Atlanta MS Pros
Last night we had about 60 people at the Atlanta MS Pros user group listening to Jim Wooley talk about the migration path developers currently using Linq to SQL might use to move to the Entity Framework. Jim has some deep history with Ling, including being the coauthor of the Manning Press book Linq in Action.
After the informative meeting, nearly 20 of us wandered over to the local Miller’s Ale House to continue our socializing over beer and enormous mounds of the Ale House’s famous Chicken Nacho’s
Don Browning from Turner Broadcasting came out of the fun buildings which bring you the Cartoon Network (and those other channels) to talk to the group about the new architecture features of Visual Studio 2010. Those changes include:
- 6 new designers
- case model – a visual view of user stories (including dependencies) backed to TFS (2008 or 2010) work items
- class diagram – UML class designer NOT tied to code so you can make changes without messing up code
- activity diagram – looks like a flowchart to show logic
- sequence diagram – across a given span of time, what objects get used or come into play
- component diagram – helps you define service interactions
- Layer diagram
- architect explorer – architectural view of code supporting class view and solution view
- model explorer – model elements that are reusable are listed in the model explorer, which is a repository model of elements
- code analysis visualizations – a static analysis turned graphical including graph mode, force directed mode, and matrix mode.
- Integration with TFS – supports the storage of model elements in TFS and can be tied to work items.
The talk was clearly popular as we had a huge turnout at about 65 people!
Please join us on Monday, October 1 at 6:30 PM for the monthly Atlanta Cutting Edge .NET / MsPros / VB Study Group meeting.
Note, for this meeting we will be meeting at Turner in midtown (1015 Techwood Drive) rather than the usual Microsoft offices. If you haven't attended meetings in the past due to location, here's your chance to let us know if this facility is better. Scroll to the bottom of this message for directions to the meeting.
Presentation Topics
Speaker: Steve Porter
Topic: Windows Workflow Rules Engine
This talk explores creating, maintaining and executing business rules using the Windows Workflow (WF) rules engine.
Speaker: Rik Robinson
Topic: Deep Dive CSS for the ASP.NET Developer
This will be a thorough discussion of all that is CSS. Whether you know it as the necessary evil or the great enabler (that just hasn’t quite clicked for you yet), you should walk away with something valuable from this discussion. I will begin with the basic box model and travel all the way to the holiest of grails (the no tables here, two and three column ASP.NET Master Page layout…yours to take home for free!). Along the way, we’ll touch on some CSS Best Practices and gotchas in ASP.NET and take a look at the new CSS tools in Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas).
Rik Robinson is an Independent Consultant in the Atlanta GA area. He holds the following certifications (all .NET Framework 2.0): MCPD –Enterprise Applications, MCTS-Web, MCTS-Windows, MCTS-Distributed Applications. He really hates that he has to type this in third person like someone else wrote it. Rik is supposed to maintain his blog at www.r2musings.com. He will soon, I’m sure. Rik’s focus is always on the User Experience (both the end user’s and the developer’s).
NOTE: Different location! We will be meeting at the Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta
Directions to Techwood
Marta Rail System: Midtown Stop on the North/South Line
FROM I-75/I-85 NORTH HEADING NORTH
- Travel North on I-75 and I-85.
- Take 10th Street/14th Street/Techwood Drive/Georgia Tech exit (Exit #250)
- Turn left at first red light, onto Tenth Street (heading West)
- Turn right onto Techwood Drive and left into the visitor entrance.
- Pull up to window of the GateHouse and Security Officers will direct you to visitor parking
- Take the parking deck elevator to the 1st floor of the 1000 Bldg and check in with the receptionist in the lobby. Tell them you are with the Atlanta MS Pros.
FROM I-75/I-85 SOUTH HEADING SOUTH
- Travel South on I-75 or I-85.
- Take Techwood Drive/Tenth Street/Fourteenth Street exit (Exit #84)
- Go straight ahead and the exit ramp turns into Techwood Drive
- Cross 14th Street and stay in the right lane.
- Turn right into the visitor entrance on Techwood Drive
- Pull up to window of the GateHouse and Security Officers will direct you to visitor parking
- Take the parking deck elevator to the 1st floor of the 1000 Bldg and check in with the receptionist in the lobby. Tell them you are with the Atlanta MS Pros.
Thanks, and I hope to see everyone at this month's meeting!
The Atlanta Microsoft Professionals group has been through more than one change in its history. It started life as the Atlanta.NET Mobility group, but was probably before its time. Next came the AMP name and the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! training sessions. The 18 hours worth of presentations and hands on labs were incredibly well receivied, but the creation of that material took a huge effort from those involved and we're probably not going to repeat that for free. It really was a lot of work.
