CINNUG Blog

February 2008 - Posts

• CINNUG now a member of the Pearson Education User Group Program

  I just received word that CINNUG is now a member of the Pearson Education User Group Program.  Look for the discount code to be in the next meeting's announcement slides.  Also, if you want the 35% off now, just use the contact form and I'll get the instructions out to you. Note the monthly contest below.  Here is the welcome newsletter from the program: "Dear User Group Leader/Member: Welcome to the Pearson Education User Group Program! Please pass along to your colleagues/ UG members and share the news and promotions! The new program provides qualified user groups with product news, discounted prices on products, free review copies in exchange for reviews, marketing materials, and promotional giveaways. Housed on InformIT.com, the program represents Pearson Education imprints and well-known technology brands of Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing. If you are receiving this initial email then your group has been qualified and registered in our program. Please ensure that your group's information is accurate on your page of the site: www.informit.com/usergroups select "Find a User Group" and your state, and group name. News & Announcements New site launch - check out www.informit.com  -  representing Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing and hear from Publisher Paul Boger directly.  Discounts and Bulk Orders All active groups will receive a discount membership code, a link on our user group site, a link to a welcome page that lists program benefits and downloadable materials, opportunities to provide feedback through surveys and become bloggers, and more! Groups with face-to-face meetings will also obtain a spot on a topical "review copy" mailing list; group leaders can use review copies to help boost meeting attendance. A link with the discount code and additional information is coming soon! Tell us what you think - Review A Pearson Product Read a Pearson product lately and have something to say about it? Besides posting the review on places like Amazon.com, BN.com and Bookpool.com, we'd love to hear your feedback in order to create the best possible products! Email the review to reviews [at] informit [dot] com with the subject "Book Review" and the product name in the subject line. Subscribe to Technology Topic Focus Newsletters Visit our newsletter page to subscribe to the topical or publishing imprint newsletters and learn about new products, articles, and promotions! This will be your monthly message regarding new products. Encourage your members to do the same. Sign Up for This Quarterly Newsletter Our new program will have a quarterly newsletter that leaders and members can subscribe to exclusively! Look for more information about the newsletter in the future! This Month's Exclusive UG Contest - visit www.informit.com/usergroup to enter to win during the rest of the month! The Pearson Education User Group Program offers a monthly contest to all current user group members. Each month a different prize pack on a specific technology topic will be available! Simply complete the registration form below to enter; one entry per person please  (duplicates are discarded).   Bookmark www.informit.com/usergroups and come back each month for your chance to win!  ..... Thank you for reading - Pearson Education User Group Program Team (Jamie Adams, Heather Fox, Andrea Bledsoe, and Lisa Jacobson-Brown)" Posted Feb 24 2008, 09:38 AM by MikeWo with 2 comment(s) Filed under: General News

• Directors Meeting Minutes

  After the February meeting the CINNUG Directors (Dan Hounshell, Nino Benvenuti and myself) met to discuss the goals for CINNUG over the next year.  I think we have some great plans and we wanted to share them with our members. We reviewed the results of the survey that was sent out to our members. From this survey several items came up: We will start an Architecture SIG. The target is to start this within a few months.  Look for more information on this soon. We will NOT start a VSTS SIG; however, we will target having some sort of special event (defined as an event other than our normal meetings) once a quarter. The first one will most likely target VSTS and leverage the interest in VSTS from the survey. The goal would be to have this starting in the May-July timeframe. We will start trying to break up the meeting format so that we have some sort of intro topic or grok talk(s), followed by pizza, followed by the main presentation. The April meeting will be our first try at this since we have two speakers for the community launch event. We will attempt to have some grok talks prior to our pizza and main presentation. These should be 10-15 minute mini-talks. They can be related to the main topic, or not.  We will start requesting speakers for these soon. Starting in June we will move our normal CINNUG meetings to the Fourth Tuesday of every month, trading with CincySQL. It was discussed on what to do about Nov. and Dec since these are holiday months. The decision was that November would meet as normal, but December’s meeting would be changed to a party of some sort. We’ll still have it on the normal day (unless it falls on Christmas / Christmas Eve), but it’s a party not a presentation. We need to drive more traffic to the website to help build community outside of the meetings. We will start with a meeting forum where people can post their thoughts on meetings and hopefully continue the discussion outside of the meetings.  This has already been started, so check out the Meetings Forum. We will continue to purchase a salad along with the pizza for an alternative. One of the open comments indicated a Patterns SIG, which we decided to not do; however, as a way of filling this request we will start doing a “Better Know a Pattern” (a good name might be helpful….so if you think of any….) after our normal CINNUG meetings. This will be after the final presentation and only for those interested in staying.  Look for this to start soon. One of the open comments asked if we could record the presentations for download later, even if it was just audio. The idea was discussed and we decided further discussion would be needed after some research into how this would be accomplished with the least amount of pressure and impact to the presenters. We have decided to give speaker appreciation gifts for speakers giving the main presentations. We discussed the budget: We have a budget of $5,000 for the year (thanks to all of our Annual Sponsors!). There is an additional $1,000+ left in the account from 2007. We have set aside $3,000 to pay for our refreshments for the Architecture SIG and normal CINNUG meetings. We have set aside $600 to pay for the speaker appreciation gifts. The remaining amount will be used to help pay for the special events, giveaways and other costs. Domain name renewal (due in Sept) and iContact (due in Dec). Together these would be around $120 or so. If you have comments or questions about any of these decisions, please feel free to contact us about them.  Also, I have put up a thread to discuss them so you can start an open discussion there. Regards, Michael Wood, CINNUG Director Posted Feb 23 2008, 11:05 PM by MikeWo Filed under: General News

