Jim O'Neil's Blog : User Group

Thank You Providence

joneil — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:02:45 GMT

I’m stealing a line from Alanis Morissette to offer my (and Chris’) appreciation for the turn out at our first-ever Northeast Roadshow to be held in the Ocean State. If there were any doubt this is the ‘winter’ edition of our series, they melted (ahem) away on Wednesday as 30+ folks braved the winter storm to come to our event at the Hotel Providence.

If you signed up for the event, but couldn’t get past your driveway, don’t worry, our content and demos are currently on line at http://tinyurl.com/nerdshow1109. We have one more stop on this tour on Tuesday (in Augusta, Maine), and then we’ll put the finishing touches on the demos, etc., and upload them up on our Code Gallery site (where you can also find materials from past roadshows).

By the way, you don’t have to wait for us to come to you for great content and networking with the local technical community. Here are some links to user groups and other regularly occurring technical events in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island .NET User Group (Bristol)
Southern New England SQL Server User Group (Warwick)
Southern New England Network Users Group (Warwick)
Providence PHP Meetup (Providence)
Providence Web Developer Lunch Hour Meetup (Providence)
Providence Geeks (Providence)

Also, check out the community calendars below for additional events in Rhode Island:

RI Nexus

Tech Collective

Parallel Programming For Newbs: F# User Group 12/7

joneil — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 05:03:00 GMT

Developing applications for multicore machines is no longer an “if”, but rather a “when”, and the “when” is fast approaching (some would say it’s now). Those of you following Visual Studio 2010 through its CTP and beta cycles are aware of the functionality being added to .NET 4.0 and the IDE to better support you as you code parallel constructs in your choice of languages. You may also be aware that Visual Studio 2010 marks the debut of F# as a bona fide .NET language, and that F# (and functional programming languages in general) are focused on abstracting complexities like parallel application development.

So it’s a perfect storm of sorts as co-leader Talbott Crowell leads an interactive meeting of the New England F# User Group tonight (December 7th) from 6:30 to 8:30 at the New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge.

Bring your laptop, so you can actively participate in the discussion, which will focus on the following goals:

Tackling many-core programming the easy way
Providing a way to parallelize tasks without the heavy lifting
Deciding which F# constructs are appropriate for various scenarios

NEW! Boston Business Intelligence User Group

joneil — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:52:18 GMT

I have yet another new user group to announce! The Boston Business Intelligence User Group – starts meeting TOMORROW, Tuesday, November 17th, at 6:30 p.m. at the Microsoft Office on Jones Road in Waltham. Thanks go out to Slava Kokaev, a familiar face in the local developer and BI community, for the initiative to establish and lead the group.

Here’s the group’s charter, shamelessly lifted from the group’s website:

Welcome to BOSTON BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE User Group.
We have regular face-to-face with hands-on meetings including guest speakers. We located in the Greater Boston area. We meet first 3 Tuesday's of each month. This is a FREE study group for everyone interested in learning the latest Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform technology and tools and Languages as well as Client Side Data Analysis Applications.

To kick off the group, Brian Knight, SQL Server MVP and BI specialist, will present a remote Live Meeting session on an introduction to Business Intelligence.

Troy (NY & area): Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

joneil — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:55:47 GMT

It’s going to be a busy week in the capital area of New York next week, and a great time to get knee deep in all things technical!

Tech Valley Code Camp – Saturday, Nov. 7th at SUNY Albany

There’s 20 sessions and over 100 signed up thus far! I hope to see you there as I deliver my “7 on 7” spiel.

Tech Valley User Group – Tuesday, Nov. 10th at VersaTrans in Latham

For the group’s monthly meeting, Rob Fisch, Director of Global Technology at Kaz, Inc, is speaking on Getting Started with Reporting Services.

Northeast Roadshow – Thursday, Nov. 12th at RPI

Chris and I are bringing you the “Don’t Fear the Coder” tour with topics including Silverlight and MVVM, ASP.NET, LINQ, and WCF. (We’re taking the show to six other venues as well!)

User Group Happenings East and West and in Between

joneil — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:59:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce we have THREE new User Groups starting up, stretching from the extreme east to the extreme west edges of the Northeast!

