Perth .NET Community of Practice

Creating a great online video experience with Microsoft Smooth streaming - with Ola Karlsson

mitch — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:43:00 GMT

In this presentation we'll look at how you can leverage tools like Microsoft Smooth Streaming, IIS, Silverlight and Expression Encoder to get a simple video player up and running in minutes and start delivering a great online video experience. We'll also look at ways of creating your own fully customised player, including using the Microsoft backed open source project, Silverlight Media Framework (SMF).

Smooth Streaming and SMF use industry best practices and have been used for events such as the NBC 2010 Winter Olympics and the Tour de France on French Télévision. Smooth streaming provides features like near instant video start, very fast seeking and eliminating that irritating "buffering" we see all too often when watching online video.

TOPIC: Microsoft Smooth streaming - with Ola Karlsson

DATE: Thursday, Aug 5th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Ola Karlsson works as a full time Silverlight and ASP.Net developer and has been working with Microsoft Smooth Streaming since it was released in early 2009. Ola is an active member of the Australian Silverlight community, having spoken at the at the first Australian Silverlight Code Camp, which was held in Melbourne February 2010 and he is a frequent speaker at the Perth, Silverlight Developer Designer Network (SDDN).

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)- with Mike Minutillo

mitch — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:25:00 GMT

Applications that can be reconfigured and extended after deployment often last longer and enjoy greater success. Enabling this powerful technique requires forethought and planning and can be difficult to implement. With the .NET Framework 4.0 a new library, called the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), provides you with the tools you need to make highly customizable applications with very little additional effort. You will walk away from this session ready to extend existing MEF-based products and add MEF extensibility to your own applications.

TOPIC: Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)- with Mike Minutillo

DATE: Thursday, July 1st, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Mike Minutillo is .NET software engineer with a BSc in computer science. He is a regular attendee at the Perth .NET Community of Practice where he has given presentations on new features of C#, ASP.NET MVC and Test-Driven Philosophy. Mike is half of the winning team in the 2008 Microsoft DevSta programming competition winning best overall application and best mobile application. Mike is co-author of the upcoming Professional Visual Studio 2010. He maintains a technical blog at http://wolfbyte-net.blogspot.com/ and can be contacted at http://twitter.com/wolfbyte/

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA), and several 30-day coupons to Tekpub's high-quality, online screencasts for programmers.

XNA Game Development - with Andrew Parsons

Administrator — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:11:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, May 27th where Andrew Parsons will build a simple 2D shooter game for Windows and Xbox 360 in an hour from start to finish, and hear how you can do the same thing with the tools already at your disposal not just for Windows and Xbox but also the upcoming Windows Phone 7.

TOPIC: XNA Game Development - with Andrew Parsons

DATE: Thursday, May 27th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Andrew Parsons is the Academic Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Australia which means he gets to travel the country talking to students about cool technology - stuff like Xbox, Windows Phone, cool dev stuff, tips and tricks with Office, PhotoSynth, Pivot and more. Combining his 15 years as a professional developer and 8 years as a professional games journalist prior to joining Microsoft, his passion for video game development has seen an outlet through XNA.

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

Code Contracts in Framework 4.0 - with Joe Albahari

Administrator — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:02:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, May 6th for a presentation on Code Contracts. With Framework 4.0, Code Contracts are now a reality. In this session, we'll look first at what Code Contracts are, and then demonstrate how to use them in Framework 4.0 to write more robust, concise and better-documented code. We'll also look under the covers on how they work, and see how to tailor contract behaviour for development, deployment, legacy and unit testing environments.

TOPIC: Code Contracts in Framework 4.0 - with Joe Albahari

DATE: Thursday, May 6th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of O'Reilly's C# 4.0 in a Nutshell. He's a regular user group speaker and has presented at TechEd and JAOO.

