Christina Aldan came and gave a very informative presentation to the group on emotional intelligence.

Better UX with Emotional Intelligence

For designers and developers to create user-centric products, we must focus on creating the best possible experience for our clients. We do this by incorporating emotional intelligence into the creative process, triggering positive emotions when clients engage with our products and services. Emotional Intelligence is a skill you can develop with practice. Learn how to incorporate it into your creative process to design products and services that impress your clients.

• Understand ways user experience is included at every level of business
• Identify the touch points of your brand
• Learn the difference between UX vs. UI
• Learn to quickly identify what poor UX looks like
• Examine where UX fits into your own creative process
• Learn strategies you can implement immediately to design products and services with the best possible user experience
• Discuss companies that are effectively using EQ for their UX
• Understand the areas where you can incorporate EQ into your creative process when designing products and services

Bio
Christina Aldan is a TEDx speaker, trainer, and digital advertising consultant whose boutique agency, LG Designs, offers businesses brand consulting and creative content for everyday media. With over 12 years of experience in the digital advertising realm, Christina is highly regarded for her approach to business, partnering with clients to find unique strategies that ensure their advertising goals are met. Christina builds connections through her keynote addresses, training workshops, and technological education. She uses these tools to help individuals and businesses cultivate value in everyday media. She has presented trainings for the Microsoft MVP community and tech conferences worldwide. Christina uses her charisma and expertise to inspire others by mentoring women in business like herself. She also has sat on state and local boards supporting women in tech, entrepreneurship, and children with learning disabilities.

She is the recipient of the Las Vegas Women in Tech Community Service Award and the Distinguished Woman of the Year Award in STEM. Learn more at: ChristinaAldan.com.

Gerardo Melendrez talked about how you can use Azure AI to train and recognize various items. In his example, he trained the software to various stickers.

Bio
Gerardo Melendrez is a Senior .NET Software Developer with experience in a wide variety of business and consumer applications involving different industries, from manufacturing and high-volume transactional payment processing applications to casino management and mobile gaming. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) and write a blog called .NET Tips And Tricks with emphasis in hard-to-find solutions to problems regarding development using the Microsoft technology stack. He is the founder of The Magic Software, a software development shop and CTO/Co-Founder of Revohloo Studios, a unique premium consumer music video platform.

Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardomelendrez
Website: http://www.themagicsoftware.com
Blog: http://blog.themagicsoftware.com

We started this year with a talk by Gerardo Melendrez entitled "Deploying an UWP App on Windows 10 IoT Core on a Raspberry Pi".

The talk covered how to create and deploy an UWP app to a Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 IoT Core. The sample app turned a LED on and off and sent messages to an Azure IoT Hub backend with the events being displayed in a PowerBI dashboard.

Bio
Gerardo Melendrez is a Senior .NET Software Developer with experience in a wide variety of business and consumer applications involving different industries, from manufacturing and high-volume transactional payment processing applications to casino management and mobile gaming. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) and write a blog called .NET Tips And Tricks with emphasis in hard-to-find solutions to problems regarding development using the Microsoft technology stack. He is the founder of The Magic Software, a software development shop and CTO/Co-Founder of Revohloo Studios, a unique premium consumer music video platform.

Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardomelendrez
Website: http://www.themagicsoftware.com
Blog: http://blog.themagicsoftware.com

For our October meeting, we had Shaun Abram giving a talk about how pre-production testing alone is not enough to ensure that your software is working in the only place that really matters: production. He covered such topics as production deployment and testing strategies, observability, and chaos engineering.

Synopis
The sole purpose of software is to have a positive impact on your customers.

And the only place your software has an impact on your customers is production.

While testing in demo and stage is good (indeed, essential), testing in production is all too often overlooked. Deploying to production and hoping for the best is a gamble, not a strategy.

In this talk, we discuss

1) Better production deployment and testing strategies including dark pool testing, canary releases and feature switching.

2) After deployment, your work is still not done. We'll talk about Observability, including monitoring, tracing and metrics.

3) Finally, even with the best deployment strategies and monitoring techniques, your software WILL fail in production. It's a question of when, not if. So why not simulate those failures first? We'll finish with game days and chaos engineering.

This talk should be of interest to all developers, QA and Ops folks who are responsible for getting working software in front of users.

Bio
Shaun Abram is a technical lead and development manager, interested in software design, architecture and continuous deployment. A Northern Ireland native, now happily based in San Francisco, Shaun is passionate about building quality software.

For our September meeting, Joe Mayo gave a very insightful talk about the basics of deep learning.

Synopis
In this talk, we saw an example of how deep learning works. We covered the basics, discussing concepts and techniques that are common to many types of deep learning. Although math is inherent in how deep learning works, Joe explained enough to where you don't have to be an expert in calculus, linear algebra, or statistics. We saw that this technology doesn't require a Ph.D. for any developer who wants to learn and take advantage of AI. By the end of the presentation, we saw a full example of how deep learning works, design and considerations, and practical applications.

Bio
Joe Mayo is an author and independent software consultant, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He has written several books, including Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework by Microsoft Press. Joe is a Microsoft AI MVP with several years of awards, he lives in Las Vegas, NV and tweets (as @JoeMayo) about #ai, #botframework, and #chatbots on Twitter.

For our August meeting, Troy Miles gave a remote presentation entitled "The Best Editor on the Planet, Visual Studio Code".

Synopis
In the talk, he discuss the background of Visual Studio Code, how it compared to Atom, and show how to set Visual Studio Code up for both JavaScript (React-Native) and C++ (Linux Web Server). And best of all it everything he showed is free and open source.

He demonstrated VS Code running on Windows and Mac along with creating apps and debugging them in both JavaScript, and C++. He will also talked about some of his favorite extensions. Extensions are VS Code's not-so-secret super power, wiith them you can customize it to your work your way.

Bio
Troy Miles, aka the Rockncoder, began writing computer games in assembly language for early computers like the Apple II, Commodore C64, and the IBM PC over 35 years ago. Nowadays he writes web & mobile apps for a Southern California based automotive valuation and information company. Troy is fluent in JavaScript, C#, C++, Kotlin, and Clojure.

Nights and weekends he can usually be found writing cool apps for mobile and web or teaching others how to do so. Troy has spoken at O'Reilly's Velocity, MobileWeb Dev Con, Mobile Dev+Test, NG-Vegas, and Angular Summit. He is a regular speaker at So Cal and Silicon Valley Code Camps and to local developer groups all over southern California and Las Vegas. A few of his talks can be found on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/rockncoder.

Troy loves writing about software development and is also a video author. His first magazine article was published in Dr. Dobb's magazine over twenty years agos. He is the author of jQuery Essentials.

For our May meeting, Jay Harris gave a talk entitled "Rebooting the ASP.NET Franchise" in which he covered what is different about ASP.NET Core. The talk was focused on what to look for when moving from an ASP.NET MVC application to an ASP.NET Core MVC application.

Synopis
The talk discussed ASP.NET Core, focusing on how it differs from ASP.NET MVC 5. We even drill down into file, structure, and code differences between the two, as if we were going to migrate an MVC application into a Core application. There's also considerable elements on how it can change (and improve) developer workflow.

Bio
Jay Harris is a code wrangler, software consultant, and owner of Arana Software. He has been developing on the web since 1995, when the Blink tag lured him away from Visual Basic 3, and has been awarded as a Microsoft Regional Director, ASPInsider, and Microsoft MVP. Recognizing that the greatest application performance bottleneck is a developer’s time, Jay’s continuing quest is for frameworks, modules, tools, and practices that make developers stronger, fitter, happier, and more productive.

For our April meeting, we had two people from Microsoft, Ed Macuaely and Alan Yu, that talked about two Microsoft topics: documentation and cross-platform SQL Server.

Synopis
First, Ed Macuaely of Microsoft gave a brief session about Microsoft's initiative on open-sourcing documentation and how everyone can contribute to their online documentation.

Then the meeting shifted to cross-platform Microsoft SQL Server. Ed demonstrated installing SQL Server on a Linux machine, which took just a few minutes (assuming you have a good Internet connection). Finally, Microsoft's Alan Yu gave a very informative remote presentation on SQL Operations Studio, Microsoft's new cross-platform management tool for SQL Server.

SQL Server related links
How to contribute to SQL Server Documentation
http://aka.ms/editsqldocs

Microsoft Docs contributor guide
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/contribute/

About SQL Server On Linux
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-overview

Unattended Install Script for SQL Server on Linux
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sample-unattended-install-ubuntu


Microsoft SQL Operations Studio related links
Download link
https://aka.ms/sqlopsstudio

Github repo to learn more
https://github.com/microsoft/sqlopsstudio

Issues and Feature Requests
https://github.com/microsoft/sqlopsstudio/issues

Twitter
@sqlopsstudio

Jay Harris of Arana Software gave a really fantastic presentation about various UI design principals that non-UI oriented programmers can use in doing their UI designs.

Synopis
Elegant design requires talent, but talent is not a prerequisite for avoiding bad design. If you lack artistic touch and prefer rules and logic over the ethereal art form, the fundamental tenets of composition can enable you to apply Design as a programming paradigm. Spend an hour with a coder learning the logic of design—hacking pixels instead of bits—and free yourself of your excuse for horrible designs.

Bio
Jay Harris is a code wrangler, software consultant, and owner of Arana Software. He has been developing on the web since 1995, when the Blink tag lured him away from Visual Basic 3, and has been awarded as a Microsoft Regional Director, ASPInsider, and Microsoft MVP. Recognizing that the greatest application performance bottleneck is a developer’s time, Jay’s continuing quest is for frameworks, modules, tools, and practices that make developers stronger, fitter, happier, and more productive.

Joe Mayo gave a nice presentation about using the Azure Bot Service to create chatboxes.

