Meetings

Time for the first Augusta Developer Event of 2010. Join us for a morning filled with information about Silverlight. Shawn, Chris and Mark will present a variety of topics and we've planned a group discussion, so make sure you come prepared with questions, examples and your experiences.

When
February 24th, 2010 at 9:00am to 1:00pm.

What is Silverlight?
Shawn Robichaud – 30 min
Introduction to Silverlight for decision makers, architects and developers.

Choosing the right technology
Mark Blomsma - 30 min
Silverlight vs. WFP vs. Windows Forms vs. ASP.NET. A session for decision makers, architects and developers. Which technology to use for which scenario?

Choosing the right technology – group discussion
Everyone - 30 min
Silverlight vs. WFP vs. Windows Forms vs. ASP.NET. A session for decision makers, architects and developers. Which technology would YOU use for which scenario? Please come prepared with questions, examples and ready to share your experiences.

Silverlight and Section 508 compliance
Mark Blomsma – 30 min
“Section 508 requires that all Web site content be equally accessible to people with disabilities. This applies to Web applications, Web pages and all attached files. It applies to intranet as well as public-facing Web pages.” (http://usability.gov).

Silverlight architecture overview
Chris Bowen – 30 min
Introduction to XAML, Silverlight assemblies, n-tier development, asynchronous behavior, …

Silverlight + Windows Communication Foundation overview
Chris Bowen - 30 min
Introduction to WCF based on a Silverlight demo.

Silverlight + RIA Service overview
Chris Bowen - 30 min
Introduction to RIA Services based on a Silverlight demo.

Q&A
30 minutes.

Location
The event will be held at:
State of Maine Offices
Harlow Building
First floor conference room
18 Elkins Ave
Augusta, ME 
Marquardt Building, 1st Floor Conference room 1B
Old AMHI Campus
32 Blossom Lane
Augusta, ME

RSVP
Please register so we can make sure we have sufficient room.
Register here: http://www.maine-devnet.org/Home/SignUpForEvent.aspx.

The MDN meeting on the 27th of August, 2009 will be an INETA sponsored event. INETA will make arrangements for Kathleen Dollard to be able to speak to our group. Kathleen is a great speaker and authority on the subject of code generation and software composability. We're very happy and lucky to have her come up and present two sessions at our meeting. A third session, also on code generation will be done by Mark Blomsma.

We'll start the meeting with free pizza at 12pm. With the first session starting at 12:30pm. We aim to finish around 5pm.

Code Generation
by Kathleen Dollard
Code generation is undergoing a renaissance as Microsoft jumps into the picture and converges with our increasing understanding of code generation. You’ll learn core code generation principles that transcend all code generation tools. Building on this you’ll get a dip into template languages seeing both T4 which is part of Visual Studio and VB9 XML literal templates in order to understand the strength of each approach. Once you understand how templates work, you’ll dive into metadata – the part of the system that uniquely describes the specific application your building. You’ll see two approaches to protecting handcrafted code on the .NET platform. And you’ll see how to hook generation into your development process. The overall process of application generation has not matured and is rapidly changing – this talk doesn’t promise silver bullets. Instead you’ll leave with a good understanding of the latest code generation techniques and how you can fit them into your unique development environment.

Introduction to Visual Studio T4
by Mark Blomsma
An introduction to a somewhat hidden feature in Visual Studio: Text Template Transformation Toolkit or T4 for short. You will learn about using T4 and the statement, expressions and declarations needed to succesfully use T4 in your software projects.

Composable Applications with MEF
by Kathleen Dollard
Decoupling portions of your application has tremendous payback during both development and maintenance. Your application becomes more testable and flexible and can more easily evolve to meet changing demands. Decoupling your application also allows a new level of partnership with external groups because you can safely incorporate their code in your application without recompiling or releasing source code – effectively creating ecosystems supported by your application. Over the years Microsoft has released several different provider models in different areas of the framework, libraries, and supporting tools. This year several teams at Microsoft moved toward consolidating these efforts with the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF. This tool differs from an IoC (Inversion of Control) container because focuses directly at application composability, extensibility, and discover. MEF supports Microsoft efforts like Visual Studio 2010, but it can also play a role in your current applications.