However, we still believe that we can fill a need in the Atlanta .NET community with our original charter - a group focusing on professional Microsoft toolkits. This allows us to explore beyond development topics. To that end, our new focus is SharePoint and the Information Worker's toolkit. This will certainly include the various flavors of SharePoint 2007 (WSS, OSS Standard and Enterprise, Search, etc) as well as Office 2007 and even some third party products.
Last night was the first of these meetings and we split the meeting in half along the developer/information worker line. The first part of the meeting was a developer focused topic and Dan Attis presented Feature development to the group. At the highest level, a feature is a wrapper around a set of functionality which can be individually enabled or disabled inside of a SharePoint installation. Features can include other features and can be scoped at various points along the Web farm to Site heirarchy. Features are composed of at least an XML file and can include resource files and expanded XML definitions. For more information, check out Dan's presentation which will be online at DevCow.com sometime in the near future. If you're dealing with features on a regular basis, you might find Todd Baginski's little Feature Manager tool a helpful friend.
The second presentation of the evening was given by yours truly (that's Matt Ranlett for those of you who aren't paying attention). I took the power user/information worker slant and presented task management to the group. I started off by showing the out of the box templates available for tracking tasks, issues, and project tasks (Gantt view). We looked at the available KPIs for monitoring the task lists and the out of the box Three-State Workflow for automating the task. 
My intention was to follow up this out of the box presentation with a demonstration of Ascentn's AgilePoint but I couldn't remember the password on the virtual PC image and had to simply explain about Business Process Management and AgilePoint's super slick Visio UI. I plan to come back to this tool at some point in the future as I believe that this kind of tool will become an invaluable part of streamlining business processes in the future.
The presentations were both well received by the audience, bringing out a lot of questions and general comments from the group. One thing we heard over and over from the audience was that there appears to be a gap in the available online and printed information about SharePoint. There is plenty of high level out of the box types of discussions around and there are plenty of deep dives into the development of a particular niche of SharePoint, but there is no business value overview. What people seem to be asking for is the 10 minute or less pitch that they can take to their management teams and say, "We should buy SharePoint 2007 because...". This is not necessarily an easy space to fill, but we're going to work together to identify and fill the gaps a little bit at a time. To that end, we're hosting an open forum where anyone who is interested can post their thoughts. This is where you can help steer the presentation topics toward what you'd like to see, post general comments, and give feedback to the group's leaders.
The Information Worker and SharePoint 2007 are broad topic areas and we can easily spend over a year covering this material. If you have particular areas you'd like to see, or if you would like to present some of the material yourself, please get in touch with us either via the forum or by e-mail. We would really love feedback from you. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help you learn more. However, having said that, please keep in mind that this is a volunteer effort and that asking us every detail of how to implement a technology will likely come with a bill! ;-)
If you are interested in presenting material on SharePoint 2007, Office 2007, or any Information Worker toolkit, please let us know. If you do not volunteer to give a presentation, you will have no choice but to listen to us give the presentations.
If you are looking to sponsor the user group, here is what we can offer you. In exchange for approximately $150 worth of pizza, you get 15 minutes on stage to present your company's product and marketing message. You also get your logo on our event's web page and mention in the DevCow blog covering the meeting. Finally, we will provide all of the attendees with any printed material you wish to hand out. Thank you for your interest in the group and it is my genuine hope that your sponsorship pays off for you in real dollars as well as general goodwill.
Unfortunately we have lost our location due to scheduling conflicts at the Microsoft location. We regret having to do this twice to the same event, but we're going to cancel the LoadFest. We will regroup and try to bring this to you again, next time with better planning.
http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn/archive/2006/09/14/754083.aspx
The fine folks on the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals leadership committee decided to cancel the SharePoint 1, 2, 3! Level 300 seminar and hands on lab, originally scheduled for September 18th and 19th.
However, not wanting to leave you with a single free Monday evening, they have decided to replace the exploration of SharePoint 2003 advanced development topics with an exploration of SharePoint 2007!
We’re talking Loadfest here folks! We’ll be giving you a DVD with a virtual PC on it. We’ll be giving you all the sofware you need to install SharePoint 2007 beta 2, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and Microsoft Office 2007 beta 2. We’ll help you get all of this software set up and running correctly so that you can play with some of the great new features inside the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.
Please plan on bringing your laptops with you to the Microsoft offices on Monday, September 18th.
Register here: http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=111622
Excellent turnout in terms of percentages at last night’s SharePoint 1, 2, 3! Level 200 presentation. We had 23 people registered to attend and where we normally experience between 25% and 40% drop-off, last night we saw only a 17% drop-off. That means that 19 people were in attendance last night. Several of these were new faces to user groups, although a bunch of them had been at the Level 100 presentation. Thanks again to our sponsor CorasWorks for providing pizza and beverages last night.