There will be door prizes of: 2 copies of 'C# 4.0 in a Nutshell' and a LINQPad license courtesy of Joe Albahari, plus a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper, TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

Goodcompany link

Administrator — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 02:15:00 GMT

As mentioned at Thursday's meeting, here is the goodcompany link:

goodcompany is a not for profit organisation whose mission is to create a new generation of professionals who make a positive difference in the community. Our aim is to make skilled volunteering a normal part of Australian life.

If you are interested in donating your skills and some of your time, please follow the link and sign up.

Developing Office Add-Ins with VSTO in Visual Studio 2010 - with Jake Ginnivan

Administrator — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:12:00 GMT

Updated: Please note, date has changed to Thurs April 8th, due to long weekend.

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, April 8th where Jake Ginnivan will build an application from the ground up using VSTO. Microsoft Office offers a platform that provides many possibilities for application development using managed code. In this talk Jake will describe what VSTO is, why to choose it as a platform and how you can build a successful application from the ground up. In addition, he will cover the pitfalls of COM Interop, ways to avoid performance and memory issues, structuring your solution to enable it to be fully unit testable, the common extensibility areas of outlook, using WPF as your presentation platform within Outlook, deployment using ClickOnce, dealing with ClickOnce update issues and the patterns you can use to make it all fit together. To demonstrate these techniques, Jake has built an Outlook add-in using Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, which synchronises his Facebook events list into Outlook.

TOPIC: Developing Office Add-Ins with VSTO in Visual Studio 2010

DATE: Thursday, April 8th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth

COST: Free. All welcome

Jake Ginnivan is a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist in WPF and has worked in roles that have spanned both software development and information technology since late 2006. He has worked on internal systems and utilities such as TimeCards (VSTO, WPF, LinqToSql, and SQL), data importers/exporters among others, as well as automating existing software deployments and server rollouts. Jake’s passion lies with WPF technology and designing good application architecture. Jake is also a member and contributor to the Perth .NET community of practice, ALT.Net Perth and the Perth Silverlight Designers and Developers Network. He maintains a blog at http://jake.ginnivan.net and can be contacted at http://twitter.com/JakeGinnivan

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

What's New in Visual Studio 2010 - with Dave Gardner and Michael Minutillo

Administrator — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:18:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thursday March 4th where Michael Minutillo and Dave Gardner will present a session on many of the new features in Visual Studio 2010, which is due to be released in April with a host of new and enhanced functionality. The improvements range from minor tweaks to major new features. In this hands-on session they will demonstrate the new code editor, better multi-monitor support, IntelliSense improvements, new debugging tools, ASP.NET v4 and Web deployment enhancements, and built-in support for MEF, T4 support, and MVC2

TOPIC: What's New in Visual Studio 2010

DATE: Thursday, March 4th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Dave Gardner is a seasoned.NET developer and the Chief Software Architect at Intilecta Corporation. Dave has an ongoing passion to produce well-designed, high-quality software products that engage and delight users. Since the mid-90's, Dave has worked as a solutions architect, consultant and developer, and lent his expertise to organisations in Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia. Dave is the co-author of Professional Visual Studio 2008 and the upcoming Professional Visual Studio 2010, and occasionally blogs about Visual Studio and .NET at http://www.professionalvisualstudio.com.

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of: ReSharper, TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

DevJam Community Event: Topics

Administrator — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 17:04:00 GMT

For our end of year meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 3rd December), we are running another DevJam event.

DATE: Thursday, Dec 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome. No need to RSVP.

The speaker line up is:

· Piers Williams: Windows 7 Touch

· Jeremy Thake: SharePoint 2010 toolbox in VS2010, resistance is futile!

· Paul Cooper: T4 templates in Visual Studio

· Rhys Campbell: AOP with Unity

· Jake Ginnivan: Introduction to VSTO Outlook Add-ins

· Ying Low: Caliburn

· Adrian McGrath: Windows 7 Virtualisation

· Mike Minutillo: .NET on RAILS

There will be pizza and refreshments provided, as well as a few give aways.

