# Monday, 20 September 2010
WHAT: October PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Wednesday 10/06/2010 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. After Words at On the Border Mexican Grill
WHERE:

Intel Ronler Acres RA1 Auditorium
2501 NW 229th Avenue
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Scott Hanselman
Scott Hanselman works out of his home office for Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager, aiming to spread good information about developing software, usually on the Microsoft stack. Before this he was the Chief Architect at Corillian Corporation, now a part of Checkfree, for 6 years. He was also involved in a few Microsoft things for many years like the MVP and RD programs and will speak about computers (and other passions) whenever someone will listen.

TOPIC:

Information Overload and Managing the Flow: Effectiveness and Efficiency
As developers, we are asked to absorb even more information than ever before. More APIs, more documentation, more patterns, more layers of abstraction. Now Twitter and Facebook compete with Email and Texts for our attention, keeping us up-to-date on our friends dietary details and movie attendance second-by-second. Does all this information take a toll on your psyche or sharpen the saw? Is it a matter of finding the right tools to capture what you need, or do you need to unplug?

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 20 September 2010 09:54:45 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Thursday, 29 July 2010
WHAT: PADNUG Meeting - GeekRoadTrip
WHEN: Tuesday 07/29/2010 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Z-Tech Staffing)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Steve Andrews' GeekRoadTrip
Steve Andrews is a Team System MVP and INETA speaker, and has been working as a developer for more than 9 years. During this time, he has designed and developed applications in such widely varying areas as trust accounting, medical information management, supply chain management, and retail systems. Steve is also a MCTS, ICSOO, and community fanatic.

TOPIC:

Testing ASP.NET MVC Apps with VS 2010 Ultimate
Testing web applications has always been a manual and tedious process. With Performance Tests in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, automated web testing is now a reality. In this session, we'll look at created Web Tests and configuring parameters and database driven testing. We'll also look at performance testing your web applications to find and squash performance issues.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/

And, our appreciation goes out to Z-Tech Staffing for providing pizza for this additional meeeing:

Z-Tech Staffing - http://z-techstaffing.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Thursday, 29 July 2010 00:17:46 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 15 June 2010
WHAT: Visual Studio 2010 Community Launch
WHEN: Thursday 06/17/2010 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by PADNUG)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. After Words at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse - Imbrie Hall
WHERE:

Fiserv Cafe
3400 NW John Olsen Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

TOPIC:

Portland Visual Studio 2010 Community Launch
Join us for a special Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG) program for the launch of Visual Studio 2010. Microsoft Regional Director Stuart Celarier and Microsoft Developer Evangelist Mithun Dhar will present highlights on what’s new in Visual Studio 2010, C# 4.0, .NET 4, as well as other products and technologies that make up the 2010 launch.

This program will help you figure out what new features to dig into first, as well as make you a more effective developer. This event is free and open to the public, however registration is required as seating is limited: http://tinyurl.com/register-padnug-2010-launch.

The first 200 registered people in the door will receive free, preauthorized access for Microsoft® WebsiteSpark™ which includes Visual Studio 2010 Professional and other valuable developer resources!

Get excited, get the goods, and get started with Visual Studio 2010!

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 15 June 2010 06:57:55 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 29 March 2010
WHAT: April PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 04/06/2010 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Jason Mauer
Jason Mauer is Owner and Chief Architect of Mighty Code, a development shop based in Portland, Oregon focusing on software consulting, training, and development. He has over fifteen years of experience in software development, including a stint with Microsoft from 2001 to 2009 as an application development consultant and developer evangelist. Jason is active in the developer community and frequently presents on technical topics at user groups, Code Camps, and conferences such as DevConnections and OSCON. Jason’s free time is spent making music with his band No Good Jones, cycling all over the place, and enjoying life with his son Zachary. He can be found online at http://jasonmauer.com/ or on Twitter as @jasonmauer.

TOPIC:

Post MIX10
MIX10 last month had a plethora of amazing announcements for the .NET world, including Windows Phone 7 development with Silverlight and XNA, Internet Explorer 9 with support for HTML5, the Open Data Protocol (OData), new developments with Windows Azure, and more. Come check out the latest and greatest with plenty of demos!

