Woody and Llewellyn are two of the best presenters I have seen. Hands down. They are funny, intelligent, bright, and can really boil down a difficult subject into it’s barest essentials , making it easier to grok. On Tuesday December 13, 2011, Woody and Llewellyn presented “Testing Microsoft Technologies” to the user group.

Unit testing has become a industry wide best practice. But many Microsoft technologies propose quite a challenge when testing attempting to unit test them. In this talk, Llewellyn will go through the techniques he has personally developed to unit test the following Microsoft API’s:

· Entity Framework
· Datasets
· RDLC Reports
· Asp.net
· WinForms
· WPF

Attendance: 30

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

Mike Roth is a long time friend and uber-software architect. On Tuesday November 8, he presented to the group, “Tales from the Trenches: Real World Use of MVC and EF”. In this session we will build parts of a start up that was built this month! In this talk we will focus on how to get your business from nil to something using MVC and EF. We will talk about hurdles and technology and appropriate use of things that are seldom covered in other MVC talks. We will be focusing on Model Binding, Filters, PGR (Post Get Request) method as well as diving deep in to unique solutions to common problems as Mike goes over the basis that he used for his start up.

Attendance: 22

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

On Tuesday Octover 11, 2011, my friend and fellow MVP, Craig Bernston talked about “Software Gardening” with the IEDOTNETUG.

Creating great software is not like construction. It's more like gardening. In this session you will learn about important software gardening concepts such as soil, water, seeds, light, pruning, insecticide, weeding, and more. Along the way you'll see processes, concepts, tools, and techniques that you can use in your software gardening project. By applying the ideas presented in this session, your software will be lush, green, and vibrant.

This presentation really opened the doors to a great new way to develop software.

Attendance: 25

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 I presented to the User Group with a title of “A real world web app with ASP.NET MVC”. MVC is the latest web development technology from Microsoft and requires a bit of a reset from what you know about web forms development. There are lots of examples for building MVC apps available, but not many on "real world" applications. In this presentation we will dig deep into the inner workings of an MVC web site and cover Authentication, Models, View Models, Database operations with Entity Framework, how to do file uploads with MVC, and some groovy stuff with jQuery. All the pieces needed to build a real world application.

I thought the presentation went really well.

Attendance: 28

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

On Tuesday August 14, 2011, my good friend and fellow MVP, Bill Sheldon presented on “Building Business Applications with LightSwitch” to the IEDOTNETUG.

Need a new distributed business application? Concerned that creating a new rich application requires learning more than one new technology? WCF, Silverlight (XAML) and Entity Framework – the Microsoft business application stack consists of a series of technologies that didn’t exist 3 years ago. Have you mastered all of them? If not perhaps LightSwitch is for you. Microsoft has announced that this tool will be or was (depending on when you are reading this) released on July 26th. This session will show you how LightSwitch provides you with an abstraction above low level technologies like WCF, EntityFramework and XAML. LightSwitch allows you to build and customize new applications which use these technologies. Instead of spending your time in the weeds trying to figure out how to set up your WCF service. Learn how you can leverage LightSwitch to generate boilerplate code while you focus on the business requirements.<br />Internationalization<br />This session will take you through some of the built in features of Visual Studio 2010 for managing multiple languages and cultures. The session looks to help explain the difference in how the operating system treats the language and culture settings and demonstrates many of the built in features for supporting multiple languages and cultures when using .NET

Attendance: 27

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

On Tuesday June 14, 2011, my good friend and fellow MVP, Mike Vincent presented on “The Role of the Software Architect: Technology, Process and People” to the IEDOTNETUG.

What does the role of the Software Architect really imply? Why do organizations need architects? That’s what this session is all about.  It’s a lot more than UML diagrams. Architecture is technology, it’s user experience, it’s communication, it’s bridging between a business vision and implementation of a system. Architecture is about making new and existing systems work well together, to be extensible, to be maintainable. Architecture is process, it’s agile, it’s negotiation and bargaining, it’s about bringing people together and facilitating the implementation of systems that work well, it’s about delivering business value.

Attendance: 25

Raffle Prizes: 32

-James

In this session we will focus on topics that are specific to this platform and learn the foundational concepts behind Windows Phone 7 so you can start all your apps using the same base code. We will build on top of the knowledge you already possess to address concepts and tips to make your development faster.  We will go through the steps of making an application touching on phone specific concepts such as maintaining your data alive, managed navigation, tomb stoning your application and isolated storage. After this session, you will feel comfortable to create your own ideas into applications and publish them into the marketplace; you will realize how fast and simple you can make an app that can be useful to others and maybe earn some extra money.

Oscar is a really good presenter and the session was well received.

Attendance: 30

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

My good friend, and IEDOTNETUG Member Dustin Davis, came to present to the group with a talk titled, “Aspect Oriented Programming”. AOP allows you to write code that handle cross-cutting concerns, and while at the beginning, it seemed more “black boxish” than it should, by the end of the presentation, everyone in the audience was getting the hang of it.

Dustin is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and has been developing on the Microsoft stack exclusively since 2005. Dustin spends his days as a lead developer, his nights as a consultant and independent contractor.

Attendance: 27

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

Craig Shoemaker from Infragistics came to present “ HTML5 for Today and Tomorrow to the IEDOTNETUG on Tuesday February 8, 2011. Craig is a really great speaker and showed the group all the different, and new, tags available to developers when building HTML5 apps.

Craig Shoemaker is a software developer, podcaster, blogger and New-Media Evangelist for Infragistics.

Attendance: 20

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James

Jeremy Clark from BiTKOO came to present, “Learn to Love Lambdas” to the IEDOTNETUG on Tuesday January 11, 2011. It was a great presentation and really opened the doors on learning how lambdas work and how to best use them.

Jeremy works for BiTKOO, a company specializing in Identity and Access Management. After hours, he puts together demos and technical articles for JeremyBytes.com, a website focusing on .NET technologies.

Attendance: 25

Raffle Prizes: 30

-James