Wednesday’s meeting was not only a welcome change for some folks who were now available to come to Group, but a fun time learning about UI Frameworks, jQuery, and HTML 5 in the modern Microsoft dev environment. There’s a lot there, and we barely scratched the surface.

I’m sure we’ll revisit this topic in the future.

Greetings, Devs!

As we kick off our seventh year of operation under current leadership here in SW Florida, we’d like to thank all of you, and remind you that this month’s Meeting is scheduled for 4/19 at the Polaris Center, to begin at 6:30pm.

(It hasn’t always been the easiest ride as Group leader, but it has to have been, as it continues to be, the most rewarding. Again, I thank you for placing your trust in me.)

Developers and officers from Surround Technology of Estero – Derek Maciak, Kent Pickard, Patrick Davis, Lee Paul – will present Accelerating MVVM development for Windows, Web and Mobile. This presentation, I’ve been told, was very well-received and successful in New Jersey, where Surround’s other office is located.

The synopsis is as follows:

Software developers need the ability to implement applications that can rapidly support multiple User Interfaces which are easy to build and maintain, and the ability to reuse all business intelligence implemented in the business tier. In this session, you will learn how to build an application that is loosely coupled, data driven, modular, n-tiered, service oriented, and high performing in design. The focus will be on the reuse of the MVVM design pattern when developing in WPF, Silverlight, and ASP.net for windows, web and mobile deployment. An application will be developed for a fictitious company named EasyBuy Auto Parts that will allow their users to order products through windows, web and mobile devices. Best practices for large-scale, high performing enterprise level applications with globalization and localization support will be discussed and implemented.

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Work continues apace on our Code Camp website, and will conclude in an explosion of announcements and more work whenever we can fit it in beside our day jobs. We have taken the rather ambitious step of converting the website to MVC, which will allow us, we believe, to improve the user experience in all aspects, and not secondarily, make our volunteer jobs as the administrators of SW Florida Code Camp that much easier.

If you wish to help us plan and execute Code Camp this year, all I need from you is to initiate contact and provide a functional email address where you can be reached. We’re meeting semi-regularly now, which will become more frequent as this year’s launch date of 9/8 approaches, and we could use the help. Core volunteers get the undying gratitude of everyone who partakes of Code Camp, as well as a pretty decent barbecue at my place to celebrate and assess for next year.

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Finally, I should share a few words on a topic that has flared up amongst people I admire:  the role of alcohol in the developer community and its effect on dev culture.

You have my solemn promise as Group Leader and Chief Organizer of Code Camp, that your non-use of alcohol, should that be your choice, will never exclude you in ANY way whatsoever from taking a full part in this community. What’s in your glass is so much less important than what’s in your heart and what’s in your head, and I’ll presume to say that on behalf of everyone who participates in this community.

Post meeting, when I always tell you that some of us are going to the Pub, it’s about the networking and the making of new friends and the strengthening of bonds with old ones. Some people will do that with a beer or a ‘drink’ in hand; others will do it with a soda or a water. I go to every Pub Club, and I haven’t observed a problem yet. If there is one, let me know.

And I’m sorry if that all seemed obvious to you already, as well it could have. It’s not even our stack, but there’s a serious conversation going around this blog post (http://ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion). And it’s got lots of folks talking.

…

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Thanks again for all your participation.

No?

Good!

Chad will be taking another sip from the firehose on Thursday, March 22nd at the Polaris Center (kicking off as usual at 6:30pm).

This time:

Entity Framework Code First

MVC 4 with HTML 5

possibly the new Telerik Product, Kendo UI

ALL IN ONE PROJECT.

It’ll be awesome.

So will the swag.

Come see us.

• You can clean up your code by encapsulating mundane stuff like auth and exception handling into classes that you then apply with .Net attributes.
• You can follow that cool Ruby principle of not repeating yourself, in .Net.
• Your whole team can use the same attributes to standardize practices and frameworks.
• Your team doesn’t have to completely understand more complex procedures in order to use them as aspects.

Chad England has clearer explanations, and code samples he’ll be showing at his presentation on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) at our February Group meeting. This presentation will also kick off our introduction of newest Friends of the Community, Sharpcrafters, makers of the PostSharp AOP tool.

PostSharp is in use at such enterprises as Siemens, Intel, eBay, Deutsche Bank and Telligent. People in attendance at Group will be eligible to win the raffle of a Postsharp Developer license at each meeting starting with February, 2012, until however long it lasts.

Polaris Center is at 1265 Creekside Parkway, Naples at the conjunction of Goodlette and Immokalee Roads. We generally meet in the 4th floor training room there.