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 29 March 2010 22:28:04 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 22 March 2010

Scott Hanselman, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, will be speaking on .NET and other technology topics.

Many of you know Scott or have heard him speak. He is always both informative and entertaining. If you don't already subscribe to his blog, you should.

WebMD is hosting this event and will be providing lunch. It would really help our planning if you could send a quick e-mail to Rob Garrison if you plan to attend. This will help us plan for lunch.

The meeting will be in the large ballroom on the first floor. Parking is available on the west side of the building. Carpooling is encouraged.

This event is being held on Tuesday, April 13 at:
Montgomery Park
2701 NW Vaughn Street
Portland Oregon 97210

General Schedule:
9:00 - start
10:00 - break
10:15 - restart
11:15 - end talk, open for questions
11:45 - break for lunch
1:00 - done and out

Monday, 22 March 2010 07:01:26 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 30 November 2009
WHAT: December PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 12/08/2009 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse Imbrie Hall
WHERE:

Fiserv Cafe
3400 NW John Olsen Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Scott Stanfield
Scott Stanfield is the CEO of Vertigo Software, Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner for eCommerce Solutions. Scott is a proud member of the MSDN Regional Director community, covering Silicon Valley, and participates in the Microsoft .NET Partner Architect Council. His company built the Windows DNA "Rosetta Stone" sample application Fitch & Mather Stocks 2000, the ASP.NET Starter Kits and IBuySpy, the Nile and Petshop benchmarks and many others. He is a frequent speaker and has delivered keynotes at Microsoft events including TechEd, PDC, DevDays and VBITs.

TOPIC:

Portland Silverlight User Group Kickoff - Silverlight in Action
Interested in how Silverlight is used in some of today’s best applications (Think Olympics, Sunday Night Football, Hard Rock Cafe)? Scott’s group made them. It’s going to be a great chance to see Silverlight in action. It’s also a great night to invite designers and manager types. I think Scott’s talk is going to be a good way of introducing people Silverlight.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 30 November 2009 09:12:54 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 02 November 2009
WHAT: November PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 11/03/2009 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Kelly White
Kelly White is a Senior Software Engineer with MyContent.com. He previously lead the PDXUX.Net user group, and now runs the Portland Silverlight User Group with Erik Mork. He has presented at user groups and code camps throughout the northwest on both Silverlight and WPF. Find him online at http://kelly.whitepdx.com.

TOPIC:

Examining Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM)
MVVM is a design pattern for building rich clients in both Silverlight and WPF. Frankly, there's a lot of buzz around this idea, but why should you care about it (other than to pad your resume)?
In this session I'll be making the case both for and against using MVVM. I'll go over what it is, show how you can use it, and will be including plenty of examples. I'd also like to discuss some of your concerns for why you may want to avoid it, and lastly examine some tools that make it easier to use.
Even if you don't currently use WPF or Silverlight you should still attend this presentation. At the very least you'll leave with an understanding of MVVM such that you'll be able to comfortably discuss it during your next job interview.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 02 November 2009 07:31:22 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 05 October 2009

Jeff Paries, author of Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation will be sharing some great insights with us this month.

WHAT: October PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 10/06/2009 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Jeff Paries
Jeff Paries is a Sr. Experience Developer for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide near Portland, Oregon. He's written a few books and a good number of magazine articles on 3D animation, and is the author of the book Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation.

TOPIC:

Principles of Silverlight Animation
Come and learn the fundamentals of Silverlight animation. We’ll start at the beginning with a review of storyboards and keyframes, and then break free from storyboards and explore procedural animations. This is where the rubber meets the road and your objects come to life – vectors, frame-based animations, collisions, particle systems, and VR objects.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Rober Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 05 October 2009 13:27:46 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 12 August 2009

It must be Summer! That means Rick is in town and ready to present some of his great content!

When Rick presented on jQuery to us last year, we were still about a month away from Microsoft's announcement that they would ship it with Visual Studio. Let's catch up and expand on that presentation!

Check out his post, too.

