Tag Archives: .Net

AADND, Software Stimulus Lab, Agile Groupies: oh my!

Tomorrow is the 2nd Wedneday of the month, which means that the Ann Arbor .NET Developer group is meeting at SRT.  If, like me, you're still bummed that you missed last month's meeting with Michael Wood on PLINQ, you probably will want to make an extra effort tomorrow night, when Steve Smith is in town and speaking on ASP.NET MVC.  Steve will be presenting Robert Martin’s SOLID principles of Object Oriented Programming, with examples of violations of these principles in a simple ASP.NET MVC application. The principles are then applied, resulting in a much more elegant and maintainable application.  This is a free meeting, open to the public.

SRT Solutions is inviting all developers to join them at Automation Alley in Troy for a day of software development at the SRT Stimulus Lab. This is a jam format, not a lecture format (which means that it's very hands-on).  We'll start off with some fundamentals: version control (bazaar), continuous integration, unit testing and functional testing. The format is open; you can work on your problems (with encouragement, advice, and help from others) or on our examples, if you just want a flavor of some new languages.  This is a low cost event ($75 for the full day), and it's free for unemployed software developers (limited seats available).  Sign up at http://srtstimulus.eventbrite.com.  If you use the discount code SRTUSER, you can still get the early bird price of $50 for a few more days. 

The Agile Groupies in Ann Arbor will meet at SRT Solutions on June 16, from 6-7:30 or so.  Cost: $10 for food.  Joe Hershey will be pairing and speaking, and the talk is entitled, "TDD is Nonsense".

The Detroit Java User Group will meet on June 17 at Compuware, during the Eclipse DemoCamp and IT Exchange Forum, from 5-8 pm. 

The next Ann Arbor Java User Group meeting is scheduled for June 24.  I'm still waiting to hear what the topic is.

JavaFX, Microsoft Surface, and TDD talks this week

The Ann Arbor area is ripe with events this week (apologies to our spouses).

Join up with fellow coders tonight at NSCoderNight, at Sweetwaters in Kerrytown.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday April 15), you will have to choose between attending a JavaFX talk at the Detroit JUG and a Microsoft Surface talk at GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET User Group).  Jim Weaver has solidly embraced JavaFX, and is working on his second book.  I'm thrilled that he's returning to the area, since I missed his talk at the Ann Arbor JUG late last year.  The meeting will be held at ePrize, 1 ePrize Drive, Pleasant Ridge, MI.  I had a hard time finding the location the first time I went there, so definitely check out the directions. The meeting starts at 6:30.

The Microsoft Surface is also pretty exciting.  VectorForm is a Michigan company that has been doing Surface development perhaps as long as the device has been available.  My first view of the Surface was in the James Bond movie (Quantum of Solace), and then I was also lucky enough to see one at CodeMash.  So if you haven't seen the Surface, definitely head out to the Microsoft office in Southfield (1000 Town Center Drive, Suite 1930, Southfield, MI 48075) tomorrow night.  Joe Engalan and Jennifer Marsman will co-present.  The meeting starts at 6:30.

And after the meeting (around 9 pm), join up with CoffeeHouse Coders in person at Mujo's in the Duderstadt Center on North Campus or on their IRC channel.

On Thursday 4/16 for lunch, choose between the monthly A2 Nerd Lunch or the weekly A2B3.  They're about a block apart, so perhaps you can hit both.

On Thursday evening, you have several choices in Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Startup Drinks at Grizzly Peak, and the Washtenaw Linux Users Group at WCC.

Also on Thursday, but a little further from home, Dennis Burton is speaking at the Greater Lansing .NET User Group with his talk on "Test Driven Development is Driving me Insane".  Dennis will discuss patterns and techniques for writing tests that are more robust and provide better information, including techniques that you can apply to your design when writing new code to make testing easier, as well as tools for working with existing applications that do not have good test coverage.  If you miss his talk on Thursday, catch this talk again the following week 4/21 in Toledo, at Northwest Ohio .NET User Group.

On Friday, you can learn how (and why) to join a non-profit board in the Ann Arbor area.  A2Geeks is helping to sponsor training at the NEW Center, for just $35.

This is your last chance (mine too!) for the 2008/2009 academic year to visit the MPowered Entrepreneurship Hour at UM.  The speaker this week is Joshua Pokempner of Entrepreneur Toy Company.  The meeting is held from 3:30-4:30.

