NOTE: Special Meeting Date
November's presenter is an INETA speaker.  Due to travel schedules, we had to move to meeting to November 15th instead of the usual date.  Note that this is a Wednesday, and not a Tuesday.

Adding Response and Reliability to Your Solutions with MSMQ Triggers

One of the best ways to increase the perceived response and reliability of your .NET solutions is to incorporate MSMQ services into your implementation. In this talk you’ll learn how to create useful MSMQ-based services that use triggers to fire off custom workflows based on the message placed in the queue. The talk covers the basics of MSMQ and MSMQ Triggers; shows you how you can identify opportunities in your application to add MSMQ services; and how to manage and monitor MSMQ services during the lifetime of your application.

The talk includes a number of code samples and additional resources for leveraging MSMQ services on Windows XP, NT, and Server 2003 platforms.

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An internationally known author and lecturer, Mike Amundsen has traveled throughout the United States and Europe speaking and teaching on a wide range of topics including .NET, the Internet, team development, and other subjects.

He has more than a dozen books to his credit. His most popular titles are Teach Yourself Database Programming with Visual Basic in 21 Days, Using Visual InterDev, and ASP.NET for Developers.

When he is not working, Mike spends time with his wife and three children at their home in Kentucky, USA.

Layouts, Styles and Templates in Windows Presentation Foundation

One powerful feature of Windows Presentation Foundation is the separation of the appearance of controls and the behavior of controls. In this session, we'll look at the power of layouts, styles and templates and how you'll use them in your applications. We'll also look at the underlying concepts that make them work and how you can use them to compose your own WPF components.

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Drew Robbins is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in the Heartland District.  Drew has over 12 years of experience using Microsoft products as both an IT Professional and Application Developer. Before joining Microsoft, Drew was already very active in the developer community on both a local and global level. He served in central Ohio as a Microsoft Regional Director (honorary Microsoft position), establishing a major user group and working in several enterprise accounts.   Drew was also recognized as a Microsoft MVP for his role in community and expertise in Visual Studio and ASP.NET. Drew mobilized the global developer community through blogging websites that drove buzz and participation in conferences such as TechEd, PDC and DevDays. Drew is a regular presenter at local and regional events on Microsoft technology and development methodology.

Intro Session: Are you scared of using Delegates in .NET?  Do you have no idea what that last question even means?  NWNUG's President (Jason Follas) will initiate the the NWNUG Introduces series of short (< 20 minute) presentations with "An Introduction to Delegates in .NET".

Main Presentation: NWNUG's Chariman (Greg Huber) will present on the upcoming Microsoft AJAX Library and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions.  Prior to September 11, 2007, these technologies were collectively known as ATLAS. 

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Greg Huber is the founder and chairman of the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group, established in 2001. Greg is a Microsoft MVP and was first recognized in 2004 for his role in community and expertise in Visual Studio .NET and ASP.NET. He is also a membership manager for INETA, the International .NET Association, where he enjoys helping the user group community flourish. Professionally, Greg has been developing software on the Microsoft platform since 1998. He is currently employed at TNS (a global market research firm) as the director of software development. Greg is an avid geek and enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter, geocaching, developing software, and gaming on the Xbox 360.

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Artifacts:

Delegates.ppt (82.5 KB)

Part I: The first section covered er a very high level of what each of these technologies are, what they can do, and when you would want to use them.

Part II: The second session covered, in detail, how you can use WF in your applications. Workflow is everywhere, and you will learn how to leverage this new technology.

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Brian is the Practice Manager of the Application Development consulting practice at Quick Solutions, Inc.  He has achieved over eleven years Information Technology management and consulting experience including e-commerce, extranets, and business technology.  Brian has successfully implemented his technology expertise in numerous industries including real estate, financial services, healthcare, retail and state government institutions.

Brian has exceptional proficiency in Microsoft .NET framework and n-tier e-commerce and web application development.  

Further, Brian has maintained numerous executive positions where he applies management capabilities in the field of developing marketing and strategy efforts to improve and enhance web-based technologies.

Brian is a member of the Microsoft Business Process Integration Virtual Technology Specialist team, and works with the BPI product groups to help them in the marketplace. Brian is also a recipient of the Microsoft MVP Visual Studio Solution Architect award.

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Slide Deck: http://brianhprince.com/Documents/Intro%20to%20WF%20and%20BTS.ppt

The term Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become ubiquitous in our industry. Unfortunately, that has led to massive hype that makes it difficult to understand and distinguish the real value of adapting SOA principles.  The current definition also suffers from technology-centric views that are based on the technology environment in use today.

Sam will concentrate on the Design Patterns that distinguish Service-Orientatation and how to apply them to your designs. Upon these principles, we look at their real-world implementation in WCF ("Indigo") and using WCF for real world demos.