Talk Prizes:

1st Prize

VS Team System with MSDN Premium Subscription (worth around US$10,000) (donated by Mitch Denny). A USB Plasma Orb and Microsoft Screwdriver set (donated by Mitch) and a USB memory Stick (donated by Redgate)

2nd Prize

A place on Readify's next Perth Pro .Net 3.5 course, scheduled for 22nd - 26th March 2010 (worth $3,300) (donated by Readify) [Note: If the winner is already skilled in this area, they can transfer this dollar amount towards any MasterClass. The winner would still need to cover their own flights and accommodation and the shortfall between the price of the MasterClass and the Pro .Net class.]

A USB Plasma Orb and Microsoft Screwdriver set (donated by Mitch), a USB memory Stick (donated by Redgate) and the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference + LINQ Pocket Reference (donated by Joe Albahari).

3rd Prize

Windows 7 Ultimate (special Edition) (donated by Microsoft). A Resharper License, and the Head First Design Patterns Book (donated by O'Reilly)

December DevJam Community Event

Administrator — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:28:00 GMT

For December's meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 3rd December), we are running another DevJam community event, where anyone can give a short talk about anything .NET software development related.

DATE: Thursday, Dec 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

You can talk about any development topic but it must be between 5 – 10 minutes long.

· Anything you’ve done.

· Any new technology you’ve investigated.

· Any tips and tricks, or tools that aid developers

· Basically anything .NET software development related!

How do I enter? You must register by sending an email to mitch.wheat at gmail.com, no later than 23rd November, with the word 'DevJam’ in the subject, stating your talk topic in the body. Let me know whether you will be bringing your own laptop (preferable). Presenter places are limited, so it's first come, first served.

There are prizes for the three highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break), including a first prize of a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium, worth approx. $18,000 (courtesy of Mitch Denny). There will several other prizes which will be announced shortly.

There will be pizza and refreshments provided. If you have any questions, please send Mitch an email.

What's new in C# 4.0 with Joe Albahari

Administrator — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 14:13:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group, Thurs November 5th to hear Joe Albahari present on some of the new C# 4.0. features. C# 4.0 is just around the corner, and it introduces a number of much-requested features including optional parameters, named arguments and (horror) dynamic typing! We're going to demo all of C# 4.0's new features, discuss best practices, show off dynamic Office and Python interop, and explore some novel uses for dynamic typing that may not have crossed your mind. In particular, we'll examine a surprising pattern whereby a little quacking can make large classes much more manageable. VB programmers may attend - but please, no smirking!

TOPIC: What's new in C# 4.0 - Joe Albahari

DATE: Thursday, Nov 5th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell and the upcoming C# 4.0 in a Nutshell.

There will be a door prize of a LINQPad 10-user team license donated by Joe, and a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, or IntelliJ IDEA).

Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Data Collector - Brad McGehee

Administrator — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:26:00 GMT

We are fortunate to have Brad McGehee present two sessions while he is in Perth. The second session is "Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Data Collector". In previous versions of SQL Server, performance tuning was often difficult because the available tools weren't always easy to use or interpret. In SQL Server 2008, Microsoft is introducing the Performance Data Collector. This comprehensive new toolset has been designed to integrate the collection, analysis, troubleshooting, and persistence of SQL Server diagnostic information, making the jobs of DBAs much easier. In this session, you will learn:

· What the Performance Data Collector Can Do

· How to Implement the Performance Data Collector

· Performance Data Collector Best Practices

TOPIC: Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Data Collector - Brad McGehee
DATE: Friday, Oct 2nd, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Brad McGehee is a MCSE+I, MCSD, and MCT (former) with a Bachelors’ degree in Economics and a Masters in Business Administration. Currently the Director of DBA Education for Red Gate Software, Brad is an accomplished Microsoft SQL Server MVP with over 14 years’ SQL Server experience, over 6 years’ training experience, and has been involved in the industry since 1982. He is a frequent speaker at SQL PASS, European PASS, SQL Connections, SQLTeach, SQLBits, SQL Saturdays, TechFests, Code Camps, SQL Server user groups, and other industry seminars.

