When: 6/15/2009 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Speaker: Jeffrey Palermo

Speaker Bio: Jeffrey Palermo is the CTO of Headspring Systems. Jeffrey specializes in Agile management coaching and helps companies double the productivity of software teams. He is instrumental in the Austin software community as a member of AgileAustin and a director of the Austin .Net User Group. Jeffrey has been recognized by Microsoft as a "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional" (MVP) for technical and community leadership. He is also certified as a MCSD.Net and ScrumMaster. Jeffrey has spoken and facilitated at industry conferences such as VSLive, DevTeach, and Microsoft Tech Ed. He also speaks to user groups around the country as part of the INETA Speakers' Bureau. His web sites are headspringsystems.com and jeffreypalermo.com. He is a graduate from Texas A&M University, an Eagle Scout, and an Iraq war veteran. Jeffrey is the founder of the CodeCampServer open-source project and a co-founder of the MvcContrib project.

Topic: TDD, DI, and SoC with ASP.NET MVC

Summary: Spelled out, it is test-driven development, dependency injection, and separation of concerns with Active Server Pages .Net Model View Controller. This talk will dive into how to design a presentation layer using ASP.NET MVC. In today's industry, TDD, DI, and SoC are proven concepts that lead to more maintainable applications. Along with demonstrating how to use these techniques with ASP.NET MVC, we will discuss just what concerns should be separated. This talk provides a unique perspective on separation of concerns and uses TDD and DI to make it happen. MvcContrib is used in all the demos.

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 5/18/2009 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Speaker: Zac Kleinpeter

Speaker Bio: Zac is an analyst at Praeses, LLC in Shreveport, Louisiana. He has experience with a variety of technologies, but is currently working in (and greatly enjoying) Ruby on Rails. Zac has a passion for technology, but also enjoys many non-geek pursuits, such as raquetball, brewing his own beer, and spending time with his daughters, Elizabeth and Eva.

Topic: CouchDB

Summary: CouchDB is a free and open source document-oriented database written in the Erlang programming language. It is designed for extreme scalability and is easily deployed to multi-core or multi-server clusters. Zac will present an overview of CouchDB, demonstrating how to use it from a coding perspective, as well as discussing situations where a document database would be a good fit for an application.

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 4/20/2009 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Speaker: Chance Coble

Speaker Bio: Chance Coble is a partner and founder of A6 Systems, LLC. Chance is a regular speaker and author on the topic of functional programming for the real world. His career as a functional programmer began several years ago with Haskell, and he now works full time as a consultant and teacher in F# for applications ranging from scientific computing to advanced enterprise solutions. Prior to A6 Systems Chance was Senior Scientist at Ideal Innovations, Inc where his inventions were applied to mission critical systems for the DoD, DHS, DARPA and other government agencies around the world. He has an MS in Bioinformatics from the University of Texas at Houston and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Topic: The F# Language

Summary: Chance Coble will give a presentation on F#, Microsoft's new hybrid OO/Functional programming language for the .NET platform. In this talk he will give a general overview of the language, and walk through some real world examples of its use. The audience will walk away with an understanding of where this language fits, when to bring it into a project and where to go to learn more.

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 3/16/2009 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Speaker: David Mohundro

Speaker Bio: David Mohundro is a software developer at Data-Tronics, Corp. in Fort Smith, AR and is a co-founder/leader of the Fort Smith, AR .NET User Group. He has over 5 years of experience developing software using technologies ranging from classic ASP and JavaScript to Windows Forms and WPF. David is enthusiastic about building decoupled and maintainable applications using practices such as Test Driven Development and he strives to be a lifelong learner. You can contact David through his blog.

Topic: The Power of Powershell

Summary: PowerShell is the a scripting language and environment from Microsoft built on top the of the .NET Framework. It offers functionality ranging from helping developers be more productive by automating their repetitive tasks to allowing them to create build scripts in a DSL-like syntax. It is being used heavily by Microsoft in the soon-to-be-released Windows 7 as the basis for the automatic troubleshooting system and is also featured in both IIS 7 and SQL Server 2008.

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

Since we've had a bit of trouble with the CMS system we were trying to use for the site, we've decided to switch to just a static HTML site. That's all we really need anyway, and hopefully it will be a little more accessible to our members.

The details about previous meetings, plus the slide decks and other resources from those meetings will be put back on to the new site shortly. We wanted to get the more usable site out on the web as soon as possible. We hope you like the new look!

