NOTE: Due to a venue conflict, this month's meeting is one week later than the regularly scheduled meeting.

In recent years, many features have been added to the C# language that make it possible to write programs using techniques from other programming paradigms. Chief among these is functional programming. Often regarded as only being academically useful, functional programming has many practical uses, some of which appear within the .NET Framework itself. In this session, we'll examine some ideas taken from functional programming and see how they might be implemented using language features that already exist within C#. In addition, we'll highlight ways in which the .NET Framework APIs borrow from functional programming. Throughout, we will focus on how to use these techniques in practical ways.

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Dustin Campbell is a lead developer for the IDE tools division at Developer Express Inc. His responsibilities at Developer Express include much of the low-level plumbing of the award-winning CodeRush and Refactor! products. A regular speaker, Dustin is a noted authority in many advanced areas of the .NET Framework and tends to get “under the hood” in any area that he is learning. For his contributions to the community, Dustin was awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status by Microsoft in 2007.

 

Two topics in one! Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection: Inversion of control, or IoC, is about enforcing isolation. IoC can help you write more maintainable code that is highly decoupled and easy to test. Remove boilerplate code by using Castle's Windsor IoC container. Improve your designs by thinking about IoC and testability.

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Jay R. Wren has been writing custom software solutions for integrating Windows and Unix for over seven years. His blend of traditional system administration and custom software solutions has allowed numerous enterprises to transcend platform dependence. Some of his software is still in use at a state university in Michigan and at the nations largest payroll processor.

 

Note: This meeting was originally indicated to be "NWNUG Presents: XML Usage Scenarios".  However, busy work/travel schedules prevented that presentation from coming together, so Jason will be giving his current talk to the group instead (which is sort of on the same topic...)

XML-based data is very prevalent in today's data world to the point that every database developer should know how to work with XML. Middle-tier translation of XML into relational data may be inflexible, and often leads to a loss of fidelity over time. One solution is to move the XML handling into the database itself in order to improve overall integration. SQL Server 2005 provides powerful XML processing features that allow easy access to data stored within XML without sacrificing any of the original fidelity.

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Jason Follas, President of the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group, has over 13 years of professional experience developing for the Microsoft platform using Visual Basic and C#. He is a Technical Architect for Perficient, Inc. proudly serving the Toledo and Detroit markets, and is a Microsoft MVP (SQL Server) and a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCAD, MCSD.NET). Over the course of his career, Jason has worked on a wide assortment of projects for various industries, including an Aircraft Weight and Balance system, several e-Commerce websites, Risk Management systems, and blend optimization software. Hobbies and interests include Coin-Op Video Game restoration, prime numbers and factoring, astronomy, and annihilating songs by attempting to play them on his guitar.

Scott Cate began with a simple 100-level ASP.NET "Frequently Asked Questions" application that directly binds the user interface to the database. Then he proceeded to abstract the data layer away from the Application. At this point, the application was in a state that is about as far as most developers go when writing web applications (resulting in the UI being tightly coupled with the application).

So, Scott went a step further and abstracted the UI layer away from the application so that the application was no longer dependant on the UI at all. Finally, to demonstrate this functionality, he built a new UI with Windows Forms that binds to the application.

This design pattern is known as the "Model View Presenter".

NOTE: This meeting was our Big Prize Raffle meeting where NWNUG member Aaron Lease was the lucky winner of a Zune! 

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Scott Cate is the President of myKB.com, Inc., in Scottsdale, Arizona. myKB.com is a technology company specializing in commercial ASP.NET applications. His product line includes myKB.com (Knowledge Base Software), kbAlertz.com (Microsoft Knowledge Base Notifications), and EasySearchASP.net (a Pluggable Search Engine for ASP.NET sites).  Scott also runs AZGroups.com (Arizona .NET User Groups), one of the largest and most active user group communities in the country, and is a member of ASPInsiders.com, a group devoted to giving early feedback to the Microsoft ASP.NET Team. Scott has also been awarded the ASP.NET MVP for three years in a row, from 2004-2006.  In addition, Scott has co-authored "Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET" ( http://BeginningAjax.com ) released in 2006 and the non-fiction novel "Surveillance" ( http://surveillance-the-novel.com ).

INFO: ArcReady comes to Detroit on May 25!  http://www.arcready.com/

Josh Holmes introduces Microsoft Silverlight, which is described as "a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows."  (source: http://silverlight.net/Default.aspx)

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Josh Holmes is a Architect Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation. Over the past ten years, he has worked with a diverse client set, ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller-sized companies. Specializing in mobility solutions, Josh has developed server, web, desktop, handheld and Pocket PC applications. Josh is an accomplished trainer with a deep and varied knowledge base. He has developed software technology courses in the areas of .NET, ASP.NET, XML SPY, XML, VB.NET, C#, Compact Framework and Advanced Compact Framework. Utilizing his unique combination of theoretical knowledge and hands on experience, Josh combines the abstract with real life, practical day-to-day applications. A frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development, Josh also served as an officer for several non-profit technology organizations including Volunteer IT, Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group and the Ann Arbor Computing Society.