Upcoming tech events in Ann Arbor area

The Michigan Python User Group (MichiPUG) meeting is tonight at 7 pm, at SRT.  If you want to learn how to write a web framework using WSGI, this is the place to come.  Kevin Dangoor (creator of TurboGears web framework) and Mark Ramm (maintainer for TurboGears 2) are both Ann Arborites and usually attend.

Tomorrow, Phil Wilmington of PeopleSoft will speak at the MPowered Entrepreneurship Hour on "Entrepreneurship in a Changing Technology Environment". This is held at the Stamps Auditorium, Walgreens Drama Center.

Next week:

At 6 pm on Monday February 9, the Ann Arbor New Tech February meetup will be held at the Google building in Ann Arbor (201 S. Division St, 3rd Floor).  Sign up at http://www.meetup.com/a2newtech/. 5 companies this month take the stage for 10 minutes each, 5 minutes to demo and 5 minutes to answer questions, followed by networking downstairs at Bar Louie. Space is limited, RSVP strictly required.

At the same time, across the street, the Flex/RIA group meets at SPARK Central, 330 E. Liberty, Lower Level, in Ann Arbor from 6-7:30 pm.

The Michigan!/usr/group meets on Tuesday from 6:30-9 at the Farmington Community Library, 32737 W. 12 Mile Rd, Farmington Hills, MI. George Castro is going to talk about microblogging.

The Ann Arbor .NET Developers group meets at SRT Solutions (206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200, Ann Arbor) from 6-8:30 pm.  Patrick Steele will be talking about ASP.NET MVC.

And on Thursday, January 12, the Michigan Flex User Group meets in East Lansing at MSU.

To close out the week, on Friday, January 13, SRT will hold its biweekly lightning talks, from 3:30-5. Join us for 5 minute sessions on tech topics. All are welcome to speak and/or listen!

Also, a group is forming to drive from Ann Arbor down to EdgeCase in Columbus for Merb and Rails 3.0 with Yehuda Katz. Contact Winston Tsang if you want to rideshare (not sure how much room is available).

Enjoy!

Upcoming events in the Ann Arbor area

I missed posting about a lot of events in the past few weeks. It's unfortunate, because there were some great events, including Kirsten Schwark's talk on "Why Groovy" at the Detroit JUG this past Wednesday.

But, it's time to look forward. Today, SRT is hosting lightning talks from 3:30-5.  Held at our office at 206 S. Fifth, Suite 200, this event is open to the public and free.  We love it when other geeks come in and talk for 5 minutes about things that they're doing.  It keeps us all up to date!

Next week is a slow week, but there are some things coming up in December that look interesting and useful:

December 3: Eclipse DemoCamp, Compuware, 6 pm.  Free. There will be a presentation about building applications on top of the Eclipse OSGi framework, demos of products / plug-ins built on the framework and after the presentations, people will head over to the Detroit HardRock Cafe. The Detroit HardRock Cafe is located on the first floor of the Compuware building.  There will be plenty of free parking and security at Compuware.

The Ann Arbor Computer Society also meets on December 3 at 6 pm.  Topic is still TBD, but I hear rumors that people may try out parts of their CodeMash talks, to get input from the AACS audience.  That will probably be quite fun and interesting.  And of course, this is also free (pizza supplied by AACS). Meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave., Suite 200.

On Thursday, December 4, the Michigan Python User Group meets at 7 pm. The MichiPUG group negotiates its meeting topics in the week prior to the event on its google group, and they never disappoint.  Join them at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200. Their meeting is free as well.

On Thursday, December 18, ArbCamp resurfaces … as a BarCamp! You can read more about this event in detail at http://tinyurl.com/6eda4s. This article is not only about the ArbCamp event, but it's a great look at building and growing the tech community in Ann Arbor.  I think that this is going to be a fabulous event, and people will not want to leave.  It starts at 6 pm on the 18th (I'm trying to figure out how I can get there … have to figure out how to break it to my very understanding husband).

On Wednesday, December 10, the Ann Arbor .NET Development Group will host Jason Follas, speaking on Spatial Data 2008. The meeting will be at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200 at 6 pm.  Donations taken for pizza.  More details at http://aadnd.org. 

On Wednesday, December 17,  the Great Lakes Area .NET user group meets at 6 pm at Microsoft's office in Southfield, 1000 Town Center Drive, Suite 1930, Southfield, MI.  I'm not sure what the topic is, but keep an eye on http://migang.org

 And, don't forget to sign up for CodeMash (January 7-9 in Sandusky, OH). The early bird deadline is November 29! We have an amazing group of speakers lined up, including Mads Torgerson, Venkat Subramaniam, Jesse Liberty, Bill Wagner, David Laribee, Chris Adamson, Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, Andrew Glover, Ed Vielmetti and many many more. Whether you're looking for a talk on Ruby or Python, Silverlight or Multithreaded programming, User Experience or Continuous Integration, CodeMash has something for you. Wondering about Erlang? We have talks. IPhone development?  I'm VERY excited about this event.  

