Tuesday, May 08, 2007
The Ann Arbor .Net Developers user group meeting is quickly coming upon us. This months speaker is Keith Elder and the topic is Structure and Guidance for Organizing Application within Visual Studio. Heres an abstract:
Visual Studio is an outstanding tool when it comes to building applications on the .Net Framework. It can be confusing for users when trying to initialize a new software deliverable though. For example, how do you name your projects? Where do you put third party assemblies so they can be re-used? How do you set things up for an n-tier architecture? And the list goes on. I've given various talks throughout the US and it never fails that I end up in a conversation with multiple people on what are the best ways to organize projects within Visual Studio. This session should answer these questions and provide some proven guidance that works. In this session we'll cover some best practices on how to organize your projects and solutions. We'll also look at some tricks and guidance on how to map your folder structure to your namespaces. During the session we are going to build a new application from scratch and cover how to initially incorporate an n-tier design when initializing your project. Even if you are an experienced .Net developer this is one session you will not want to miss!
Hope to see you there.
Time: 6p - 8:30p
Place:
S.P.A.R.K Center
(Ann Arbor I.T. Zone)
330 E Liberty St
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Monday, May 07, 2007
The Day of .Net was great! We had a great turnout at about 205 people according to Jason Follas. What a turnout. Everyone I have talked to has said it was a great event and can't wait for next year.
I would like to give props to the following organizers for their hard work in putting this all together:
John Hopkins (president of GANG): overall chairman of DoDN/AA 2007
Jason Follas (president of NWNUG): speaker/session coordinator
Darrell Hawley (program chair of Ann Arbor .Net Developers): registration coordinator
David Baldwin (AADND webmaster): sponsorship/public relations
Scott Zischerk (AADND): the DoDN webmaster (and T-Shirt designer)
Dave Redding (vice president of Ann Arbor .Net Developers): sponsorship
Chris Kotsis (secretary of GANG): sponsorship
Along with some volunteers:
Dan Hounshell, Telligent
David Patow, Compuware
And especially our sponsors and speakers to which the conference would not be possible.
I would also like to single out Darrell Hawley again for bringing me along for the ride.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Last night upon arriving at the usual meeting place for the user group meeting after walking in the pouring rain. I was informed that it had been moved down the street at the cottage inn restaurant, so out I went again into the rain. When I got there I found out that our regular meeting place had been double booked and the group leaders found out just hours before the meeting. Yet they still pulled it off!! I have to give kudos to the Ann Arbor .Net Developers board for still having the meeting. Thanks guys.
The speaker was Richard Hale Shaw and the topic was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). The session was very informative, but a bit light on code.
Next months meeting is going to be on Structure and Guidance for Organizing Applications within Visual Studio by Keith Elder. Hope to see you there.
Don't forget about Day of .Net in Ann Arbor on May 5. You can register at: http://www.dayofdotnet.org/Registration.aspx.
Scott Zischerk
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
The Ann Arbor .Net Developers website got a facelift today, thanks to Dave Baldwin the Ann Arbor .Net Developers webmaster. Check it out at: http://www.aadnd.org
Great Job Dave.
And don't forget to come to our next meeting on April 11 @ 6:00p. Richard Hale Shaw will be there with a look into the Windows Communication Foundation. It's sure to be a good time. And after the meeting maybe we'll have some cocktails and networking at a local watering hole. For more info: http://www.aadnd.org
-Scott Zischerk
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Friday, March 23, 2007
This just in! The Day of .Net in Ann Arbor developer conference has just posted a sneak preview of some of the sessions. From starter tutorials to .Net 3.0 there's a little for everyone. Check it out at: http://www.dayofdotnet.org/Sessions.aspx. You can register for the conference at http://www.dayofdotnet.org/Registration.aspx. And after you register, be sure to post your badge on your blog or website. You can get a badge here: http://www.dayofdotnet.org/badges.aspx. See you there!
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Thursday, March 08, 2007
The date for the Day of .Net in Ann Arbor has been chosen, it's May 5, 2007. This free event for developers in Southeast Michigan will be held at Washtenaw Community College. More details to follow or see the Day of .Net website for the latest info. Speaking of the website, I'm taking care of it so check it out and let me know what you think.
-Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers member
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
I haven't written in a while, I was on vacation from 2/14 - 2/25. I had a great time! Went to my uncle's cabin in Brevort, Mi with a bunch of guys. The trip up really sucked. I was stuck in a traffic jam for an hour and a half while they closed the expressway to clean up an accident. After I got there and I relaxed for a bit I started having a good time. I did almost 400 miles on my new snowmobile. Then on 2/18 my wife and kids picked me up and we headed farther north to visit my in-laws in Houghton, Mi. While up there I did another 180 miles with my sled. The snow was about 3 feet deep and I got stuck pretty good once, but if your not getting stuck your just riding trails.
On the way home I had 3 flat tires on the trailer (the trailer only has 2 tires and 1 spare) I was so mad. I had the first blowout and I changed the tire, then the second blowout happen about 10 miles later, after the second blowout I went looking for a tire place at 5:30pm, most were closed, but I found a Walmart and they replaced the tire. I got back to the trailer that I left at the side of the expressway and changed the tire. I made it about 10 more miles when the tire I just replaced went again! Turns out they gave me a tire rated for 760lbs. and I had 2 550+lbs. snowmobiles on the trailer. At this point it was after 7:00pm and the Walmart auto department was closed and I had 3 kids and a wife just wanting to be home (did I mention this all happened at hour 8 of a 10 hour trip?). From this point we were stuck, so I called my Dad and bother-in-law and they jumped in the truck and started up to get us. We started heading home again and left the trailer on the side of the road. We met my Dad and brother-in-law halfway and I switched cars and sent the rest of my family home and went to get the trailer. From there everything went pretty smooth, my Dad had brought up two spare tires with him so when we got to the trailer we changed the tire and headed home again (without any further problems).
So that was my adventure on vacation, all in all it was a relaxing time with the exception of a few moments and I sure was great to rack up almost 600 miles on my new sled!
Scott
Friday, February 09, 2007
I was reading Scott Hanselman's blog and he was pretty geeked about this video so I checked it out. It was very interesting and very fast, furious and intense. I liked the way it presented the past worked up to the present and showed the advantages of separating content from format. Check it out here: Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
Scott Zischerk
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
I Just wanted to remind everyone about the Ann Arbor .Net Developers meeting this coming Wednesday. It's on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is presented by Microsoft Developer Evangalists Jennifer Marsman and Drew Robbins.
During the abstract session Jennifer Marsman will speak on 3D Graphics in the Windows Presentation Foundation
The Windows Presentation Foundation is Microsoft’s unified presentation platform for Windows. WPF provides an integrated set of APIs allowing the developer to create 2D and 3D content with ease. Developers and designers can construct scalable, high-quality content in both two and three dimensions using WPF’s advanced vector-based rendering system. In this session, we will discuss how to create 3D graphics in WPF
During the main session Drew Robbins will speak on 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
Scott Zischerk
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Thursday, January 25, 2007
I've been reading about the new extension methods in VB 9.0. They look to be extremly useful for placing custom functionality on other peoples classes, even sealed classes. Read more about them here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/pages/articles-about-extension-methods.aspx
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Got an airzooka for christmas, my wife ordered it from ZeroToys. http://www.zerotoys.com/newsite/airzooka.htm This thing is awesome, It shoots a ball of air 25-30 feet across the room. I brought it to Christmas dinner with my family, which consisted of about 25 people. We had a blast waiting for someone that was not paying attention and poof! Hit them with a big ball of air! I only wish I would have had about 10 of these, then we could have had a war on our hands. The really great thing about the Airzooka is it takes no batteries and you don't have to reload it. I highly recommend it! Also, I highly recommend ZeroToys, my wife ordered it on Tuesday and it arrived on Thursday. Talk to you after the New Year.