Since about 75% of all software developers write applications that make use of databases, managing schema changes in their development, testing, staging and production environments can be overwhelming and very difficult to accomplish.  Until now, the Database Professional has been left out the development life cycle. 

A new tool from Microsoft (Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals, or better known as "Data Dude") will enable the people who develop the application databases to become a full fledge member of the software development team... Yay! 

With this tool, we advocate that there should be one version of the truth for the data and one version of the truth for the schema. VSTEDP manages the one version of the truth for your database schema objects in a disconnected off-line environment, storing them in source control allowing the schema to be versioned and shared with the rest of the team.

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Randy Pagels is a Developer Technology Specialist for the Microsoft Corporation and works in the Heartland District. He provides coverage for MI, OH, and KY and focuses on Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server. Before coming to Microsoft, Randy worked as a developer for 16 years in a large company in Southeastern Michigan. He is experienced in SQL Server technologies and ASP.NET object oriented design and programming. He has also architected and developed many client, web applications, and e-commerce systems, including an award winning fleet maintenance tracking system using the Agile SDLC methodology.  A long-standing active member in the .Net community, Randy continues to promote Visual Studio, SQL Server, and Team System as the preferred choice for software development teams when talking about Application Lifecycle Management tools.

 

CSLA.NET 2.0 allows you to quickly develop applications by simplifying the creation of business objects.  The framework allows developers to concentrate on the business logic implementation and not worry about the tedious details and plumbing code.  The framework provides an abstracted data portal, n-level undo, security, serialization, transactions, and data-binding support. 

In this presentation, we’ll look at how the CSLA.NET framework provides these features and how it is different than data persistence frameworks.  We will then implement our own business objects using the CSLA.NET framework.

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Jamie Wright is president of Innovativ Studios, a software development consulting service provider and ISV for software management applications.  He has over ten years software development experience in Microsoft technologies and has developing in .NET since the first beta release.  He specializes in application architecture, design patterns, object-oriented design, and business objects using the .NET framework.  He loves spending time with his newly growing family, blogging at http://wrightin.gs, and he is currently getting therapy for his gadget addiction.

NWNUG will be celebrating the launch of Windows Vista at the beginning of the meeting, followed by Ken's presentation:

Application Frameworks increase the quality of code, decrease the "time to market", and, if they are configurable, decrease the cost of a change to the application and how it behaves.  Stand alone code generators create working code from templates, merging in application-specific metadata such as database schema information, to quickly produce common application functionality.  What happens when you COMBINE code generation with two of the most popular ASP.NET application frameworks available: DotNetNuke and Microsoft's recently release ASP.NET AJAX?  Come find out.

DotNetNuke (http://www.dotnetnuke.com) provides a security, performance and GUI framework for web applications - allowing software developers to focus on application specific functionality by building "modules" that plug into the framework and to be configured through the browser in various configurations.

ASP.NET AJAX (http://ajax.asp.net) allows rich User Interface experiences using DHTML, JavaScript and asynchronous XML-based HTTP requests allowing only those portions of the page that actually change to update - eliminating the "erase and refresh" UI experience with traditional web applications.

We will demonstrate the generation of DotNetNuke application-specific modules that utilize ASP.NET AJAX to provide a highly configurable, rich User experience - all without coding.  The generated modules support DotNetNuke's module settings ability to allow the modules to behave differently on different pages of the site.  In addition to being able to configure each module, each control WITHIN the module can be configured via the browser (in DNN) as well, giving fine-grained configurability to modules with the DotNetNuke application.

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Ken Kutz is Senior Manager of Web Development for HCR Manor Care and has been connecting web pages to databases since Netscape was the leader in that space in the 90s.  Ken has over 20 years of IT experience.

Reuben Ahmed is a developer for HCR Manor Care currently specializing in the development of reusable web application frameworks.  Using the code generator being presented, he has had his hand in developing approximately 50 web applications in the past 5 years.

Note that starting in January 2007, NWNUG's meetings will be held on the third Tuesday of each month (instead of the last Tuesday). This means that NWNUG's meeting will now be aligned with GANG's meeting, which is the third Wednesday of each month in Southfield, MI.

In the ever-changing world of software development, we must constantly keep up with new technologies. In fact, so much time is spent absorbing new APIs, documentation and hype that we are often left with very little time to improve our coding skills. This session will some discuss general ways to improve code quality that apply to all languages. In addition, we’ll cover several ways to use C# 2.0 (and some future C# 3.0) features to create readable and elegant code.

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Dustin Campbell is a lead developer for the IDE tools division at Developer Express Inc. His responsibilities at Developer Express include much of the low-level plumbing of the award-winning CodeRush and Refactor! products. Dustin is an expert in many advanced areas of .NET and specializes in design patterns, refactoring and object-oriented design.