RedGate have generously donated a license to their excellent SQL Compare Pro.

Try to arrive early if you want a seat!

How to Interpret Graphical Execution Plans - Brad McGehee

Administrator — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:18:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group in October for two talks with a SQL Server focus, aimed at both Developers and DBAs. We are fortunate to have RedGate's Brad McGehee present two sessions while he is in Perth. Brad is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.

The first talk is Thurs October 1st, where Brad will present on "How to Interpret Graphical Execution Plans". One of the SQL Server black arts is how to read and interpret graphical Query Execution Plans. This is a key thing to understand as Execution Plans provide valuable clues as to why a particular query may be running slowly. In this session, you will learn how to read an Execution Plan, and learn what to do with the information you have gained from reading it.

TOPIC: How to Interpret Graphical Execution Plans - Brad McGehee
DATE: Thursday, Oct 1st, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

We will have pizza at this session courtesy of INETA.

RedGate have generously donated a license to their excellent ANTS Memory Profiler Pro. There is also a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA).

Try to arrive early if you want a seat!

Continuous Integration: Improving Quality and Reducing Cost Through Constructive Laziness

Administrator — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:40:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group, Thurs September 3rd to hear Colin Scott talk about Continuous Integration and why you should be doing it. Merging the work of multiple developers and producing reliable, deployable systems is a time consuming and tedious process that wastes developer effort that could be better spent on creating software. Continuous Integration (CI) allows us to automate these tasks and include automated testing and code analysis. This results in higher quality outputs at a lower cost. This presentation shows how to set up simple CI for .NET projects using readily available tools.

TOPIC: Continuous Integration: Improving Quality and Reducing Cost - Colin Scott
DATE: Thursday, Sept 3rd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Colin Scott is a Senior Consultant with CSG Solutions working in Perth, WA and has been a professional developer for 10 years. He has a variety of interests including development tooling, design patterns and practices, Service Oriented Architecture and ALT.NET. His blog is available at http://www.abstractcode.com/.

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA)

Try to arrive early if you want a seat! (Please Note: The Excom doors automatically lock at 5:30pm. If the door is locked, call 0422 971 731 to be let in).

Pex: Automated White Box Testing

Administrator — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:09:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group, Thurs August 6th to see Rhys Campbell demonstrate Pex, a tool being developed by Microsoft Research which has the potential to dramatically improve the quality of software testing while requiring minimal effort on the part of the developer. Pex can automatically generate a set of inputs for a parameterized unit test which can effectively exercise most, if not all, possible code paths.

TOPIC: Pex: Automated White Box Testing - Rhys Campbell

DATE: Thursday, August 6th, 5:30pm

VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth

COST: Free. All welcome

Rhys Campbell is a software developer currently contracting in Perth, WA. He recently returned from London, where he has been active in the .NET community, attending and speaking at the 2008 Seattle and London Alt.NET Open Spaces. Rhys is interested in design, architecture, patterns and bringing best practices from other communities to .NET. Rhys is a director of ArtemisWest.

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper, TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, or IntelliJ IDEA)

Try to arrive early if you want a seat! (Please Note: The Excom doors automatically lock at 5:30pm. If the door is locked, call 0422 971 731 to be let in).

When should ASP.NET Developers leverage the SharePoint Platform?

Administrator — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:53:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Thurs July 2nd to hear Jeremy Thake answer a common question: Is SharePoint is the correct choice as a base platform for a solution? Jeremy Thake will present the advantages (and disadvantages) of leveraging the SharePoint Platform. Some lines in the sand will be drawn to make it easier to make the decision early on the project based on real world experience gathered by Jeremy from the SharePoint community.

TOPIC: When should ASP.NET Developers leverage the SharePoint Platform?

