A round table discussion of some of the topics discussed recently on the Herding Code Podcast. Episode #84 - Ex-Microsoft Developer Panel with Mike Moore, Jeff Cohen, and Scott Bellware
http://herdingcode.com/?p=256

Some of the topics mentioned:
  - Discussed tooling and IDEs versus lightweight development environments (Notepad++, TextMate, vi, emacs, etc...)
  - Dogfooding software development tools
  - Entrepreneurship in the different development communities
  - ASP.NET MVC versus Rails
  - Looking for meaning versus "working a job"
  - Complexity and Ceremony in software development

And I though we might throw in:
  - Where is .NET meeting my needs as a developer? Where is it exceeding? falling behind? How does .NET align with my needs as an entrepreneur or consultant?
  - In what ways can you leverage .NET while bootstrapping a business?
BizSpark? Combination of Mono and .NET? Azure?
  - What else do you want/need from .NET 5.0? Is "Compiler as a Service" enough? What language features? What changes or additions to the platform WPF, Silverlight, RIA, OData, Modeling, Azure, WCF, etc... What is going to keep you engaged with the .NET platform.

I'm hoping everyone can listen to the podcast episode before the meeting.

Food and drinks will be provided. Please signup - http://anyvite.com/events/home/jpjcasvxbf

Thursday, July 15 at 6:30 PM Microsoft - Charlotte Campus
8050 Microsoft Way
Charlotte, NC 28273
Please RSVP - http://anyvite.com/events/home/coe4zmvhie

This month we got a hands-on workshop led by Brian Hitney.

Learn how to build an Azure cloud app that will contribute back to Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project.

Folding@home on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

A laptop (or desktop) is required to participate in the lab.

Please read this page for additional requirements:
http://distributed.cloudapp.net/getstarted

NOTE: Attendees will get a free Azure account for 20 virtual machines for two weeks.

Food will be provided.

First Session (Mike Linnen)
Caliburn is an Application Framework designed to make building WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 applications easier.   In this presentation you will learn how to build a WPF application using Caliburn and gain a new appreciation of using convention over configuration.

Second Session
Second session of the night will be an open discussion on WPF and Silverlight, the frameworks, patterns and design choices, and the XAML toolset (VS2010 & Expression Blend).

I'd like to spend the last 10 minutes talking about future topics and planning needed for a ReSharper/Refactoring meeting.

Food will be provided this month by Ettain.
When: June 15th, 2009 at 6:30 PM

Where: Microsoft Charlotte Campus (AP2/1793 VTC Conference Room)
Questions: email me mjlefevre (at gmail.com)

Please register for the event
http://anyvite.com/events/home/pa8mbzxtzh

Please RSVP: http://bit.ly/9HTtvR

This month we are having two presentations.

Distributed Version Control with Mercurial (Jim Christopher)

CVS and its successor Subversion are good SCM solutions; but they solve the wrong problem for today's distributed and open development environments. Come learn what the real problems are, and how DVC systems like Mercurial address them. Focus will be on real world usage of Mercurial for distributed teams and open-source projects.

Dynamic Dashboards in Silverlight 4 (Matt Duffield)

Building a dashboard and supporting it can sometimes be very a time consuming and tedious for any IT department. Many systems have been put into place to support reporting off of cubes and systems such as Hyperion, Business Objects, and Microsoft Analysis Services/Reporting Services. If what you need is the ability to let your business build a dashboard based on the data that they already know then perhaps providing a custom simple system is all you need. Here is where Silverlight comes to the rescue coupled WCF Services. With these two technologies a simple intuitive dashboard system can be put into place where the ownership and maintenance of the dashboard belongs to the business and not IT.

Food will be provided.
When: May 20th, 2009 at 6:30 PM
Where: Microsoft Charlotte Campus
Questions: email me mjlefevre (at gmail.com)

Location: Microsoft Charlotte
Date: Feb 18th, 2010
Time: 6:30 PM

From Phil Meeks our presenter:

In this talk, I will demonstrate the Asterisk telephone branch exchange (PBX) running in a Linux virtual machine on the Hyper-V technology of Windows Server 2008 R2. I will discuss the Linux flavors supported on Hyper-V, the Microsoft Linux Integration Components, and recent developments and directions with running Linux VMs on Hyper-V.

I will then present an overview of a working PBX, using the FreePBX package. I will demonstrate Asterisk and the FreePBX GUI, and will describe the many features and capabilities of this platform. I will give practical examples of how I have used this technology at home, using a router which integrates the VoIP and Analog telephone lines into one seamless system.

Next, I will show how to integrate .NET code running on a Windows box with the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI), using the nAsterisk .NET library available on CodePlex. I will show you how you can call out of the Asterisk dialplan to interact with a SQL Server database and to perform just about any task in the Windows world during the course of a dialplan session.

Finally, we will save time for some general Q&A on the topics we have just discussed.

Food and drinks will be provided. Please RSVP - http://anyvite.com/events/home/vctcejsywf

Location: Microsoft Charlotte
Date: Feb 18th, 2010
Time: 6:30 PM

In this presentation from Brian Hitney, we’ll take a look at Windows Azure – Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform. To make things interesting, I’ll assume some basic familiarity with the Azure platform – I’ll target only about 10 minutes for general overview, and then we’ll dive into various topics mostly related to the Azure Platform itself (compute, and working with blobs/tables/queues), tweaking roles and monitoring, WCF and role communication, SQL Azure, designing for scale and pricing considerations, and if time permits, we might be able to introduce some AppFabric concepts like the Service Bus and identity federation.

I’d like to encourage the meeting to be an open format so the meeting progresses more organically, and if necessary, we’ll cut some topics and follow up with them at another meeting.

Food will be provided. Please sign up: http://bit.ly/dnnOLx

C# has humble beginnings as an object-oriented language of the purest kind. It was class-based, it was imperative, and it was component-oriented. For many years, the classic object-oriented design principles served class library designers well, and the programming world rejoiced.

Chaos began creeping its way into the world of C#. They were minor things at first: a generic list here, a nullable type there. Developers used these elements to enhance their work. But those that understood utilized them to varying degrees. Some applied the new techniques with wanton abandon. Some kept the old traditions in mind.

Then the dark specter of functional programming infiltrated the language. For those that were doomed to a life of incoherent language usage, there was no hope. But those that held onto the old traditions managed to get by.

There is another way. C# is no longer a purely object-oriented language. It is no longer just an imperative, class-based, component oriented discipline. It is also a generic, declarative, functional discipline.

I will reexamine the object-oriented principles and introduce new principles. I will then introduce new refactorings as we move toward a more declarative, fluent world.

Additional Info: This meeting will be held in the MPR Room which is diagonally across from the usual room we use. Food will be provided.

* note: there will be some additional Telerik goodies.

Sign up here: http://anyvite.com/events/home/yggwfs6u19/

The Parallel Extensions Library (PFx) is a new system from Microsoft that makes it much easier to make code run in parallel. This makes your code run a lot faster on modern hardware, with much less effort than is traditionally required. Justin James will be covering the basics of PFx, how to use it, and where to use it. In addition, Justin will provide "real-world" use case information for this new technology.

Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 6:30 PM at the Microsoft Charlotte Campus.

Please sign up here

Food will be provided.