We sat in a new room in the Microsoft offices last night due to the large number of regional Microsoft TS folks occupying our normal meeting space for some kind of six state regional meeting. Anyway – the room that our user group got was actually ideal for the group. We all sat around a single large table and were able to discuss round table style all of the various topics that came up.
The evening went well, but that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have any problems last night. For some reason, the air conditioning was turned off and especially at the end of the evening we were sweltering. One of our demos crashed right at the end and we were short enough on time that we just moved on past it. Time being our enemy, we were unable to present three of our scheduled demos. I guess we might have spent too long in roundtable discussions about SharePoint.
Tonight is the Hands on Labs presentation and we’ve got plenty of room thanks to DeVry University allowing us into their computer labs. The room holds nearly 50 individual PCs! That’s a major step up from the Intellinet lab which only holds 16. Please Register for tomorrow (hands on lab) and join us.
*** NOTE *** Food is not allowed in DeVry’s lab so we will not be providing any. Sorry!
There is still room for attendees.
Thanks in advance to everyone for coming out and supporting us!
This past Monday was a meeting of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals, and we featured Karl Rissland, a Microsoft BizTalk technical specialist. Karl was a great presenter and I'm only sorry that I was so late getting the newsletter out because we didn't have a very large crowd.
Another reason we might have had a fairly small crowd is that lots of people don't really understand what BizTalk does or what it can be used for. If you listen to any of the BizTalk technical specialists, including Karl, you'll hear "Business Process Orchestration" mentioned over and over, but what does that really mean? Let's step back and look at this from the perspective of the average mid-sized company developer.
Have you ever written an interface program? Something that takes data from one system and moves it into a different system, possibly requiring some sort of transformation or parsing of data? Perhaps you're moving data from a Point of Sale system into a home office Marketing database, or maybe you're moving data from the HR system to some kind of inventory tracking system. Or there is the classic example of moving data from some kind of sales system into some kind of order fufillment system. Basically, you have data elements in point A that need to move to point B. Who hasn't done this at least once in their careers? It's not terribly hard, you write code to grab data, match it to some sort of data element map, and then put the data somewhere else. If you work at a company with five or six systems, each of which needs to talk to at least one other system, you're talking about a minimum of three of these interfaces. This kind of inter-application wire-up is called EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and BizTalk can make this easier for you by providing all the hard parts.
Where BizTalk really shines though is when you want to do more than just pass a simple file around. Let's say you have a company policy that when a new person gets hired, they visit HR to get entered into the HR system and the Payroll system. Then they visit IT to get a domain account and to get a workstation and telephone assigned. If you think of this in terms of EAI, you've got at least three connections to make - HR <--> Payroll <--> IT (and IT here is probably 3 different systems or databases - Active Directory, Telephone Directory, and some kind of inventory tracking database). Now, if you think of this in terms of a business process that you're facilitating, the "New Hire" process, you can start to see how you might be able to pull this stuff together. Let's say that the new hire visits HR and they stick him into their system. Now BizTalk could get a message from the HR system saying "I've got a new hire" and it could begin to automatically do the work in the payroll system as well as work in some of the IT systems. Domain accounts could be added (BizTalk can do more than pass database messages around, you can run code or scripts). Telephone assignment notices could be filed with the appropriate IT staffer, who could update the records once the line is connected. There is a lot that can be done here, and this process of encapsulating an entire business process and managing several details and decisions is called Business Process Orchestration.
Now, if you want to hear someone who really knows what they're talking about explain how all of this really works, we need to invite Karl to come back and present a more in-depth view of BizTalk and what it can do for you. This is a tool that every developer should understand. I'm not saying that every developer will use BizTalk or that it's appropriate for every situation, but this is another significant tool in the toolbox. Knowing a wide array of tools (or at least knowing that they exist and what they're for) can never hurt anyone.
Popping up just in the nick of time as I work on a project dealing with unmanaged code, Jeffery Richter gave us a great presentation on threading and reliability. Among the things I learned...IntPtr is bad. Time to go rewrite some code! Stupid examples....
We had about 60 people show up for Richter's presentation. He was a great speaker, very dynamic and engaging. I know a lot of people who couldn't make it and I'm sorry that they missed such a great show. Jeff has a way of taking an extremely complex topic and turning it into something you feel like you've known about for a long time. It has something to do with the way he explains things in plain language. Threading, marshalling across app domain boundries, limitless app domains in a single process... All of this stuff just makes sense when he talks about it. It's a shame that he's not here now that I'm looking at my own convoluted code to ask questions. Oh well. Richter's new book on the 2.0 CLR comes out at the end of this week and it looks like something I'm going to have to run out and get (and read!)