DATE: Thursday, July 2nd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Jeremy Thake has been in the Microsoft web development space since 1999. He has specialised in SharePoint since the beta release of SharePoint 2007. He facilitates the SharePointDevWIki.com which has become a open source resource for all things SharePoint Development. His blog focuses on SharePoint and Enterprise Content Management and is supplemented by his Tweet stream at @jthake. Jeremy has worked for Readify, a Technical Readiness company, since August 2008 and has implemented various SharePoint projects and trained both locally in Perth and the rest of Australia.

There will be a door prize of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains).

Try to arrive early if you want a seat!

.NET Micro-ISV (or Get Rich Working from Home!)

Administrator — Wed, 13 May 2009 15:41:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Thurs June 4th to hear Joe Albahari present on using your .NET skills to write a program to sell over the Internet. Sound hard? It's easier than you think! This presentation will cover what Joe learned in setting up a successful Micro-ISV (Independent Software Vendor), including:

· Idea incubation - what works and what doesn't

· Marketing strategies, bootstrapping and how to get free advertising, including a simple trick to increase your sales 30%

· Traps in dealing with domain experts & business partners

· How programming best practices differ for Micro-ISVs

· A rarely-used but easy deployment mechanism to maximize downloads

· Handling automated payments

· Designing a licensing system that works

· Web site design and search engine optimization

· Monetization options & establishing a price, and why a micro-ISV does well in a recession

TOPIC: .NET Micro-ISV

DATE: Thursday, June 4th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Joe Albahari is author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, and inventor of LINQPad - the popular querying utility. He's been programming for 20 years in a variety of industries and has been involved in two startups. His web site is www.albahari.com.

There will be door prizes of a 10-user team license for LINQPad Autocompletion (courtesy of Joe) and a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains).

Try to arrive early if you want a seat!

DevJam Community Event

Administrator — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:55:00 GMT

We have a great lineup for May’s DevJam community event of the Perth .NET User Group:

Tiang Cheng: Developing Software as a Service with the Google API

Graeme Foster: 'Dude, where's my memory?': Finding managed memory leaks using Windbg

Andy Dent: WPF layer-cake: C#, C++/CLI and C

Dave Gardner: NDepend

Rhys Campbell: Introduction to ASP.Net MVC

Adrian McGrath: Measuring .NET Application Performance - Application Instrumentation

Jeremy Thake: ‘What's this ReSharper all about then?’

Hadley Willan: Partial classes with LINQ-SQL

DATE: Thursday, May 7th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There are prizes for the presenters of the highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break):

First Prize: Visual Studio 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium, worth approx. $3,500 (courtesy of Microsoft), plus a license for NDepend (courtesy of Patrick Smacchia).

Second Prize: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), plus a copy of C# in a Nutshell (courtesy of Joe Albahari)

Third Prize: a copy of Code Craft (courtesy of O’Reilly), plus a LINQPad auto-completion license (courtesy of Joe Albahari).

Audience Door Prizes: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), and a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

In addition, the top 3 voted talks will each receive a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

There will be pizza and refreshments provided.

DevJam in May

Administrator — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:13:00 GMT

For May’s meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 7^th May), we are running another DevJam community event, where anyone can give a short talk about anything .NET software development related.

DATE: Thursday, May 7th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

You can talk about any development topic but it must be between 5 – 10 minutes long.

· Anything you’ve done.

· Any new technology you’ve investigated.

· Any tips and tricks, or tools that aid developers

· Basically anything .NET software development related!

How do I enter? You must register by sending an email to mitch.wheat at gmail.com, no later than 25^thApril, with the words ‘May DevJam’ in the subject, stating your talk topic in the body. Let me know whether you will be bringing your own laptop (preferable).

There are prizes for the presenters of the highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break):

First Prize: Visual Studio 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium, worth approx. $3,500 (courtesy of Microsoft)

Second Prize: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), plus a copy of C# in a Nutshell (courtesy of Joe Albahari).

Third Prize: a copy of Code Craft (courtesy of O’Reilly), plus a LINQPad auto-completion license (courtesy of Joe Albahari).

Audience Door Prizes: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), and a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

In addition, the top 3 voted talks will each receive a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

There will be pizza and refreshments provided. If you have any questions, please send Mitch an email.