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Sam Gentile is internationally known and recognized for his comprehensive expert Microsoft and .NET knowledge, and has been acknowledged by Microsoft as an Solutions Architect MVP. Sam is also an INETA Speaker, having delivered .NET training to user groups and companies all over the world. Sam is employed by a major international firm as an Agile Software Architect and Team Lead. His team utilizes full Agile practices as well as WinFX technologies like WCF, and WinFX to rapidly deliver business value. Sam has delivered over ten .NET based solutions into the market as well as provided expertise for a number of companies such as Microsoft, Adesso Systems, BCGI, Groove and Pacific Mindworks. Sam maintains a busy Agile WinFX blog at: http://codebetter.com/blogs/sam.gentile/

(Sam was also a guest on .NET Rocks! Show number 45)

 

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Artifacts (slides/code) from Sam's visit: Demo.zip (561.23 KB)  OhioWCF2006.pdf (4.36 MB)

Writing high quality software is hard; however, recent years have seen an influx of tools to help developers write better code. This talk is split into two segments: how to write quality software with free .NET tools (NUnit, NCover, FxCop) and how to write quality software with the new Visual Studio Team System Developer Edition.
 
VSTSDeveloper Edition provides several tools to ensure we write quality code. Many existing tools, such as FxCop for static code analysis, are now fully integrated within VSTS Developer Edition. New tools for unit testing and code coverage have also been added. In this session, we'll see how to create and run your unit tests, how to review test coverage across test cases, as well as how to use the static code analysis tool to ensure your code conforms to design guidelines. 
 

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David is a C# MVP and independent consultant specializing in application architecture and development for the Microsoft .NET platform. David is very active in the .NET community as he is the co-leader of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group (www.condg.org) and is the founder of the Columbus Geek Dinner. He’s also the co-founder/co-organizer of the Day of .NET events (www.dayof.net) and maintains a .NET-focused blog at www.arcware.net. David is also a semi-frequent speaker at .NET user groups, code camps, and other conferences such as the Visual Studio Developers Conference and the Heartland Developers Conference.

Dave's slides: WritingQualityCode.zip (786.94 KB)

Do you ever wonder what it would be like to build you own Windows Mobile device? If you are like me you are probably a software person looking at the embedded world with more than a little trepidation. Come with me as I explain my journey building a Windows Mobile device to do in car entertainment.

In this session we'll talk through picking a device platform and things to look for in a design board. Once we've gone through that we will jump into Platform Builder and learn what it means to build a Windows Mobile platform to actually run your system. Lastly, we will actually build and test a .Net application running on the platform we have just built.

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David White is a principal in GSD Telematics. GSD Telematics was formed in 2005 to provide a programmable platform for in vehicle Telematics for everyone. Before that he was an Architect in the Microsoft Industry Solution Group focusing on the Automotive and Industrial Equipment Vertical accounts. He has over 17 year's enterprise experience across many disparate platforms and has spent over 10 of that in the automotive industry. After spending time working on enterprise mainframe applications on MVS he moved to the Unix/VAX arena and then on to the Microsoft arena. He has used almost all the major development paradigms over this time (J2EE, DNA, CORBA, etc.) and advised customers on technology decisions related to development and architecture with regards to Microsoft products and how they fit into the customers overall architecture. He had been with Microsoft for 8 years.

CodeRush and Refactor! are two powerful IDE tools by Developer Express that increase productivity while coding. Both tools are based on the DXCore API, which is freely available from Developer Express. Dustin Campbell, one of the people responsible for their existence, took us on a tour of how to use these tools to build software faster. Our Ninja class and throwing star collection were created with blinding speed and precision! Dustin also demonstrated how to create a custom DXCore plugin from scratch, enabling you to create your own refactorings that will work across multiple versions of Visual Studio.

Relevant Links:

Developer Express: http://www.devexpress.com/
CodeRush: http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/CodeRush/
Refactor! Pro : http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Refactor/

Screencasts showing these tools in action (impressive): http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/CodeRush/Training.xml

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Dustin Campbell is a lead developer for Developer Express Inc. and is responsible for the low-level plumbing of the popular CodeRush and Refactor! tools for Visual Studio. He is an expert in many advanced areas of .NET and specializes in design patterns, refactoring and object-oriented design. In addition, Dustin is one of the few developers in the world that can boast to have rewritten .NET reflection simply because it wasn't fast or powerful enough.

User group leaders Greg Huber and Jason Follas brought their Media Center road show presentation back home, and gave the small group in attendance an overview of Media Center, Alternatives to Media Center, The 10-foot Experience, Developing for Media Center, and using the Xbox 360 as an Extender.

nwnug_mce.zip (3.6 MB)

Bill Wagner presented on Generics in the C# language, the CLR, and several tips and tricks for utilizing generics in common programming tasks. At the end, he also provided an overview of the upcoming Language Integrated Query (LINQ), an important new feature in C# 3.0.

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A commercial software developer and co-founder of SRT Solutions, Inc., Bill Wagner facilitates adoption of .NET in clients’ product and enterprise development.  His principal strengths include the core framework, the C# language, Smart Clients, and service oriented architecture and design.  In 2003 Microsoft recognized his .NET expertise appointing him Regional Director for Michigan.

A frequent writer and speaker, Bill’s work is published in ASP.NET Pro and Visual Studio Magazine.  He is the author of C# Core Language Little Black Book and Effective C#.