WHAT: September PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 09/01/2009 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Rick Strahl
Rick Strahl is president of West Wind Technologies on Maui, Hawaii. The company specializes in Web and distributed application development, training and tools with focus on ASP.NET and .NET in general. Rick is author of West Wind Web Connection, a powerful and widely used Web application framework, West Wind HTML Help Builder and West Wind Web Store and Business Framework for .NET and Visual FoxPro. He also collaborates with Kevin McNeish on the Mere Mortals Framework for .NET. Rick is a Microsoft C# MVP, a frequent contributor to magazines and books and speaks frequently at professional developer conferences all over the world. He is co-publisher and co-editor of CoDe magazine.
In the summer months, Rick spends his time in beautiful Hood River, Oregon to play on the river, forests and mountains. Find more about Rick at http://west-wind.com/webblog/.

TOPIC:

Using jQuery with ASP.NET
jQuery is a compact and powerful JavaScript library that greatly simplifies JavaScript and HTML DOM manipulation. jQuery's appeal lies in its compact implementation and flexible and elegant use of selectors to select document elements and manipulate them using jQuery's flexible and intuitive functions in a browser independent way. From AJAX functionality, to easy DOM manipulation, to simplified event handling, to simple effects, this compact library provides many ways to make client scripting much easier and… actually fun.
Additionally a vast community of add-in authors have added hundreds of extremely useful, easy to use and free plug-ins that provide many common useful features to common client side tasks.
In this session I'll show a quick review of jQuery's core client side features, but the main focus of this session will be on integration of ASP.NET server side functionality for AJAX callbacks. We'll look at various ways to interface with ASP.NET with jQuery via manual implementations in WebForms and MVC applications as well as using ASMX/WCF to handle callbacks. We'll also look at several examples that demonstrate how to effectively manage client side and server side operations in a maintainable way to minimize code and layout duplication by using client side templates and wrapping jQuery functionality via server side components.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
Rober Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Wednesday, 12 August 2009 08:07:23 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 03 August 2009

As many of you know, Mr. Mauer is about to head out on his 1,300+ bicycle journey to San Diego.

Well, before we lose him to the wilds of California, he's going to share some tidbits from the new Windows Workflow Foundation 4 and related technologies.

WHAT: August PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 08/04/2009 (vCal Link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Jason Mauer
Jason Mauer is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft covering the Pacific Northwest. He presents frequently at developer events and user groups about topics related to software development. Find him online at http://jasonmauer.com/

TOPIC:

Windows Workflow Foundation 4
What's New and What's Changed

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
Rober Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 03 August 2009 09:46:19 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 07 July 2009

Just in time for the weather to cool back down, we're having a PADNUG meeting!

We have the good fortune to have Nick Muhonen visit us again to discuss some of the new bits that are coming from Microsoft for C#.Next. There are some compelling changes, but some things to watch out for, too.

WHAT: July PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 07/07/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Nick Muhonen
Nick Muhonen, a Portland area resident, has been working in and teaching Microsoft .Net technologies for the past 8 years. He currently works for his company, Useable Concepts, as a freelance certified trainer and software architect, helping others reach technical goals and new levels of understanding.

TOPIC:

C# 4.0 - Microsoft's Brand New Language Lovechild
Nick Muhonen discusses the new language features of C# 4.0 and of course, demos for the faithful!

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/rdirects/NEW_padnug_hostby.asp
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
Rober Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 07 July 2009 13:12:17 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Wednesday, 17 June 2009

Sara Ford is in town for the Open Source Bridge conference. It'll be a great time to show her how much fun visiting Portland is!

If you don't know, among all of the cool geeky things Sara is involved in, she also helps young survivors of Hurricane Katrina with a scholarship program. You can contribute to this directly or by purchasing Sara's book. You can read more about the program here.

What: Portland Nerd Geek Dinner
Where: Old Town Pizza - 226 NW Davis Street
When: Wednesday, June 17, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: Because Open Source Bridge is happening and Sara Ford is in town - Uncle Jimmy Stories*!

Be There and Be Square!

[* If you want to know what Uncle Jimmy stories are, then be there! It's worth it!]