• February 2008 Meeting Recap

  This month we had not one, but three presenters!  We had our first ever Panel style meeting where Nino Benvenuti, Mike Shields and Justin Kohnen gave their thoughts and experiences with various source control products.  If you attended please let us know what you thought about the meeting on our new meetings forum.  We have started this meetings forum so that you can continue to discuss the topics of our meetings before and after the meetings.  There were no materials from this presentation. Attendance (43):  We had an awesome turn out this month.  Please keep telling your colleagues about us!  If you blog, be sure to blog about the group. Announcements: Special Meeting Date for March!  Our March meeting will be held on Wednesday, March 12th instead of our normal meeting date.  See more below. Official Microsoft Launch Events for VS 2008 & Windows Server 2008.  Microsoft will be putting on several official launch events throughout the region over the next few months.  If you are interested in trying to attend one of these please post to our forums.  Maybe we can get some ridesharing going.  You can find a list of the regional events here with dates and registration links. CINNUG will host a community launch event on April 15th.  This will be our normal April meeting, but will be extended to allow for two topics on VS 2008.  We will have a short overview of 2008, then more detailed talks, including LINQ.  If you are a member of the CINNUG website that signed up after December, you may not be part of our newsletter distribution.  You can sign up on our home page. We now have a new Google Calendar!  You can see the calendar on our new Events page.  You can add the Google calendar to your own Google Calendars, or check out how to sync it with Outlook 2007. CinySQL - Next meeting will be February 26th.  The topic will be Advanced TSQL presented by Maria Stone.  Check out http://www.cincysql.org for more information. ArcReady Event - ArcReady is back in Cincinnati on March 3rd at 9:00 AM at the Microsoft Mason office.  The topic this quarter is "Service Lifecycle Management".  [Http://www.shrinkster.com/twv] Central Ohio Day of .NET - (previously known as the Cincinnati/Dayton Area Code Camp) - April 19th at the Roberts Centre in Wilmington, OH.  This is a new venue for us, but will give us a lot more space.  Look for more information on the Central Ohio Day of .NET home page. Next Month: Remember that the March meeting will be on Wednesday, March 12th! Topic: Sexy Extensibility Patterns Let's face it, like everything else in software development, some patterns are cool and some are just plain boring.  So let's turn up the heat and go over some exciting patterns that will allow you to enhance and extended an application without affecting the original design or code.  In this session, I will teach you to design your applications using providers, plug-ins, and modules; in the end making an application as robust and full-flavored as a good beer. Presenter: Miguel Castro Miguel Castro is a principal consultant and trainer with SteelBlue Solutions and specializes in building and teaching how to build, .NET solutions. He is a Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker, Conference Speaker, contributor to CoDe Magazine and DevSource.com, as well as an active blogger, and has been a software developer for over 20 years. With a Microsoft background that goes all the way back to VB 1.0 (and QuickBasic in fact).  Miguel has spoken at numerous user groups, code camps, and conferences around the country.  He has also been featured on the Internet Radio Talk Show, .NET Rocks, .NET Rocks-TV, Microsoft’s ARCast (Architecture Podcast), and The Polymorphic Podcast on numerous occasions.  His blog and other things of potential interest can be found at http://www.steelbluesolutions.com/, where you can obtain his new CodeBreeze code-generator.  He currently resides in Lincoln Park, NJ with his wife Elena and his daughter Victoria. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, March 12th at 6:00PM at Max Technical Training in Mason Ohio. Posted Feb 22 2008, 08:05 PM by MikeWo with 8 comment(s) Filed under: Meeting Annoucements

• Telerik's Sitefinity Challenge

  Telerik, one of the sponsors of the Central Ohio Day of .NET, is having a promotion around their new Sitefinity product.  Watch a few online videos, answer some questions, and be registered in a raffle for some Sitefinity licenses or a Zune!  Check it out: "Telerik is the leading vendor of User Interface (UI) components for ASP.NET and Windows Forms, and .NET Reporting solutions. Building on our expertise in interface development and Microsoft technologies, Telerik helps customers build applications with unparalleled richness, responsiveness and interactivity. Check out the latest release featuring our RadControls for ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX controls, Silverlight tools, RadControls for WinForms, and Telerik Reporting: http://www.telerik.com. Enter our Sitefinity Challenge and win a complimentary copy of our CMS, an $899 value!" Posted Feb 20 2008, 08:53 PM by MikeWo with 4 comment(s) Filed under: General News, Free