Kathleen Dollard is a consultant, author, trainer, and speaker. She’s been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years and has spoken about .NET in 28 states and 5 countries. She’s written dozens of articles including the “Ask Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine. She also wrote “Code Generation in Microsoft .NET” (Apress). Her passion is helping programmers be smarter in how they develop by learning to better use .NET languages, libraries and platforms. She works with WPF, WF, as well as core technologies including System.AddIn. She’s currently creating template infrastructure for code generation using VB XML literals. After working on the problem of capturing business intent in metadata and test definitions for years, she’s working with industry improvements in these areas. She’s also working on full life cycle improvements, such as unit testing, better debugging and static analysis (FxCop). When not working, she enjoys woodworking, snowshoeing, and kayaking depending on the outdoor temperature.

Mark Blomsma is a consultant, author, trainer and speaker. He's been a Microsoft MVP for 6 years and has spoken at our meeting many time. He runs a consulting business up in Lincoln, ME.

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

RSVP
Please register so we can accommodate accordingly and make sure we have enough pizza.
Register here: http://www.maine-devnet.org/Home/SignUpForEvent.aspx

Thanks to the efforts of John Gagnon the MSDN Northeast Roadshow will once again make a stop in Augusta, ME.

Mark your calendars for June 18th is the day you can enjoy a day of free learning with Microsoft's New England Dream Team: Chris, Bob & Jim.

More info and sign up info: http://tinyurl.com/Summer09Roadshow

The kick-off for the first virtual study group will be on April 6th at 7pm.

Join us at: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mvp/meet/P838MM

To sign up for the study group visit: http://ms-study-group.groups.live.com

The show is on! You are invited to join us on Thursday afternoon, the 16th of April as the Maine Developer Network will host the Augusta Developer Event.
Learn all you need to know about LINQ to SQL, DevForce Entity Framework, SQL Server Client Side Reporting and hot stuff from the patterns & practices group!

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? [60 min.]

Introduction to DevForce Entity Framework
By Scott Woodruff
Entity Framework is a cornerstone product that shipped in .NET 3.5 SP1. The company IdeaBlade has been working on enhancing this product from the very first CTP and betas that have been available.
In this session Scott will talk and demonstrate what Entity Framework is and how DevForce EF enhances the basic mechanics of Entity Framework. [30 min.]

SQL Server Client Side Reporting and LINQ
by Mark Blomsma
SQL Server Reporting Server has created a client side reporting control which allows you to use SQL Server reports, even without having a SQL Server! This session is all about using the control and hooking up data to it using LINQ queries. [45 min.]

What’s new from Microsoft Patterns & Practices?
by Shawn Robichaud & Mark Blomsma
The Microsoft Patterns & Practices group offers guidance in various forms.
Recently the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (Prism) has been made available.
Shawn will take you on a tour what this package has to offer for you.
After which Mark will offer a look at what the Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Application Architecture Guide 2.0. [45 min.]

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

Time
We'll start at 13:00 and plan to finish by 16:30.
Please use the Register form on the website to RSVP:
http://www.maine-devnet.org/Home/SignUpForEvent.aspx.

See you there!

Mark Blomsma
Maine Developer Network
 

Once again the Maine Developer Network (thanks to John, Shawn and the State of Maine Government) is happy to help out Chris, Bob and Jim with finding a location to hold the MSDN Northeast Roadshow.

On March 19th the Roadshow will hit the Central Maine Commerce Center in Augusta. Go here to sign up today!

Location
Central Main Commerce Center
Florian Auditorium
500 Civic Center Drive Augusta Maine 04330
United States

Date
Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:30 AM - Thursday, March 19, 2009 4:00 PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Welcome Time: 8:00 AM

The Maine Developer Network is proud to announce that the Northeast MSDN Roadshow by Chris Bowen and Jim O'Neil will once again make it as far north as Augusta!

Don't hesitate: sign up today!

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.

SQL 2005 Performance Tuning and Optimization/SQL Server 2005 High Availability Seminar>

Seating is limited!
You must RSVP to Tricia Richardson at TRICHARDSON@VTEC.ORG by 5pm Thursday May 1^st. 

