July 21st – Coding Dojo with Llewellyn Falco and Woody Zuill

Abstract: Too often at conferences all we do is talk about code. Our coding dojo skips the talk and provides a chance for everyone to have a common shared experience instead. We start by taking audience suggestions on a typical programming story (such as a simple game or problem), and the participants decide on which story to program.  During the dojo everyone takes a turn coding using Agile and Extreme Programming practices such as Pair Programming, Test Driven Design, User Stories, and Story Test Driven Development – all guided by Llewellyn and Woody.  Everyone works together toward a common goal and we reflect on our results at the end.  Each time it is a unique experience with a lot of learning, and a lot of fun.

A successful dojo is like being part of a expert chefs cooking class. In the process of baking a cake, you may learn how to sift the flour, understand when you are making the frosting too sweet, or how to use a baking thermometer. These will all be little things and unique to your needs, but in the end they are what helps you progress down the path to the being able to bake an excellent cake.

About our Presenters:

Woody Zuill has been programming computers for over 25 years, and currently works as an application developer for a company that makes medical devices.  Over the last 5 years he has worked continuously as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach for development practices.  He believes that code must be simple, clean, and maintainable so that we can realize the Agile promise of Responding to Change, and that we must constantly Inspect and Adapt our practices.  He has a passion for bringing code that is hard to maintain back into a manageable state.

Llewellyn Falco has been a software developer since 1996 and an Agile Coach for the past 2 years. Focusing on Java and C# he is the creator of the opensource testing tool ApprovalTests which simplifies the testing of complex GUIs, Databases, and objects. When not working with clients, Llewellyn continues to develop ApprovalTests and regularity speaks at local user groups. Find his blog at llewellynfalco.blogspot.com

Meeting Agenda:

* 6:00p Mixer/Networking/Pizza
* 6:30p Presentation Starts
* 7:30p Break
* 7:45p Presentation Resumes
* 8:45p Raffle

Directions: Park in parking structure at 570 E Huntington Dr, Monrovia, CA 91016 . Meeting is across the street in 605 E Huntington Dr. Once parked, use the overhead walk way to get to the building. The meeting will be right inside the door after the walk way.

This is a Green Dot sponsored event. There is no entry fee and the event is free for attendees.

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June 10th – Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) with Bart De Smet

Abstract: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable collections.Rx is a superset of the standard LINQ sequence operators that exposes asynchronous and event-based computations as push-based, observable collections via the new .NET 4.0 interfaces IObservable<T> and IObserver<T>. This talk will introduce you to Rx and Bret will teach how to do complex event processing and asynchronous computations using LINQ queries over observable collections using Reactive Extensions.

About the Presenter:
A former Visual C# MVP, Bart De Smet now works at Microsoft Corporation on the WPF dev team in an SDE role. Prior to this new challenge, Bart was active in the Belgian community evangelizing various Microsoft technologies, most of the time focusing on CLR, language innovation and frameworks. In his evangelism role, he’s been speaking at various events and attended several international conferences including TechEd Europe, IT Forum and the PDC. In 2005, Bart graduated as a Master of Informatics from Ghent University, Belgium. Two years later, Bart became a Master of Computer Science Software Engineering from the same university. http://bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/

This is a Green Dot sponsored event. There is no entry fee and the event is free for attendees.

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May 19th – Web Sites for Mobile Clients using .NET 4.0 w/ Woody Pewitt

Abstract: Many developers know how to make great web sites for desktop browsers but how can a developer take that same effort and make sites that look good to mobile browsers? In this talk we will review different mobile browsers and see what they support and how developers can make a website that can look good in a desktop browser and still look good on a mobile browser. We will see some new tools in Visual Studio 2010 that make creating sites like this more productive.

About the Presenter:
Woody Pewitt is the Director of Product Incubation at Neudesic where he explores how Neudesic can make innovative products and solution accelerators to enable customers Information technology budgets get greater returns for their organizations. Before joining Neudesic he worked at Microsoft in Southern California doing several Evangelism jobs where he got to work with all kinds of people who are interested in Microsoft development technologies.

This is a Green Dot sponsored event. There is no entry fee and the event is free for attendees.

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April 21st – Silverlight 4 w/ Volkan Uzon

Abstract: Silverlight 4 enhances the building of business applications, media applications, and applications that reach beyond the browser. New features include printing support, significant enhancements for using forms over data, full support in the Google Chrome web browser, WCF RIA services, modular development with MEF, full support in Visual Studio 2010, bi-directional text, web camera and microphone support, rich text editing, improved data binding features, HTML support, MVVM and commanding support, new capabilities for local desktop integration running in the new “Trusted Application” mode such as COM automation and local file access.

While Silverlight turns into a mainstream RIA technology for enterprise level applications; this presentation will focus on and demonstrate a selected group of Silverlight 4 features to highlight its potential. The content will include useful pointers for further study and experimentation.

About the Presenter:

Volkan is currently working at California State University as an Information Technology Consultant. He has a passion for creating accessible and secure applications and loves to share his knowledge with the developer community. He was the instructor for the IEDOTNETUG ASP.NET Web Forms class in 2008 and this year he taught teaching ASP.NET MVC. Volkan is holding a MS degree in Computer Science from California State University.
He has been developing softtware since 1999; former companies he worked for include Wincor-Nixdorf and Denizbank; where he was involved in systems engineering and programming. He is certified as MCTS on SQL Server 2005 and MCTS on ASP.NET Web development.
Read Volkan’s blog at http://www.msnetprogrammer.net/blog.

This is a Green Dot sponsored event. There is no entry fee and the event is free for attendees.

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