Synopis
Chatbots are an incredibly easy way for user's to interact with your company or service. A few popular use cases are FAQs, customer service, and notifications. This session shows how easy it is to get started creating your own chatbot in the cloud with Azure Bot Service. Some knowledge of C# development will be helpful, but this is an entry-level presentation, teaching you how to build a basic chatbot.

Bio
Joe Mayo is an author and independent software consultant, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He has written several books, including Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework by Microsoft Press. A long-time MVP with several years of awards, he lives in Las Vegas, NV and tweets (as @JoeMayo) about #BotFramework and #AI on Twitter.

Gerardo Melendrez gave a very informative presentation about using the Linux Subsystem on a Windows 10 machine and deploying an ASP.NET Core application to a Linux VM on Azure.

Synopis
This talk will be about creating a .NET Core ASP.NET MVC application using the .NET Core CLI tools, running it in Ubuntu Linux on Windows 10 using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL,) and then deploying it to a Docker Container in an Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine on Azure.

Goals:

• Install Ubuntu Linux on Windows 10
• Create an Ubuntu Linux VM on Azure
• Install the .NET Core SDK for Linux
• Create a .NET Core MVC Web Application using the .NET Core CLI tools
• Install Docker on Linux
• Create a Linux Docker container with an ASP.NET Core base image
• Deploy the app to the Docker Container in the Azure Linux box
• Run the application and open a port in the Azure firewall to access the website

Bio
Gerardo Melendrez is a Senior .NET Software Developer with experience in a wide variety of business and consumer applications involving different industries, from manufacturing and high-volume transactional payment processing applications to casino management and mobile gaming. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) and write a blog called .NET Tips And Tricks with emphasis in hard-to-find solutions to problems regarding development using the Microsoft technology stack. He is the founder of The Magic Software, a software development shop and CTO/Co-Founder of Revohloo Studios, a unique premium consumer music video platform.

Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardomelendrez
Website: http://www.themagicsoftware.com
Blog: http://blog.themagicsoftware.com

Hattan Shobokshi gave a nice presentation about setting up and using a CI server to automatically build and deploy to Azure.

Synopis
Are your production releases big and scary? They shouldn’t be! In this talk I’ll show you how to make releases easier and repeatable. We’ll look at how CI can surface issues faster. Then we'll set up a CI server, hook up a process to build and deploy to Azure with every checkin. I’ll show you all the tools you need to get started with CI on the .NET stack.

Bio
Hattan Shobokshi is a Microsoft MVP, Software Engineer and technical speaker. Hattan is responsible for developing applications on a variety of platforms including web, desktop and mobile devices. He is passionate about delivering scalable applications that adhere to industry best practices. Hattan is experienced in .NET technologies (with a particular expertise in ASP.NET MVC), JavaScript and other web technologies. Hattan is Co-Chairman of the Los Angeles .NET user group as well as a member of the organizing committee for SoCal Code Camp. He regularly presents at local user groups and code camps.

Troy Miles, instead of giving a demostration of working with AWS Lambda, C# and Nancy, he instead talked about what to be aware of and possible pitfalls that you may encounter when using open source packages. And issues that he encountered when using open source packages to bridge between C# and ASW Lambda.

Bio
Troy Miles, aka the Rockncoder, began writing computer games in assembly language for early computers like the Apple II, Commodore C64, and the IBM PC over 35 years ago. Nowadays he writes web & mobile apps for a Southern California based automotive valuation and information company. Troy is fluent in JavaScript, C#, C++, Kotlin, and Clojure.

Nights and weekends he can usually be found writing cool apps for mobile and web or teaching others how to do so. Troy has spoken at O'Reilly's Velocity, MobileWeb Dev Con, Mobile Dev+Test, NG-Vegas, and Angular Summit. He is a regular speaker at So Cal and Silicon Valley Code Camps and to local developer groups all over southern California and Las Vegas. A few of his talks can be found on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/rockncoder.

Troy loves writing about software development. His first magazine article was published in Dr. Dobb's magazine over twenty years agos. He is the author of jQuery Essentials. Troy is also a video author, his most recent video will becoming out on Lynda.com fall 2017.

This month, Rob Richardson gave a very good, informative presentation on working with Docker.

Abstract
Welcome to Docker

Docker is carefully tucked between virtualization, continuous deployment, and pure awesome. We'll look at the commands and ecosystem around building infrastructure as code, deploying a swarm, and sharing images on Docker Hub. We'll see how easy it is to create Linux and Windows docker images, and run both single containers and a whole system. Come see why devs and ops love Docker.

Bio
Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET and Node, Angular and React. He’s a Microsoft MVP, published author, frequent speaker at conferences, user groups, and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on his blog at https://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on twitter at @rob_rich.

Our scheduled speaker had to cancel due to family issues. Rafael dos Santos, a Microsoft MVP from Brazil was nice enough to step up and give a nice remote presentation to the group.

Abstract
Asp.net core + Integration Tests + VSTS + Azure



Bio
Rafael dos Santos is a Microsoft MVP. He is passionate about software development, specially ASP.NET and Azure. His contact page is https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/PublicProfile/5002632?fullName=Rafael%20Ferreira%20dos%20Santos.

Joe Mayo gave a talk about using chatbots with the Azure Bot Service.

Abstract
Chatbots on the Azure Bot Service

Joe talked about how to use the Azure Bot Service to build chatbots. He also showed how to build chatbots on-line. And he demostrated how the serverless computing features of the Azure Bot Service helps achieve greater performance and scalability.

Bio
Joe Mayo is an author and independent software consultant, specializing in Microsoft technologies. He has written 7 books and is currently writing Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework by Microsoft Press. A long-time MVP with several years of awards, he lives in Las Vegas, NV and tweets (as @JoeMayo) about #BotFramework and #AI on Twitter.

Jeremy Clark gave a very nice, informative presentation on doing parallel programming in .NET.

Abstract
I'll Get Back to You: Task, Await, and Asynchronous Methods

There's a lot of confusion about async/await, Task/TPL, and asynchronous and parallel programming in general. So let's start with the basics and look at how we can consume asynchronous methods using Task and then see how the "await" operator can makes things easier for us. Along the way, we’ll look at continuations, cancellation, and exception handling.

Bio
Jeremy Clark makes developers better. By drawing on over 15 years of experience in application development, he helps developers take a step up in their skillset with a focus on making complex topics approachable regardless of skill level. He is a Microsoft MVP for .NET, and he has authored seven courses for Pluralsight, including "C# Interfaces", a course aimed at giving developers a clear understanding of abstraction. He loves speaking and has delivered over 200 technical presentations in the last 7 years in the United States and Europe. Jeremy lives in Southern California with 2 cats and a banjo. You can visit his website at http://www.jeremybytes.com

Gerardo Melendrez gave a demonstration about creating a cross-platform game using Unity 3D and C#.

Abstract
Creating Bandito Bob: A 2D Cross-Platform Game Using Unity 3D and C#

The presentation will focus on a live demonstration about creating a cross-platform game using Unity 3D and C# with Visual Studio 2015. In the demo I will cover the basics of importing 2D sprites and sprite sheets, creating animations, using rigid bodies and colliders for collision detection, working with sorting layers and creating C# scripts. Finally I will cover the basics of building the game for different platforms, such as Windows 10, Windows Phone, Android and iPhone.

Bio
Gerardo Melendrez is a Senior .NET Software Developer with experience in a wide variety of business and consumer applications involving different industries, from manufacturing and high-volume transactional payment processing applications to casino management and mobile gaming. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) and write a blog called .NET Tips And Tricks with emphasis in hard-to-find solutions to problems regarding development using the Microsoft technology stack. He is the founder of The Magic Software, a software development shop and CTO/Co-Founder of Revohloo Studios, a unique premium consumer music video platform.

Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gerardomelendrez
Website: http://www.themagicsoftware.com
Blog: http://blog.themagicsoftware.com

Matthew Renze gave a very nice talk on the philosophy of writing code for the reader of the code rather than for the author or for a machine. Mr. Renze talked about how writing code that is clean is extremely important because of the high maintenance cost associated with messy code.

Abstract
Clean Code: A Reader-Centered Approach

Writing code that is clean is extremely important because of the high maintenance cost associated with messy code. In this session, you will learn from industry experts what makes code clean. In addition, you will learn how to write reader-centric code that is simple, readable, understandable, maintainable, and testable.

Bio
Mathew Renze is an independent software and data science consultant with over 17 years of professional experience building large-scale data-driven desktop, server, and cloud-based applications. He's an international public speaker, an author for Puralsight, a Microsoft MVP, and ASPInsider, and an open-source software contributor. His interests include Agile software practices, code craftsmanship, and machine learning. For more information, please visit his website at http://www.matthewrenze.com.

Joe Mayo gave an introduction talk about implementing conversational user interfaces (CUI) using the Microsoft Bot Framework. No, we weren't talking about physical robots here. We are talking about programs that lets your user communicate with the program in plain English (or communicate with the user in English).

Abstract
Introduction to the Microsoft Bot Framework

Developers, like you, are increasingly adding conversational user interfaces (CUI) to their applications and tools for enabling this are getting better. One of these new tools is the Microsoft Bot Framework. Learn how these tools can help you add more intelligent interaction directly into your applications. You'll learn how to write your own bot to communicate with a user as well as managing conversation state. Along the way, you'll see how to debug bot apps and use other Bot Framework tools. Finally, you'll learn how to publish and register your bot. After this presentation, you'll have enough information to get started coding your own bot.

Bio
Joe Mayo is an author and independent software consultant, specializing in Microsoft technologies. Joe has written 7 books, many magazine articles, and taught numerous on-line and in-person courses. His experience spans multiple technologies for desktop, cloud, and device. He is also author of the LINQ to Twitter open source project. Joe is a long-time MVP with several years of awards. Joe lives in Las Vegas, NV and tweets (as @JoeMayo) about bots and #VegasTech on Twitter.

