Previous Meetings
January 9, 2012
NEW LOCATION! ABF General Office. See location in left sidebar.
| Speaker: | Chris Koenig |
| Topic: | Database for Mango |
| Summary: | With the release of the new ?Mango? operating system, the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 now supports SQL Server CE as part of the Windows Phone runtime environment. Join Microsoft Developer Evangelist Chris Koenig for a tour of SQL Server CE Database Support on Windows Phone. We?ll talk about defining, creating and accessing databases on the device, deploying databases with your application, and making updates to your database as you version your application. You are encouraged to bring your own computer to follow along (download and install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27570). |
| Speaker Bio: | Chris Koenig is a Senior Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas, TX. Prior to joining Microsoft in March of 2007, Chris worked as a Senior Architect for The Capital Group in San Antonio, and as an Architect for the global solution provider Avanade. As an Architect and consultant, Chris worked with a variety of clients from many vertical markets, ISVs and other solution providers on enterprise-class Windows and web-based applications. Today, Chris focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana while specializing in Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight development. |
November 14, 2011
| Speaker: | Chander Dhall |
| Topic: | Enterprise development with MVC3 |
| Summary: | When it comes to Enterprise development, best patterns and practices are more a necessity than something good to have. This talk would go through some of those best practices with focus on some of the tools quintessential for success on MVC applications. It will also incorporate some real world scenarios and different ways to solve them as well as building modular solutions with separation of concerns leading to scalable apps. |
| Speaker Bio: | Chander Dhall is a Microsoft MVP, professional software architect/lead developer, trainer, INETA speaker, open source contributor, community leader and organizer with more than eight years of experience in enterprise Software Development. He works in a goal oriented, technologically driven, fast paced AGILE (SCRUM) environment. |
October 10, 2011
| Speaker: | Rob Tennyson |
| Topic: | SOA For The Developer |
| Summary: | Service Oriented Architecture has been a buzz word for a while now and gets talked about all the time. However, I see very few presentations targeting the developer and what he/she should be doing in code as an SOA advocate. In this presentation we surface an old and well known design pattern called the Gateway. When developing applications that talk to other applications (or pull data straight out of their databases!), this pattern can save your bacon at worst and at best will give you a clear and easy to see delineation between your app and external systems. |
| Speaker Bio: | Rob has over 10 years of experience writing enterprise level applications. He works diligently in the development community trying to raise the bar of all developers. Most importantly, he takes pride in building more maintainable and higher quality applications. In short, he treats software development as a craft worthy of a great deal of dedication and passion. Read more at http://www.robtennyson.us |
September 13, 2011
| Topic: | General Discussion and .NET Reactive Extensions Fundamentals Video |
| Summary: | We will start the meeting with a general discussion about the direction of the group. Do you want advanced topics, back to basics, or a mix for our presentations? Do you have any topic or speaker requests? Afterwards there will be a PluralSight video on .NET Reactive Extensions Fundamentals. The .NET Reactive Extensions (Rx) is a library to compose asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections and LINQ-style query operators. Rx is a superset of LINQ's standard query operators that exposes asynchronous and event-based computations as push-based, observable collections via the new IObservable interface in .NET 4. This course walks you through the details of working with Rx to develop asynchronous applications. |
August 8, 2011
| Speaker: | Lori Hull |
| Topic: | What's New in Visual Studio 2010 |
| Summary: | Watch walkthrough demos of many of the new features that were introduced in Visual Studio 2010, as well as some language and framework enhancements. |
| Speaker Bio: | Lori Hull is a developer/trainer for Data-Tronics Corp. in Fort Smith, AR where she has worked for 15 years. She has served in the training department for the last six years of her career, where she trains on a broad spectrum of topics in IBM Mainframe, classic ASP Web Development, and .NET Windows Forms Programming. Lori has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from Missouri State University in Springfield, MO. |
July 11, 2011
| Speaker: | Brian Sullivan |
| Topic: | Ditch the Designer - Building a More Maintainable Model with Entity Framework Code-First |
| Summary: | The whiz-bang visual designer features of the Entity Framework demo well, and may even work for small projects, but anyone who's worked with EF knows that on larger projects, the design surface quickly becomes unusable and a bottleneck to your development process. Thankfully, the Entity Framework team has heard our anguished cries and introduced a new API for defining your EF models, dubbed "Code-First". In this presentation, Brian will guide you through building a true POCO model, basic mapping techniques, and leveraging conventions to keep your mappings DRY. |