Wednesday, 17 June 2009 10:36:00 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Wednesday, 03 June 2009

Taking Team System to the Next Level
A VSTS 2008 Training Event

EVENT ABSTRACT
Please join Northwest Cadence for this half-day training event on Visual Studio Team System 2008.

Successful Adoption of VSTS
Are your legacy tools no longer meeting your needs? Is VSS too small for your development team or not well suited to your geographically dispersed team? Have you already moved to TFS to scale up from VSS or another legacy version control tool, but feel like there are features that you're missing? Feel like it should do more? This session will show you have to use Team system to improve the quality of your code and better manage/monitor software development and ease communication between project stakeholders.

Regulatory Compliance: End-to-End Traceability
Some form of traceability or regulatory compliance is commonplace, as is the ever-increasing challenge of managing adherence to regulatory standards. While compliance stretches across many parts of an organization, one of the key points is the software development process. Whether it is SOX, HIPPA, or PCI compliance, regulatory standards require your software development process to provide a secure development environment with traceability from one end through the other.

Metrics for Real Process Improvement
Process improvement without good metrics is like shooting in the dark – it is impossible to aim and difficult to know if you hit your goal. This session will be framed around using a process improvement effort (either formal or informal) to ensure that your Team System implementation is helping you achieve real improvements.

Using Team System to Drive Agile Adoption
Are you struggling to adopt agile? Is there still a fundamental disconnect behind the desires of the dev team to be agile, and the business who wants "business as usual"? This session will focus on using Team System to act as a change agent for adopting agile. We'll cover the features of Team System that support agile, how to handle iterations effectively, and how to use the results of prior iterations to effectively scope future iterations. Finally, we'll specifically address the use of Scrum with Team System, and will share results from an actual implementation to show the gotchas and successes of adoption Agile.

Sneak Peek at VSTS 2010
We'll wrap up our morning with a sneak peek into VSTS 2010 to see what all of the excitement is about!

DATE
Portland, OR – July 16, 2009

TIME
8:30 AM: Registration and Welcome
9:00 AM – noon: Event

LOCATION
Microsoft Corporation
10260 SW Greenburg Rd
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

REGISTER
Register online – http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=138856
Register via email – please email: Sue.Ferguson@nwcadence.com

Wednesday, 03 June 2009 10:30:24 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]

What is SQLSaturday?

It's a free one day learning event for SQL Server professionals, loosely patterned on the well known Code Camp model, organized by the Portland SQL Server Users Group (pdxSSug).

Date and Location:

SQL Saturday Portland will be held June 6, 2009 at Mt. Hood Community College, 26000 S.E. Stark St., Gresham, Oregon 97030. The event follows the standard conference model. There are 12 sessions across 2 tracks. Most of the sessions will run 60 minutes. Check in will open at 8:00 am and sessions begin at 9:00 am. Lunch will be provided on site, and the day will close out around 5:00 pm. The after event will be held at McMenamins Edgefield, 2126 S.W. Halsey St., Troutdale, OR 97060 beginning right after the last session. Registration is at http://www.sqlsaturday.com

When will the schedule of sessions be posted?

The call for speakers is closed, and the schedule is finalized.

Can I sponsor this event?

More sponsors are needed to help subsidize the incidental costs of running the event and this is a great event to meet SQL Server professionals or to just give back to the community. If you are interested or want more information, please visit the sponsor page. You can view all of the great sponsors there and it is hoped that most of them will be at the event.

What else can you tell me about the event?

This event is free to anyone that wishes to attend. Check in for the event opens at 8 am.

Be sure to register at http://www.sqlsaturday.com

Wednesday, 03 June 2009 09:03:59 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 02 June 2009

Yes, Virginia, there is a PADNUG meeting! I know last weekend's Code Camp still has many heads spinning, but we are now settling back in to the groove. Obviously, mine is!

Join us this evening for a great presentation on debugging ASP.NET applications. I know the majority of us work in ASP.NET, so this should be very useful.