Barry Stahl gave a presentation about when there are more than one solution, how to determine the best solution.

Abstract
A Developer's Guide to Finding Optimal Solutions

Solving problems that have more than one possible solution is something every developer will be asked to do over the course of his or her career. Figuring out the best way to utilize the capacity of a device or machine, finding the shortest path between two points, or determining the best way to schedule people or events are all problems where mathematical optimization techniques can be used to quickly and efficiently find solutions. In this introduction to mathematical optimization designed specifically for software developers, we will explore some of the foundational techniques for solving these types of problems, and add several of these methods to your toolbox so that you can put them to work for your customers. Since this is a session for developers, we'll keep it in terms that work best for us. That is, we'll go heavy on the code and lighter on the math.

Bio
Barry Stahl is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers for nearly 30 years. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 30+ year resident of Phoenix Arizona. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamp events, he spends his days as Principal Application Architect for Crew Systems at American Airlines and his nights thinking about the next AZGiveCamp, an annual event where software developers come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.

Justin James gave a very informative overview of Cordova and Ionic works together and how to go about developing cross platform mobile applications utilizing them. He demostrated how you can write a single application using HTML and Javascript and target the various mobile platforms: iPhone/iPad, Android and even the Windows Phone.

Abstract
Using Visual Studio with Cordova and Ionic to Create Cross Platform Mobile Applications

Are you already a web developer and want to create a mobile application? Then come learn all about the Ionic mobile framework and how to use it with the Visual Studio 2015 Cordova Tooling. With technologies that we already know and love like Html 5, Javascript, CSS 3, and Angular we can easily create a mobile application that targets Android, iOS, and Windows 10 Phone.

Your application will look, feel and perform like a native application without you having to do anything special. Ionic takes care of all of the hard work of making it look right on the mobile devices so that you can focus on your application.

By the end of this talk, you will be ready to deliver mobile applications using Ionic and Visual Studio 2015. You will understand the the features of Ionic, how to get it setup, and have a fully working sample application that is ready to release in the app store.

Bio
Justin James a software craftsman building applications in ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, Html, CSS, and Javascript. He has been using .NET since the 1.0 beta days building everything from small utilities to web sites that have more than a million views per month. He has presented at several user groups in the Phoenix, Arizona area; Code Camps in Las Vegas, Arizona, and California; Conferences such as Nebraska.Code(), Codepalousa, and NDC Oslo; and appeared on .Net Rocks Episode 1158. He loves to share knowledge that he have gained to inspire and help developers reach their end goal faster.

Rob Richardson gave a talk about what is new in Javascript in a presentation titled "A taste of ES6: the language and the tools". Due to his airline flight being canceled, Rob gave the presentation as a remote presentation.

Abstract
A taste of ES6: the language and the tools
JavaScript has come of age, and this latest version, ES6, adds lots of syntactical sugar to make our code clearer. You can use these tools in ES5 browsers today by leveraging a code bundler and transpiler. We'll look at the new syntax such as =>, let, import, and class, transpilers like Babel, and Code Bundlers like Webpack. You can use these open-source technologies in production today to quickly build very powerful web apps.

Bio
Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET, Node, Angular, and React. He’s a Microsoft MVP, published author, frequent speaker at conferences, user groups, and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on his blog at https://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on twitter at @rob_rich.

James Chambers was in town, and was very nice to offer to come and take the time to talk to the group. He gave a very good and informative talk about various ASP.NET Core subjects in a talk entitled "An ASP.NET Core All-You-Can-Eat Buffet".

Abstract
An ASP.NET Core All-You-Can-Eat Buffet
This session covered some of the great things that you can do in ASP.NET Core. The actual subject discussed was based upon the feedback of the members in attendence. The subjects decided upon were:

Dynamically-Generated Test and Prototype Data
When you're asked for a sample or mock-up it's nice to have realistic data in what you present, but then you're either stuck hand-bombing in unique combinations, using Lorem Ipsum, or copying-and-pasting "John Smith" 132 times. Are there better options? Yes, there's Genfu.io.

Configuration That Doesn't Suck
Stop writing code to read your config! The new configuration system gives us not only dead-simple configuration options, but storage for local development environments, easily replaced-values in the cloud and strongly-typed class support for properties that mean something to our code. James talked about how the configuration files work and are read by ASP.NET Core.

Structured Logging to a Hosted Service
Logging locally? Okay, cool...you're ahead of most developers out there. But once you've seen the power of a hosted logging system you may never go back to disk. And when you top that up with structured logging, you're all about to get exciting over log files. James covered how to do logging using the Serilog logging framework.

Cache All the Things
It's got to be one of the simplest ways to improve performance in your app, next to removing the Thread.Sleep(5000) statements. Caching can be done locally or across the wire to give your apps a boost, and it only takes a few lines of code to light it up. James covered how to implement caching in ASP.NET Core.

Bio
James Chambers was weaned onto a Commodore VIC-20 and has been programming pretty much every day since. Now a five-time Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies, James shares with tech communities ranging from elementary schools to MVA and everything in between. While he codes in several languages on both the server and client, don't let the glasses fool you; he's no hipster.

Simon Timms gave a live remote presentation on the subject of CQRS Design Patterns.

Abstract
CQRS Design Patterns
Remember when you took that database class and 1/3 of the class was talking about normal forms? Turns out that everything you learned was to optimize databases for writing: avoiding inconsistent data and updating only one location. Why spend so much time optimizing for write when 90% of your operations are read operations? With CQRS we split the read and write models so that queries are simple and we ensure consistency with asynchronous message handlers. In this session we'll learn the basics of the Command Query Responsibility Segregation approach to building applications.

Bio
Simon Timms is always interested in improving himself and learning all that he can. He has worked in various oil and gas domains as well as insurance and enterprise search. He began his career working with build systems so is very passionate about proper builds and is excited by the burgeoning DevOps movement. For the most part Simon works in C# mostly on web applications. Somehow he seems to have picked up a reputation for knowing about JavaScript. He is a big fan of ReactJS and currently dislikes knockoutjs, but that will likely change in a day or two. Check back soon!

Simon holds an honours degree in computing science from the University of Alberta and a masters in information systems from Athabasca University. Simon believes in community and giving back for all of his good fortune. He helps run the Calgary .net User Group where he typically talks several times a year. He also talks whenever he can at technical conferences. He is a three time ASP.net MVP.

Troy Miles is returned to talk to the group once again, this time about ReactiveX, a package to help make writing asynchronous coding easier.

Abstract
A Deep Look at ReactiveX
The Internet is asynchronous, people are asynchronous, the universe is asynchronous. They are now and they always will be. Writing applications which deal correctly with asynchronous data is difficult. Or at least it was. Microsoft open sourced ReactiveX in 2010 to make what used to be some of the hairiest kinds of coding almost easy.

The project was so well received that it has been ported to nearly every major programming language. Versions of ReactiveX exists for .NET, JavaScript, Java, Scala, Clojure, C++, Ruby, Python, Groovy, JRuby, Kotlin, and Swift. The project is open source and community maintain with corporate backing from the likes of Microsoft and Netflix.

Microsoft created the ReactiveX, then called reactive extensions, from the burnt out remains of Project Volta. Project Volta's goal was to extend .NET's to run both on the server and in the browser. A compiler would decide which parts were best to put where. It essentially was the Meteor framework in 2007.

In this talk we will take a deep look at ReactiveX. We will use code samples to show how things are done before and after ReactiveX. The code will be in C# and JavaScript. We will see how ReactiveX makes our lives as developers easier and our code more reactive.

Bio
A designer and developer of software since 1979, Troy began his career writing games in assembly and C. Since then he has written code in C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript and even a smidgen of Python. Along the way, some of his titles have won awards, he became a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, and in 2012, he won a developer challenge at a local Microsoft Windows Phone Unleashed event.

His passion since 2007 has been mobile and mobile web development. In 2011, he joined the mobile development team at Kelley Blue Book. His small team is responsible for the KBB.com application for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 and the mobile versions of KBB.com. Troy also spends time talking to developer groups and maintaining his blog, The Rock n Coder

After an absence in speaking to our group, Hattan Shobokshi returned and gave a very informative talk about the new version of ASP.NET MVC 6, or as it has been renamed to, ASP.NET Core.

Abstract
ASP.NET MVC6 Deep Dive
This session will focus on ASP.NET MVC6. We'll take a detailed look at some new features including DNX, the new pipeline, Built in Dependency Injection, new razor features and much more!

This session will feature a lot of code samples and demos to help you get familiar with asp.net 5 (vNext) and it's associated tools.

Topics include:

• Command line tools (DNX, DNU, DNVM)
• Custom Middleware
• User Secrets
• View Components
• TagHelpers (including creating custom tag helpers)
• Dependency Injection
• Poco Controllers
• Async Views
• Incremental Flushing
• Combining MVC routes and WebAPI Routes in a Single Controller
• ASP.NET MVC on *nix/OSX

Bio
Hattan Shobokshi is a Microsoft MVP, Software Engineer and technical speaker. Hattan is responsible for developing applications on a variety of platforms including web, desktop and mobile devices. He is passionate about delivering scalable applications that adhere to industry best practices. Hattan is experienced in .NET technologies (with a particular expertise in ASP.NET MVC), JavaScript and other web technologies. Hattan is Co-Chairman of the Los Angeles .NET user group as well as a member of the organizing committee for SoCal Code Camp. He regularly presents at local user groups and code camps.

Jeremy Clark gave a very good talk to the group about what they are and how to use design patterns.