When: 11/19/2008 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Speaker: David Penton

Speaker Bio: David L. Penton lives in the Dallas, Texas area and has a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, LA. He currently is a Lead Software Development Engineer / Performance Lead at Telligent Systems, Inc. Before that, he was a technical lead for the International Systems Group and then in Merchandising Systems atJCPenney, Inc., in Plano, TX. Before that, he was a senior business and analysis analyst for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Grand Prairie, TX. During that time he has worked on various technologies. He currently spends most of his time with C# and SQL Server. Database platforms he has dealt with (development and admin) include but not limited to SQL Server, Oracle, DB2. David is a member of the ASPInsiders and was formerly a SQL Server MVP for several years and is now an ASP.NET MVP.

Topic: A New Approach to HttpRuntime.Cache Management

Summary: ASP.NET has a wonderful built-in framework for managing Cached items within a website in the namespace System.Web.Caching. It is accessible from HttpRuntime.Cache (among other ways, such as from System.Web.UI.Page.Cache). You have great flexibility with the data you may wish to cache. With this flexibility, there is an extremely important piece missing from HttpRuntime.Cache - and that is thread safety. Not from inside of the Cache, but from the external code that accesses it. Websites under high load could cause a cache item to be populated multiple times. Web applications are multi-threaded (whether you know it or not!). This is wonderful and wicked at the same time. Why, do you ask? This discussion will show you how to manage safely loading items into HttpRuntime Cache. I will also describe methodologies for easily load collections in a thread safe manner.

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 11/17/2008 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Speaker: Brian Sullivan

Speaker Bio: Brian Sullivan is a developer analyst for Praeses, LLC in Shreveport, LA. He has been working with Microsoft technologies for about 4 years, and is interested in increasing the exposure of agile techniques and methodologies in the Microsoft developer community. He is a graduate of Harding University in Searcy, AR

Topic: Debugging Evolved - An Introduction to Automated Unit Testing

Summary: Automated Unit Testing has started receiving some "buzz" in the Microsoft developer community in the last few years, and even Microsoft itself has gotten into the game by creating its own unit testing framework. Brian will cover the basics of unit testing using the NUnit framework. The goal of this presentation will be to give the audience an entry-level understanding of how unit testing frameworks function to open the door for study into more complex topics, such as Test Driven Development

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 10/20/2008

Speaker: Rob Vettor

Speaker Bio: Rob Vettor is a Microsoft .NET Architect/Senior Solution Developer, who has built systems for a number of corporations, including Avanade, Raytheon and American Express. Rob, an avid Toastmaster and 'hacker golfer,' founded the Dallas .NET Architecture User Group (http://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 computer books

Topic: LINQ

Summary: While most enterprise applications are object-oriented, the data upon which they depend is not. Today, binding these two platforms together results in a significant amount of lost productivity as well as a less than optimal solution. Come and take a detailed look at the "LINQ Project " to see what Microsoft is doing to help bridge the mismatch between OO and relational data. We will take a close look at the following areas:

• How LINQ manifests a move from an imperative to a declarative style of programming.
• New language and framework extensions that provide a single, unified approach to querying data.
• Examples of querying data from multiple data domains: In-memory, database, ADO.NET constructs and XML documents.
• A look at the upcoming Microsoft Entity Framework.
• How LINQ might fit into a multi-tiered application

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map

When: 8/18/2008

Speaker: Chris Koenig

Speaker Bio: Chris Koenig is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft, based in Dallas, TX. Prior to joining Microsoft, Chris worked as a Senior Architect on the Architecture Strategy Team for The Capital Group in San Antonio, and as an Architect, Developer and Development Team Lead for the global solution provider Avanade. As a consultant, Chris worked with a variety of clients from many vertical markets, ISVs and other solution providers on enterprise-class Windows and web-based applications. Today, Chris focuses on building, growing, and enhancing the developer communities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas. Chris is a devoted husband and father of four awesome children who keep him very busy. In his spare time, Chris serves as Scoutmaster for his oldest son's Troop, and Committee Chair for his youngest sons' Pack. Chris also enjoys travelling, cooking, camping and playing guitar. You can contact Chris through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/chkoenig, via email at chris.koenig@microsoft.com, or via Windows Live Messenger at chris@koenigweb.com.

Topic: Silverlight 2.0 - Next Generation Web Applications

Summary: Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web

Location: Centenary College, Wright Math Building Room 103 - map