| Speaker Bio: | Brian Sullivan is a developer analyst for Falcon Applications, LLC in Shreveport, LA. He got his start in programming maintaining legacy mainframe applications in COBOL at a large trucking company, but quickly realized he needed to find a more productive environment in order to stay sane. He jumped at the opportunity to help transition some of those COBOL applications to .NET, and he hasn't looked back since. He has been working with Microsoft technologies for about 6 years, and is interested in increasing the exposure of agile techniques and methodologies in the Microsoft developer community. He currently runs the Shreveport .NET User Group and speaks frequently at local user groups and regional conferences. Brian is a graduate of Harding University in Searcy, AR. |
June 13, 2011
| Speaker: | Jay Smith |
| Topic: | Agile Open Discussion |
| Summary: | Join us for an open discussion forum on Agile development practices. |
| Speaker Bio: |
Jay Smith is a Lead Programmer Analyst with Tyson Foods, Inc., based in Fayetteville, AR. Prior to joining Tyson Foods in April 2, 2001, Jay worked as a Windows Server Engineer for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. in Bentonville, AR. Jay has worked on a variety of web based applications for internal use, as well as, worked with internal teams to improve team efficiency and developer practice adoption. Jay focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer community in the Northwest Arkansas area while specializing in Software Architecture, Agile Practices(Scrum and Extreme Programming), and ASPNET MVC. When Jay is not presenting at events you can probably find him organizing one. Jay has been the chairman for the 2011 Northwest Arkansas GiveCamp, 2010 Northwest Arkansas CodeCamp, and the ever popular Community Leadership Town Hall (Houston TechFest and Tulsa Techfest). Jay is has been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in ASP .NET for 2008, 2009, 2010. You can view his MVP Profile here. Jay often presents to the community on various topics including Agile Software Development, Object Oriented Principles, and Application Architecture. |
May 9, 2011
| Speaker: | Kerry Jenkins |
| Topic: | How to be a rock star web developer! |
| Summary: | Learn how to harness ASP.NET MVC using Razor, Entity Framework 4.1 Code First, SpecFlow, NUnit , Knockout.js, and HTML 5 in real world web applications. |
| Speaker Bio: | Kerry Jenkins is a programmer for Data-Tronics Corp where he has worked for over 20 years. He has spent the last 29 years trying to be a better programmer. |
| Additional links: |
http://knockoutjs.com http://docs.jquery.com/Qunit http://diveintohtml5.org/ http://nuget.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Getting%20Started http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adonet/archive/2011/03/15/ef-4-1-code-first-walkthrough.aspx http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2011/01/13/scaffold-your-aspnet-mvc-3-project-with-the-mvcscaffolding-package/ http://www.specflow.org/ |
April 11, 20111
| Speaker: | Tom DuPont |
| Topic: | PLINQO: Advanced LINQ to SQL |
| Summary: | In the time that LINQ to SQL has been available, we have been identifying ways to make LINQ to SQL better. We have compiled all of those cool tips and tricks including new features into a set of CodeSmith templates. PLINQO opens the LINQ TO SQL black box giving you the ability to control your source code while adding many new features and enhancements. It's still LINQ to SQL, but better! (www.plinqo.com) |
| Speaker Bio: | Tom DuPont lives in Dallas, Texas, where he is the Vice President of CodeSmith Tools, LLC. But don?t let the title fool you, Tom is a total code monkey! He specializes in .NET development with C#, ASP.NET MVC, and even that crazy JavaScript stuff. Tom has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. In his spare time Tom enjoys long rides across the country on his motorcycle. (www.tomdupont.net) |
March 14, 2011
| Speaker: | David Mohundro |
| Topic: | JavaScript and jQuery |
| Summary: | jQuery is the most widely used client-side framework on the web today. It is "a fast, concise library that simplifies how to traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add AJAX." It has revolutionized the way that JavaScript is written on the web. It has also helped many to understand why JavaScript is "the World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language" and has helped to educate the masses on the true power that JavaScript provides. In this talk, we'll take a deep dive into how JavaScript works as a language to show how jQuery was built. In doing so, we'll use the jQuery library as a learning tool and hopefully learn more about both jQuery and JavaScript in the process |
| Speaker Bio: | David Mohundro is a software developer at ServiceU Corporation in Memphis, TN. He has over 7 years of professional experience building both client and server software using technologies such as classic ASP, Windows Forms, JavaScript, PowerShell, WCF, and ASP.NET MVC. He also enjoys working outside of the Microsoft space occasionally using tools such as Rails and Sinatra. You can contact David through his blog at http://www.mohundro.com/blog/ |