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
I can't believe it took this long. The power went out at my house on Monday 1/15 at 9:30am and finally came back on today 1/17 at 3:30pm. My family and me were living by generator, no washing clothes, doing dishes, hmm wait a minute, that doesn't sound that bad. The nights were the worst, last night it got down to 5ºF, a bit chilly to say the least. Went to bed while the generator was still running, woke up about 4:30am with the inside of the house at 60º. Luckily we bundled our three boys up with extra clothes and blankets.
On a better note, I leaving for CodeMash today. I hope it's as good as I've made it up to be in my head.
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Saturday, January 20, 2007
The final day at Codemash was one to remember. The day started off with a keynote from Scott Guthrie on LINQ. A great intro on the power of LINQ, and how it can be used as an OR mapper. Next was a session on letting NHibernate be your data layer, which, after the keynote on LINQ, I wonder if it is necessary to use NHibernate, seems to me that they do similar jobs, but I could be way off base also. The following session I sat in on was about a product called Selenium. It was a really cool and very powerful website testing tool. You can record your inputs while moving through a website (with a firefox plug in) then edit and save it as a test. It looks easy to install and will run on any web server and most browsers because it is written in javascript. A product that must be checked out. After that I was invited to sit in on a small group private lunch with Scott Guthrie, that was awesome, we got to ask him questions and tell him about the pain points we are having with the all the new technologies from Microsoft that are coming fast and furious. After lunch I listened to a session on continuous integration, it's not something the company I work for is looking to implement, but we could definitely could use some of the tools presented. The last session I attended at Codemash was a more in depth look at LINQ, it had peaked my interest at the keynote, so I had to learn more about it. Extremely powerful, unfortunately it doesn't work on any project below 2.0, so it's great for the future, but as for now I will have to access data the way I have been doing it. At the Codemash closing, they had a ton of swag, everyone got a book, I got the Java 6 sdk book, I'm don't see how I'm going to use it, but I'll at least peruse it. They gave away 2 xbox 360's a WII, some iPods, and some USB sticks, I, unfortunately, didn't win any of them, but I'm still happy with the book. At the end, Josh Holmes and Brian Prince shaved their heads in response to the 500+ blog posts about Codemash!
All in all, I had a great time at the conference, I met a ton of people that I wouldn't have got a chance to meet at a .Net conference. The biases between the languages seemed to take a back seat while developers took the time to embrace the differences in the languages and admit that there are simply tasks that a specific language is better at accomplishing. I can't wait for Codemash 2008! Thank you to all the sponsors and the volunteers that made this possible.
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Friday, January 19, 2007
Another great day at CodeMash! The morning keynote was awesome, I really like Neal Ford's presenting style, I just get the feeling he's a real straight shooter and he always let's you know exactly what he's thinking. Listened to an interesting session on rapid web development in TurboGears, looks like I need to learn Python now so I can explore TurboGears a little further. The second session I sat in on was 'the end of n-tier' which was basically a parallel processing, grid computing, cache product to place the different tiers in. The lunch keynote was a little off the wall yet still intriging Bruce Eckel was attempting to expamd our minds and they way we think about programming. After lunch I sat in on a session called 'Beyond TDD' which I thought was going to be about taking TDD to the next level, but was actually just contemplating the side effects of TDD (Trust, Documentation, etc...) still good, just not what I was expecting. My last session of the day was on a source control product called Subversion, sounds like something I need to check into further, but I don't know if I can get my head around not checking out exclusively. Dinner was awesome, good food, good conversation, I ate with Dave Pease, Darrel Hawley, and I met two java programmers from Columbus, Jonathan and Bryan, Jonathan was trying to explain dependency injection to us, and when I say trying I mean I still don't get it. Looking forward to tomorrow, Scott Guthrie is going to be here talking about LINQ.
Scott
Ann Arbor .Net Developers Member
Got here yesterday with my colleage Dave Pease checked in to the Kalahari Resort, this place is pretty great! A large indoor waterpark, gameroom, and putt-putt. But what was even better was the panel of speakers they had there. Some of the best and brightest in PHP, Ruby, C#, Python, Java and Flex. What was so great was how civil it was, no language zealots, no arguments, there were a few digs, but the entire panel was very informed and accepting of different languages and where each had it's good points and bad. Looking forward to tomorrow.
Scott
AADND Member
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