Meeting Archive
Past meetings at North Houston DNUG
- August 2010: Silverlight PivotViewer
Speaker: Tony Champion
Session Description: The Silverlight PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and valuable. PivotViewer lets us present thousands of things at once and visualize them in a way that exposes value from the group.
Speaker Bio: Tony Champion is the principal solution consultant for CDS, a software solution company and member of the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Program. Tony has been developing in Microsoft technologies since 1996 and has experience in web applications, desktop applications, graphics, and real-time software. He is currently focused on providing professional solutions using the latest technologies, including Silverlight, WPF, SharePoint, AJAX, and WCF.
- July 2010: Special Mini Presentations
Speaker: [To Be Determined]
Session Description: This month we're ditching our normal presentation format. Instead, we'll offer a set of mini-presentations (10-20 minutes each) from a number of different speakers. Topics will include an introduction to F# and an overview of DDD (Domain Driven Design).
Speaker Bio: Speaker for this meeting is not yet finalized. Details coming soon.
- June 2010: Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform
Speaker: Phil Pennington
Session Description: We start with an introduction to new operating system technologies for many-core scale computing and proceed with illustrative examples of parallel work-item partitioning, scheduling, and collation. Featured technologies and tools include Windows 7 (x64), Visual Studio 2010, the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Parallel Extensions, the C++ Concurrency Runtime, the Parallel Debugger, and the Concurrency Analyzer.
Speaker Bio: Phil is a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft focusing on both Windows Server and Technical Computing technologies. This user-group presentation is a preview of material Phil will present in July as a guest speaker at the University of Illinois Parallel Computing Research Center summer-school. More information about Phil can be found at the following link: http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserverexperts/archive/2010/01/08/about-phil-pennington.aspx
- May 2010: Refactoring, Patterns, new language features, code quality, and more!
Speaker: Claudio Lassala
Session Description: Command design pattern, Lambda Expressions, Extension Methods, fluent interfaces, refactoring, test-driven development, writing elegant code, and more. This session will cover a little bit of many things learned from projects I've been working on. We expect every attendee to learn a few tricks that can be applied immediately, and also to feel encouraged to go out and research more on whatever area appeals the most.
Speaker Bio: Claudio Lassala is a Senior Developer at EPS Software Corp. He haspresented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil andvarious other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and usergroups across North America and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of theMicrosoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C#ever since), an INETA speaker, and also holds the MCSD for .NETcertification. He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDNBrazil Magazine, CoDe Magazine, UTMag, Developers Magazine, and FoxProAdvisor.Claudio blogs at http://claudiolassala.spaces.live.com, and can befollowed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ClaudioLassala. More detailedinformation regarding his presentations and articles can be found in his MVPhttps://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=EC6B1E0B-8EFC-4530-97B0-55BD924E26D0
- April 2010: High Speed, Low Drag: Driving Application Quality with Minimal Friction
Speaker: David Williamson
Session Description: Software teams are continually under pressure to do more in less time, to build higher quality and ever more complex applications on ever increasing ship cadences. In this session we will use Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle tools to demonstrate how to deliver bugs that get fixed first time, every time; how to prevent regression with Coded UI Tests and Automation for Navigation; how to streamline build and application deployment using Lab Management and virtual environments; and how to identify the source and impact of changes even when developers “forget” to mention them.
Speaker Bio: David R. Williamson is PM on the Microsoft Visual Studio Testing Team
- March 2010: Special Forum - the .NET Job Market
Speaker: Open Forum
Session Description: Join us for a special open forum to discuss the state of the .NET Job Market. We'll look at it from both the perspective of employers - how to find, evaluate and interview candidates - as well as from the job seeker's POV - how to find jobs and ace evaluations and interviews.
Speaker Bio:
- February 2010: Dot Net Collections: Tips and Tricks
Speaker: Mark Gordon
Session Description: If you tend to always use List<Whatever> for your collections and nothing else, then this talk may be for you. We will cover design and performance considerations when using collections and review the classes that support collections in .NET. While LINQ is not the primary focus of this discussion, we will cover the design patterns of LINQ that you can use in your code.
Speaker Bio: Mark has been leading software teams at Hewlett-Packard for 15 years, using .NET for 7 years. While at HP, he has primarily worked on customer support applications: client and server. If you have ever used Windows Help and Support on a HP computer, you may have used one of his applications.
- January 2010: Visual Studio Tips and Tricks
Speaker: Zain Naboulsi
Session Description: Most of us use Visual Studio but do we really know how to USE it? Come to this session with Zain Naboulsi as we look at the top tips and tricks that can jet propel your use of your IDE. Marvel at simple editor features that you never think about all the way to arcane registry hacks that you can use to improve your programming experience.