Abstract
Lean the Lingo: Design Patterns
You already use Design Patterns but probably don't know it. Observer, Facade, Iterator, Proxy - Learning the lingo allows us to better communicate your ideas with other developers. We'll take a look at several Gang of Four patterns that we regularly use without realizing it. Don't know who the Gang of Four is? Join us to find out.

Bio
Jeremy Clark makes developers better. By drawing on over 15 years of experience in application development, he helps developers take a step up in their skillset with a focus on making complex topics approachable regardless of skill level. He is a Microsoft MVP for .NET, and he has authored seven courses for Pluralsight, including "C# Interfaces", a course aimed at giving developers a clear understanding of abstraction. Jeremy lives in Southern California with 2 cats and a banjo. For more information, visit www.jeremybytes.com.

For our first meeting of the year, Josiah Mory will be the presenter. This is his first time presenting to the group and hHe will be giving a talk about using regular expressions.

Abstract
Regular Expression
So many developers see the words "Regular Expressions" and think of a frightening string of crazy symbols. While this is true, they are also a valuable way of manipulating text and knowing the basics can lead to many practical uses that will often save many lines of code. Learning to use regular expression will show ways to manipulate text and strings by testing, extracting, and changing the string. We will take a look at some of the ways to do this specifically using the Javascript RegExp Engine.

Bio
After 10 years of touring and gigging in the music industry, Josiah left behind his bass guitar and moved fully into the world of software development. He currently is working for BuildFire.com, a platform app developer, as a Developer Advocate. Josiah has loves Ruby, but like most the world, is currently working primarily with Javascript.

For the first time, we had Barry Stahl presenting to the group. He talked about creating maintainable and discoverable code in a talk entitled "Simplify Your API: Creating Maintainable and Discoverable Code".

Abstract
Simplify Your API: Creating Maintainable and Discoverable Code
Developers don't read documentation, this is a fact. It is also a fact that an API that depends on its documentation to get developers to understand and discover its features is at a huge disadvantage in the marketplace. Fortunately, there are some simple, easy-to-use mechanisms for wrapping complex APIs and making their functionality both easy to use, and highly discoverable. Imagine being able to use tools like IntelliSense that the Visual Studio IDE already provides as a way to expose the functionality of your service or library. In this session we will build a fluent Domain Specific Language interface over an existing API to create an interface that is easy to use and discoverable through IntelliSense.

Bio
Barry S. Stahl is a .NET Software Engineer, a Co-Founder of AZGiveCamp, an Election Integrity Activist, a Baseball and Hockey fan, the husband of one genius and the father of another. Barry spends his days as Principal Application Architect for Crew Systems at the new American Airlines and his nights working on the next AZGiveCamp and building presentations to be delivered as an INETA Community Speaker. Barry has lived in the Valley of the Sun for more than 30 years and currently resides in historic downtown Phoenix. His blog site is Cognitive Inheritance.

Steele Price came and gave a presentation entitled "Practical Domain Driven Development" in which he talked about what is domain driven development and how his group is using domain driven development in their environment.

Abstract
Practical Domain Driven Development
We've all heard the term but what does it really mean and how can we put it into practice?

What does an application look like that uses this approach?

What are the processes involved, especially if I need to work with legacy systems?

Domain Driven Development is a process that heavily involves the subject matter experts, business processes and business terms directly in the design and coding of software to fulfill the needs of the business. Learn how to leverage the .Net Languages and Tools to support the use of Domain Driven Development.

Learn about the specific terms such as Ubiquitous Language, Bounded Context, Anti-Corruption Layer, Domain Commands, Domain Events and how to apply these into the design of your code to create a more readable, sustainable system.

I will demonstrate how we are using this to great effect in end to end development and to connect over 100 separate systems together. This is an interactive talk and you should bring lots of questions.

Bio
Steele Price is the Chief Architect at the Arizona Supreme Court. He has successfully used this technique and continues to modernize several vital systems in the Arizona State Court System. He is also working with the National Center for State Courts participating in the National Standard recommendations for the Next Generation Case Management systems. He has been a Microsoft MVP for over 10 years and has been developing software full time for 30 years.

We had a special meeting this month. Once again David McCarter was in town and offered to talk to the group. This time, he gave a presentation about code contracts. Code contacts allows the developer to specify conditions on the values that are being passed to your code. It's like data validation and more, but it's handled before your code even executes.

Abstract
Rock Your Code Using Code Contracts
Code contracts are a powerful new feature that is part of the .NET 4.5 framework. Code Contracts brings the advantages of design-by-contract programming to .NET programming. Contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. We will also explore the new Smart Unit Tests in Visual Studio 2015 that works best with Code Contracts.

Bio
David McCarter is a C# Microsoft MVP Developer/ Architect/ Consultant & Professional Code Reviewer in San Diego, California. David is the creator of dotNetTips.com that has been helping programmers since 1994. David has written for programming magazines and has published many books and his latest self-published book is David McCarter's .NET Coding Standards. He is one of the founders and the president of the almost 20-year-old San Diego .NET Developers Group. In 2008 David won the INETA Community Excellence Award for his involvement in the .NET community. David is also an inventor of a software printing system that was approved by the US Patient Office in May 2008.

David gives lectures on software engineering at colleges, high schools, user groups and conferences such as Code Camp, VSLive, Microsoft DevDays. This year is his 17th year teaching at the University of California San Diego.

If that's not enough David is also an award winning photographer and works for bands such as Queensryche, Buckcherry, Geoff Tate, Gary Hoey and too many other bands in the US to list. He is also working on his first non-geek book about tribute bands. David is also a guitarist and has had the honor to play with Carl Franklin and the lead guitarist from Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Steven Schwendinger gave a talk about how he is ablet to generate apps quickly using code generating techniques.

Abstract
Using Visual Studio for all the heavy lifting on cross platform development
Steve walked through how he generates an application quickly using he code generator. This included:
• Creating a SQL database
• Making Data visible through a Web Service
• Viewing and editing the data on an IOS device

Bio
For the last 35 years Steve has worked for a medical instrument distributor, handling several management roles and automating processes until finally ending up coding full-time for the last 17 years. His specialty is quick solutions to complex problems.

Justin James came for the first time and gave a presentation just full of various tips and techniques on ways to maximize your productivity with Visual Studio.

Abstract
Come learn about the new productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6.0, some very cool Visual Studio Extensions, and standard shortcuts to use to unlock your productivity potential in Visual Studio. You will walk away from this session with all kinds of new tips and tricks to wow your fellow developers.

Bio
Justin James a software craftsman building applications in ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, Html, CSS, and Javascript. He has been using .NET since the 1.0 beta days building everything from small utilities to web sites that have more than a million views per month. He has presented at several user groups in the Phoenix, Arizona area; Code Camps in Las Vegas, Arizona, and California; Conferences such as Nebraska.Code(), Codepalousa, and NDC Oslo; and appeared on .Net Rocks Episode 1158. He loves to share knowledge that he have gained to inspire and help developers reach their end goal faster.

Jeremy Clark returned and gave a very informative, well done presentation on getting started with Git.

Abstract
We all need source control, and you may already be using a centralized source control system. But let's take a look at Git -- a distributed source control system that has 100% functionality without needing a network connection. We'll take a look at how to get started using Git, some of the useful features like branching and rollbacks, and we'll also see the built-in support that is provided in Visual Studio. After seeing how easy it is, you'll wonder why you haven't been using it all along.

Bio
Jeremy Clark is an application developer and speaker with over 15 years of experience in all aspects of the development lifecycle. Through speaking and consulting, he helps developers take a step up in their skillset with a focus on making complex topics approachable to developers of all skill levels. He is a Microsoft MVP for Visual C# and has authored several courses for Pluralsight, including "C# Interfaces", a course aimed at giving developers a better understanding of abstraction. He lives in Southern California with 2 cats and a banjo. For more information, visit www.jeremybytes.com.

For the first time, Jeff Hart came and presented to the group. He gave a very nice talk about asynchronous programming using the Async/Await pattern.

Abstract
Each version of the .NET CLR has supported a separate asynchronous programming models. Along the way there have been numerous "helpers" like the Background Worker Component. None of these techniques were flexible, powerful and simple enough to really catch on. That is changing with the Task Async Programming (TAP) pattern in v4. But TAP really didn't come to the fore until .NET v4.5 added the Async/Await keywords in C# and VB. An hour isn't enough time to do this topic justice but we'll outline a way to understand Async/Await and what it provides. And we'll point you towards more info since you'll likely rush out to write (or re-write) your first async functions!

Bio
Jeff specializes in developing and supporting solutions on the Microsoft stack. He is president of Vanishing Clouds, a local Microsoft Partner focused on helping small businesses leverage technology. Jeff is active in a number of the local user groups where he’s a frequent speaker and mentor.

Rob Richardson gave a very enjoyable presentation about what new with the next version of ASP.NET, ASP.NET vNext.

Abstract
ASP.NET vNext is the next version of ASP.NET. Publicly demoed at TechEd, it's a re-imagination of ASP.NET MVC and Web API built on top of a server-optimized version of the .NET Framework. Let's dig into the early release CTP available at http://www.asp.net/vnext and start to understand where the ASP.NET Team is going.

Bio
Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET and Node. He's a frequent speaker at conferences, user groups, and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on his blog at http://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on twitter at @rob_rich.

Shaun Abrams come and gave a very enjoyable presentation about what are microservices and how to utilize them.

Abstract
The microservice architectural style is an approach to developing an application as a suite of small services. Each can be independently developed and deployed. In this talk, we will cover the pros and cons of microservices, including contrasting with the more traditional 'monolithic' application. We will also dive into the most common mechanism used to expose their functionality: RESTful APIs, including a discussion of HTTP and its components.

Bio
Shaun Abram is a test obsessed software developer, interested in software design, architecture and continuous deployment. Originally from Northern Ireland but now living in San Francisco, California.

