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Fall 2009 - Sessions

Here's a list of session titles currently submitted. Note that the final list may not contain all of the session ideas.

"Introduction To..." Sessions

Introduction to CSS

Do you still use tables to layout your user interface? Do you still use the <font> tag or have presentation information scattered throughout your markup? Learn how to leverage CSS to simplify your web development.

Speaker

Robert Boedigheimer works for Schwans Shared Services, LLC providing business solutions with web technologies and leads Robert Boedigheimer Consulting, LLC. Robert has been designing and developing web sites for the past 14 years including the early days of ASP and ASP.NET. He is a columnist for aspalliance.com, an ASP.NET MVP, an author, an "Early Achiever" MCSD for .NET with C#, an MCPD: Web with C#, and a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Robert has spoken at industry conferences including the Heartland Developers Conference, DevLink, DevTeach, Tulsa Tech Fest, DevWeek, TechEd, AJAXWorld, and numerous national and international VSLive! events.

Introduction to Ruby

Come learn about Ruby, and how it's much more than Rails. Ruby is a dynamic, fully object-oriented language that borrows from Perl, Smalltalk, and LISP, but provides a clean, simple syntax usable by hobbiests, but enough power to be used by some of the most hardcore metaprogrammers in the world. Ruby has caught the attention of Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and Sun, powers sites like Yellowpages.com and Hulu, and is an absolute joy to work with. In this presentation, you'll learn the fundamentals of Ruby, and you'll see it in action as we build a simple web service using the Sinatra microframework, a static web site with StaticMatic, and we'll test a web site using Cucumber and our browser. Ruby is a lot more than Rails, so come learn about it today!

Speaker

Brian Hogan has been developing web sites professionally since 1995 as a freelancer and consultant. He's built small and large web sites and web applications using ASP, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. He enjoys teaching and writing about technology, particularly web design and development.

Introduction to Silverlight 3

In this talk we will create three examples of commonly requested flash components but create them in Silverlight. We will create a custom video player, Interactive Photo Gallery and a Dynamic Menu generated from XML. This presentation will be a great way for .Net developers to get into Silverlight or induce Flash/Flex Silverlight and .NET.

Speaker

Gregory Wurm is a .Net developer for Sierra Bravo since 2006. He started programming on the Apple II in grade school and has not stopped since. Recently he took part in Microsoft's National PhizzPop Challenge and was awarded the top prize at the SXSW 09. You can find his blog at http://gregorywurm.com.

Introduction to the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio is a robust and powerful environment for hobbyist, pedagogical and expert robotic design and prototyping. It allows, without any robotics parts, visual feedback of algorithms for a variety of robotic platforms. In this talk, we will walk through some of the more interesting features of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, both the Express version and the Academic/Pro version. In addition, we will work through a simple example project utilizing the Visual Programming Language 2008 Express environment and a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot as well as demo a solution for the Sumo robotics challenge from the 2009 Imagine Cup.

Speaker

Dr. Alan C. Jamieson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland (no, it's not a private school). A theoretician by training, working in self-stabilizing algorithms and dynamic programming, he also directs undergraduate research in robotics and game development. He is the current director for the fledgling SMCM Robotics Laboratory and RiverStudio, an undergraduate student-run game development studio. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Clemson University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Tulane University. Dr. Jamieson is also a giant gamer geek and fancies himself quite the amateur chef.

Introduction to XAML

Creating a rich user experience involves diving into some unique challenges. How do you work with data from various sources? How do you take advantage of modern media elements? What can you do to integrate all these things into an application that works? XAML provides a powerful schema for approaching the next generation of rich interactive applications both on the PC and on the Internet. In this session, we look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next-generation experiences for consumers and business, and we demonstrate how to use XAML to build rich interactive applications using XAML and Microsoft .NET. We explore how to use Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Blend to create applications and compelling UI using XAML markup, code, controls, and file I/O. We also discuss networking, how to retrieve data from a Web service, and various other aspects of building Silverlight applications.