Speaker Bio: For over 15 years Zain has been teaching and consulting on the latest Microsoft technologies. He’s been a Consultant and Microsoft Certified Trainer since 1995. He is the current purveyor of Visual Studio Tips and Tricks as well as the creator of Online Community Evangelism; which is an effort to build communities in virtual places like LinkedIn, Facebook, and OpenSim. He is not only a proponent of the community aspect of online environments but also is a supporter of the myriad business applications that these new mediums offer.Zain’s efforts have been featured by eWeek, Redmond Developer News, and many others. He has been interviewed by Forrester Research, ThinkBalm, UgoTrade, Gartner, and the Science Channel for his work with online communities. He is a frequent speaker at events in LinkedIn, Facebook, ReactionGrid, and other online venues. Zain also lectures world-wide on a variety of topics.
- December 2009: iPhone Apps using .NET and MonoTouch
Speaker: Jason Awbrey
Session Description: An introduction to using Novell's MonoTouch framework to write iPhone applications using .NET and C#.
Speaker Bio:
- November 2009: Dependency Inversion Principle
Speaker: Harry Nystrom
Session Description: In this talk Harry will discuss the Dependency Inversion Principle, an extremely important element of any application with any degree of complexity, where high cohesion and loose coupling of components is vital. He will define the principle and explain how it is implemented. He will then present two illustrative examples. The first will show how it may be implemented when using Microsoft’s new Prism framework. The second will show how to go about implementing it in a legacy application.
Speaker Bio: Harry Nystrom has held many positions, both technical and managerial, over his 35-plus years in the IT industry. In 1996 he began his own consulting/contracting business, and has been specializing in Microsoft .NET application design and development for the last seven years. He holds the MCSD .NET certification, and is the leader of the Houston Advanced C# Special Interest Group, which meets monthly at the Houston Microsoft sales office.
- October 2009: PLINQO – Supercharged LINQ to SQL
Speaker: Shannon Davidson Tom Dupont
Session Description: 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!
Speaker Bio: Shannon Davidson lives in Grapevine, TX and has a bachelor's degree in Math and Computer Science from East Central Oklahoma University. Shannon is currently the General Manager for CodeSmith Tools and has over ten years of development experience that includes ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server and Smalltalk. Before CodeSmith, Shannon spent 5 years in the automotive industry at Reynolds Web Solutions/Third Coast Media working on CRM and websites and 4 years in the insurance industry at Cybertek working on GUI front-ends sitting on top of mainframes. In his spare time, he enjoys long walks on the beach while sipping a swiss mocha. Tom DuPont lives in the Dallas, Texas, where he is a Software Development Engineer at CodeSmith Tools, LLC. Tom is a .Net developer, specializing in C# and ASP.Net MVC; he is also well versed in Javascript and the ExtJS framework. Tom has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. While Tom doesn't mind long walks on the beach, he much prefers long rides across the country on his motorcycle.
- September 2009: Overview of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight
Speaker: Claudio Lassala
Session Description: This presentation covers an overview of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (codename Prism), its architecture and Composite Application Library (CAL), and how applications are be built on top of it. If you build any application that goes beyond "Hello World", it's likely that you create composite applications. Prism allows for applications to be built with proper separation of concerns, promoting loose coupling, extensibility, and testability. It also helps with WPF's goals of allowing developers and designers to collaborate more easily on the same project. The presentation also cover some dependency injection and Model-View-ViewModel patterns.
Speaker Bio: Claudio Lassala is a Senior Developer at EPS Software Corp. He haspresented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil andvarious other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and usergroups across North America and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of theMicrosoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C#ever since), an INETA speaker, and also holds the MCSD for .NETcertification. He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDNBrazil Magazine, CoDe Magazine, UTMag, Developers Magazine, and FoxProAdvisor.Claudio blogs at http://claudiolassala.spaces.live.com, and can befollowed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ClaudioLassala. More detailedinformation regarding his presentations and articles can be found in his MVPhttps://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=EC6B1E0B-8EFC-4530-97B0-55BD924E26D0
- August 2009: The Ultimate .NET Q & A
Speaker: Todd Anglin
Session Description: Over the last few years, .NET developers have been introduced to many new technologies from Microsoft- Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, LINQ, LinqToSQL, WPF, XAML, Azure, RIA Services, Prism and on the list goes. While we all as developers enjoy seeing technology improve, sometimes it can be hard to see the big picture and understand how best to use everything that's new- or know enough to avoid using technologies that aren't quite ready for prime-time.In this session, Telerik Chief Evangelist and Microsoft MVP Todd Anglin will be you guide to understanding how all of these technologies fit in the big picture. This unconventional session format will be 1 part demo, 3 parts Q & A, so bring your burning .NET questions and prepare to finally make sense of the complete .NET developer technology scene!
Speaker Bio: Todd Anglin is an active .NET community member, President of the North Houston .NET User Group, an O’Reilly author, Microsoft MVP and Telerik's Chief Evangelist. At Telerik, Todd is responsible for educating Telerik's global community of developers and helping ensure Telerik's products serve the needs of .NET developers around the world. In the general .NET community, Todd is an active author and speaker, focusing primarily on ASP.NET and Silverlight. You can find him online at http://telerikwatch.com.
