VB.Net User Group
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!
Jim Wooley and the Atlanta Visual Basic Study Group will be hosting the .NET University courses on .NET 3.0 starting this Wednesday on Windows Workflow Foundation.
Come out and join us and make sure to register.
Dotnet University comes to Atlanta
The Atlanta Visual Basic .NET Study Group met at it's new location for the second time since loosing the LaVista Rd. facility. Last night's meeting featured me talking to the group about SharePoint 2007 and Groove 2007.
Before I went on, Jim Wooly Wooley wrote a quick demonstration app that showed how to implement a queue for logging purposes. The question a member asked was how to handle multiple simultaneous application accesses of a log file. Jim showed how a simple queuing app can handle writing to the log by popping updates off a stack and how multiple apps can send messages to the stack at the same time.
Next up was my discussion of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I covered a lot of the same kind of material covered by Microsoft's E-Learning Clinic 3370: Getting Started with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I blatently ripped off some of the graphics and bullet points from their slides for my own. This was actually a discussion last night - about how much free Microsoft stuff is out there in terms of free tools and training when compared to companies like IBM and Oracle. It's honestly amazing! Anyway - after I covered the basics of what MOSS 2007 offers, I stumbled around in my seriously underpowered VPC attempting to demonstrate some of the great new features of MOSS 2007.
Once I finished up the MOSS portion of the talk, I showed the group a little bit about Groove 2007. I had a great slide deck for Groove that I nabbed off of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (Beta 2) Technical Resource DVD. This is actually where I got my VPC for the SharePoint demos as well - as the VPC I built didn't allow any SharePoint sites to be created/browsed. However, my demo VPC did work with Groove installed, although without a network connection and another machine to show the changes, it was sort of useless to show the demo. Whatever, the people seemed to be impressed.
We had 8 people present at the meeting, and six of us went out for a beverage after the event where conversations ranged from software topics, future of the study group, quantam computing and cool TV programs.
If you couldn't make it to my preview of SharePoint 2007, try to make it to next Monday's meeting of the Atlanta .NET User Group where Brendon will be presenting MOSS 2007 for the first portion of the meeting.
Due to a sudden loss of venue, the VB User Group (and the Atlanta FoxPro Group) is suspending future meetings until a new meeting location has been secured. If anyone knows of a free meeting area complete with projector and screen that can accommodate up to 20 people, please let me know.
Been working on Winforms code and you're finally feeling like you know what's going on? Now Microsoft is throwing some new stuff at you - Avalon or the Windows Presentation Framework. Avalon is this crazy new breed of Windows Forms where you define your UI in XML (actually, XAML, but that's splitting hairs). Why the heck would you consider moving to this new model of programming?
Come to the Wednesday meeting of the Atlanta Visual Basic Study Group and find out! Shawn Wildermuth is presenting...
-- 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
10 people turned up for Jim Wooley's presentation of the DotNetNuke survey module. Since Jim and I wanted to post an online survey and Jim wanted to extend the module to allow open ended questions and comments as part of the survey, we looked at his work in the group. Check out Jim's blog to see his writeup of his work.
After Jim's presentation, John Crawford showed us how to create an addin for Visual Studio by demonstrating one of the 101 VB.Net Sample projects posted by Microsoft. John managed to get everything working, but he had trouble getting the debugger to work for debugging, since the client app was Visual Studio itself. Jim showed everyone a trick for attaching a Visual Studio debugger to a running instance of Visual Studio.
-- Matt Ranlett
Last night I lead the VB.Net User Group down the meandering path of DotNetNuke development. Unfortunately, the group was actually pretty small - only six people showed up aside from our perenial leader Jim Wooley and myself. Fortunately, that meant practically no one was present when the data access layer of my DotNetNuke module blew itself to smithereens in an unrecoverable fashion. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but I think it's something to do with the name space. Or something. Who knows.
The other result of the small meeting is that we're considering making some changes to the group. We've been in a membership slump for a few months now and we clearly need to see what's going on. To that end, Jim Wooley and I are going to put together a survey for the VB.Net group members to see why they're not coming anymore. Should we go down to one meeting per month, move locations, change topic focus, etc. or should we simply disband due to lack of community interest? The survery will be online soon and VB.Net members will be able to send in their thoughts and feelings about how we can better meet their needs as User Group members.
-- Matt Ranlett