Speaker

Mike Benkovich delivers technical presentations around the U.S. as a developer evangelist on the MSDN team at Microsoft. He has worked in a variety of professional roles, including architect, project manager, developer, and technical writer. Mike is also a published author of books from WROX Press and APress that show developers how to get the most from their SQL databases. Since appearing in the 1994 Microsoft DevCast, Mike has presented technical information at seminars, conferences, and corporate boardrooms across America.

Standard Sessions

ASP.NET MVC with the Spark View Engine

In this session the audience will be introduced to the Spark view engine. The Spark view engine is an alternative view engine for the ASP.NET MVC and MonoRail frameworks. The idea of Spark is to allow html to dominate the flow and to allow the code to fit seamlessly into it. We will delve into creating an ASP.NET MVC app with Spark, Visual Studio Intellisense integration, and finally wrap things up by unit testing a Spark view for acceptance testing. To actively participate in this session an understanding of ASP.NET MVC is advised.

Speaker

Donn Felker is an Independent Consultant in Minneapolis, MN. His company, Agilevent, is a Midwest .NET solution provider. He has over 9 years of professional experience in various markets that include – entertainment, health, retail, insurance, financial, and real estate. He is a MCTS in Web Client Development for .NET 2.0 and 3.5 and is also a certified ScrumMaster. He is the founder and coordinator of the Twin Cities Give Camp, the founder of Twin Cities Pragmatic Beer, and now also the leader of the Twin Cities Developers Guild. He is a writer, presenter and consultant on various topics ranging from architecture, development in general, agile practices and patterns & practices.

Leveraging Social Networking Tools in your Line of Business Apps

Social networking sites are popping up at an incredible rate. In this session, I'll give a brief overview of some of the more popular / useful social networks and dig into the Twitter API with a demo building a Twitter client app using VB .NET.

Speaker

Chris Williams is a Principal Consultant for Magenic. He is the founder of several .NET User Groups on the east coast, and most recently the Twin Cities XNA User Group and Twin Cities Developers Guild, both in Minneapolis, MN. He is a rabid blogger at BlogusMaximus.net, author of the very popular NINE Questions series and owner of the VB Community site www.ILoveVB.net. His most recent project is the Charity Fragathon fundraiser event. He's also a Visual Basic .NET MVP, MCT, MCSD (.NET) Early Adopter, MCAD, INETA Speaker, freelance game developer, occasional author, tech editor, conference speaker, vintage arcade game collector and INETA Community Champion. He also plays a pretty mean guitar in Rock Band. Lastly, yes, the rumors are true, he loves Visual Basic so much he even named his dog VB.

Leveraging Client Capabilities with jQuery in Visual Studio and ASP.NET

Microsoft has embraced the popular jQuery open source JavaScript library, which is already used by many major web sites. jQuery provides a very productive enivornment for client side programming in JavaScript. It takes advantage of existing knowledge of CSS selector syntax to offer a powerful and efficient alternative to the DOM. The use of operation chaining and implicit iteration lead to a very compact and productive syntax. The library is very lean at a mere 15K, yet provides a strong base and a great extensibility model which has led to a large number of plugin extensions to simplify web development. The session will review how to use the library for very useful features such as watermarks, avoiding browser inconsistencies, and making AJAX calls to the server. Several plug ins will be demonstrated which provide stunning client experiences with as little as 1 line of code! We will also study how to extend the library with our own custom utility funcitons and plug ins. Learn how Jquery and the Microsoft AJAX Library JavaScript libraries greatly simplify client side development, and which to use for particular scenarios.

Speaker

Robert Boedigheimer works for Schwans Shared Services, LLC providing business solutions with web technologies and leads Robert Boedigheimer Consulting, LLC. Robert has been designing and developing web sites for the past 14 years including the early days of ASP and ASP.NET. He is a columnist for aspalliance.com, an ASP.NET MVP, an author, an "Early Achiever" MCSD for .NET with C#, an MCPD: Web with C#, and a 2nd degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Robert has spoken at industry conferences including the Heartland Developers Conference, DevLink, DevTeach, Tulsa Tech Fest, DevWeek, TechEd, AJAXWorld, and numerous national and international VSLive! events.