When:                  Friday, May 2nd, 2008
Time:                    1-4pm
Where:                 VTEC Education Center 50 Foden Road South Portland, Maine 04106
Questions:           Contact Tricia Richardson 207.775.0244 ext 3038 or via email at trichardson@vtec.org      

Agenda:              

SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning and Optimization

Every installation of SQL Server will need to be tuned at some point.  Many DBAs don’t have the time or the experience to affectively troubleshoot and tune a poorly performing SQL Server.  In this session, we will share with you the tools that Microsoft Premier Support technicians use to gather and analyze data used to pinpoint performance issues.  One of the issues most DBAs have when troubleshooting performance is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle.  Is it hardware, database design, or poorly written queries??  We’ll discuss real world scenarios and case studies from the field and show you step by step how to identify performance problems.

SQL Server 2005 High Availability

In this session, we will discuss the many features of SQL Server 2005 that directly affect high availability to keep your mission critical data safe.  You need to protect against hardware failures, data corruption, connectivity failures and site isolation.  We’ll take the confusion out of the all the options and help you decide which high availability option works best for your needs.

Microsoft Presenter:   Shaun Beane, who taught at VTEC, before getting snagged by Microsoft

Shaun is currently working at Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer.  He works with enterprise level customers to help maintain, troubleshoot and tune installations of SQL Server.  He also provides onsite in-depth training for SQL Server, including, Reporting Services and Integration Services.  He’ll be sharing real world experience during these two sessions to help you become a better DBA.

SQL 2005 Performance Tuning and Optimization/SQL Server 2005 High Availability Seminar>

Seating is limited!
You must RSVP to Tricia Richardson at TRICHARDSON@VTEC.ORG by 5pm Thursday May 1^st. 

When:                  Friday, May 2nd, 2008
Time:                    1-4pm
Where:                 VTEC Education Center 50 Foden Road South Portland, Maine 04106
Questions:           Contact Tricia Richardson 207.775.0244 ext 3038 or via email at trichardson@vtec.org      

Agenda:              

SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning and Optimization

Every installation of SQL Server will need to be tuned at some point.  Many DBAs don’t have the time or the experience to affectively troubleshoot and tune a poorly performing SQL Server.  In this session, we will share with you the tools that Microsoft Premier Support technicians use to gather and analyze data used to pinpoint performance issues.  One of the issues most DBAs have when troubleshooting performance is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle.  Is it hardware, database design, or poorly written queries??  We’ll discuss real world scenarios and case studies from the field and show you step by step how to identify performance problems.

SQL Server 2005 High Availability

In this session, we will discuss the many features of SQL Server 2005 that directly affect high availability to keep your mission critical data safe.  You need to protect against hardware failures, data corruption, connectivity failures and site isolation.  We’ll take the confusion out of the all the options and help you decide which high availability option works best for your needs.

Microsoft Presenter:   Shaun Beane, who taught at VTEC, before getting snagged by Microsoft

Shaun is currently working at Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer.  He works with enterprise level customers to help maintain, troubleshoot and tune installations of SQL Server.  He also provides onsite in-depth training for SQL Server, including, Reporting Services and Integration Services.  He’ll be sharing real world experience during these two sessions to help you become a better DBA.

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:

Russ Nemhauser presented on unit testing and test-driven development, using mock objects.
Original info:

Topic

An introduction to Unit Test, Test-Driven Development and Mock Objects As software development projects grow over the course of months and years, it can be increasingly difficult to manage quality and consistency. With the help of Visual Studio 2005, Test-Driven Development (TDD) can be used with very little effort to insure constant, high-quality code is written during the lifetime of your projects. In addition, you'll see how to create and use mock objects to logically separate development efforts on different tiers of your application to prevent blocking issues.

Speaker

Speaker will be Russ Nemhauser.

Russ Nemhauser is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and a Microsoft Certified Professional, and has served as an Architect, Developer, Team Leader, and Project Manager over the past several years. His projects have included enterprise applications, online commerce sites, and corporate intranets for Wall Street, Universal Studios, Microsoft, Seagram, and others. Russ actively participates in the development community, speaking at several conferences and user groups each year. He also writes for several technical magazines and industry web sites.

Location and Time

The meeting will be held on Friday the 29th of February 2008 at Thomas College in Waterville, ME.
The meeting will start at 3:30pm and finish at 6:00pm.

Address:
Thomas College
Stickney Room in the Student Center
180 West River Road,
Waterville, Maine 04901

RSVP

Please let us know you're coming. Send me an e-mail or sign up using this page on Facebook. 