- July 2009: Tools, Developer's Best Friend
Speaker: Mohammad Azam
Session Description: In this presentation Mohammad Azam will take a look at few of the useful tools for .NET developers. He will also discuss some of the custom tools that he has created which have helped him in development. Some of these tools include Reflector, ReSharper, JetBrains Profiler, TestDriven.NET, SessionCacheManager, ImageCombiner, ViewStateMover, ELMAH, FireBug etc. Don't forget to bring hammers and screw drivers!
Speaker Bio: Mohammad Azam works as a senior consultant at Sogeti. He is the founder of the knowledge based website, HighOnCoding. The website contains over 300 articles, 50+ videos and several podcasts. Few months ago Mohammad Azam also launched www.ScreenCastADay.com, a website which hosts screencasts related to the .NET technology.Mohammad Azam is also a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP.Mohammad Azam also contribute to the AspAlliance website. The contributions are in the form of videos and articles. You can check out all the videos at www.aspalliance.com/videos.Mohammad Azam blogs at www.azamsharp.com.
- June 2009: Business Logic and Data Separation in WPF / Silverlight
Speaker: Jared Bienz
Session Description: Starting with a short history on familiar patterns like MVC and MVP, we’ll quickly move on to a discussion of Model-View-ViewModel (M-V-VM). This chalk talk will cover the use of WPF / Silverlight features like data binding, validation and commands to isolate business logic from UI design. We’ll wrap up with a short demonstration of these patterns applied.
Speaker Bio: Jared Bienz is an ISV Architect Advisor with Microsoft, which means he helps companies who write software understand and leverage Microsoft technologies. Jared has been a professional in the software industry since 1995. He’s worked on a wide range of technologies including IP Telephony, Mobile, Web, Composite and Rich Clients. He’s particularly interested in client and UX technologies like WCF, XNA, WPF and Silverlight.
- May 2009: Getting Started with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
Speaker: Rob Vettor
Session Description: While most enterprise applications are object-oriented, the data upon which they depend is not. Often, binding these two platforms together can result in significant amounts of lost productivity and a less than optimal solution. Come see how you can resolve this recurring theme by leveraging the ADO.NET Entity Framework as your Data Access Layer. In this session, we’ll… Explore the Entity Framework and its related components Design an Entity Data Model using the designer tools Walk through a variety of examples of how to interact with the model Demonstrate advanced mapping scenarios Compare Entity Framework to LINQ-to-SQL You’ll walk-away with a clear understanding of how the Entity Framework can greatly simplify your DAL and enable you to program against a conceptual model of your data, versus the actual data store itself.
Speaker Bio: Rob Vettor is a Microsoft .NET Architect/Senior Solution Developer, currently with Jack Henry and Associates. Rob, a C# MVP, has built systems for a number of corporations, including Avanade, Raytheon and American Express. Rob, an avid Toastmaster founded the Dallas .NET Architecture User Group (www.dotnetarch.com) and is a member of the Microsoft South Region Developer Guidance Council. Rob lives in Dallas, TX, with his wife, twin sons, three dogs and rooms full of NET computer books. You can contact Rob at robvettor@hotmail.com.
- April 2009: Developing RIA Applications in Silverlight 3
Speaker: Tony Champion
Session Description: With each new version of Silverlight, Microsoft has continued to improve the features and toolset available for building rich internet applications (RIA). Silverlight 3 has solved many of the issues facing RIA developers in Silverlight 2; including navigation, data forms, validation, and data services. We will walk thru developing a data centric application in Silverlight 3 and discuss the role of Silverlight in future application development.
Speaker Bio: Tony Champion is the principal solution consultant for CDS, a software solution company and member of the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Program. Tony has been developing in Microsoft technologies since 1996 and has experience in web applications, desktop applications, graphics, and real-time software. He is currently focused on providing professional solutions using the latest technologies, including Silverlight, WPF, SharePoint, AJAX, and WCF.
- January 2009: Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Service
Speaker: J Sawyer
Session Description: In this session we will take a tour of the capabilities of the Microsoft cloud platform by building and running a simple service using the platform SDK. The sample service highlights some of the features of the platform including service management, storage, and an integrated developer experience. This is a demo-heavy session.
Speaker Bio: J Sawyer is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelist team, primarily covering south Texas and Louisiana. He was born and raised in a suburb of Baltimore, MD and discovered a passion for computing and developing software while working his way through college as an English Lit major with a Philosophy minor. Starting his career as an instructor, he earned his MCP and MCSD in 1996, relocating to Houston in 1997 and joined DRT Systems as a consultant. Since he's been in Houston, J has worked on many projects, including eCommerce Web applications, trading applications, exploration and production applications for energy and partner extranets. He was also named MSDN Regional Director for Houston in 1999. Joining Microsoft in 2000 as a consultant, he moved to Evangelism in 2002 where he has been active in bringing the joy that is .NET to developers across the South Central District. When not spreading the word about .NET, J enjoys relaxing with family and can often be found riding his Ninja around Houston and the surrounding areas.