WHAT: June PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 06/02/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Prashant Sinha
Prashant Sinha has over more than 11 years of work experience including software development in finite element analysis, telecommunication, investment banking, Check Imaging, Remote Deposit Capture and enterprise services. He has led, consulted and trained developers in software development, performance analysis and production debugging on Microsoft technologies. He has also prepared coursewares on Advanced .NET debugging to conduct debugging workshop. His debugging blog is http://www.debuggingblog.com/

TOPIC:

ASP.NET Debugging
A production environment is likely different than the developer's machine. This means that the system's load pattern and timings will be different and it makes reproduction of bugs in test difficult or impossible.
Too often, bugs end up in the, "It works on my machine," unreproducable pile.
The goal of this presentation is to introduce the audience to tools and techniques to determine the root cause of common production debugging issues. The techniques and tools shown in the demos are based on real production issues. We will discuss the issues and debugging steps required for ASP.NET applications hosted on IIS 6/7. We'll also discuss debugging Silverlight applications on a customer machine when no development environment or source code is available.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
Rober Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 02 June 2009 13:05:52 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 01 May 2009

We’ve combined this month’s meeting with Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN)! Many of you may already be attending the Team System Big Event on Tuesday and we are just going to continue the party for our meeting.

Rose City SPIN is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement.  The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area.  Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.

WHAT: May PADNUG and Rose City SPIN Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 05/05/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium and Pacific NW Software Quality Conf. PNSQC)
7:00 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Steven Borg
Steven Borg, co-founder of Northwest Cadence, is the Visual Studio Team System Practice Lead at Northwest Cadence. In addition to being a Visual Studio Team System MVP, Steve holds several other credentials including MCP, MCSD, MCT and Certified Scrum Master (CSM). Steven has helped hundreds of organizations, both large and small, adopt Team System successfully, improving their software development process, reducing costs, increasing quality and speeding delivery dates.
Steven Borg is the Visual Studio Team System Practice Lead at Northwest Cadence, a Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle partner focused on helping organizations improve their software development process. He has helped several organizations improve their development process, reducing costs, increasing quality and speeding delivery dates. In addition, he assists the Team System community as a Team System MVP, an author, and a speaker. Visit his blog at NWCadence.com to learn more about process improvement and Team System.

TOPIC:

Metrics for Real Process Improvement
Process improvement without adequate metrics is shooting in the dark - you might hit your target, but it's impossible to aim and difficult to determine how close you were to hitting your goal. In this talk we'll look at several candidate metrics that many real world organizations have used to achieve real improvements and get an excellent return on investment in process improvement initiatives. We'll also look at how to collect the right data, including the right steps to identify process changes to collect the right data.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 01 May 2009 08:10:54 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 06 April 2009

It’s been about a year and a half since Wayne last joined us to teach more about developing with Scrum management. He’s continuing to refine the Agile processes his team is using and will share some of that experience with us.

WHAT: April PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 04/07/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Stuart Celarier
Stuart Celarier is Chief Software Architect of Aivea, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Connected Systems. His career spans more than two decades of development, architecture, writing, and training, with a focus on new and emerging technologies. His professional interests include the current and next generations of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), “Oslo” modeling platform, “Dublin” application server extensions, “Geneva” claims framework, .NET Framework 4.0, and Windows Azure. Stuart is co-founder of Portland Code Camp and frequently speaks at .NET user groups, conferences, and community events. He is a member of the Software Association of Oregon’s Development SIG committee. Stuart is an INETA Speaker and has volunteered with INETA since 2003, including co-chairing the community-led Birds-of-a-Feather track at Tech•Ed 2005–2009 and PDC 2005.

TOPIC:

WCF Best Practices with Unit Testing
Stuart will present a simple, effective strategy for unit testing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services — as services rather than as objects — and then use unit tests as a means for exploring several best practices programming with WCF and service-orientation. Topics include understanding the relationship of services and objects, test-driven development (TDD) for services, contract-first service development, consuming services defensively, how exceptions and faults work (or don’t), and more. If you have been using WCF to work with services, this session will help you identify areas where you might improve your practices. And if you are just getting started with WCF, this session will help jumpstart your effort.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/ Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
ORCS Web - http://www.orcsweb.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 06 April 2009 18:41:20 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 02 March 2009

It’s been about a year and a half since Wayne last joined us to teach more about developing with Scrum management. He’s continuing to refine the Agile processes his team is using and will share some of that experience with us.