On Thursday the 29th of November 2007 at Thomas College in Waterville, ME, we had two presenters: Shawn Robichaud and Mark Blomsma.

A look at Microsoft Acropolis
by Shawn Robichaud.

Microsoft is in the process of developing and releasing some exciting new technologies for developers using the .NET framework. In this session we will learn what Microsoft has up its sleeve for smart client development by taking a close look at the project code named “Acropolis”.

Shawn Robichaud is a Programmer Analyst working for the State of Maine, Office of Information Technology. For the past three years Shawn has been orchestrating a project involving the State of Maine Department of Agriculture. The project utilizes Microsoft’s Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 Technologies to provide field and office workers alike with a rich smart client application. Shawn has a broad range of programming experience working for customers in both local and state government. Shawn has also provided consulting services on projects ranging from automotive sales to medical transcription. Shawn lives in Augusta with his wife and cat Zorro.

Challenges in .NET architecture and team development
by Mark Blomsma.

In this presentation we take a look at first hand experiences of developing an enterprise application. Architecture, team development, deployment, coding standards, testing cycles and QA are all topics that are covered.

Mark Blomsma is a software architect, entrepreneur, author, speaker, and trainer. Mark is the owner of Develop-One, co-owner of Omnext, instructor for DevelopMentor and an active community organizer and contributor in the Software Developer Network and the Maine Developer Network. Mark is a Microsoft MVP; his blog can be found at http://blog.develop-one.com.

Our meeting on the 4th of October went well inspite of some bad luck. Shawn's car broke down on the way to the meeting so his session got cancelled last minute. In his stead Mark Blomsma did an on the spot demo of building a Windows Vista gadget. Looking at basic development, deployment, security considerations and some other fun stuff.Chris Rhoda gave a detailed account of the state of the art IT facilities offered by Thomas College, in particular the technologies around instant messaging and Live Communications server.

Thanks to Thomas College for providing us with excellent facilities and Develop-One for providing drinks and snacks.

The weather finally gave us a break and we had our last meeting on the 26th of April! Chris Bowen presented on Windows Communication Foundation and he did a great job explaining the material and showing lots of code, explaining how to get started with WCF.

A great session!

For those who missed the meeting, or those who wish to be included on our mailinglist: just create an account on this website an you will receive our newsletters and any other notifications about our meetings.

Download:

wcfintro.zip

On the 27th of February 2007 we had Mark Blomsma from Develop-One do two sessions. The first session was all about developing about implementing business logic in .NET 2.0, the second about developing for Windows Vista with .NET 3.0. The focus here was on WPF and gadgets.

Material from the first session can be found here.

Material from the second session can be found here.

On the 22nd of June we had Mark Blomsma from Develop-One as a guest speaker.

Using an application that is close to completion Mark showed how to create a typed dataset, deliver the data to a client using webservices, consume the service and asynchronously use the data retrieved to send a newsletter using the .NET mail classes.

Click below to download the powerpoint:

• 06-22-2006 MDN - Building applications with .NET.zip (52.64 KB)

Gregg Dunn and Bryan Beatty spoke at our meeting on the 22nd of May and shared their knowledge and insights on DevForce Express and .NET in general with us. Looking into the inner workings of the solution offered by DevForce they provided some great insights into the world of distributed applications, Smart Clients and Object Relational Mapping.

Powerpoints:

• DevForce_Architectural_Overview.zip (714.79 KB)
  
• DevForce_Object_Mapping.zip (812.36 KB)

DevForce Express is a .NET developer productivity solution for building data-intensive, web-enabled, client/server applications. 

You can download a free version at:   http://www.ideablade.com/downloads.html.
If you are still running under .NET 1.1 / VS2003, a free version can be downloaded at: http://www.ideablade.com/IB%2DLite%5FHome/

Another way to learn more about our DevForce is to browse the IdeaBlade Web Seminars, which may be found at http://www.ideablade.com/web_seminars.html

Thom did two presentations for us, one on .NET in general and one that focused on new features in ASP.NET 2.0. Here are the downloads:

• Introduction to .NET (164.62 KB)
• What's new in ASP.NET 2.0 (980.27 KB)

Thom also maintains a blog which can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/trobbins