After the meeting we all headed over to the center of slow restaurant service, Buffalo Wild Wings. I don't understand why the service at this place is so bad. There are like 8 people working as wait staff at 9pm. When my party of approximately 25 people showed up, there were possibly 15 other people in the restaurant. It took them over 20 minutes to get me my order of sweet tea and somehow my table got left out of the wings distribution until the very end (nearly an hour after we got there). However, the company was good and the conversations were engaging so time flew by and I didn't get home until 11pm
We gave away a dozen tshirts, some random books and notebooks, a copy of ComponentOne's Enterprise Studio 2005, a pass to the MIX '06 conference in Vegas, and an MSDN Team Suite license courtesy of James Shaw. Thanks to everyone who came out and I hope everyone had a great time!
-- Matt Ranlett
First of all, does everyone know who
Jeffery Richter is? He's a cofounder of
Wintellect, he's the author of several books, including
this one, he supposedly contributes to
this blog (although I can't find any of his posts after 3 seconds of searching), and he apparently owns a cat (we'll forgive him for that one). Now that you know who he is, would any of you like to come hang out with him? He's coming to Atlanta where he's planning on giving a short technical presentation on the general topic of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.Net followed by an informal meet and greet in a local eatery (probably involving Buffalo wings).
****************************************************
YOU MUST REGISTER TO ATTEND
http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=106837****************************************************
This kind of opportunity doesn't come along every day. Please come out and bring your brains! We promise to show you something good then numb the pain with beer later (you'll be buying your own beer, just so we're clear)
-- Matt Ranlett
Check out the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals site to get the presentations and hands on labs content from SharePoint 1, 2, 3! Brendon, Dan, Keith, and I spent months training ourselves and preparing this content. Now we're giving it away for free! If you've ever been curious about SharePoint, this is the place to start your research.
-- Matt Ranlett
Last night the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals got together with Kenny Wolfe and Kirk Evans to go over some actual code examples of working Indigo code. We got to see how you could change the transport and easily generate data contracts via the tools and more. Kirk put himself on the spot with some on the fly coding in front of the group (luckily Kenny and Justin Smith were there to remind him to put in his semicolons). This was highly valuable information (even I learned something - thanks Kirk!) and I'm glad the 20 or so people who came out got to peel back the covers a little bit.
-- Matt Ranlett
Last night 27 people showed up to the cross user group holiday party/Visual Studio Launch Event recap. I gave a quick slide deck based recap of the Launch Event content (the web slide deck is now online at the Atlanta MS Pros website). Chris Wallace followed me with some great demos of new ASP.Net features including site maps, master pages, and the wizard control.
We followed the short presentations with some open forum discussions about the nature of the user groups in Atlanta and the kinds of topics. We heard a variety of opinions, including a significant minority of people wishing there was a user group in Cobb county. I've actually got someone who is now interested in possibly leading a Cobb county user group with a focus on studying for MCSD certifications. We need to get a location in Cobb county, so anyone who might be able to help with that is encouraged to either leave a comment here or send me an e-mail. We got some requests for different topics, including Microsoft's CRM software, Object Oriented Programming basics (an ever popular beginner topic), Development tips and tricks (like using SQL Server to send e-mail), and more. The ghost of the Atlanta Mobility group showed up to request some more mobile development topics. We had some great topic ideas, one or two presentation volunteers, and lots of fun overall. We had balloons all over the room (sparking an outbreak of INETA style volley ball during the open forum discussion) and plenty of traditional holiday food - Chinese food!
Thanks go out to the Microsoft Biztalk team, who generously provided enough Biztalk books for everyone in the room to get one. We also had plenty of other launch event prizes to give away - shirts, pens, flashlights, tool kits, and more. And one more time, I'd like to thank Doug Turnure for generously footing the bill for our highly overpriced Chinese food. Apparently I am now banned from planning the menu!
-- Matt Ranlett
I want to thank everyone who came out to sit in the audience and learn something about SharePoint. We've collected over 200 surveys from the attendees, replete with comments such as, "Great job!", and "Thanks for all the hard work!" I'm proud of the effort that went into this series of presentations and I think Brendon, Dan, and Keith are as well. The way I hear it, we've also brought a big project to our sponsor Intellinet, so they're also extremely pleased to have been involved. Good stuff all the way around!
Once Brendon, Dan, Keith, and I finish polishing the material, we're going to get it to the Microsoft SharePoint team to give a final review. Once we make the required changes based on the SharePoint team's comments, we'll be distributing the content via the Microsoft DEs and through INETA. Hopefully we'll be seeing other SharePoint 1, 2, 3! presentations around the country and perhaps beyond. I've heard of interest up the East coast as well as in Canada. This proves that there is a great deal of interest in SharePoint and I'm hopeful that our training material might be valuable to everyone who receives it. Of course, when we are finished with the SharePoint team review of the content, it will be placed online for any registered member of the Atlanta Microsoft Professionals to download. We won't be offering the Virtual PC for download as the file is too large, but we will be providing directions on how to build your own Virtual PC.
Thanks again to everyone who came out and was so supportive.
-- Matt Ranlett
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