• O'Reilly Webinar on LINQ

  As CINNUG is a member of the O'Reilly User Group program we get information from O'Reilly from time to time about their products and offerings.  O'Reilly is putting on a Webinar related to LINQPad, which is a tool for writing LINQ queries.  This will be on Feb. 20th, so sign up quick if you are interested.  Here is a short abstract: "In this webinar, Joseph Albahari, author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, the LINQ Pocket Reference, and the upcoming C# 3.0 Pocket Reference, provides an introduction and brief tutorial to LINQPad, the querying tool that's sweeping the .NET world. This is a must-attend webinar for anyone working in C# 3.0 and .NET Framework 3.5." Here is more information: http://oreilly.com/emails/webinar-linq2.html Posted Feb 16 2008, 12:56 PM by MikeWo with 2 comment(s) Filed under: General News

• February Meeting Reminder

  Our February meeting will be next Tuesday, Feb. 19th!  We start at 6:00 PM at the Mason facility of MAX Technical Training. Topic: Source Control Panel You asked for it!  Well, one of you did anyway....a topic on comparing various source control applications and best practices in using them.  This will be a very interactive meeting, so bring your questions about source control!  We'll have three panel members who between the three of them have experience with VSS, TFS, Harvest, ClearCase, Vault and Subversion. Speakers: Nino Benvenuti Nino is a technology consultant with over ten years of experience, ranging from development and architecture of enterprise systems to mobility solutions.  He has worked with .NET since its beginnings and has focused on mobility solutions for many years.  He maintains a blog at http://nino.net/blog  and is responsible for the 'The Mobile Minute' series of posts.  Nino is also a Microsoft MVP in the area of Device Application Development and has given presentations at several events such as Ann Arbor Day of .NET (DoDN) and the Cincinnati-Dayton Code Camp (2006 & 2007).  He is active in the .NET CF, Pocket PC, and Smartphone forums and newsgroups and in his spare time works to absorb new technologies and create tools to make his job easier.  Oh...and did we mention he is a Director for CINNUG? Mike Shields Mike Shields is a software developer with ten years of experience. He has been working for Resurgent Capital Services as an application developer for 4 years and as TFS administrator for a little over a year. Mike is currently working on migrating applications from VSS to TFS along with implementing CI with Team Build and VSTS process guidance for the company. Justin Kohnen Justin Kohnen graduated from the University of Dayton in 2003 with a BS in Computer Science. He is currently working for Triune Software as a Senior Software Engineer, developing in ASP.NET 2.0. He's a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist for .NET 2.0 Web Applications. Justin is an active member is the user community, always trying to help others learn and grow to become better developers, by actively presenting and supporting local user groups. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 19th at 6:00PM at Max Technical Training in Mason Ohio. Posted Feb 13 2008, 11:48 PM by MikeWo with 7 comment(s) Filed under: Meeting Annoucements

• March Meeting Date Moved!

  Early warning that the March meeting date has moved.  We will meet on Wednesday, March 12th at the normal starting time of 6:00 PM at MAX.  We have moved the meeting to allow for the rescheduling of our INETA speaker Miguel Castro who had to cancel in December.  Miguel will be coming to speak on Extensibility Patterns in .NET. I've sent out a warning in the newsletter and will follow up with notices at the meeting, on this blog and in the next two newsletters!  Please be sure to let your colleagues know that the date has changed for our March meeting! Note that our February meeting will still be as scheduled on Tuesday, February 19th. Posted Feb 13 2008, 11:44 PM by MikeWo with 9 comment(s) Filed under: Meeting Annoucements

• A New Director for CINNUG

  Since James turned over the User Group to me and moved south there has been only Nino and I manning the Board of Directors for the group.  We've had a vacancy on the board but were in no hurry to fill it.  Well, we've finally filled it.  Dan Hounshell is now the newest Director for CINNUG!  From what I gather he's also helping out on the Dayton user group as well.  Dan's definitely a community leader and I'm looking forward to working with him. Be sure to tell Dan congratulations (or condolences) at the next meeting. Posted Feb 10 2008, 09:46 PM by MikeWo with 3 comment(s) Filed under: General News

• Thanks to Scott Zischerk for our Badge!

  We'd like to thank Scott Zischerk for designing our Day of .NET logo.  Scott is also the designer of the logos for the other Day of .NET events. Posted Feb 02 2008, 11:48 AM by MikeWo with 3 comment(s)

• Central Ohio Day of .NET - Registration is Open!

  The registration site for the Central Ohio Day of .NET is now up and ready.  The event is not until April 19th, but get registered early.  Last year the registration booked up two weeks prior to the event! Here is the link:  http://www.shrinkster.com/udg See how short it is?  It's easy to remember (thanks to Shrinkster) so that you can pass it out to coworkers and colleagues from memory.  You can even tell that one guy you see on the bus who's coding as he commutes. Don't forget that the Call for speakers is still out there.  If you're interested in speaking at the event, pick up a submission form and get it back to us by March 1st. Once you're registered make sure to stop by the event home page to get a site badge for your blog or website. Sponsors: Platinum Sponsors: Robert Half Technology, MAX Technical Training Silver Sponsors: Telerik Posted Feb 02 2008, 11:39 AM by MikeWo with 3 comment(s)