Boo! at Lansing Area .NET User Group meeting

Nope, this isn't a Halloween gag, but it's timed well. On Thursday, October 16, Jay Wren will be speaking about the Boo programming language at GLUGNet in Lansing. Boo is a statically typed language with a python-inspired syntax and it runs on the .NET platform.  He will be discussing how to create Domain Specific Languages using Boo.

The meeting will be held on Michigan State's campus in East Lansing, at 1235 Anthony Hall.  The meeting starts at 6 pm.

More information and directions are available on the GLUGNet website.

Technology events in Ann Arbor this week and next …

Even though it's summertime, there are still a lot of meetings in Ann Arbor this week, and next.   

On Wednesday, July 2, Chris Sellers will be talking about Amazon EC2 at the Ann Arbor Computer Society meeting.  That meeting will be held at SRT Solutions, 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI.  The meeting starts at 6 pm and is free and open to the public.  AACS supplies pizza for all.  Supporting members ($20/year annual dues) qualify for door prizes.

On Thursday, July 3, the Michigan Python User Group will meet, also at SRT Solutions.  Kevin Dangoor will talk about ZODB, the Python Zope Object Database. MichiPUG meetings are free and open to all.

The following week, on Wednesday, July 9, the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developer Group will host Jonathan Zuck, from ACT Online.  Jonathan is a software developer turned lobbyist.  His cause is innovation, and his company ensures that our elected officials are informed about technology matters.  Jonathan's making the user group rounds, visiting Ann Arbor, Lansing, and Grand Rapids .NET user groups with his message about why we, as technologists, need lobbyists.  DotNetRocks listeners may be familiar with Zuck, since he's made several appearances on that podcast, including his most recent visit to discuss OOXML.  AADND meetings are also held at SRT Solutions and are also free and open to all.

If you want to participate in a developer-oriented charity event, check out Ann Arbor Give Camp, July 11-13 at Washtenaw Community College.  

Just outside of the Ann Arbor area, is the Michigan!/usr/group at the Farmington Hills Library.  The topic of their meeting on July 9 is "MythTV".

Oh, and if you were wondering about SRT lightning talks for this week, we've cancelled them because Friday IS the Fourth.  The next scheduled lightning talks are on July 18, which happen to be Art Fair week.  Hmm, we may need to rethink that date.  It seems unlikely that even the half million or so visitors to the art fairs will draw much foot traffic for technical topics!  

Events this week in Ann Arbor and Lansing

Thursday night, June 19, SRT's very own Darrell Hawley will be speaking on IronPython at the Greater Lansing Area .NET User Group.  If you read his blog, you will know that he's been working hard on this talk, refining the content as well as his speaking technique.  That's not to say that it was bad before (it wasn't).  I think it shows how much emphasis people are putting on delivering high quality talks these days.

On Friday, June 20, SRT will hold lightning talks, which are free and open to all for speaking and/or listening.  We love it when people come to speak from other companies because we enjoy learning about what others are doing.  The 5 minute talks are a great way to get your confidence up, if you're not a regular speaker, and a great way to distill a topic into its essential components if you are.  There's usually something for everyone. I always compare lightning talks to the "short films" at the Ann Arbor Film Festival. If the film (or talk) isn't of interest to you, you haven't made a big investment and another film (or talk) that may be more to your liking will soon follow.  Lightning talks will start at 3:30 and go until about 5.  If you can't get there right at 3:30, no worries. Show up when you can.  We're a casual bunch.

Saturday, June 21, is the Lansing Area Day of .NET.  You have probably heard about these free 1-day immersions into .NET technology.  The first one was in Ann Arbor a few years ago.  The events usually sell out quickly, so register soon if you would like to attend.

And I wanted to add a quick reminder in case you missed my blog earlier this week about Startup Weekend Ann Arbor, that's going on this weekend as well!

C# 3.0/LINQ MiniCamp at SRT in March

The Richard Hale Shaw will present a 1-day MiniCamp on LINQ and C# 3.0 for experienced .NET developers on March 14 from 9 am – 5 pm.  This class will be held at SRT Solutions' offices, at 206 S. Fifth Ave, Suite 200, Ann Arbor, MI.