Sorry – I’ve been hammered with everything.

YES, there is a meeting – tomorrow, in fact. I, your humble President, am going to relate my experience at the two-day developer conference in Ohio I attended, Codemash.

It’s at the Polaris Center, 4th Floor, 1265 Creekside Parkway in north Naples, FL. Meeting starts at 6:30pm.

Thanks,

John

The Introduction of Producing an Open Data Protocol (OData) feed for Data Access

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol for sharing data. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in a way that is far more powerful than currently possible, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem increases its overall value.

In this talk Chris will provide an introduction to this protocol, how to produce a OData service and finally how to implement an OData service on Windows using the WCF Data Services product.

Bio

Chris Woodruff (or Woody as he is commonly known as) has a degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University’s College of Engineering.

Woody has been developing and architecting software solutions for almost 15 years and has worked in many different platforms and tools. He is a community leader, helping such events as Day of .NET Ann Arbor and West Michigan Day of .NET. He was also instrumental in bringing the popular Give Camp event to Western Michigan where technology professionals lend their time and development expertise to assist local non-profits. As a speaker and podcaster, Woody has spoken and discussed a variety of topics, including database design and open source. He is a Microsoft MVP in Data Platform Development. Woody is the co-host of the popular podcast “Deep Fried Bytes <http://deepfriedbytes.com> ” and blogs at www.chriswoodruff.com. He is the President of the West Michigan .NET User Group and also is a co-founder of the software architecture online portal nPlus1.org.

Chad is a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist in Silverlight 4 Development. Chad currently serves as one of the primary developers at ASG (www.asg.com) working on Energy Management solution for the Data Center built on top of WCF and Silverlight.  Chad takes an active interest in the local and online development communities and can be reached via his blog at: www.chadengland.com .

That’ll go down at our now usual spot, the Polaris Center – 1265 Creekside Parkway, Naples.

At press time, it is unknown whether our customary spot on the 4^th floor will be fully remodeled and ready to host. If it is not, we’ll use the conference center on the 3^rd floor, which worked great for the 15 of us who turned out to hear Russ Fustino this month. You know for sure it’s at 1265 Creekside Parkway, and doors should be open around 6:00pm, so show up there, stay tuned for Adam’s sign, and stay frosty. Josef has already garnered many positive reviews of his presentation, and I’m sure this time will be highly enlightening and entertaining, as well.

See you there!

John

Many of you knew Russ Fustino as the Guy with the Toolshed. He’s now working for our newest Friend of the Community, GrapeCity.

He’s also toting around FlipCam and becoming the historian of the Florida .Dev Community. http://gvtv.gcpowertools.com/ has all of it – it’s a great site and you can keep an eye on what the community is up to.

He’ll do Silverlight Reporting on Thursday, 8/11 at the Polaris Center. We’re extremely happy to have him back.

We’ll see you there – Polaris Center is 1265 Creekside Parkway – Naples. We meet on the 4th Floor.

Follow after the jump for the bio and synopsis:

Topic: Reporting in Silverlight.

Join Russ Fustino as he takes a tour of the new ActiveReports 6 Silverlight Report Viewer.

He will show how this component is designed for reporting in Microsoft Silverlight 4 and higher. See how the Silverlight Report Viewer is simple, lightweight, flexible, localizable, and easy to customize for quick end user deployment. It includes these features:

• Preview reports loaded from a file, document stream, ASPX page, RPX Handler, or WCF service.
• End-user toolbar with Table of Contents (TOC), Thumbnails, Print, Search, Zoom, and Navigation buttons, plus you can add your own custom buttons.
• Printing support with an extra print-to-PDF option.
• Full UI customization with Themes. Use Silverlight Viewer XAML template to customize the look of the UI. We provide pre-customized templates in six useful themes.
• Localization support. Use resource files (*.resx) to create custom localizations of all text in the UI. We provide pre-localized satellite assemblies for Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.
• Out-of-browser support

Russ Fustino is a highly experienced software developer with a passion for conveying relevant, current, and future software development technologies and tools through live seminars, teaching, and internet video productions.  He enlightened, entertained and educated 100’s of Thousands of developers nationwide as a former Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. Russ now heads up Developer Evangelism at GrapeCity PowerTools Group as a Senior Developer Evangelist.

We’re not going to have a presenter. Instead, we’re just going to get together and help each other. We’ll have a projector, wifi, power, swag and food at the Polaris Center, 6:30pm.

Any issue, any question, any nerd problem that’s on your mind, come on down and we’ll try to work it out. Then we’ll have our usual social.

See you there!