Joe Mayo gave a very prepared presentation entitled "What's new in C# 6.0".

Abstract
C# 6.0 offers several new features that help streamline your code. You'll learn about primary constructors, property initializers, exception filters, and more. You'll also learn about some of the new features of VS 2015. This presentation will help you understand how these features work and why they can help you be more productive.

Bio
Joe Mayo is an author, consultant and instructor who specializes in Microsoft .NET technology. Joe has written several books, magazine articles, and presented on .NET topics. His open source project is LINQ to Twitter and he has received multiple Microsoft Visual C# MVP awards. You can find Joe on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JoeMayo.

Gerardo Melendrez gave a very nice presentation entitled "Demystifying the ASP.NET MVC Project Template". The portion on utilizing social media sites for authentication was especially interesting.

Abstract
This talk was be a live demonstration about creating a web application using the Visual Studio 2013 ASP.NET MVC 5.2 Project Template. In the demo he covered all the out-of-the-box nice features of this template and a couple of extras, including the Model-View-Controller architecture, hosting the application on Windows Azure Websites, data access using the Entity Framework 6.0 with Code-First approach, enabling Social Authentication for Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Google using Owin/Katana, customizing the Twitter Bootstrap theme and adding support for analytics with Application Insights.

Bio
Gerardo Melendrez is a Senior .NET Software Developer with experience in a wide variety of business and consumer applications involving different industries, from manufacturing and high-volume transactional payment processing applications to casino management and mobile gaming. He is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) and write a blog called .NET Tips And Tricks with emphasis in hard-to-find solutions to problems regarding development using the Microsoft technology stack. He is the founder of The Magic Software, a software development shop and CTO/Co-Founder of Revohloo Studios, a unique premium consumer music video platform.

Profile: http://bit.ly/GMProfile
Website: http://www.themagicsoftware.com
Blog: http://blog.themagicsoftware.com

Couple members of the group took notes of the presentation which they have provided for posting. (Thank you.) Their notes can be downloaded from here: Presentation Notes

Nuri Halperin came and gave a very good presentation about getting started using the non-SQL database MongoDb.

You can obtain a copy of the code that was used during the presentation from: http://1drv.ms/1wXnSEj

Abstract
MongoDB is a very popular NoSQL database that is fast and scalable. The talk was designed to help get you familiar with this unique database and arm you with the essential skills to start using Mongo to power your software applications.

Bio
Nuri Halperin, Principal for +N Consulting Inc (Santa Monica, CA), brings over 15 years of development and leadership experience in internet, E-Commerce and corporate space. He currently serves as Solution Architect focusing on .Net technologies and platforms. Nuri has successfully championed initiatives in ASP.NET, database, data mining, E-commerce, integration projects and custom component development for specific business needs.

Li Chen came and gave a presentation on using LINQ on objects entitled "LINQ to Objects A-Z and beyond".

The slides and demo from the presentation is available from http://weblogs.asp.net/lichen/gave-a-talk-at-socal-code-camp-at-usc-today-titled-linq-to-objects-a-z.
And additional information about LINQ is available on his blog.

His open source project site is located at http://skylinq.codeplex.com/.

Abstract
LINQ is a wonderful part of .net platform that allows us to write code succinctly. In this presentation, I will provide a comprehensive review of LINQ to Objects.

In the first half of the presentation, I will review LINQ methods by the following classifications:
● Mapping and conversion
● Take-1 and Take-N
● Filter
● Flattening
● Grouping
● Aggregating
● Combination

In the second half, I will discuss technique in converting real-world problems to LINQ queryable problems and provide an end-to-end example.

Bio
Li Chen, MCSE, MCSD, MCDBA, SCJP, SCDJWS and SCWCD, is a 4 time Microsoft ASP/ASP.NET MVP. He has been a Microsoft certified developer since 1996. He is the developer of open source projects VBScript.net and ASP Classic Compiler (http://aspclassiccompiler.codeplex.com) and SkyLinq cloud analytic platform (http://skylinq.codeplex.com).

David McCarter gave a special meeting this month entitled "Röck Yoür Cöde With Visual Studio Add-ins", discussing free and inexpensive Visual Studio Add-ins.

Abstract
This session will focus on my must have Visual Studio add-ins and other tools that makes programming faster and easier (and makes you look like a rock star programmer). All the tools that are either free or very affordable. Tool categories include add-ins for debugging and profiling and more. These tools are designed to impress your boss and get you home at a reasonable time. This session is packed full of demonstrations! Sit close and you just might catch a custom dotNetDave guitar pick. Some of some of them will win you free software! You can check this page from David's about the presentation.

Bio
David McCarter is a C# Microsoft MVP Developer/ Architect/ Consultant & Professional Code Reviewer in San Diego, California. David is the creator of dotNetTips.com that has been helping programmers since 1994. David has written for programming magazines and has published many books and his latest self-published book is David McCarter’s .NET Coding Standards. He is one of the founders and the president of the almost 20-year-old San Diego .NET Developers Group. In 2008 David won the INETA Community Excellence Award for his involvement in the .NET community. David is also an inventor of a software printing system that was approved by the US Patient Office in May 2008.

David gives lectures on software engineering at colleges, high schools, user groups and conferences such as Code Camp, VSLive, Microsoft DevDays. This year is his 17th year teaching at the University of California San Diego.

If that’s not enough David is also an award winning photographer and works for bands such as Queensryche, Buckcherry, Geoff Tate, Gary Hoey and too many other bands in the US to list. He is also working on his first non-geek book about tribute bands. David is also a guitarist and has had the honor to play with Carl Franklin and the lead guitarist from Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Bret Stateham of Microsoft gave a very informative presentation about developing using Visual Studio Online and using/manage Windows Azure.

Abstract
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is growing by leaps and bounds. Both in terms of what you can do it, as well as in the number of people using it. Still it many developers are unaware of how Azure and Visual Studio Online can help them not only run their production code, but help them manage their build, deployment, and test, and monitoring workloads as well. In addition, developers with MSDN subscriptions may not be taking full advantage of the up to $150/month Azure benefit that is part of their subscription. In this session we will show you how to take advantage of the Azure platform and your free Visual Studio Online account to help simplify and automate your development lifecycle.

Bio
My name is Bret Stateham, and I’m a Microsoft Technical Evangelist based in San Diego, CA. As an Evangelist for Microsoft I am passionate about Microsoft technologies like Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Azure and my long term favorite Microsoft SQL Server. However, I am a lover of technology in general, and the impact that it can have on peoples lives. If you would like to learn more about me, you can read my blog, visit me during my office hours, or find me at one of the many meetups I attend regularly.

This month, Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration on doing remote debugging utilizing Visual Studio.

A key point of the presentation was the necessarily of having installing the Remote Tool on the remote computer that matches the version of Visual Studio being utilized. This page allows you to download the appropiate version of the Remote Tool.

Here is also a good tutorial of how to use Visual Studio to do remote debugging.

After Richard finished his demostration, Gerardo Melendrez gave a presentation on debugging websites utilizing the Chrome browser. He also talked about browser's user agents, including showing how websites can use the user agent string to change their behavior. As an example, he demostrated how Orbitz pricing can change depending upon the browser's user agent string.

This month, Steele Price returned and gave presentation entitled "Introduction to OWIN and Katana," explaing what is OWIN and Katana.

Introduction to OWIN and Katana
As Web application development takes its next evolutionary step into the world of cloud computing, project Katana provides the underlying set of components to ASP.NET applications, enabling them to be flexible, portable, lightweight, and provide better performance – put another way, project Katana cloud optimizes your ASP.NET applications.

OWIN
OWIN defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of the OWIN interface is to decouple server and application, encourage the development of simple modules for .NET web development, and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools.

Project Katana
Whereas both the OWIN specification and Owin.dll are community owned and community run open source efforts, the Katana project represents the set of OWIN components that, while still open source, are built and released by Microsoft. These components include both infrastructure components, such as hosts and servers, as well as functional components, such as authentication components and bindings to frameworks such as SignalR and ASP.NET Web API.

Steele Price has been professionally designing and developing databases and interfaces to them for 30 years. He has also been professionally developing with Microsoft Visual Basic, C#, SQL Server and Visual Studio since their inception many years ago. Recently he has focused on the SOA, REST, Semantic Web, HTML5 and cross-platform Web Enabled solutions.

This month, Llewelly Falco came a gave a very enjoyable, educational interactive talk about unit testing entitled "Hands-on workshop for Better Unit Testing."

The foundation of the talk was using koans (puzzles for learning). A Koan is a set of failing unit tests. Learning by doing with koan puzzles is fun, engaging, and produces remarkably quick results. Koans can be used to learn a variety of programming skills including languages and APIs. This session will challenge you in group and individual settings to complete these puzzles to get the unit tests to pass. After you decode the puzzle, we will reflect on what and how you have learned. As part of the presentation, the group created a number of our own koans.

Llewellyn Falco is an Instructor for DevelopMentor & Author for PluralSight. He is a international speaker and the creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests( www.approvaltests.com ). He spends most of his time programing in Java and C# specializing in legacy code. He also volunteers creating courseware and teaching kids to program ( www.teachingkidsprogramming.org ).

Our scheduled speaker was not able to show this month. Instead, we just talked about various subjects, such as Visual Studio Online.

This month, Jeremy Clark was nice enough to come and talked to the group about dependency injection.

In very simple terms, dependency injection is the ability to have different flavors of a class and being able to choose which version you wish to use at runtime. For more information, Jeremy has a Pluralsight course on the subject, Dependency Injection On-Ramp and also has an blog entry that talks about some questions he has been asked on the subject, Dependency Injection Questions

Jeremy Clark is an application developer, Pluralsight author, and Microsoft MVP with over 14 years of experience in all aspects of the development lifecycle. After hours, he puts together demos and technical articles for JeremyBytes.com, a website focusing on .NET technologies. Other times he can be found shredding on a plastic guitar (or playing a real guitar fairly badly). He lives in Anaheim, CA with a seedling redwood tree and his cats, Amanda and Toby.

