It took a little while, but we're ready to rumble. The Main Developer Network is organizing the Visual Studio 2008 Community Launch Event. A whole afternoon of sessions all about the recently released Visual Studio 2008. We've got the following sessions lined up:

The Business Analyst Perspective
by Shawn Robichaud
The focus for this session is on requirements gathering and techniques to help capture and manage requirements throughout the lifecycle. The session explains some of the challenges associated with deciding precisely what to build and it presents techniques for capturing and evolving requirements to ensure that requirements stay current throughout the software development lifecycle. [40 min.]
 
Value-up software development
by Shawn Robichaud
This session introduces the notion of value-up software development. It compares and contrasts core value-up principles and practices with conventional work-down approaches. The latter have proved over the years, largely ineffectual for team-based software development and are part of the reason why only 30% of software projects succeed. [40 min.]

Enabling Offline with SQL Server Compact and Sync Services for ADO.NET
by Scott Woodruff
Synchronization Services allows you to maintain a local, synchronizable copy of your data regardless of connection reliability or availability. This session will introduce synchronization services and how you can build applications that use the services. [75 min.]

LINQ and LINQ to SQL
by Mark Blomsma
The number one topic requested at our previous meeting: LINQ and LINQ to SQL. This session will take a close look at one the biggest additions to the C# and VB.NET language: LINQ and LINQ to SQL. How does Language INtegrated Query work, what are lambda expressions and expression trees and how do they get translated into SQL statement? [75 min.]

The session will be held at:
State of Maine Offices
Harlow Building
First floor conference room
18 Elkins Ave
Augusta 

We'll start at 12:30 and plan to finish by 17:00. Please use the Register form on the website to RSVP: http://www.maine-devnet.org/Home/SignUpForEvent.aspx.

The event data on the left of the homepage has been replaced with a live RSS aggregation of Maine developer blogs. The RSS subscription for the Maine Developer Network will also include all recent posts of listed people. If you blog and wish to be included in this feed, please email me at mark.blomsma@maine-devnet.org.

Our lunch meeting with Chris Bowen as a speaker was well attended and the feedback on the evaluation forms indicates, very well received.

Chris did a session: Introduction to LINQ & Language Improvements in C# 3.0/VB 9

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a unified approach for querying data using coding syntax that remains consistent regardless of the data source. It WILL change the way you work as a developer and architect and this session will help you on your way to using it effectively. To understand how LINQ works, we'll first navigate the new features of C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 that enable LINQ functionality. Then, we'll dive into .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 to explore the various realms of LINQ: Datasets, XML, Database/SQL, in-memory objects, and more. By the end of this session, you'll have a solid understanding of how LINQ works and what it can do for your applications.

Download the slides here:

If you want to sign up for our newsletter, then please create an account and sign up! Use the 'login' link in the top right hand corner, or just go to 'newsletters' or 'account'.