Start Developing Flash Applications...for Free!

With the open-source release of Adobe's Flex SDK, anyone can start developing Flash applications. It's true that Adobe's tools -- the Flash and Flex IDEs -- help make developing Flash applications easier. But with knowledge of some particular parts of the Flex compiler and Actionscript 3, a person could actually run a professional Flash development business with no up front cost! Join Andrew as he takes you through downloading and configuring the Flex SDK with a particularly cool and free IDE. You'll see Actionscript 3 in action, covering those aspects of the language that will help you make real-world interactive applications. Together you'll make an XML-driven website navigation menu. Come and get your Flash development career started for free!

Speaker

Andrew Watson is currently an Interactive Developer at Sierra Bravo Corp. in Bloomington. He likes making cool products with cool tools, which in his career has included applications developed in Actionscript, .NET, PHP, and mobile Java. If he can make you smile while using one of his applications, then his work is done.

Backups! Don't Get Caught With Your Pants Down!

Did you hear about the blog site that disappeared when their system failed and they didn't have a backup to restore from? Or how about the pet supplier that went out of business after a DELETE statement removed everything from their database and there wasn't a backup on hand. These aren't urban myths but rather typical stories that make the news every couple months. Is your company one database failure from collapse? In this session, we'll go over the basis of backups. And also go over the basics and best practices in creating a backup and recovery strategy.

Speaker

Jason Strate, Digineer Inc, has been a Database Architect for over ten years. His experiences include designing and implementing both OLAP and OLTP solutions involving clustering servers, database monitoring and tuning, analysis services, DTS/Integration Services, Reporting Services, and Notification Services. Jason is actively involved with the local PASS chapter (SQL Server User Group); he is currently serving on the Executive Board and has presented at monthly meetings. Jason contributed to Microsoft's published white paper Empowering Enterprise Solutions with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and actively blogs about SQL Server and related technologies. Jason participated in the development of Microsoft Certification exams for SQL Server 2008. Over the past year, he has presented at the SSWUG SQL Server Launch Event and the past two SSWUG Virtual Conferences. He is also scheduled to present at this year's PASS Summit in Seattle, WA.

Extending VS2010: Control your IDE Destiny

Microsoft has made a giant leap with Visual Studio 2010. Moving to a WPF interface and majorly overhauling the process of adding and managing extensions. The inclusion of the new VSIX package model and built in managed classes for interacting with the Editor. It has never been easier to integrate your interface ideas into your IDE. This track will cover VSIX packages, some of the editor Adorners, debugging your extension and implementing some more advanced features like Menu Commands and Tool Windows.

Speaker

Jeff Klawiter is a Senior .NET Developer at Sierra Bravo Corporation. After spending the 6 years of his professional career as a PHP programmer he fully embraced .NET. He has worked on projects in ASP.NET, .NET CF 1.-3.5, WinForms, Surface, Silverlight. Everything from handheld warehouse management systems, vending machines to multitouch surface applications. His ambitions in life are to learn all there is to know about programming before he dies and to one day make his own dragon with Biological Programming. He currently holds MCTS Windows and MCPD ASP.NET certifications.

Links

No More Excuses: Test Your Javascript!

Javascript errors are nasty. All too often when a developer writes a web application, they may write fantastic unit and functional tests, but forget that all-important final layer of testing Javascript. Few enjoy debugging scripting errors, so we'll take a look at how to use libraries like Screw.Unit, Smoke, JSpec, and JSocka to help address those typos, errors, and even more dangerous design issues of "Doing the wrong thing right."