Rick Miller was kind nice enough to fill in for our scheduled speaker, whom was unable to make it due to a scheduling conflict with work.

Rick gave a very interesting, informative presentation on using lists of Actions. He showed how you can create list of actions, based upon what processing or validation actions you care to perform on the data, and then have those actions performed. A very interesting concept and easily can be used for such tasks as performing data validation.

Rob Richardson gave a presentation on Git.

Have you ever looked at Git because it was trendy, but stumbled away dazed? Git isn't your father's source control system, but most of your knowledge of TFS, SVN, or other source control systems transfer over just fine. We'll take your existing knowledge of your Commit / Update VCS and we'll layer in the methodologies, tools, and communities that Git uses. What's the difference between pull and update? Isn't branching and merging dangerous? Can I get colored icons in Windows or Visual Studio? How do I contribute to a GitHub project? We'll graph Git's actions in blocks and compare it to git command results. You'll come away thinking in Git, ready to easily leverage the additional power.

Rob also has a blog posting on this subject at http://robrich.org/archive/2012/04/27/thinking-in-git.aspx

Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET and Node. He is principal of Richardson & Sons, LLC, builder of ASP.NET and Node solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. Rob has a BFA and MSCIS, and has been building software in .NET and HTML for over a dozen years. He's a frequent speaker at user groups and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on his blog at http://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on twitter at @rob_rich.

Simon Timms gave a talk explaining what Windows Azure is all about.

All the cool kids are developing applications in the cloud these days. But what is the cloud and what does it mean for developing .net applications? How does it differ from deploying to a GoDaddy account? In this talk we'll examine how to use Microsoft's cloud offering, Azure, to rapidly develop and deploy a web application.

We'll take a look at the three different levels of interaction Azure offers: Virtual Machines, Cloud Applications and Websites. Which one is right for your needs? We'll also talk briefly about some of the other PaaS offering which exist such as storage, scheduler and service bus.

Simon Timms is a freelance developer out of Calgary, Alberta. For the most part he works for large oil companies on relatively uninteresting systems related to oil and gas production. However, at night, he develops far more interesting programs using Azure, distributed systems and nifty JavaScript visualizations. He blog extensively at blog.simontimms.com and has just had his first book, Social Data Dava Visualizations with HTML 5 and JavaScript. He is also the president of the Calgary .net user group and attempts to be a guest speaker wherever he travels.

Craig Berntson gave a presentation on how to modify a simple MVC application in a way that makes it testable.

The ASP.NET Model-View-Controller (MVC) is designed for testability. However, the out-of-the-box templates and examples are not well suited for good unit testing. This session showed how to modify a simple MVC application in a way that makes it testable. Mr. Berntson also talked about such things as repositories, mocks, dependency injection, and more.

Craig Berntson is the Chief Software Gardener at Mojo Software Worx in Salt Lake City. He has a passion for community and helping other developers improve their skills. Craig has spoken at developer events across the US, Canada, and Europe for over 20 years and is the co-author of "Continuous Integration in .NET" available from Manning. Because of his community efforts, Craig has been named a Microsoft MVP every year since 1996. He is an INETA Community Speaker and a ComponentOne Community Influencer. You can contact him at craig@craigberntson.com, through his blog at www.craigberntson.com/blog, or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/craigber.

Mario Hernandez gave a remote presentation on Responsive Web Design.

Responsive web design involves having a single design that adapts to the devices of any size. Mario Hernandez talked about how techniques like responsive web design can help us rethink existing strategies, explore new options, and evolve so we can create websites that look great everywhere. This meetup was designed to introduce responsive web design techniques to designers and coders. There was examples of actual code, but also many theoretical considerations was discussed.

Mario Hernandez has over 10 years of experience in Web Design and 6 years experience as a Front-end Developer. Currently works as a Web Developer and Lead Designer for the largest Federal Court Court in the country and and also runs his own independent freelance business under DesignsDrive.com. Intensive experience in web design, best practices and web standards. Well-versed in adaptive layouts, media queries, mobile-first and has strong knowledge of SEO best practices. Specialties include Web Design, Drupal, CSS, CSS3, XHTML, Wireframing, Prototyping, Front-End Frameworks such as Foundation Zurb and Bootstrap. Mario can be contact at designsdrive@gmail.com

The source code from the presentation can be found at github.com/mariohernandez/Introduction-to-Responsive-Web-Design
The presentation slides are available at www.slideshare.net/marequi/introduction-to-responsive-web-design-14708311

Rob Richardson came into town and gave a nice talke to the group about NodeJS.

Node.js is an incredibly fast JavaScript runtime that powers web servers and command-line tools. Rob gave a tour through the basic features of Node, showing how to get started quickly, and talked about some of the advanced features and capabilities of the Node community and ecosystem.

Rob Richardson is principal of Richardson & Sons, LLC, builder of ASP.NET and Node solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. Rob has a BFA and MSCIS, and has been building software in .NET and HTML for over a dozen years, and frequently enjoys sharing his passion for software development at user groups and community events. Follow Rob at @rob_rich or on his blog at http://robrich.org/.

Steele Price gave a very informative talk on WebAPI design.

The success of a Web API design completely depends on how quickly developers can get up to speed and start using your API. What are the standards and best practices to consider when designing a great Web API. You have to get the design right first, because design communicates how your API will be used. Learn how to design for the optimal benefit of the App Developer. Get an overview of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style for distributed hypermedia and how to use it correctly with Web API. How do we do things correctly so that our API is suited well for Desktop, Mobile and Future Clients? Can we run it in Azure? (yes!) The Sample Project demonstrated is a .Net Web API using RavenDB as the backend without Entity Framework. We will dig deep into the Code and see firsthand what tools are beneficial in the design and API development process as well as the Goodness and the Gotchas around Asp.Net MVC4 WebAPI and how you can be productive quickly.

Steele Price has been professionally designing and developing databases and interfaces to them for 30 years. He has also been professionally developing with Microsoft Visual Basic, C#, SQL Server and Visual Studio since their inception many years ago. Recently he has focused on the Semantic Web, HTML5 and cross-platform Web Enabled solutions. He started professionally developing software in 1983. Software development has not only been his primary source of income since; it is his passion. Many of his software development processes grew to fruition by seeing a business or consumer need and working diligently to fulfill that need with a real application. When you love to do something it invades every aspect of your life. In recent years he has focused on improving the software development process, design patterns and application reach. Learning from his own process failures as well as successes let him demonstrate how to achieve better real-world delivery of applications to companies ranging from "mom and pop" stores to top tier Insurance Carriers and Airlines. He has always maintained a passion for taking that knowledge back to the community by speaking and sharing often with local user groups.

As a result of the group losing its meeting space, we were unable to hold a meeting this month.

Hattan Shobokshi gave a very informative presentation on "Angular JS with ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI. Angular JS is a front end javascript framework and Hattan showed how you can integrate angular into an ASP.NET MVC app. He demostrated the various features of angular including support for data binding, client side routing, services, filters, dependency injection and testing. And he used WebAPI to persist data back to the server.

Hattan Shobokshi is a Microsoft MVP, Software Engineer " technical speaker. Hattan is responsible for developing applications on a variety of platforms including web, desktop and mobile devices. He is passionate about delivering scalable applications that adhere to industry best practices. Hattan is experienced in .NET technologies (with a particular expertise in ASP.NET MVC), JavaScript " other web technologies. Hattan is Co-Chairman of the Los Angeles .NET user group as well as a member of the organizing committee for SoCal Code Camp. He regularly presents at local user groups and code camps.

Troy Miles gave a presentation about how simple it is to use SignalR with your website. You can get a copy of the presentation via his blog at http://therockncoder.blogspot.com/2013/01/signalr-and-aspnet.html.

Troy Miles has been a designer and developer of software since 1979. Troy began his career writing games in assembly and C. Since then he has written code in C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript and even a smidgen of Python. Along the way, some of his titles have won awards, he became a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, and in 2012, he won a developer challenge at a local Microsoft Windows Phone Unleashed event.

His passion since 2007 has been mobile and mobile web development. In 2011, he joined the mobile development team at Kelley Blue Book. His small team is responsible for the KBB.com application for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 and the mobile versions of KBB.com. Troy also spends time talking to developer groups and maintaining his blog, The Rock n Coder

Nuri Halperin came and gave a talk about "Async patterns in ASP.NET/MVC". The presentation was very informatively and focused on how to use asynchronous operations to improve performance of your website. Also discussed was when not to use multi-threading. You can get a copy of the presentation at http://bit.ly/GetTheTalk.

Nuri Halperin is Principal for +N Consulting Inc (Santa Monica, CA), Nuri brings over 15 years of development and leadership experience in internet, E-Commerce and corporate space. He currently serves as Solution Architect focusing on .Net technologies and platforms. He has successfully championed initiatives in ASP.NET, database, data mining, E-commerce, integration projects and custom component development for specific business needs.

Jeremy Clark returned and give his talk about delegates, "Get Func<>-y: Delegates in .NET". As usually, his talk was very informative and in-depth. You can get a copy of the presentation, the code and a PDF walkthrough from his website at jeremybytes.com or directly from his download section here.

Jeremy Clark is an application developer, technical speaker, and Microsoft MVP with over 13 years of experience in all aspects of the development lifecycle. After hours, he puts together demos and technical articles for JeremyBytes.com, a website focusing on .NET technologies. Other times he can be found shredding on a plastic guitar (or playing a real guitar fairly badly). He lives in Anaheim, CA with a seedling redwood tree and his cats, Amanda and Toby

Paul Mendoza gave a very informative talk about how to write maintainable Javascript.