Flexible UI Composition with WPF

Administrator — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:13:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Thurs April 2nd to hear James Miles present on how Inversion of Control (IoC) and separated presentation principles can be used to build rich WPF applications, while keeping memory consumption low and minimising object lifetimes. James will demonstrate how the careful introduction of an IoC Container can increase the flexibility of your UI architecture, facilitating agile software development.

TOPIC:    WPF Flexible UI Composition with James Miles
DATE:     Thursday, April 2nd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

James is an independent software contractor and has been developing rich client applications in .NET for more than 5 years. He specializes in C# 3.0, LINQ & WPF, bringing the latest technologies to line of business. James is currently working on the Phoenix Project at Racing & Wagering WA.

There will be door prizes of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains), a .NET Memory Profiler license (courtesy of SciTech), a copy of “Programming WPF” (courtesy of O’Reilly) and T-Shirts (courtesy of RedGate).

If the last meeting’s record attendance was anything to go by, try to arrive early if you want a seat!

Real World Test Driven Development: Unit Testing Enterprise Solutions

Administrator — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 13:12:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Thursday March 5th to hear Rhys Campbell present on the essentials of TDD and how it encourages good software design as opposed to just having tests. Rhys will cover the differences between unit, acceptance and integration tests, why conventional unit test examples often do not work in the real world, what to test and what to mock, automating your tests, coding examples of how to use Mocks, Stubs, Fakes, Dummies and Spies... what are they and how do they help me.

TOPIC:    Real World TDD with Rhys Campbell
DATE:     Thursday, March 5th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

There will be door prizes of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains) and T-Shirts (courtesy of Redgate).

Silverlight: what is it and what is it not!

Administrator — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 14:37:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Thursday February 5th to hear Stephen Price and Ola Karlsson present an introductionto to Silverlight as a concept, a technology and to some of the tools used for Silverlight development. We will look at what Silverlight is and is not, whether it is ready for ‘real’ application development, reasons to use it and how not to use it and make a brief comparison with other rich internet applications. The presentation will include a section showing how to host Silverlight on a budget. Utilising a LAMP web host, you can host your Silverlight application and make it talk to PHP on the back end. This makes for a low cost, web application that looks great. All this can be done with the free Visual Studio Express Web edition.

TOPIC:    SilverLight with Ola Karlsson and Stephen Price
DATE:     Thursday, February 5th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Ola Karlsson

Having spent his teens dabbling with web development and BBS's all around Sweden, Ola worked his way around the globe as a scuba diving instructor. Later, after resuming studying web development, the .com crash hit and he moved to Perth, graduating University in early 2005. Since then he's been working in the IT industry and lately as an ASP.NET developer for a medium sized Microsoft Gold Partner in Perth. Ola has been following Silverlight since version 1.1 Alpha, and has a keen interest in most things web. You can visit Ola’s blog at at http://weblogs.asp.net/olakarlsson/.

Stephen Price

Stephen has been interested in computers for most of his life, and has been working in the IT industry for 14 years, the last 5 as a .NET developer. In his spare time he is a cartoonist. This puts him close to the middle of the Designer - Developer curve, being able to develop and do artistic things such as user interfaces. This is one of the reasons he enjoys working with Silverlight so much as it gives him the opportunity to code AND make great looking web applications all in one box.

DevJam Lineup

Administrator — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:01:00 GMT

The line up for this week’s DevJam meeting (Thursday, 11^th Dec) has been finalised:

Hadley Willan - Implementing IDisposable

Tiang Cheng - Visual Studio Testing Techniques

Adrian McGrath - Configuration Management Introduction

Michael Minutillo - Test-Driven Philosophy

Jeremy Thake - Azure

James Miles - LINQ->WPF

Dave Gardner - Preventing XSS

Alastair Waddell - WCF Syndication Feeds

DATE: Thursday, December 11th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

The presenter of the best talk will win a Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 with 1 year MSDN Premium subscription (courtesy of Mitch Denny). The second prize is a Resharper license and 3 books; third prize is 2 books. There will also be an audience draw for a Resharper license.