Speaker

Kevin Gisi is a Ruby on Rails application developer at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. A Rails Rumble 2008 award winner for an accessibility-focused web application, Kevin is a strong advocate for accessibility-mindful application design, test-driven development, and writing clean code. Kevin is the author of the JSocka mocking and stubbing framework for Javascript, and is currently writing Firefox Extensions: Creating Tools for Productivity for the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Applying the MVVM Pattern in Silverlight/WPF

Building an app using XAML is different from both earlier Windows and web development models. While there's still room for the MVC and MVP design patterns, the unique capabilities of XAML mean that the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern is often a better option. In this session you'll get a basic understanding of the MVVM design pattern itself, and more importantly will see practical examples of its use in building Silverlight and WPF applications.

Speaker

Rockford Lhotka is the creator of the popular CSLA .NET development framework, and is the author of numerous books, including Expert C# 2008 Business Objects and Expert VB 2008 Business Objects. He is a Microsoft Regional Director, MVP and INETA speaker. He contributes to several major magazines and regularly presents at major conferences around the world. Rockford is the Principal Technology Evangelist for Magenic (www.magenic.com), a company focused on delivering business value through applied technology and one of the nation's premiere Microsoft Gold Certified Partners. For more information go to www.lhotka.net.

So Your Boss Wont Let You Use F# - Functional Programming in C#

In this talk, Aaron Erickson covers how to do do F# style functional programming - even when your boss won't let you. C# has many of the tools you need in order to do many things that you would do in functional programming. Everything from immutable structures, Linq to Objects, PLinq, and most importantly, design techniques such as Command/Query separation are discussed in this session that will have you writing F# code using C# in no time!

Speaker

Aaron Erickson is the author of "The Nomadic Developer – Surviving and Thriving in the World of Technology Consulting" (http://tinyurl.com/buynomadbook). He is a Lead Consultant for ThoughtWorks Inc., where he helps the world's most ambitious companies get the most from their technology investments.

Scripting Data Sources and Destinations in SSIS 2008 and SSIS 2008R2

In this talk we will example how scripting can be used to leverage atypical data sources with SSIS Data Flows. We will look at how to write a script and library for reading metadata from media files as well as creating custom XML data destinations.

Speaker

Kent Tegels is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on SQL Server and Business Intelligence. Kent is also an Adjunct Professor for Business and Computer Science. Since the 1980s, Kent has been building systems and educating his fellow developers, adminstrators and analysts. He spends his time teaching Microsoft technologies to students and developers world wide. Kent enjoys helping people achieve their "AH-HA!" moments.

Building Peer-to-Peer Applications

Explore the world of Peer-to-Peer programming. In this session, attendees will be introduced to the powerful peer-to-peer infrastructure that is present in the Windows platform. Starting with an overview of peer-to-peer networks including graphing, grouping, and secure nodes, the talk will move into examples of building peer-to-peer applications. It will include demonstrations on how to use the PeerChannel infrastructure in WCF to build an appand how to tap into the Peer APIs directly to harness the full power of the P2P platform.

Speaker

Jeff Brand is a .NET Developer in Microsoft's Developer and Platform Group. Jeff assists customers in evaluating, developing and deploying applications built on the .NET Framework and the Microsoft platform. He has been with Microsoft for thirteen years and has served in variety of roles including infrastructure consultant, e-commerce technology specialist, and enterprise technology advisor.

Audio Synthesis with Silverlight 3

Silverlight 3 offers new power to developers in being able to work with raw WAV audio. In this code-heavy session you will see how to produce raw sound wave forms, work with the sound buffer, and send audio to Silverlight 3. We'll cover topics such as sequencing, blending, peaks, panning, and how to generate a considerable amount of annoying noise through your web browser to irritate co-workers.

Speaker

Mike Hodnick is a .NET developer and works as a Lead Consultant for Inetium in Bloomington, MN. He's been writing code professionally in the the Twin Cities area for about 10 years, and in his spare time enjoys camping, hiking, home recording, songwriting, and conducting highly controversial experiments with WPF and Silverlight.