The Cape Code XNA User Group is kicking things off this Friday, Oct 23rd, with a discussion of the pre-production and design of a game.

Closer to Boston, the Boston Azure User Group hosts their inaugural meeting on Thursday, Oct. 22nd, at the New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge. Start time is 6:30 p.m., and the featured speaker is Brian Lambert of Microsoft, who will step through building an ASP.NET MVC application for deployment to Windows Azure.

On the opposite fringes of our Northeast District, the Western New York Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) is being re-formed! Their first meeting is on November 5th, at 6 p.m., in Lewiston. The speaker is John Kerwin, owner of Buffalo Web Labs, Inc., who will be discussing using XML with SQL Server.

Declarative Database Development @ NE SQL Server Group

joneil — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:16:00 GMT

The New England SQL Server User Group is kicking off its 2009/2010 season on September 10th with a topic spanning the developer and DBA audience. Special guest, Gert Draper, a software architect from the Visual Studio Team System Database Edition team in Redmond, will be presenting an alliteratively-titled session focusing on:

Models everywhere! The drive towards more model driven development technologies such as LINQ to SQL and Entity Data Model, can also be applied to how one manages and deploys its database schema, through a model instead of via a physical implementation script. The Visual Studio Database Edition product is the first major step towards a true declarative database development environment. This session will cover the pros and cons and future directions around this topic, including how you can use VSDB to automate the deployment of your database schema and integrate in to your own "database setup".

The event will be held at the Microsoft Office, 201 Jones Road, Waltham MA, on September 10th from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You must RSVP to the event, and the easiest way to do so is sign up for the group’s mailing list and then respond to the event notice that will come your way on Tuesday, September 8th.

Thanks to SQL Server MVP Adam Machanic for organizing this special event as well as for all his work in the SQL Server and developer communities!

Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo: There’s a New Group in Town!

joneil — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:29:53 GMT

Thanks to PowerShell MVPs Joel Bennett and Jeffery Hicks for putting the wheels in motion for the Upstate New York PowerShell Users Group.

The Upstate NY PowerShell Users Group is for any IT Professional, Developer, Manager, or Administrator interested in learning more about Windows PowerShell. No prior experience is required, simply a healthy appetite for learning something new and having a little fun at the same time.

The kickoff meeting will be held on September 9 (hmm, 9/9/09 – that’s gotta be a good omen!) at New Horizons in Rochester beginning at 6 p.m. Since this is the first meeting, much of the agenda will be focused on refining the goals and scope of the group:

How often and where to meet?
What topics should the group cover?
What should the organizational structure be?

Time-permitting, there will be a short overview and introduction of PowerShell 2.0 as well.

You can get more information from their flyer to the right. Be sure to RSVP so they have an idea of how many to expect.

Scott Guthrie On LinkedIn.NET User Group

joneil — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:14:34 GMT

Just a quick note that Scott Guthrie will be visiting the LinkedIn .NET User Group tomorrow at 12 noon (EDT). As with his first appearance, Scott will be opening it up to Q&A as well as giving us all insight into where Microsoft is heading with .NET.

There’s even SWAG: JetBrains ReSharper and DevExpress CodeRush and Refactor.

User Group Hiatuses (Hiati?)

joneil — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:41:05 GMT

For the most part, summer is a slower time in terms of User Group meetings, and since I got notices this week from three groups that generally meet today that they’re taking July (and even August) off, I thought I’d mention it’s a good idea to check the various user group sites (full list here) to make sure their meeting is on before battling the traffic!

By the way, if you had been planning today to drop by the New Hampshire .NET User Group, the New England ASP.NET Professionals Group, or the Boston Pocket PC group, consider heading south to Providence and join me for the monthly Providence Geeks dinner. Providence has an awesome community of professional developers and designers fed in part by its the proximity to RISD, Johnson and Wales, and Brown, so come check it out!

Thrive For Developers

joneil — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:40:03 GMT

On Monday I posted on some ways to stay informed of .NET happenings within your area. Just today, Microsoft launched a new program, Thrive for Developers, tailored specifically on the developer community in these times of economic uncertainty.