October 11, 2010
| Speaker: | Tom DuPont |
| Topic: | ASP.NET MVC |
| Summary: | The ASP.NET MVC Framework is a web application framework that implements the model-view-controller pattern. Based on ASP.NET, it allows
software developers to build a Web application as a composition of three roles: Model, View and Controller. This architecture lends itself
very well to developing dynamic Web 2.0 applications that require only AJAX callbacks to the server. This session will provide an introduction to ASP.NET MVC development and Web Application Architecture. Participants will see how they can leverage their existing ASP.NET skills and tools to create applications that will run on a single webpage. The presentation will also include a discussion of cross-browser considerations, tips and tricks for leveraging .NET 3.5's anonymous types for serialization with JSON, and demonstrations for both the ExtJS and JQuery frameworks. |
| Speaker Bio: | Tom DuPont lives in Dallas, Texas, where he is the Vice President of CodeSmith Tools, LLC. Tom is a .NET developer, specializing in C#, ASP.NET MVC, and JavaScript. Tom has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. In his spare time he enjoys long rides across the country on his motorcycle. |
September 13, 2010
| Speaker: | Matt Hinze |
| Topic: | Inversion of Control |
| Summary: | Join Matt Hinze to talk about inversion of control, object-oriented principles, software architecture and how to develop quality software very quickly. In this intermediate to advanced level live coding session, Matt will present the basics of IOC in C# and dive deep into interesting usage patterns. |
| Speaker Bio: | Matt Hinze is a Principal Consultant at Headspring in Austin, Texas. As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, Matt has been successfully delivering technical courses to software developers since 2005. Meanwhile he is a full time developer and architect working in the trenches on major software projects. Passionate about software and programming, Matt is a leader in the developer community and presents technical talks to community groups and at conferences. Matt is an ASPInsider and Microsoft MVP for C#. Matt is an author of ASP.NET MVC2 In Action from Manning Press. |
August 9, 2010
| Speaker: | Dennis Bottjer |
| Topic: | Stop Drowning In Technical Debt! |
| Summary: | Technical Debt is a metaphor introduced by Ward Cunningham to describe the result of “Quick and Dirty” Software Design. Eventually, software projects will incur either accidental or strategic Technical Debt. What is the price of accumulating to much technical debt? How do we measure our Technical Debt? How do we pay down our Technical Debt? This session will provide the answers to these questions through a balance of presentation and real-world examples using various code analysis and metrics available within Visual Studio 2008. |
| Speaker Bio: | Dennis J. Bottjer is a solutions architect, consultant, teacher, blogger and speaker. As a three time Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET MVP, he specializes in SharePoint and Web Development. Dennis has over 12 years of industry experience with an emphasis on the Financial and Banking Sectors. As an associate for a Fortune 100 Financial Services Company, Dennis was a key contributor during the development of an underwriting system and fulfillment system. Dennis builds community by regularly participating in user groups and community events. He has been a user group president and is currently an INETA.org membership mentor. Dennis lives in Tulsa, OK with his wife Carrie, daughter Kate, son Will and two cats. |
July 12, 2010
| Speaker: | Todd Anglin |
| Topic: | HTML 5 |
| Summary: | The Rich Standard: Getting Familiar with HTML 5 HTML 5 may take some time to find full support in all major browsers, but you may be surprised to discover how many of HTML 5's features are available today! HTML 5 is the next generation standard for web applications, and it promises to give plug-in based RIAs a serious challenge. In this demo heavy session, you'll see HTML 5 in action and learn what you can do with today's browser support for the new standard. If you're building rich web applications and you've never touched HTML 5, this session is a must see. |
| Speaker Bio: | Todd Anglin is Chief Evangelist for Telerik, a provider of development tools and user interface components for .NET. Before joining Telerik, he worked for a large Fortune 200 financial services company IT shop where he learned the way of the “Enterprise” – big budgets, big projects, legacy systems, and incessant measurement. He now leverages this Enterprise experience to help Telerik make components that make the lives of all developers as easy as possible. Todd is an active author and speaker in the .NET community, focusing on web development technologies, a Microsoft MVP, founder and President of the North Houston .NET Users Group, and an O'Reilly author. |
May 10, 2010
| Speaker: | Dennis Palmer |
| Topic: | XML is Everywhere! |
| Summary: | XML, XHTML, XAML, app.config, web.config, Office Open XML, WiX, RSS, SOAP and sometimes REST. These days it's getting rare to find a software application that does not use some form of XML. It's everywhere! Remember ages ago (back in 2001) when you wrote your own xml parser? Hopefully you've been using XPath and the .NET classes inside System.Xml like XmlDocument and XmlNode for the last few years. But that's so 2003.