To attend this course, you should have a minimum of 2 years experience programming C# and the .NET Framework and 1 year programming C# 2.0, or you should have attended the .NET Bootcamp.

Cost of the course:
$350 by February 18 (NOTE: That's Monday!)
$500 by March 7
$600 by March 14, if space is still available

Detailed course information and registration is at http://srtsolutions.com/static/register.php 

CodeMash speakers announced

I'm really looking forward to CodeMash 2008.  There is an amazing list of speakers. 

Here's a subset of the talks that interest me (not in any particular order)

Testing with Guice, by Dick Wall

Dick is a cohost of the Java Posse podcast, which is invaluable for keeping up to date on Java.  He's also a software developer at Google.

Getting Started with Django, by Leah Culver

Leah is the cofounder/lead developer for Pownce.  Don't know Pownce?  It's a social networking platform that has been compared to twitter, jaiku, and tumblr.  Perhaps it's more than all of those.  Hopefully we'll get Leah to tell us more!

LinqTo<T>:Implementing IQueryProvider, by Bill Wagner

Bill is the author of Effective C# and the upcoming More Effective C#.  He's also my business partner at SRT Solutions.

Engineering and Polyglot Programming, by Neal Ford

Neal works for Thoughtworks and travels extensively, speaking at many different conferences.  He spoke at CodeMash last year and gave an awesome keynote as well.

Crash, Smash, Kaboom Crash Course in Python, by Catherine Devlin

Catherine did this talk at PyCon, to rave reviews.

Bitter Java? Sweeten with JRuby, by Brian Sam-Bodden

Brian is the author of Beginning POJOS and Enterprise Java Development on a Budget.  I'm interested in learning more about JRuby and this looks like an interesting talk.

Why I Love Python, by Bruce Eckel

Bruce is a longtime author and active in the development community.  He was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee.  He has spoken at many different conferences, including CodeMash 2007, where he did a fascinating keynote which brought together elements from many different aspects of life about progress toward a solution.

Coding in Silverlight, by Jesse Liberty

Jesse is the Senior Program Manager of Microsoft's Silverlight team. 

 

And there are so many more (but I should get back to work, so check it out yourself on the online session list).

The early bird deadline is tomorrow.  Conference registration is $125 today, but will go up to $175 on Friday.

 

CodeMash – I'll be there!

CodeMash early bird deadline is fast approaching

CodeMash is a conference that I'm involved with, as an organizer. Next year's event will be held Jan 9-11 (panel discussion the evening of the 9th, with full days on the 10th and 11th), at the same location as the 2007 event: the Kalahari Resort and Indoor Water Park in Sandusky, OH.

CodeMash a cool event, that brings together developers from all different languages, platforms, and technologies, to learn from one another.  And, it's priced so that anyone can afford to attend.  We know that many companies do not allocate money for training, so we priced CodeMash at the "self-pay" level (it's just $125 for the event, if you sign up by November 15).  The registration fee includes meals (2 breakfasts, 2 lunches, and 1 dinner).  HOW can we do this at such a low price, when other conferences charge in the thousands?  First, we have an amazing list of sponsors, from small companies to very large ones. Every dollar helps us to put this event together, and we seriously could not do it without our sponsors.  And, it's an all volunteer organizational team, and we have worked pretty hard to put this together because we all feel strongly that this benefits the community.  We couldn't even REACH our sponsors without our volunteer team, since volunteers even take on the responsibility for contacting and soliciting sponsors.  And no, none of us are in sales.  We are all developers.  We're lucky that our sponsors have been so responsive!

You can see a partial session list at http://codemash.org/SessionList.aspx.  We were absolutely overwhelmed by cool talks this time around and we had to turn down some really interesting talks.  I am confident that the schedule that we've come up with will be of great interest to our attendees. There will be Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, and many talks on technology in a non-language specific type of way.  There will be open spaces where you can propose your own session, and have an interactive conversation with the other attendees rather than listening to a prepared lecture.  It's going to be a great event … again.

The family-friendly location (bring the kids! hang out in the water park!) is intentional, and we have introduced "CodeMash Families" for the 2008 event.  A volunteer organizer will help families to meet one another and perhaps even have some scheduled activities, if that suits them.  This was borne out of last year's experience, where the families who had come along sort of "discovered" one another throughout their time at the Kalahari and eventually introduced themselves.

So anyhow, get in on the early bird pricing.  The $125 entry fee expires November 15.   I'll certainly blog more about this in the upcoming weeks, as we release the rest of the talks and nail down more information.