Managed Extensibility Framework

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) keeps showing up in an increasing number of areas. Whether it is heard in the context of Prism, RIA Services, the MVC framework or even Visual Studio 2010, MEF is mentioned as a core enabling technology. Some people have even used MEF as an IoC container. In MEF everything is an extension and everything is an extensible – including the extensions themselves. This introduction is focused on describing what MEF is (and equally important - what it isn't), we'll walk through a real-world scenario of changing an application to use MEF and get a glimpse at how MEF will change how we think about application composition.

Speaker

Steve Hebert created the dotMath open source library on CodePlex. Steve has also co-authored an ANSI plugin specification in the control space and created a plugin pattern that was awarded an international patent. Steve has been focusing on the .Net space since its inception and primarily around the web space for that entire time. Steve currently works for ThomsonReuters in the financial markets space.

Experiences With Multi-Core, HPC Clusters, and GPU Programming

Based on our experience at 3M speeding up numerical processing algorithms for image processing and ray tracing we will cover topics related to parallel programming in C/C++ on diverse platforms. By looking at examples using threads, MPI, and OpenMP on multi-core workstations, high performance computing clusters, and Nvidia GPUs we will explore some of the issues with programming multiple cores and the performance gains we have achieved. All the examples will be with Visual Studio 2008 C++ and Windows.

Speaker

Richard Moore is a Staff Scientist at 3M Company working in the corporate research Software, Electronics, and Mechanical Systems Laboratory (SEMS). Richard has a Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Nevada Reno. His work experience over the last 29 years ranges from microprocessor design to leading teams in the development of commercial software applications and systems. Areas of specialty and interest include image processing, graphics, printing, color, parallel algorithm development, high speed computing architectures among many others.

T4: Stop Coding and Start Generating

Did you know Visual Studio 2008 comes with a code generator? Well it does, and you should learn to use it so you can stop writing repetitive code (i.e. DTO's and DAL's) and generate it. Come to this session to learn about the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4). T4 allows you to use simple ASP.NET-like template syntax to generate application source code, configuration files, stored procedures and more. This session will give you all the information you need to start using T4 effectively in your project, TODAY! We will go from basics (such as T4 template syntax) to advanced topics (such as template design and use of T4 in large projects) stopping along the way to create several templates from scratch.

This will be a PowerPoint free presentation. No slides, just code!

Speaker

Adam Grocholski has a great job at RBA Consulting in Minneapolis, MN where he has been working since 2006. Lately he has been diving into the latest and greatest UI technologies such as Silverlight and WPF and showing his clients how they can leverage these technologies to create compelling line of business applications. Adam also has a strong commitment to the local developer community. From co-founding the Twin Cities Cloud Computing user group, to hosting nerd dinners, to speaking at the .NET and Silverlight user groups and code camps. When not working he enjoys spending time with his two awesome daughters and amazing wife. You can catch up with his latest projects and thoughts on technology at http://thinkfirstcodelater.com, or if that's a bit too verbose for your liking you can always follow him on twitter at http://twitter.com/agrocholski.

Fun! Fun! Fun! With ASP.NET MVC View Engines

ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller) is one the new shiny technologies from Microsoft. We will take a quick tour of the M, V, and C of MVC. While the Controllers and the Models are very nice, the real fun is with the View Engines. That's right! ASP.NET MVC supports a gaggle of different view engines. We will take a look at a representative set of view engines (ASP.NET, Spark, and NHAML in some detail) and a quick "fly by" of other (NVelocity and Brail). We will look at the good and bad of the coding experience, the debugging experience, and the (dreaded) maintenance experience. All of this will be useful input to the selection of a view engine for your next project.

The secret is that the selection does not have to be exclusive. Fun Fact: you can use multiple view engines in the same application. Funner (OK, Even More Fun) Fact: you can even use multiple view engines on the same web page. Come and see how to make the magic happen. More goodies: see how to write your own view engine for fun and profit; if I told you how easy it was, you might think it was a scam.

