual Studio 2005.

Date/Time: Tuesday November 7, 2006 from 6:30-10pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. You can also send an email to event@vicdotnet.org with the subject heading of "Nov 7th Event"

September 2006 - Windows Live Services

nolanzak — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:44:00 GMT

The Victoria .NET Developers Association welcomes John Bristowe, Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Canada, for a presentation on Windows Live Services.

Title: "Windows Live Services"

Description: Windows Live Services is a platform for creating and delivering rich user applications on the web and mobile devices. Combining technologies like RSS, AJAX/ATLAS, and ASP.NET, developers can create their own web applications or services quickly using information pulled from around the web. Examples include Live Local and Map Point services mashup sites like Zillow (http://www.zillow.com/), shopping sites (http://shopping.live.com/), and Desktop Gadgets (http://MicrosoftGadgets.com/).

Join us at this presentation to learn about these .NET technologies and find out how to write code to put your own applications together. This will be a "code intensive" presentation, NOT marketing slides!

Date/Time: Thursday September 21, 2006 from 6:30-10pm

Location: University of Victoria, New Engineering and Computer Science Building, Room ECS660 see map

Registration: Please register for the event. We are going to try using the Microsoft Event Registration System to do registrations for this event to see how well it works. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the system.

Monthly Meeting Announcements Previous to Fall 2006

nolanzak — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:36:00 GMT

Below are all of the monthly meeting announcements from June 2004 to June 2006 from the old site (for reference purposes)... Please note that presentation slide downloads may not be available, but you can check the file download area to see if they have...(read more)