With the 3.5 release of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2008, there is a whole new way of working with XML. Whether you're creating, editing or consuming XML, you need to know LINQ to XML and the XML Literals within Visual Basic. But don't take my word for it! Kathleen Dollard on Hanselminutes show #152 said, "If you code in any language and do not understand XML Literals in VB9, you're selling yourself short. Go learn about it... It's a really powerful mechanism." We'll cover LINQ to XML, how to enable XML Intellisense, and using VB XML Literals for dynamically generating XML. Demos will include:
While this technology was introduced with Visual Studio 2008, the code and demos will be shown in Visual Studio 2010. |
| Speaker Bio: | Dennis cut his coding teeth by teaching himself BASIC on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A computer in the early 80's. His earliest memory of debugging a program was when he found that his mother had typed the letter O instead of the digit 0 in a hexadecimal string that defined the graphics of a program she copied from the listing in a magazine.
After discovering Delphi 1.0 during college, he went to work on a fax broadcast system and other telephony projects. In the late 90's he worked with a few record labels to put software on their music CD's. This included Windows screen savers of album art work and a music player that scrolled the lyrics of each song across the screen -- all written in Delphi. After that, he spent about 5 years doing web development in PHP (even working with a PHP MVC Framework) before discovering ASP.NET and C#. He remained somewhat proud of the fact that he had never worked with Visual Basic until starting his current job where it is the company's language of choice for developing Microsoft Office customizations for the legal industry. Even though he still gets lost when looking at VB6 code, with the advent of LINQ to XML and XML Literals in VB9, he is happy to be a VB.NET developer. In his spare time, he is learning Python, Silverlight, iPhone development and returning to C# for some ASP.NET MVC projects. Dennis was recognized as the 2nd runner up for the Inland Empire .NET User Group (http://iedotnetug.org) Most Valuable Member award for 2008-2009. He moved to Texas with his wife and young daughter in August 2009. |
| Resources: | Dennis' blog entry about the meeting |
April 12, 2010
| Speaker: | Shan Pesaru |
| Topic: | Usability-Driven Design for Developers |
| Summary: | You've probably heard phrases like "easy to use", "user friendly", and "intuitive". Usability is everywhere around us and the less you notice it the more effective it is. As developers, we are often forced to play the designer role in our projects whether we like it or not. This presentation will teach you how to design and develop effectively while keeping the user in mind. We'll cover everything from layout and navigation to good button design and interface feedback. You'll leave this presentation with a sense that even the simplest user enhancements can make an impact and positive impression on your supervisors, users, and customers. |
| Speaker Bio: | Shan Pesaru is CEO and lead engineer at Sharp Hue, Inc. of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Shan presents web-related small business topics for local Chamber of Commerce organizations and the Arkansas Small Business & Technology Development center. Sharp Hue specializes in helping small businesses with the visual appeal, usability, and search engine optimization of their web sites. Sharp Hue uses Microsoft ASP.NET, SQL Server, and Windows Server hosting technologies along with a unique business process for design, programming, and search engine optimization. The unique process lends to professional and user-friendly web sites that are affordable for small business clients. |
March 8, 2010
| Speaker: | Brian Sullivan |
| Topic: | Introduction to Object-Relational Mapping with NHibernate |
| Summary: | Object-Relational Mappers (ORMs) have started to make their way into mainstream .NET development with the advent of LINQ-to-SQL and the Entity Framework from Microsoft. Before that, though, there was NHibernate. Based on the Java Hibernate project, NHibernate is one of the most mature .NET ORMs in the marketplace. The Fluent NHibernate project builds on this to make NHibernate a breeze to configure. In this presentation, Brian will discuss the pros and cons of ORMs in general, and demonstrate how NHibernate can take the pain out of writing your persistence layer. |