December DevJam

Administrator — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:13:00 GMT

For December’s meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 11^th Dec), we are running a DevJam style event, where anyone can give a short talk about anything .NET software development related.

You can talk about any development topic but it must be between 5 – 10 minutes long.

· Anything you’ve done.

· Any new technology you’ve investigated.

· Any tips and tricks.

· Basically anything .NET software development related!

Please register by sending an email to mitch.wheat at gmail.com, no later than 4^th Dec, with the word DevJam in the subject, stating your talk topic. Let me know whether you will be bringing your own laptop.

DATE: Thursday, December 11th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

What can you win? Well, we have a Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 with 1 year MSDN Premium subscription (courtesy of Mitch Denny), to award the presenter of the best, audience voted talk (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break). This is a great prize worth lots of $$$! (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/aa718661.aspx) The second prize is a Resharper license and 3 books; third prize is 2 books. There will also be an audience draw for a Resharper license.

If you have any questions, please send Mitch an email.

Update: F# |> functional with Nick Hodge

Administrator — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:55:00 GMT

Please Note: Date has changed to Tuesday, 4th November, due to clashes with other events. [I've had to repost as Community Server seems reluctant to update the post, even though it was edited 24 hours ago! ]

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Tuesday November 4th to hear Nick Hodge present a session on F# and the rise and rise of the new .NET functional and dynamic languages, where and when to use them, and why F# is NOT the new C#!

TOPIC:    F# |> functional with Nick Hodge
DATE:     Tuesday, November 4th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Nick is a self-confessed professional geek working for Microsoft. He has over 22 years of IT industry experience in a variety of sales, technical, management, semi-marketing and strategic roles. He is a sought-after presenter, prolific social networker and closet workaholic.

There will be door prizes of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains) and T-Shirts (courtesy of Redgate).

PLINQ and TPL: Hot New Solutions for Parallel Programming with Joe Albahari

Administrator — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 04:36:00 GMT

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, October 2nd to hear Joe Albahari present a session on two parallel programming technologies at the forefront of threading in the .NET world. CPU speeds have hit a brick wall and Moore's law has been forced onto a new path: increasing core count rather than clock speed, with quad-core processors now becoming mainstream and 8-core processors likely next year. This has radical implications for programmers: in the past we've had to do nothing to take advantage of the doubling of processor speed every 18 months. But now, to make our applications run faster, we must multithread time-intensive code.

But there's a problem: the current .NET multithreading APIs are simply not up to the job. Microsoft's upcoming technology preview promises to address this through two slick new APIs: the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ. The Task Parallel Library defines new Data and Task Parallelism models; PLINQ leverages LINQ's side-effect-free functional programming paradigm to transparently parallelize LINQ queries.

In this session, Joe will demonstrate both technologies, and look at how well they solve some real-world problems. He will also discuss what it means to think of LINQ queries as functional programming islands, and why this is important in how you code today. Finally, we'll look at their relative performance, and whether PLINQ is indeed a practical solution for completely transcending the hard problem of thread safety.

TOPIC:    PLINQ and TPL: Solutions for Parallel Programming with Joe Albahari
DATE:     Thursday, October 2nd, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome.

Joseph Albahari is an author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, the LINQ Pocket Reference and the C# 3.0 Pocket Reference. He has been developing large-scale enterprise applications on .NET and other platforms for more than 15 years, and is currently a freelance consultant. Joseph specializes in integrating LINQ into corporate multi-tier applications, and is author of LINQPad - the code snippet IDE for interactively querying databases in LINQ.

There will be door prizes of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains), a copy of Joe’s book “C# 3.0 in a Nutshell” (courtesy of Joe Albahari), as well as a few T-Shirts (courtesy of Redgate). In addition to these goodies, we will be giving away a VS 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium Subscription (courtesy of Microsoft)!