WHAT: March PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 03/03/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Wayne Allen

TOPIC:

Agile Practices: Kanban
Wayne will be speaking at the Group about using the using agile techniques for software development with a particular focus on using the Kanban board.

He'll be covering different project management approaches to product line development that include:

  • Reduced meetings
  • Clear priorities
  • Minimal multitasking
  • No estimating

You can read more at these locations:
http://weblogs.asp.net/wallen/archive/2008/02/01/no-more-iterations.aspx
http://www.infoq.com/articles/hiranabe-lean-agile-kanban
http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/KanbaninAction.html

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 02 March 2009 10:16:25 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 04 January 2009

*** Notice: We are back to Tuesdays now! ***

What a great way to start off 2009. We haven’t seen Chris present at PADNUG for almost five years. We will get to see some of the fruits of that time when Chris shows us the bits from Microsoft’s new model-driven platform called “Oslo”.

WHAT: January PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 01/06/2009
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Chris Sells

TOPIC:

“Oslo”: Writing a domain
In this talk, we'll see how to pull the pieces of "Oslo" together, MSchema, MGraph and MGrammar, to build an entire application end-to-end, discussing how you build a data-driven runtime that consumes the data in the Repository.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Sunday, 04 January 2009 22:06:26 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 29 December 2008

Here we are at the end of 2008! Another great year has passed and it's time to gather together and remember where we've been and what we've done.

Yes, it's kind of short notice, but we have some out-of-town guests that should be in attendance. Please come out and make them feel welcome!

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Food Court (Second Floor "Food Court"; typically, straight out from Sanrio)
When: Tuesday, December 30, starting around 6:00 PM (vCal link)
Why: Wrap up and recount the year of 2008.

Be There and Be Square!

Monday, 29 December 2008 17:19:03 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 04 December 2008

*** Notice: We are meeting on Thursday this week because we said we would! ***

This will be the last meet of 2008. Boy did that year move too quickly.

WHAT: December PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Thursday 12/04/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Jason Mauer

TOPIC:

Post-PDC Extravaganza
Jason will provide an overview and lead discussion of the technologies introduced at PDC.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea Corporation - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Thursday, 04 December 2008 08:35:00 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 14 November 2008

It's Nerd Movie time again!

For those who saw Casino Royale, you know that the Bond franchise has really updated their style. From IMDB:

Daniel Craig reprises his role as Ian Fleming's James Bond in Quantum of Solace, the 22nd feature in the 007 film franchise. Fueled by the betrayal of Vesper, the woman he loved, Bond's determination to track down the mastermind behind the sinister organization that blackmailed her takes him to Haiti, where he finds an unlikely ally in the beautiful and feisty Camille (Olga Kurylenko). The trail quickly leads to the ruthless Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), but with the British Government and the CIA working against him, Bond must kill or be killed on his mission to uncover the truth.

As usual, we'll do this at Cinetopia. The movie starts at 3:15PM. If you are under 21, there are showings at 2:00PM and 4:45PM in the Grand Theater, too, though. If this is right for you and you would like to see your fellow nerds, let us know and we can meet up before or after.

Speaking of meeting up, Vinotopia - the restaurant at the theater - is great to bring your special someone to. Consider making that a part of your afternoon/evening.

Consider buying your tickets and arriving early. I'd imagine that there will be a pretty good turnout for this movie.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner Movie
Where: Cinetopia Theaters - 11700 SE 7th St, Vancouver, Washington
When: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 3:15PM Showing in Cinetopia's Living Room Theater
Why: Bond is Back!

Let any and everyone that might be interested know. And of course...

...Be There and Be Square!

Friday, 14 November 2008 11:45:54 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [2]
# Thursday, 06 November 2008

Sponsored by

WHAT: November PDXUX.Net Meeting

WHEN: Tuesday 11/11/2008
6:30 p.m. Pizza Dinner (by Microsoft)
7:00 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: North (Map)
1515 NW 19th Ave
Portland, OR 97209

For this month's PDXUX meeting we are celebrating the recent release of Silverlight 2 with a launch party hosted by the folks at North.