Steve Burton from AppDynamics was originally scheduled to talk about Windows Azure this month. Unfortunately, he is not able to make the meeting.

Instead, Bill Patten has offered to talk about the various trials and tribulations he went through in developing an application for Windows Phone.

Joe Mayo gave a very nice talk about Windows 8, the newest operating system from Microsoft. Joe covered a broad range of development subjects when writing Windows 8 apps. We saw how to create a Windows 8 project in Visual Studio 2010, watch Joe code various features, and learned what makes the Windows 8 development experience different from previous .NET development technologies. In addition to Windows 8, Joe discussed the new Windows Runtime Libraries, WinRT, and their relationship to the type of development that's typically done in .NET.

Unfortunately, our scheduled presenter was a no-show this month. Instead, we just talked about the job market, and various programming topics.

After a little issue with getting into the building, Hattan Shobokshi gave a very enjoyable talk on "ASP.NET MVC Best Practices". In the presentation he covered several techniques to help build ASP.NET MVC applications such as the PRG Pattern, The Repository pattern, Dependency Injection and more.

The slides and code samples from the presentation can be download here.

Hattan Shobokshi is a Senior Software Engineer and is responsible for developing applications on a variety of platforms including web and mobile devices. Hattan has been creating web applications exclusively in ASP.NET MVC for the last several years and continues to enjoy the platform. He is a passionate web developer that is focused delivering scalable applications that adhere to industry best practices. Hattan has is experienced in .NET technologies and has been using ASP.NET since it’s initial release. Prior to that, Hattan developed web applications on the Microsoft platform using classic ASP.

Troy Miles gave a very nice presentation on developing websites for the the mobile segment using ASP.NET MVC, jQuery Mobile and Backbone.js.

The slides and code samples from the presentation can be download here.

Troy is a designer and developer of software since 1979. He began his career writing games in assembly and C. Since then he has written code in C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript and even a smidgen of Python. Along the way, some of his titles have won awards, he became a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, and in 2012, he won a developer challenge at a local Microsoft Windows Phone Unleashed event. His passion since 2007 has been mobile and mobile web development. In 2011, he joined the mobile development team at Kelley Blue Book. His small team is responsible for the KBB.com application for iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7 and the mobile versions of KBB.com. Troy also spends time talking to developer groups and maintaining his blog, The Rock n Coder at http://therockncoder.blogspot.com

Nuri Halperin and Steve Bearman came and gave an excellent presentation on doing multi-threading programming.

Multitreading is not an option -- today's CPUs have more cores, but not more speed. Multitreading allows you to make your apps faster and more responsive today. Automatically scale to available cores. It's much easier now. Processes/tasks/threads, synchronization, UI issues, and error handling--with the whys and hows and best practices.

The slides and code samples from the presentation can be download here.

Nuri Halperin is Principal for +N Consulting Inc (Santa Monica, CA), Nuri brings over 15 years of development and leadership experience in internet, E-Commerce and corporate space. He currently serves as Solution Architect focusing on .Net technologies and platforms. He has successfully championed initiatives in ASP.NET, database, data mining, E-commerce, integration projects and custom component development for specific business needs.

Steve Bearman is an independent software developer with his company, Suzy B Studios, where he innovates and software for all sectors from science and engineering through finance--especially the thorny, complex problems where architecture, algorithms, and performance are critical.

Jeremy Clark gave a fantastic presention on lamdbas and anonymous delegates.

A copy of the presentation and code can be found on his website at Jeremy Bytes

Jason Block gave a very enjoyable and educational talk on dealing with exceptions in .NET.

Paul Sheriff came in from California and gave a very interesting and well received talk about "Architecting for Multiple User Interfaces".

We started out the year with Gregg Becky giving a presentation on using WCF (Windows Communications Foundation). In simple terms, WCF is a framework from Microsoft for building service-oriented applications. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the reliance on Web services to send and receive data.

This month, Rick Miller gave a very enjoyable talk about XML.

Mr. Miller explained what XML is, and talked about the different ways you can access, manipulate and control XML-formatted data, including using XPath and LinqToXML.

This month, Joe Mayo gave a presentation on Asynchronous programming.

Asynchronous programming (async) is emerging as a common programming practice, especially in .NET technologies such as Silverlight. In sophisticated scenarios, async can be complex, which is why Microsoft is adding language support in the next version of .NET. This talk covered the current state of async, what the challenges are, and how your job will be made easier with the new language features.

Joe Mayo is an author and independent consultant, specializing in Microsoft .NET technologies. He has written 6 books; including C# Unleashed/Sams, LINQ Programming/McGraw-Hill, and Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner's guide; and multiple articles for magazines such as CODE Magazine. He operates the C# station Web site at http://www.csharp-station.com and created the LINQ to Twitter open source project at http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com. For his community contributions, Microsoft has awarded Joe with several MVP awards. Joe can often be found tweeting something technical on Twitter - @JoeMayo. Additional contact information for Joe is located at http://www.mayosoftware.com

This month, Greg Becky returned to our exploration of web development and AJAX by talking about the basic of AJAX and elaborating a litte on the AJAX Toolkit.

This month, Craig Berntson came down from Utah to give a presentation on SOLID OPP.

SOLID is term coined by "Uncle" Bob Marin that stands for five basic patterns of object-oriented programming and design. By using the principles, you are much more likely to create a system that more maintainable and extensible. SOLID can be used to remove code smells by refactoring. Attendees will learn about the following SOLID principles: - Single Responsibility- Open-Closed- Liskov Substitution- Interface Segregation - Dependency Inversion.

Craig has been a Microsoft MVP since 1996 and is currently a Visual C# MVP. He has spoken at developer events around the world, and has co-author the book "Continuous Integration in .NET".

Richard Rosenheim continued his presentation on ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor by taking the application developed last month by adding AJAX capabilities to the application to update individual portions of the web page. The sample project, "States ASP NET MVC 3 Ajax Demo" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link States ASP NET MVC 3 Ajax Demo.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation on developing an web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor. The sample project, "States ASP NET MVC 3 Demo" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link States ASP NET MVC 3 Demo.

This month, Gerardo Melendrez gave a nice presentation on doing Windows Phone 7 development. The presentation, "Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development (March 2011 Presentation)" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development (March 2011 Presentation)

This month was a round-table discussion on what employers are looking for from job applicants. If you was in the job market, it was a good chance to meet and ask questions of people that was involved in the hiring process.

The discussion panel consisted of:

• Rick Miller, a software development manager with eCommLink, a local company that provides secure prepaid processing for card programs around the world.
• Tyler McManus, a recruiter from TEK Systems, the nation's leading technology staffing and services company
• Chuck Berg, a consulting IT engineer with Station Casinos, a major gaming corporation.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation on doing owner-drawn (custom) listboxes in WinForms, and doing listboxes in WPF.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk about desktop widgets for Windows 7 (and Vista).

Rick Miller led the group in a discussion of Visual Studio and .NET in general.

Richard Rosenheim gave an introductory presentation on ASP.NET MVC 2, using the newly rewritten dotNet Group's website as an example of a MVC application.

Richard Rosenheim gave an overview of incorporating the PayPal shopping cart into a web application.

Mr. Craig Berntson. a Microsoft MVP from Utah, came and gave a very interesting talk on doing continuous integration in .NET.

Mr. Berntson's blog address is http://www.craigberntson.com/blog

Telerik hooked the group with Mr. William Moore, who gave a very nice presentation on Silverlight. He covered the history of Silverlight and went on to discuss what is new in version 4, including a demo of the new ability to add “bounce” to your animations.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of utilizing the built-in unit testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2008.

Richard Rosenheim talked about his approach in implementing word-frequency functionality to a web site.

Unfortunately, it was just one of those days, and the presentation on RESTful web services just didn't go that well. Below are the various links that was used in preparing for the presentation:

RESTful webcasts (courtesy of Pluralsight):



And how to configure IIS 7 (Windows Server 2008) to support services in IIS:

Richard Rosenheim presented a demostration of printing a flow document from a WPF application.

Steve Schwendinger finished up his two-part talk about Application Architecture for independent programmers. This month talk focused on moving code from Windows apps to the Web and back by moving the data portion to a separate layer.

Steve Schwendinger gave an enjoyable talk about Application Architecture for independent programmers. The talk touch upon such items as code reusability and business rules versus business logic.

In the second of a 2-part demonstration, Richard Rosenheim finished walking though the development of a WPF-application utilizing Expression Blend 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008.

The source code from the presentation can be download here.

The zip file contains three versions of the example application, one utilizing a XML document, another using a collection, and the third using a SQL database.

In the first of a 2-part demonstration, Richard Rosenheim started walking though the development of a WPF-application utilizing Expression Blend 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008. The second presentation will complete the development of the sample WPF application. The source code for the example project will be posted as part of the March 2009 meeting write-up.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk on using ASP.NET Routing. The example project can be found here: ASP.NET Routing Example.zip

The following Microsoft web pages were used as references in creating the demostraction:

From Visual Studio Magazine:

Richard Rosenheim demonstrated various .NET desktop applications running under Mono 2.0

A presentation of the Visual Studio 2008 Extension feature was given by Richard Rosenheim.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of using Public Key Encryption.

John Hilts and Justin Holman gave a presentation on using the MVP Patterns.

The presentation and demostrations are available in the download section or from this link: MVP Patterns Presentation and Demo

Gary Hanson gave a very nice talk on using Silverlight 2. The link to various items he used in his presentation is:

http://cid-6e1ccf3300f18def.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Silverlight%20Presentation

Shimon Klein gave a very nice talk on using Linq for SQL.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation of using Linq for XML. Shimon Klein also gave a brief introduction to anonymous data types.