| Speaker Bio: | Brian Sullivan is a developer analyst for Praeses, LLC in Shreveport, LA. He has been working with Microsoft technologies for about 5 years, and is interested in increasing the exposure of agile techniques and methodologies in the Microsoft developer community. He is a graduate of Harding University in Searcy, AR. |
January 11, 2010
| Speaker: | Chris Koenig |
| Topic: | ugPDC: Best of PDC Tour |
| Summary: | Join Developer Evangelist Chris Koenig for a whirlwind tour of the major announcements from PDC '09. We'll look at the changes and improvements to Windows Azure, new features introduced in Silverlight 4.0, and Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0. |
| Speaker Bio: | Chris Koenig is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas, TX. Prior to joining Microsoft, Chris worked as a Senior Architect on the Architecture Strategy Team for The Capital Group in San Antonio, and as an Architect, Developer and Development Team Lead for the global solution provider Avanade. As a consultant, Chris worked with a variety of clients from many vertical markets, ISVs and other solution providers on enterprise-class Windows and web-based applications. Today, Chris focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. Chris is a devoted husband and father of four awesome children who keep him very busy. In his spare time, Chris serves as Scoutmaster for his oldest son's Troop, and Committee Chair for his youngest sons' Pack. Chris also enjoys traveling, cooking, camping and playing guitar. You can contact Chris through his blog at http://chriskoenig.net/, via email at chris.koenig@microsoft.com, or via Windows Live Messenger at chris@koenigweb.com. |
November 9, 2009
| Speaker: | Michael Johnson |
| Topic: | ASP.NET MVC from Basics to Tip and Tricks |
| Summary: | ASP.NET MVC is a new framework for developing website applications utilizing the model-view-controller pattern. How does it compare to ASP.NET WebForms? There is nothing wrong with ASP.NET WebForms, but ASP.NET MVC allows for clean lightweight code while giving you more control. In this session we will cover what I learned developing a site for Wolff Wire Office Organizers using ASP.NET MVC. |
| Speaker Bio: | Michael Johnson is a software developer at SSW Holding Company, Inc. in Fort Smith, AR. Michael has over 10 years of experience developing desktop applications, websites, and services using Microsoft technologies. Michael is also involved in the .NET community and is part of the Fort Smith .NET User Group leadership. You can follow Michael on his blog http://www.michaelcodes.net or his tweets at http://twitter.com/michael_johnson. |
| Resources: | Michael Johnson's Blog Entry |
October 12, 2009
| Speaker: | Jimmy Bogard |
| Topic: | Testing the Last Mile with UI Testing |
| Summary: | The ASP.NET MVC framework greatly improved the web testability story in .NET, allowing for testing of the various components of MVC including controllers, filters, binders and more. But testing these components in isolation still doesn't prove that your site works as a whole. Action methods tested by themselves don't prove that the view shown has the correct information on it, or that links work as expected. For these types of tests, an end-to-end, browser-based test is needed. But just as it is difficult to test APIs not designed for testability, views not designed for testability can lead to brittle, difficult to understand tests. In this session, we'll look at the popular UI testing frameworks, and pros and cons of each. We'll also look at design for UI testability in our MVC application, and how we can greatly ease our testing burden with design techniques in our views. Finally, we'll look at UI test design as a whole, and examine how we can develop a complete UI testing strategy that eliminates the difficulty in testing the last mile. |
| Speaker Bio: | Jimmy Bogard is a principal consultant at Headspring Systems. He is an agile software developer with six years of professional development experience. He has delivered solutions from conception to production for many clients. The solutions delivered by Jimmy range from shrink-wrapped products to enterprise e-commerce applications for Fortune 100 customers. He is also a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) and is an active member in the .NET community, leading open-source projects, giving technical presentations and facilitating technical book clubs. Currently, Jimmy is the lead developer on the NBehave project, a Behaviour-Driven Development framework for .NET, AutoMapper, a convention-based object-to-object mapper and the facilitator of the Austin Domain-Driven Design Book Club. Jimmy is a member of the ASPInsiders group, and received the "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) award for ASP.NET in 2009. |