Our featured presenter is Tim Heuer, who is a Senior Program Manager for Microsoft Silverlight. He helps build the worldwide Silverlight community and is very passionate about the platform and technology in general. Having over 13 years of experience with Microsoft web technologies, Tim is excited about the opportunities that Silverlight brings for developers and designers and wants to ensure that everyone has the best information and tools available to them for success. Tim can be found online at http://timheuer.com/blog.

Along with Tim's presentation, we'll have several demo stations featuring Silverlight locals Erik Mork, Kelly White, and Jason Mauer. Learn more about Silverlight 2 features and how you can utilize them in your own web applications.

We'll also be talking about BizSpark, Microsoft's brand new program for supporting startups, and how you can get involved.

Food, drinks, prizes and more -- don't miss out!

Register now for this event.

Thursday, 06 November 2008 09:23:19 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 03 November 2008

*** Notice: We are meeting on Thursday this week to avoid election conflicts! ***

No typo this time :-).

This is a presentation I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. F# is a fascinating demonstration of what can be built on top of the .NET platform and has now left the Microsoft Research labs to join the mainstream world of .NET programming languages.

WHAT: November PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Thursday 11/06/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Nick Muhonan
Nick Muhonen, a Portland area resident, has been working in and teaching Microsoft .Net technologies for the past 8 years. He currently works for his company, Useable Concepts, as a freelance certified trainer and software architect, helping others reach technical goals and new levels of understanding.

TOPIC:

F# - Functional Fun for Everyone!
"A succinct, type-inferred, expressive, efficient functional and object-oriented language for the .NET platform."

Nick Muhonen discusses Microsoft’s CAML based language F# including its language and its interactive environment. And of course- demos for the faithful!

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/Pages/main.aspx
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 03 November 2008 08:41:01 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 06 October 2008

We finally got Andrew to come speak to us! Of course, it helps when you ask nicely ;-).

WHAT: October PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 10/07/2008 (vCal)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Andrew Hay
Andrew Hay is a developer, speaker and author with 15 years of industry experience. Andrew started his career programming in Assembly language on a IBM OS/360 Mainframe computer in Chicago and leapt into the online experience in the late 90’s. Over the past five years at Pop Art, Inc, Andrew has been a champion of adding visibility into complex business processes. As Director of Software Development, he specializes in ASP.Net and its adjacent technologies including AJAX and Silverlight. Andrew earned a B.S. in Computer Science from North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

TOPIC:

Dynamic Data
ASP.Net Dynamic Data is a new feature in the Microsoft .Net 3.5 SP1 release. Dynamic Data extends the data models expressed through LINQ to SQL and the Entity Framework into a template-based website in seconds.

In this presentation, I'll start at File, New Project and cruise into how the System.Web.Routing namespace works. The Routing stack has crossed the boundary of the .Net MVC Framework and is finding niches in other technologies like Dynamic Data. From there, I'll tour the data driven site using standard display and edit controls for a variety of data types. Finally, I'll show how to implement specific behaviors, business logic and 3rd party controls that adhere to DRY principle.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 06 October 2008 08:36:35 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 26 August 2008

It's back-to-school time! Or, as kids nowadays say "bk2skl" (is that right? I'm such a fuddy-duddy). This works as a perfect time to have Nick come teach us more about PLINQ and how it can help us build applications better served by our multi-core processors.

WHAT: September PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 09/02/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Nick Muhonan
Nick Muhonen, a Portland area resident, has been working in and teaching Microsoft .Net technologies for the past 8 years. He currently works for his company, Useable Concepts, as a freelance certified trainer and software architect, helping others reach technical goals and new levels of understanding.

TOPIC:

Asynchronous fun with PLINQ
This presentation will discuss the growing importance of the asynchronous programming, particularly focusing on Microsoft’s PLINQ Technology - and of course, demos for the faithful.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
* SoftSource Consulting - http://www.sftsrc.com/ * New Sponsor
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 26 August 2008 10:32:53 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 01 August 2008

I was worried that we wouldn’t get to hear from Rick this year since he was not spending his regular, lengthy summer here in the Portland area. Fortunately, the Universe cares about us much more than that and timed his visit perfectly for the August meeting!