Michael Stiefel, a published author, gave a very enjoyable and information loaded presentation on .NET 3.0 Workflow feature.

The code associated with the presentation can be obtained from his website: http://www.reliablesoftware.com/presentations.html

Richard Rosenheim demonstrated how to AJAX-ified a web page using both the pure AJAX and UpdatePanel approaches.

The presentation and demonstration are available in the download section or from this link: ASP AJAX Demo

John Hilts demonstrated three different testing frameworks (NUnitAsp, Watin and Selenium) for the web by showing a web application that illustrates some simple globalization features.

The presentation and demostrations are available in the download section or from this link: Web Testing Presentation (VB.net version) or Web Testing Presentation (C# version)

This month meeting was a demonstration of the Managed Speech API in .NET 3.0. The demo code is in the download section in the file SpeechDemo.zip.

Also demoed was the example speech application that was part of the article "Give Your Users A Voice" by Jeff Certain (Visual Studio Magazine, June 2007). http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2007_06/magazine/features/jcertain/

The demo application can be downloaded from here: .NET 3.0 Speech Example

Other useful URLs are:

Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5E86EC97-40A7-453F-B0EE-6583171B4530&displaylang=en

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en

Due to my notebook deciding that week was a good time to die, the .NET 3.0 Speech demonstration was postponed until next month. A discussion and Q&A session was conducted instead.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of owner-drawn list boxes.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk on using the PropertyGrid control.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demostration of using the EFIX metadata associated with JPEG and TIFF files.

As the scheduled speaker was unable to attend, the members that showed up sent the time helping another member with a programming problem.

Paul Barrett gave a very nice ad-hoc presentation on setting up and using TortoiseSVN, an open-source source code package which integrates the Subversion open-source package with Windows' Explorer.

Gary Hanson gave a very enjoyable presentation on using Virtual Earth. He also touched a little upon Google Maps.

Top 10 security does and don't discussion.

There was two presentations this month. To begin with, Mark Junium gave a presentation on tips for getting better search engine rankings for your web site.

Then John Hilts gave a presentation on using authorize.net, a payment processing service.

This presentation was originally planned for March. But due to illness, this talk is being presented this month.

Mike Weeks has been experimenting with using XAML and the new Expression Interactive Designer from Microsoft. He has offered to talk about his experiences so far with the designer and XAML.

Just a quick introduction for anyone that hasn't heard of XAML. XAML is the new way of designing/implementing GUI designs in Windows Presentation Foundation. Windows Presentation Foundation is being utilized by Windows Vista and will also be available for Windows XP.

Originally, there was going to be a presentation on the Microsoft's Expression Interactive Designer and XAML. Due to illness, this talk has been postponed to April.

Instead, we had an open forum discussing various aspects of programming and computers. At the end, I quickly threw together a demo application of web services and a desktop applicaton that consumes the web services. The sample code will be posted shortly.

The February meeting had a presentation by Richard Rosenheim on doing AJAX programming in ASP.NET 2.0 web pages. The focus was on using the Ajax.Net framework.

Here's are the link for the Ajax.NET framework, plus links to two presentations on Ajax.NET:
http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/download/ajax.zip
http://www.polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/usingajaxnet/
http://www.clearlakeservices.com/Presentations/UseAjaxtoturbochargeyourASPNETwebforms/tabid/59/Default.aspx

In addition, Paul Barrett briefly described a number of open-source and free .NET related utilies that he has been looking at. He has collected them together and can be found at http://lvac.com/balrog/DotNetUtilities/

Paul also mentioned that .NET Rocks did a demonstration of using a data source and GridView. This can be found at their website, dnrtv.com.

The January meeting will have a presentation on how to do a data-bound grid and an open-forum discussion about the new features of SQL Server 2005.

Terence Carroll gave a presentation of doing deployments of a Windows application which included a SQL Server 2005 Express database. He demonstrated how to deploy applications using both the ClickOnce and MSI (i.e., Setup.exe) methods. The group discussion on the various issues associated with the ClickOnce deployment method was lively.

John Hilts gave a presentation on doing unit testing and using NUnit.

Please join us for an open discussion on "User Web Pages & State Management”

This presentation is by popular demand of last month’s meeting attendees..

Attendee’s are encouraged to bring their own examples and questions regarding data handling, display, validation, and persistence.

Please join us for an open discussion on "User Interfaces, how to get a consistent look with the least amount of work!”
(Just don’t tell the boss).

This presentation will highlight the attached DotNetGroup Control “GlobalFormatter”, which is also available as a download from our website.

Attendee’s are encouraged to bring their own examples of how they apply styles to their Window Apps.

How can we take a complicated data entry form and spice it up a bit in order to separate our ‘Style’ of work from the rest of the pack? Whether you inherited an existing project or created a form with many input boxes, you can add visual functionality and style without having to replace all of the controls on the form.

• Unzip the DLL file into a folder of your choice
• Add the control to your toolbox
• Drag the control onto an existing form that has many textboxes on it
• Add one line to the Form Constructor Method as shown below

(Object Names changed to protect the innocent!)

Properties that now impact all Textboxes and Checkboxes on the form.

Property	Default	Affects
		TextBox	CheckBox
ForeColor	Black	Yes	Yes
BackColor	Yellow	Yes	Yes
Cursor	Hand	Yes	Yes
Cursor Position	SelectAll	Yes	No

Please join us for discussion and demonstrations on Deploying Dot Net Solutions. (Web & Window Apps).

This session will be presented by:

Please join us for a panel discussion on "How to Get Hired in the Las Vegas .NET Market." This lively discussion will encompass resume writing tips, interviewing from a hiring manager's viewpoint, current local .NET salaries, and critical do's and don'ts in the job search process. Whether you are in the market for another position or simply want to know more about the local .NET landscape, be sure to join us. The panel includes the following contributors:

Eric Kassan, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSE
Software Engineering Manager
MGM Mirage

Eric is currently a software engineering manager at MGM-Mirage overseeing many intranet applications as well as a major back-end processing system. He currently manages five developers, two of whom he was asked to hire. Eric has been managing staff for about ten years in a wide variety of companies from Fortune-500s to start-ups. He has spent most of his career in the financial sector, until moving to MGM-Mirage early this year. Before finding his opportunity at MGM-Mirage, he spent about three years looking for the right position (while working most of that time), so he is well acquainted with both sides of the hiring process.

Jon Von Tobel
IT-Director / Enterprise Architect
Station Casinos

Jon is a hiring manager at Station Casinos for .NET talent and has spent the last 25 years developing software and managing software developers. He has worked internationally as a technology consultant for organizations as diverse as United Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, TRW, and the Peoples Republic of China, designing and implementing multi-million dollar software systems. Starting in 1991, Mr. Von Tobel ran a small software consulting firm until last year when he accepted a position here in Las Vegas with Station Casinos. As Chief Software Architect for Station Casinos, he is intimately involved with the current state-of-the-art in software development, deployment and operations tools and technologies. Mr. Von Tobel sees .NET and related technologies as great tools to enhance productivity and to increase product speed to market but is firmly convinced that these, or any tools, are only as capable as the craftsmen who wield them. A solid foundation in OO design, SDLC, and other "base" software development concepts and techniques are as important to being a successful .NET candidate as in-depth knowledge of .NET itself.

Miguel A. Vega
Technical Instructor and Network Administrator.
New Horizons Computer Learning Center of Las Vegas, NV.

Miguel is an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience in designing, deploying and managing solutions for a variety of companies in three countries (Argentina, México and United States).

Certifications include: A+ Certified Technician,Network+ Certified Technician, Security+ Certified Technician, MCSE Windows NT 4.0, MCSA Windows 2000, MCSE Windows 2000, MCSA Windows Server 2003, MCSE Windows Server 2003, MCT, SCNP

Jet Mitchell
Recruiting Manager
Robert Half Technology

Jet Mitchell is a Recruiting Manager in the Robert Half Technology division of Robert Half International, the world's largest specialized staffing company. She has placed both programming and IT support talent in the Las Vegas area since 1997. She was recently honored for her technology recruiting efforts for the 6th consecutive year at Robert Half Technology's President's Club Awards Ceremony. Over the last 7 years, Jet has also served as an adjunct college professor at CCSN, where she has taught business courses.

This month’s presentation will be delivered by a very special guest speaker, Tim Heuer, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation.

The next generation of Visual Studio will bring to the developer a full suite of tools to redefine the Integrated Development Environment. In this session we'll look at the advancements of the tool and introduce Visual Studio Team System, the full integrated suite of software development lifecycle tools. With VSTS, organizations can reduce the complexity of delivering software projects; facilitate collaboration among all the members of a software team speeding development time and ensuring the predictability and reliability of the development process. We will demonstrate the different aspects of VSTS and provide working demonstrations of some of these tools.

With over 8 years in software development consulting, and working exclusively with Microsoft technologies, Tim has developed a passion for developing software. He has worked on teams with small business development through Fortune 500 enterprise application development. He is an advocate of continual learning and mentoring junior developers.

Tim’s passion for technology and belief in community is what led him to work for Microsoft in his current role.

1st Presentation: Advanced ADO.Net techniques / data handing for Custom searching / reporting.

2nd Presentation: Open Forum on Dot-Net Issues

1st Presentation: Project Management: At the beginning of every new project, the Project Leader should document all the Need Assessments, Application Requirements, and Use Case Diagrams. Terry Phillips (Vice President) will discuss several methods to collate these documents and create presentations suitable for Management or Clients.

2nd Presentation: Securing & Billing for Web Services: Most of us have played with Web Services developed in Visual Studio. But how can we protect them? And more importantly Bill for usage? (Hint, if we can authenticate, we can invoice!)