Thrive for Developers is focused on providing you the resources to advance your career to the next level, to enhance your skills, or just to connect and network with the Microsoft development community. Check it out and share the links with your developer friends – there’s even a ThriveDev Job Site for those of you who are (or know someone who is) looking for employment.

Happy New Year!

joneil — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:36:00 GMT

Yes, you’re still recovering from Fourth of July festivities, and, no, I didn’t get too much sun over the long weekend. July 1st indeed starts a new year, a new fiscal year, at Microsoft, and with that comes some intense planning for the coming 12 months – budgets, sales quotas, annual reviews, etc. For us, the Developer Platform and Evangelism team (DPE), specifically it’s a time for planning out our various events and road shows as well as fostering community activities like code camps and ‘firestarters.’

So what’s the best way to keep on top of all these happenings during the upcoming year?

MSDN Flash – subscribe here and enter your ZIP code to get localized content from Chris Bowen and myself in the Northeast. Our colleagues in other regions likewise add their own local flair to the bi-weekly newsletter.
Community Megaphone – on my blog’s sidebar is a feed showing the events in the Northeast district, but you can visit the main site and see what’s going on around the country.
Follow your evangelists’ blogs. Well, you found mine and the rest of the members of the East region developer evangelist family are listed in my blog’s sidebar.
Get involved in a User Group. In the Northeast, we have nearly three-dozen active groups focused on various aspects of Microsoft technologies, and there’s many more independent groups focused on complementary topics like JavaScript, Web technologies, and user experience as well. There’s no better way to hear about activities than being part of those activities yourself. It’s a double-win: you stay abreast of technology, and you meet some great people in the process.

Windows 7 @ Boston Area Windows Server User group

joneil — Fri, 01 May 2009 19:15:53 GMT

So in case you hadn’t heard, the Window 7 RC (Release Candidate) is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, and will be generally available on May 5th. Check blogs.technet.com/springboard/ for details.

Taking a page from the ‘perfect timing’ department, the Boston Area Windows Server User Group (BAWSUG), under the leadership of Clyde Johnson, will be hosting noted technologist, blogger, and podcaster, Paul Thurrott on Wednesday, May 6th, at the Microsoft office in Waltham, to speak on what else… Windows 7!

Those of you that follow Paul and his SuperSite for Windows, are aware that he likely knows more about Windows 7 than anyone outside of Microsoft, and I dare say more than most people inside as well. So I know, it’s sweeps month… just set your TiVo and join us. After all just how much Law & Order can you stand to watch in one night? Here’s the specifics, just remember ‘5-6-7’!

Wednesday, May 6th (5/6) - 6 p.m.

Windows 7 with Paul Thurrott

Microsoft Office

6th floor, 201 Jones Road

Waltham, MA

(one-click directions)

Beantown.NET Special Event: April 29th

joneil — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:34:20 GMT

Beantown.NET INETA User Group is hosting Rocky Lhotka, Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic as well as Microsoft Regional Director, MVP, and renowned technologist.

Rocky is the author of CSLA .NET, which is a framework for managing and implementing business logic whether it be in a single-tier or a distributed multi-tier system. His topic on Wednesday is CSLA.NET as the ‘M’ in MVC/MVP/MVVM (abstract below). The session will be held at the New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, from 6 –8 p.m. And if the title doesn’t have enough acronyms, here’s another… be sure to RSVP via e-mail by 3 p.m. on Wednesday to facilitate the sign-in process at the security desk, and more importantly, ensure there’s enough pizza on hand!

CSLA .NET as the 'M' in MVC/MVP/MVVM

Building a UI today can feel like wading into alphabet soup with MVC, MVP, MVVM and numerous other consonant-heavy acronyms. Nearly all of these patterns have one thing in common: the letter ‘M’, which stands for “Model”. The Model is the part of the application responsible for things like business and data processing, and is arguably the core of the application.

CSLA .NET is one of the most widely used development frameworks on the .NET and Silverlight platforms. The primary focus of CSLA .NET is to help in the creation of a rich object-oriented business layer that expresses the needs of the business domain model. In other words, CSLA .NET is all about helping create a powerful object model for an application. It should come as no surprise then, that CSLA .NET can fit naturally into many of the UI patterns.