But wait! there is more: in our "Bait and Switch" department, you can see how to switch the view that you that you use in order to support mobile browsers. You can even switch view engines on the fly. Learn how to log data for a subset of web pages (determined by values in your application configuration file) by using a different View Engine. Bring up your mastery of this dynamite technique at your next social gathering and see how many admiring glances you get.

And there will be unit testing. Yes, even the HTML produced by a view can be unit tested. Sprinkle a little pixie dust on the view, chant "separation of concerns" three times, and be able to verify that goodness of the incoming model has been transformed into even more wonderful HTML. How cool is that?

Speaker

Jon Stonecash is a senior consultant at Magenic, a Microsoft Gold Partner consulting company. Jon Stonecash has worked in software development for much longer than he would like to admit. In that time Jon has had the opportunity to make most of the serious software development mistakes at least once. He has programmed in over a dozen languages including several different assembly languages, Fortran, COBOL, SNOBOL, classic Visual Basic, VB.NET, and C#. He has survived the structured programming revolution and the object-oriented revolutions (having inexplicably missed out on the sexual revolution). Jon's software development activities have included the development of operating systems, scientific and engineering applications, and enterprise systems. He has worked in every phase of software development from the initial specification of requirements through to customer support. Along the way, he picked up a BS in Mathematics and an MBA. He still has hopes of finding something that he can be reasonably good at. His long term interests center about databases and the aspects of the application that handle data access and business logic. He is also interested in the tools and processes that assist the development process. Jon can be reached at jons@magenic.com. Jon also has an active blog on "Designing Out Loud in the .NET Space" at http://blog.magenic.com/blogs/jons/default.aspx.

LINQ Internals

Though Language INtegrated Query provides a revolutionary way to write code in C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9, it is powerless without several enabling language features and libraries. This session will explore the technologies that make LINQ possible and show how you can use the same techniques to make LINQ work for you.

Speaker

Keith Dahlby is a .NET developer and language geek from Cedar Rapids, IA. He works as a SharePoint consultant with Inetium and blogs about SharePoint and .NET at Solutionizing.NET and Los Techies. Keith is active in the local INETA chapter and has spoken at community events around the midwest. He is also studying Human-Computer Interaction at Iowa State University.

How Google App Engine Ruined My Life

It's 1:07 AM on a Tuesday morning. You're about to run your Python appengine test harness for the 75th time this evening (154 tests in 4 seconds). Your test coverage hovers in the mid 90's percentile. You have to be at work in a few hours. But all you can think about is mainlining superscalable Internet applications. What happened to you? Find out some of the ins and outs of Google App Engine.

Speaker

Nicolaus Bauman is a former Hollywood director who turned away from Tinsel Town after following up a blockbuster with a bomb so bad he was burned in effigy twice in one week on his own lot. Now he code quietly in the corner in the much more virulently realistic Midwest. He's never looked back. So he's have come to relish doling out the brutal truth rather than the Hollywood version in code and in life.

What Will Pex Do?

Pex is a tool that, at first glance, looks like it's all about testing your code in ways you never dreamed of. However, there's a lot more to Pex than that. In this session, we'll cover the testing capabilities of Pex along with exploring the advanced technologies that come with Pex, such as Stubs/Moles and Z3.

Speaker

Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic, and is also a Microsoft MVP. He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University.

Links

Domain Driven Design

Domain Driven Design (DDD) has steadily become more visible to the broader software development community, and offers some unique approaches to developing complex business applications. This session will introduce you to the basic concepts of DDD, as well as some updated thoughts by the author of "Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in Software", by Eric Evans. This session will focus primarily on DDD concepts, but will also present an implementation example developed on the .NET platform.

Speaker

Jordan Terrell is a Consultant at Digineer, with over a decade of experience in the software development industry. He has been learning and applying Domain Driven Design techniques on .NET development projects since 2005. He is an avid proponent of teaching and applying current best-practices and patterns. Jordan is also interested in embedded microcontroller development and is the author of a DHCP stack for the Arduino platform. Visit his web properties via http://wiki.jordanterrell.com.