Code Camp 2007

May 2007 - Drerw Robbins - Layouts, Styles and Template in WPF

MikeWo — Wed, 16 May 2007 02:19:25 GMT

A powerful feature of Windows Presentation Foundation is the separation of the appearance of controls and the behavior of controls. In this session, we'll look at the power of layouts, styles and templates and how you'll use them in your applications. We'll also look at the underlying concepts that make them work and how you can use them to compose your own WPF components.

This slide deck and demo was from a talk given on May 15th 2007 by Drew Robbins.

Real World SharePoint Server 2007

MikeWo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:19:17 GMT

The 2007 release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is an amazing platform for solving a great number of difficult problems for companies. Workflow, Excel Services, enterprise search, forms services, and much more all provide a wealth of resources to do things from automating review processes to giving teams a custom site to collaborate at. Unfortunately, the vast majority of complete-solution-in-15 minute examples shown in starter kits, web casts, and various blog posts are all simplistic and don't fit the real world. Find out what a real workflow looks like. Learn where InfoPath forms make sense and where they don't. See how to quickly build packages to easily deploy your solutions across an entire SharePoint server farm. Most of all, discover that while MOSS does a great many things out of the box there's still room for developers to roll up their sleeves and do cool things in code.

Jim Holmes is a Principal Consultant with NuSoft Solutions. He has two decades or so of experience in the IT domain scattered across a wide range of disciplines including telephone hotline support, network management, systems analysis, and software development. He's the founder of the Dayton .NET Developers Group and has written regular columns for VisualStudioHacks.com. He's also the co-author of "Windows Developer Power Tools," from O'Reilly publications. In his spare time he can be found hiking with his family, roasting coffee, working in his rose garden, or trying to find a quiet corner in the house where he can take a nap.

Improve Your Testing With Open Source Test Tools

MikeWo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:18:05 GMT

Solid testing is vital to any development effort if you want stable software that does what the customer expects the software to do. Visual Studio Team Systems' testing functionality is powerful, but it's not the end-all for every testing task. Open source tools can help you get more out of your testing by enabling you to offload acceptance tests to your customers, simulate services you don't have access to, debug tests in Visual Studio's IDE, and automate ASP.NET web form testing. A wealth of other tools allows you to speed up your test execution and get more information from your tests. Learn how tools such as Watir, TestDriven.NET, Rhino.Mocks, and Fitnesse.NET can boost your testing accuracy and productivity.

SQL Server 2005: New Tricks for Old Database Developers

MikeWo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:15:20 GMT

Did you know that you can easily create a Pivot Table using a SQL Server query? Ever wonder if you could store XML documents in a field in your table, and then be able query data directly from the XML in all rows at once? How can you utilize Regular Expressions in order to help make querying data even more powerful? Ever need an easy way to get a row number returned as part of your SELECT query? SQL Server 2005 provides many powerful new features in the form of T-SQL enhancements and the ability to execute .NET code inside of the database (SQLCLR). This presentation will focus on some of the new functionality that developers can take advantage of in order to do more powerful processing on the database itself.

Jason Follas, President of the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group (http://www.nwnug.com), has over 10 years of professional experience developing for the Microsoft platform using Visual Basic and C#. He is a Technical Architect for Perficient, Inc. serving the Toledo and Detroit markets, and is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCAD, MCSD.NET). Over the course of his career, Jason has worked on a wide assortment of projects for various industries, including an Aircraft Weight and Balance system, eCommerce websites, Risk Management systems, and optimization software. Hobbies and interests include Coin-Op Video Game restoration, emulation (in general), prime numbers and factoring, blogging (reading/writing), astronomy, and annihilating songs by attempting to play them on his guitar.

AJAX Patterns

MikeWo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:13:55 GMT

While there are many frameworks for AJAX applications, an understanding of what is going on under the covers will go a long way in evaluating what AJAX can and can't do for you. We'll look at methods for developing and debugging XMLHttpRequest, DOM and JSON solutions to help you get the most out of your AJAX framework.

