My definition of value.

Jeff Carley Jeff Carley

Update – we’ve moving our “Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2008” to June 2nd as we were very fortunate to be able to get Chad Albrecht to come and present on the very exciting topic of TFS 2010 & Agile Development!  Thanks go to Travis for being willing to get bumped out to the much warmer month of June!

So very much looking forward to…

Succeeding With Agile & TFS 2010: Making the transition to Agile can be challenging for even the most seasoned organization. Having good leadership and the right tools can make all the difference. Drawing on nearly two decades of experience Chad will be walking us through methods that can be used to avoid common pitfalls and using Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 as an Agile platform. In this highly interactive session, Chad will demonstrate some of the new features of TFS 2010 as they relate to Agile estimation, planning, execution and measurement. If your organization is considering a migration to Agile or the TFS 2010 platform, you are encouraged to attend.

About Chad Albrecht: Currently the ALM Practice Director at Centare Group, Chad has built numerous successful companies and software development teams over his 17 year career. With extensive experience as both an executive and consultant, Chad is a strong believer in Agile SDLC techniques and the Kaizen corporate culture.

Blog: http://blog.chadalbrecht.com

As you can see in 2010 MADdotNET has a LOT going on!

We have three events every month: the first Wed of the month being our in-depth presentation meeting where we have awesome presenters from Microsoft and other .NET professionals come and deliver full length presentations on .NET technologies, the second Wed of the month we just started getting together for .NET Lunches where we have great food and great conversations on all things .NET, and last but certainly not least the third Wed of the month we have our ALL.NET meetings focusing on Micro-Presentations where we encourage everyone to come out and bring their questions on projects they’re working on, want to work on, have seen and want to show off, etc.  Come out - share and code with us!

Check out our “All Upcoming Events” calendar for the latest!

1) This month I’m very excited to have the PDC User Group Tour from Microsoft!  And we’re giving away one copy of Windows 7 Ultimate! As well as ReSharper and Telerik licenses, and several more things in our raffle!

For all those (including myself) that didn’t make it out to the Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC) we’re very fortunate to have Microsoft provide the PDC User Group Tour – so if you didn’t get out to L.A., come see it in Madison!

Some fantastic new Technologies were unveiled at PDC and the following highlights that will be covered:

• Silverlight 4
• “3 Screens and a Cloud”
• Azure
• WCF RIA Services
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4
• Parallelism

And we’re very much looking forward to having Scott Seely back to present!

Scott Seely bio: Senior Technical Architect for SAVO Group (http://www.savogroup.com). He has written four books, most recently as co-author of Effective REST Services via .NET. When not sitting behind a keyboard, Scott can be found in northern Illinois spending time with his wonderful wife, three kids, two dogs, two frogs, and whatever other animals happen to be in the house

2) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is on Feb 17th!

As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your second wives (or husbands)... errr.. laptops <g> -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

Specifically, I’ve been coding a “File Repository” application using Visual Studio 2010, Entity Framework 4 and SQL 2008 ( using FILESTREAMs ) – and want to share where I am with that and get feedback from everyone.  So if you’ve worked with any of these ( or want to ) I’d love everyone’s input.

If you have anything in particular you want to share – bring it!

3) .NET Lunch is @ Alt-n-Backs on the 2nd Wed of each month -- starting at 11:45.  ( http://altnbach.com/ -- 2602 Whalen Lane Madison, WI )

What started out as a simple Superuser question became a long trek to find a solution.  The only answer at the time pointed me to do batch processing through Audacity, but I was trying to avoid automating the GUI as much as possible.  Although I know how to make use of ...

Happy New Year to everyone!

We have quite a few exciting events planned for this coming year of 2010!  Among them are...

1) First and foremost, our monthly meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is tomorrow!

We are very much looking forward to having Clark Sell out from Microsoft to speak at the meeting tomorrow -- joining Dave Bost, Clark is our new regional Microsoft Developer Evangelist for the Wisconsin area -- Clark will be presenting a .NET technology overview on "MVC, WPF Printing, MEF" and more --- this will be a great broad overview of topics and will allow us to tap into Clarks years as a Microsoft consultant!