At the same time, many of the UI patterns were devised on non-.NET platforms where powerful RAD concepts like data binding and UI designers don’t exist. Due to this, many of the “traditional” uses of these patterns prevent the use of productive RAD concepts and tooling, and that is an unforgivable loss. In this talk, Rocky will discuss how CSLA .NET helps implement powerful models, and how the most common UI patterns can be used to reap their benefit, without giving up the power of .NET itself.

Dynamic Data Resources

joneil — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 06:35:40 GMT

Thanks to all that turned out at the ASP.NET Professionals User Group tonight in Waltham to hear about ASP.NET Dynamic Data. As promised, I’m listing the resources I provided on my closing slide here, and I’ll provide a few pointers to answer some of the questions in a little more detail as well.

Resources

http://asp.net/dynamicdata – main site, including “How Do I” videos

ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 3

vNext sample – incorporates functionality targeted for the Dynamic Data 4.0 release (coinciding with .NET 4.0), but compiled with 3.5 SP1 bits, so you can experiment with the functionality now

Futures project – additional functionality to extend the current release including support for advanced filtering and the application of metadata at runtime

Design for Data – Dan Crowell’s community repository of CSS styles for Dynamic Data

Blogs

Scott Hunter – Dynamic Data Program Manager

David Ebbo – Dynamic Data architect

Stephen Naughton – UK developer focusing on Dynamic Data

Screencast and slides/demo from a previous version of the presentation I gave tonight

Questions

Q. How can I control what properties/columns appear in display mode versus edit mode? For instance, we added a composite ‘fullname’ property for the List view, but we needed the individual first name and last name field on the edit view.

A. To handle this you’ll have to do a little bit of coding; Stephen Naughton’s blog post will lead you through this. The gist of the solution is that you create a new attribute to specify the conditions under which the affected properties/columns should be displayed. Secondly, you implement your own customized field generator (interface IAutoFieldGenerator) to examine the attribute and either include or exclude the property/column from the GridView, DetailsView, ListView, etc.

Q. Can I use mechanisms other than ASP.NET membership to specify roles and permissions for accessing or updating specific properties in the model?

A. You can pretty much do whatever you want using a combination of custom attributes and injecting a bit of code at appropriate access points. Stephen has a great series of posts that provides a lot of detail in setting up an access scheme, one that could leverage the existing ASP.NET membership infrastructure or a mechanism of your own choosing.

Q. Are there any books on ASP.NET Dynamic Data?

A. The only one I found was a Wrox Blox PDF, a 34-page downloadable e-book. I also have the following ASP.NET 3.5 books on hand,

Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB

Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5

Learning ASP.NET 3.5 (Second Edition)

but only the latter even mentions Dynamic Data, and doesn’t do much more than describe the feature. Granted, Dynamic Data was part of the 3.5 Service Pack 1 release, so many of these books may have already been in the publication phase before the feature was nailed down. There is also Programming ASP.NET 3.5, but I don’t have that one handy, so not sure what coverage there is of Dynamic Data.

Hmm, perhaps it’s an opportunity for you to be the next great American author!

Dynamic Data @ ASP.NET Professionals User Group

joneil — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:07:00 GMT

I’ll be presenting at the second meeting of the ASP.NET Professionals User Group this coming Wednesday in Waltham. Fritz Onion kicked things off last month with “The Changing Face of ASP.NET,” an overview of what developers need to know before embarking on their next ASP.NET project. This month we’ll take a deeper dive into one of the technologies Fritz touched on, namely ASP.NET Dynamic Data:

Dynamic Data: From Data to CRUD in Five Minutes (or so)

ASP.NET Dynamic Data, introduced with the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, is a customizable, scaffolding framework for building data-driven ASP.NET web sites. Layering on top of data access technologies like LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework, you can build a CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) site literally in minutes. Additionally, you can make use of new dynamic controls, page and control templates, and custom validation to extend your site far beyond the 'out-of-the-box' experience.

Date	Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Time	6:15 – 8:30 p.m (save doing your taxes for after the meeting!)
Place	Microsoft 201 Jones Road Waltham MA 02451