Announcements and Events

When should ASP.NET Developers leverage the SharePoint Platform?

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!)

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

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).

DevJam in May

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^th April, 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

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

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

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

Silverlight: what is it and what is it not!

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

DevJam Lineup

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

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

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

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)!

Federated Identity Session Slides

Bill Poole has made the slides from Thursday's meeting available here. For those that missed this session, we will also be posting the video in the near future.

Federated Identity Management in a Service Oriented World with Bill Poole

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, Sept 4th to hear Bill Poole talk about Federated Identity Management in a Service Oriented World.  Gone are the days of siloed applications that identify users with a simple username/password combination stored in the application database.  In today’s world of Internet based e-commerce where secure transactions occur over insecure open networks and in a service oriented world of composite applications where identity must be shared between systems hosted by different organisations on disparate platforms; in a world where increasing numbers of businesses are turning to hosting their applications in the cloud, and where users from partner organisations need to be securely granted access to enterprise resources, architects are turning to an ever increasingly complex array of security solutions to solve their identity woes.  How do we as mere mortals make sense of PKI, Kerberos, SAML, and a plethora of WS-* standards aimed at addressing these concerns?  This session will provide a clear and practical description of how to apply today’s security technologies in order to effectively manage and share identity across applications, service and organisational boundaries.

TOPIC:    Federated Identity Management in a Service Oriented World with Bill Poole
DATE:     Thursday, Sept 4th, 5:30pm
VENUE:  Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome.

Bill is a Consulting Manager with Change Corporation, primarily consulting in Solution and Enterprise Architecture. With over 10 years of industry experience, his professional interests include Enterprise Architecture, SOA, systems integration, large scale application development, as well as design patterns and best practice.  He has considerable experience in the design and development of robust, scalable service oriented enterprise solutions. Bill currently manages the Application and Development Services knowledge team, which provides Change Corporation’s body of expertise in application development and systems integration.  His blog “Bill Poole’s Creative Abrasion” can be found at http://bill-poole.blogspot.com/.

Slides: Agile in a .NET Environment, Dwayne Read

Dwayne Read has made the slides available from his "Agile in a .NET Environment" presentation. You can download from here: http://www.box.net/shared/9y7hlhbxji

Reminder: Readify RDN Event, 5:00pm - 7:30pm, Thursday August 14th

If you haven't yet registered for Readify's RDN event this Thurdsay, now's the time to do it: http://www.readify.net/Default.aspx?tabid=288 

Date:           Thursday 14 August 2008
Time:            5:30pm-7:30pm (pizza and networking at 5:30pm – presentation to commence at approximately 5:45pm)
Location:     Cliftons |Australia Place, Corner St George’s Terrace & William Streets, Perth
Presenters: Chris Padgett (Building WCF Services with WF) & Graeme Foster (Windows Communication Foundation)