Clark's Bio: Clark has been with Microsoft for over 4 years and has now joined the has joined the Microsoft Evangelism team with a primary focus on Wisconsin!  He's been with Microsoft since 2005 and comes from Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) as a member of the VSTS Rangers (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/ee358786.aspx).  Clark can be reached at csell@microsoft.com and you can view his blog at http://csell.net

Meeting Address: Herzing College -- Room #120 -- 5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison WI 53718 ( Bing Maps Link )

Meeting Agenda

• 5:00pm: Networking with sponsors and members
• 5:30pm: Free pizza and soda
• 6:00pm: Introduction and start main presentation
• 8:00pm: Give away prizes and Wrap up meeting 

2) Next month we're trying to firm up the dates for the PDC Road Show here in Madison --- tentatively we're looking at Feb 3rd ( Wednesday ).  
There's a lot of anticipation for this -- so once finalized, will keep everyone informed.

3) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is coming up on Jan 20th!
As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your laptops -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

We had a fantastic presentation last month from the developer of PDO ( http://pdo.codeplex.com/ ) -- which was... "Persistable Data Objects for WPF is an ORM tool and application framework for developing data driven applications in Windows Presentation Framework (WPF). The code generation tool builds C# classes and SQL stored procedures that are fully LINQ queryable."

Presentations like these are invaluable learning lessons that show off the top quality developers that live and work in the Madison area!  Awesome.

So even though the year is rapidly coming to a close - with tons of new technology from Microsoft coming out -- I'm very excited about all the opportunities to continue learning and applying the new technologies for 2010!  We've got lots of awesome presentations on horizon -- and even a robotics competition in the works for 2010!  So keep an eye on the schedule on the site ( www.MADdotNET.com ), and as exciting events materialize we will plug them in!

Tomorrow we have two events ---

1) Our monthly ALL.NET meeting @ Herzing College (5218 East Terrace Drive, Madison) -- Room #120 -- is tomorrow!

As always -- bring your questions / comments -- bring things to show off and / or just talk about -- bring your second wives... errr.. laptops <g> -- this is YOUR time to come and tap the minds of and share with some of the other top developers in our area!

Specifically, the topic of ORM's came up on our MADdotNET list ( which if you're not on -- go "Here to Sign up for the MADdotNET .NET Discussion Group" ) -- and I was asked to talk about Entity Framework -- so I will be briefly doing a show and tell on it.

Those that have other experience with other ORMs -- please bring code examples / your experiences.

If anyone else has worked with Entity Framework -- I know that I would love to hear your experience and see your approaches!  Also, I'm just starting to look at Entity Framework 4 ( being released with VS2010 ) -- and looks like they've filled in many of the gaps -- so really excited to get to start digging into that more.

I also have an example of some cool SQL pivot code that I had to write for the project I'm on -- so time permitting I'll show that off
Meeting Agenda

2) But even before that -- Eric and Adam have setup a Dev Lunch @ Alt-n-Backs on the Wed  the 16th starting at 11:45.  ( http://altnbach.com/ -- 2602 Whalen Lane Madison, WI ) Even has a few books to give away as door prizes!

3) Lastly, very excited to let everyone know that either in Jan/Feb our Microsoft reps have put a lot of work into bringing the PDC Roadshow to Madison!  As I get specifics -- you all will know!

Hope everyone survived being stuffed over Thanksgiving! 

Now that we're all full and happy, time to get back to some cool emerging technologies that we can apply to our every day business pursuits!

1) For tomorrow's meeting ( 12/2/2009 ), I'm really excited to have Adam Salvo presenting on SharePoint 2010 / Visual Studio 2010!

2) Remember that we also have our next ALL.NET meeting coming up on Wed, Dec 16th - looks like we may be discussing ORM's and/or some of the new things that have emerged from PDC.  Come with a topic you want to discuss -- or questions on something you're working on -- or want to work on.  The ALL.NET meetings are YOUR time to set the meeting agendas and get the benefit of all the knowledge of your peers!

Session Overview:

Come learn what’s new in the world of SharePoint development with the release of SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. See how SharePoint is now a first class development platform with tight integration with Visual Studio, making it easier to create customized applications for SharePoint. With new support for Silverlight, Linq to SharePoint and the Business Data Connectivity tools, SharePoint 2010 provides a all the functionality needed to create a one stop shop for business workers to consume data from Line of Business Applications. 

Presenter: Kevin Remde

Windows 7 provides IT with the security and control they need to protect the business...

Windows 7 provides end-users with an intuitive new interface for accessing applications, documents, and media. In this session, targeted towards entry level and/or end users, we will explore Windows 7 operating system interface enhancements...

Presenter: Michael Bender

Come learn about why Windows 7 works better with the new features in Windows Server 2008 & Windows Server 2008 R2...