Group Blog

July 2010

February 2009 Meeting Recap

The presenter for Tuesday's meeting was our own Woody Pewitt. Woody is a Technical Evangelist for Microsoft. His topic was on Microsoft's Cloud Computing platform.

The meeting was sponsored by TekSystems who provided the pizza and gave away a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy. Thanks to TekSystems for their support and their candid discussion on the current state of the economy in the tech sector. They are one of the reasons that the group has a near 0% unemployment rate (the other being that our members rock!).

After everyone settled down with their pizza, there was a question and answer session about some of the problems members had faced during the previous week's work.

Then Woody began his talk on Microsoft's new Cloud Computing initiative and Windows Azure. His talk broke down into four sections:

Cloud Computing vs. Onsite
   He went over some of the tradeoffs when choosing a hosting platform, one which was control/customization vs scalability and availability.
   He also showed us a video of the way Microsoft is using local data-centers to acheive global availability. You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M36YrqMhrcY

Azure
    He began by talking about where your app fits in the azure platform and the different ways it can interact with onsite computers
    He described some of the services Microsoft is offering that make cloud computing easier: .NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services.
    He also mentioned some of the hosting services that Microsoft provides namely Windows, Office, Exchange and Sharepoint hosting.

Live Mesh
    Woody went into detail on one of the most interesting of the Live Services: Live mesh
    Using mesh he showed how applications and data can be synchronized across multiple devices and multiple users.
    The importance of this was underscored as my phone alerted me to a new twitter during the talk.
    Woody described the underlying protocol behind Live Mesh, which is an extremely clever use of an RSS feed.

Live Azure Demo
    Woody then stepped up to the plate and showed how to create a Windows Azure "Hello World" Web and Worker role project
    He showed the Development Fabric and Storage system tray components that run locally, as well as how to deploy to the cloud.

After Woody's talk we had the raffle which included: Vista, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio, and lots of books.

After the meeting finished several us met for drinks and continued discussion at Red Robin.

Remember to join us next Tuesday (Feb 10th) for the admin planning meeting. We really appreciate the help.

We will see you next month, and for those of you who like to plan ahead remember that April is our 15th anniversary, and we have lots of special things planned.

Scott Reed & Llewellyn Falco

January 2009 Meeting Recap

Happy New Year!

We started off this year with a bang at the San Diego .NET Developers group. About 50 people showed up for our first meeting of the year, and when we asked if anyone was looking for a job nobody raised their hand, which we take as a good sign that the group is keeping the development community strong.

The meeting started as always with pizza provided by this month's sponsor, Brad and Rene from Modis (www.modis.com). The first 20 minutes or so was spent eating and networking with fellow developers.

Then Dave McCarter, founder of the group, and frequent speaker, author, and teacher, gave a talk on the .NET Entity Framework, the latest from Microsoft for handling object to database mappings. Dave's talks focused on two main parts of the Entity Framework: the modeling of the objects and how they relate to the database and how the Entity Framework can be exposed through a RESTful web service. Dave punctuated this talk with many live coding examples, and hardly any problems. :-)

One cool thing was how the IDE provides a very practical GUI interface for modeling and editing the objects that will represent the tables and data from the database, allowing for renaming, moving columns, and even inheritance.

Dave recommends downloading and read his paper "What I Have Learned So Far About The Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services" before you start: it could save you a lot of time and frustration by learning from his experience. You can download it here: http://dotnettips.com/2008/09/30/WhatIHaveLearnedSoFarAboutTheEntityFrameworkAndADONETDataServices.aspx

Brad from Modis held a free raffle during the break for a $50 Frys gift card, which unfortunately wasn't won by me. Woody Pewitt announced the dates for this year's SoCal Code camp at Cal State Fullerton on Jan. 24 and 25^th. This is a really great conference and you'll have a great time learning and meeting up with everyone for the whole weekend – we highly recommend it.

The second half of the evening gave us a great look at a new idea in testing called approval tests (www.approvaltests.com). Llewellyn Falco & Dan Gilkerson gave a very lively presentation with interactive demonstrations on a way to think about how we approach unit testing that is the reverse of how we normally go about it. Approval testing allows us to capture a snap shot of the result of running our code and then using that as a base line against which we can compare future runs. Llewellyn & Dan gave a tactile example of this using beach balls (which were constantly being thrown to members of the audience, causing a general uproar). Using an existing ball as a base line, they would compare it to other balls that represented the output of future runs. If the new ball was the same as the original approved ball, then the test passes, if it even slightly different: larger, smaller, different color than the original then the test fails. From this simple example it was clean if we could find a way to do this is an automated way with our code then we could easily test our code for regressions. They went on to demonstrator their new API that can be used in any unit test framework. Showing how it is almost as easy as playing ball.

Afterwards we held our raffle for some great books, the MSDN subscription, and a full version of Office 2007 Premium.

After the meeting a few of us gathered at the Red Robin to talk and hang out for an hour or two. Fun was had by all.

See you next month when Woody Pewitt will be speaking about Microsoft new cloud computing platform Azure.

Woody Zuill

The .net developers group is great way to increase your skills, stay current, and connect with other local developers. The San Diego .NET Developers Group meets the first Tuesday of every month starting at 6:00 at the AMN Health Care - 12400 High Bluff Drive San Diego, CA 92130

http://sddotnetdg.org/

December 2008 Meeting Recap

Hello everybody. We just wanted to do a recap of the great meeting we had 2 weeks ago at the San Diego .NET Developers Group.

It started off with Mitch Lacey (www.mitchlacey.com), a Certified Scrum Trainer from Seattle, WA who gave a talk on the "Definition of Done". Mitch began with a personal story of trying to secretly wrap Christmas gifts while his Wife had taken the children to the store, and the price he paid when he was surprised by the early return of his kids while he had many partly wrapped gifts on the table. He went on to show how we can work with our teams to define what it means to have something done at the task level, at the story level, at the integration level, and finally at the release level.

He also gave some good advice on how to work with younger programmers and recommended an article you can find here: http://www.dau.mil/pubs/dam/11_12_2006/11_12_2006_spi_nd06.pdf.

Next , our own Scott Reed from Developmentor (www.develop.com) gave a code intensive talk on closures and lambdas in .NET. He started his talk by showing us how to access local variables by coding special objects to handle the persistence of local variables. He then showed us how to achieve the same thing more elegantly, with closures and took us into ildasm to show us that the generated byte code is the same (except more cryptic names in the closures version.) He then demonstrated how to transform a closure step-by-step into a lambda as follows:

delegate(string s) {return s.length;}
string s) => {return s.length;}
string s) => s.length s => s.length

We appreciate the support of both Mitch & Scott. If you know someone who would benefit from either Coaching in Scrum or .Net Technologies, we encourage you to contact them accordingly.

After the presentations we had a raffle with a grand prize of a Free MSDN Subscription (worth about $2500!) donated by Dave McCarter from his MVP booty.

After the meeting a few of us gathered at the Red Robin to talk and hang out for an hour or two. Fun was had by all.

We hope to see you at the next meeting at the beginning of the new year on January 6, 2009. The speakers will be Dave McCarter on Microsoft's new Entity Framework, and Llewellyn Falco and Dan Gilkerson on Approval Tests (http://approvaltests.sourceforge.net/), a really easy way to get your code under test.

See you next month, Woody Zuill

.NET Blogs

February 2009 Meeting Recap