Brian Sherwin is the Principal Member of SureWin Solutions, LLC, a consulting and training company focused on bringing companies back to making decisions on value, not a particular technology. Brian has been training developers in VB and C# since .NET was released into public beta in 2002. When he's not engaged with a client, he likes to play with his 5 kids, read, and watch Jack Bauer in "IDKFA" mode (cheat code in Doom).

Avoiding Database Entropy

MikeWo — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:10:55 GMT

You've developed your database and deployed your code. Now you need to add the features everyone else wanted. The more you add to the scope of the project, the more you realize your database design isn't going to cut it. You refactor your code-why not refactor your database. Come to learn practical ways to change your production database without tearing your hair out.

Practical Caching in ASP.NET 2.0

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:16:38 GMT

Caching has been part of ASP.NET since its inception. Pages, page fragments, and arbitrary data elements can all be cached to increase performance. This session will go beyond the basics to demonstrate caching in a real web application. We will show how to use post-cache substitution in a real application (to display more than the current time like most demos!). The presentation will show how to cache pages based on a custom attribute for the logged in user. Lastly, we will show one way to design a business tier to take advantage of data caching while remaining loosely coupled to the UI.

Joe Wirtley is CTO at Tellus (www.tellusweb.com) in Loveland Ohio and has been a professional software developer since 1987.ÿ Joe is an experienced software architect, skilled in all phases of design and development and has lead projects for clients including Toyota, General Motors, MCI and SBC. At Tellus, he has contributed to sites for SeaBear, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Chefs Catalog, and gradf?zn.com.ÿ He has worked in a variety of languages, with extensive experience in .NET and Delphi.ÿ Joe is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for .NET (MCSD).ÿ He has published technical articles and contributed to the O'Reilly book Windows Developer Power Tools.ÿ He has been a frequent user group presenter and recently spoke at CodeMash.

Flexible Mock Objects in Ruby

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:14:09 GMT

A well designed object oriented program consists of a number of small, collaborative objects working together to accomplish the goals of the software system.ÿ Programs designed in this manner are amazingly flexible, but poise special challenges for testing.ÿ If an object works in collaboration with other objects, testing an object in isolation can become a bit of a challenge. Mock objects are a testing technique that allows an object's collaborators to be "mocked out" for the purpose of testing.ÿ A good mock object framework is able to to this with minimum fuss for the programmer.ÿ This talk will look at the FlexMock framework for Ruby and examine how it adopts a no fuss approach to mocking.

Jim Weirichÿ is a software consultant for Compuware with over twenty-five years of experience in software developement. He has worked with real-time data systems for testing jet engines, networking software for information systems, and image processing software for the financial industry. Weirich is active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

An Introduction to Microsoft's Robotic Studio

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:11:36 GMT

Join Bill in this session where he will introduce us to Microsoft's new Robotics Studio. Microsoft Robotics Studio is an end to end set of tools that allows tinkerers and hobbyists a way to build robotic solutions that integrate various types of processors and sensors. In this session, Bill will demonstrate how to design, simulate and finally build a robot based on the Lego Mindstorm's NXT robotics hardware.

Bill loves creating the applications that often pop right into his head. Unfortunately, it takes his fingers a little longer to type them in. Bill is MCSD certified and has logged more than 20 years as a software developer. Previously, Bill worked for a regional consulting firm where he developed applications that managed internal business operations in areas including IT service management, transportation logistics, and financial management. Bill was responsible for building integration applications between various ISV's products and the client's IT infrastructure. He also spent more than seven years at StrideRite Corporation, where he honed his development skills in Visual Basic, C++ and a range of IT roles. Bill has been collaborating with Microsoft since 1992, and continues to prize his Visual Basic 1.0 Beta Thunder Clock. He's given over 300 presentations to date, and is currently developing software for a flight computer in NASA's Small Aircraft Transportation System.

An Introduction to Microsoft's XNA

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 15:01:56 GMT

Join Bill in this session where he will introduce us to Microsoft new Game Development platform, XNA. XNA is a two part product, the XNA Framework and XNA Express. The XNA Framework is a cross platform execution environment that allows you to run a game developed with XNA Express on either the Xbox 360 or on Windows. XNA Express is the development environment based on C# Express that allows developers to quickly and easily build games that take advantage of all the gaming capabilities on the Xbox 360 and Windows. In this session, we will demonstrate how to use XNA Express to build a game that runs on both platforms.

Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:55:24 GMT

Windows Communicationÿ Foundation (WCF) is Microsoft's new platform for developing distributed applications. It is a unification of the existing communication technologies, like Remoting and web services, into a single, simplified programming model. This presentation will introduce you to WCF. We will touch upon a wide number of topics including the ABCs of WCF (Address, Binding, and Contracts), hosting services, security, and migration.

Michael Levy is a software consultant with Strategic Data Systems. Mike specializes in application development using Microsoft .NET, Microsoft SQL Server and other technologies. He holds multiple Microsoft certifications including Solution Developer (MCSD.NET) and Database Administrator (MCDBA). Mike is a frequent contributor to various technical journals and has spoken at multiple conferences, seminars, and user-groups.

Balancing WCF Performance and Security

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:53:12 GMT

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), as well as the other W*F technologies, has been the focus of a lot of hype. When you see your first WCF demo, you immediately want to implement it in all of your distributed applications. If you don't have any distributed apps you can rewrite, you start thinking about brushing off some old ideas or coming up with new ones just so you can use this wonderful new technology. Before you do any of this however, there are a lot of things to consider. Two of these items - security and performance - have been the bane of all distributed applications leading up to WCF. In this session, we will discuss how WCF addresses these issues and what choices you need to make before writing that first line of code.

Darrell Hawley is a C# and VB.NET developer working with both web and windows applications. Currently, he is working in the automotive sector with a team of engineers and software developers solving complex engineering problems using the .NET Framework. During a four year stay at a Farmington Hills, MI advertising company, he streamlined business processes and acted as the company SQL Server administrator. He has also worked with Visual Basic 6, Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript and ASP. He is actively involved in the Ann Arbor .NET Developers Group, Day of .NET and CodeMash.

Building a Data Access, Logging, and Exception Handling Framework with the Microsoft Enterprise Library 2.0

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:50:23 GMT

How many times have you written the same code for data access, exceptions, and/or logging? How many different varieties and methods can you find (sometimes even in the same project) to handle the same process? In this session we will build an extensible Data Access, Logging, and Exception Handling Framework using the Microsoft Enterprise Library 2.0, all in one hour! We will be implementing the view via Smart Client since this presents a few more challenges than Web, but the framework is able to handle either delivery paradigm. This session was previously named "Using and Extending the Microsoft Enterprise Library in WinForms Application Development".

Philip Japikse is a Principal Consultant for Pinnacle Solutions Group, Inc. Developing code and architecting solutions since 1986, Philip is an Enterprise Application Architect for Web and Smart Client solutions. Certified as an MCSD, MCSD.Net, and MCDBA, Philip’s experiences encompass front and back end design and development. He has spent the past several years developing scalable web solutions with three-nine availability and “shrink-wrapped” Smart Client software for the health care industry, and as an instructor (for the technical world and also emergency care). Philip also works as a Firefighter/Paramedic for a large fire department and volunteers for the National Ski Patrol.

MbUnit : Unit Testing for People who Love Unit Testing

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:34:33 GMT

While NUnit and MSTest are great testing frameworks, they don't begin to scratch the surface of what a testing harness can do. Learn about MbUnit and how features like row testing, pair-wise testing, automatic rollbacks, and extensionable tests allow you to take unit testing to another level.

James Avery has been programming with Microsoft technologies for the last 8 years and has been working with .NET since the second beta release. He is currently working as a consultant in the Cincinnati area building enterprise-level .NET applications. He has worked on a number of different books, most recently Windows Developer Power Tools from O'Reilly. James has also written articles for MSDN magazine, ASPToday, and is a frequent blogger.

Real World Agile

MikeWo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 14:31:17 GMT

Tired of hearing about agile theory? In this talk I will cover my experiences from a year and a half agile project in an experimental public post-project lessons learned session.