WHAT: August PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 08/05/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Rick Strahl

TOPIC:

Using jQuery with ASP.NET
jQuery is a compact and powerful JavaScript library that is quickly becoming one of the most popular client-side libraries. jQuery’s appeal lies in its compact implementation and flexible and elegant use of selectors to pick up document elements that can then be manipulated using jQuery’s flexible set of useful functions in a browser-independent way. From AJAX functionality, to easy browser independent DOM manipulation, to simple effects, this compact library provides many ways to make client scripting much easier. Additionally, a vast community of add-in authors have added hundreds of extremely useful and easy to use plug-ins that provide many useful features to common client-side tasks. In this session, I’ll demonstrate a host of features of jQuery as well as demonstrate how you can integrate this powerful client-side library with ASP.NET on the server. We’ll look at how to provide JSON services through ASP.NET in a couple of ways as well as looking into ways that you can integrate existing components and plug-ins as ASP.NET server controls with a little bit of work to provide ASP.NET-style interaction with jQuery.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 01 August 2008 00:18:51 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 14 July 2008

Posted by Kelly White:

WHAT: July PDXUX.Net Meeting

WHEN: Tuesday 07/15/2008
6:30 p.m. Pizza
7:00 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Robert Half Technology
KOIN Center (Map)
222 SW Columbia Street
Portland, OR 97201

WHO: Erik Mork
Erik Mork is a speaker, consultant and Silverlight enthusiast in the Portland area. He specializes in Smart Client/RIA application development with Silverlight, ASP.NET AJAX, and other technologies. He's focused on making the web V.Next, and his consulting company can be found at http://www.silverbaylabs.org/.

TOPIC: What's new in Silverlight 2 - Beta 2
What's the big deal with Silverlight 2? What's the story with the latest beta release? Is it ready for primetime? Erik tackles these questions by reviewing what Silverlight 2 is and where it's going. If you're new to Silverlight, this is an opportunity to understand it, and if you've already played with Silverlight, it's a chance to further learn about the platform. Applications will be presented for 1) fighting corporate greed and 2) mindhacking with Silverlight. Erik will have the mindhacking source code available for all attendees.

Monday, 14 July 2008 08:30:07 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 01 July 2008

I know you are all probably thinking about the upcoming weekend; I know I am. But with these crazy temperatures lately, what a great time to hide in the air conditioned spaces of the Tigard Microsoft office?

WHAT: July PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 07/01/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Stuart Celarier
Stuart is a Microsoft MVP on Connected Systems (WCF, WF, and CardSpace) and a software architect at Fiserv. He is active in the professional software community including volunteering with the Software Association of Oregon and INETA. Stuart blogs at http://visualstuart.net.

TOPIC:

WF - Why, What, and How?
You’ve probably read about Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) somewhere and thought, “Why would I want one of those?” WF represents very powerful concepts in the way we put software together and run it. You probably already deal with workflow concepts all the time, and haven’t separated that part out. WF allows you to organize software that has complex interactions, like compensations, and may execute for a long time, perhaps days or months. Microsoft continues to invest in WF -- this is a key technology to understand and track as the .NET platform evolves. Come wrap your head around what WF really does, and how it does it.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 01 July 2008 10:39:47 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 23 June 2008

Via Ben Hickman at Microsoft:

The monthly Microsoft Portland SharePoint User Group meeting will be held on Wednesday June 25th in the Microsoft Office. We have a great speaker, topic, and give-away this month. Details are below.

We are doing away with registration, but will still be providing lunch. Also, be sure to bring your business card to register for our great give-away this month.

We now have a user group web site: www.portlandsharepoint.com kindly created and hosted by Netropole (www.netropole.com).

For June we have a great presentation from James Curry, an instructor with Mindsharp (www.mindsharp.com). We also have a fantastic give-away this month. Mindsharp has generously donated a $3,000 voucher for admission to their upcoming training event in Portland! The training event is from July 28 – August 1 and includes the following sessions:

  • 5-day WSS 3.0 Developer (syllabus)
  • 5-day 2007 SharePoint Designer (syllabus)
  • 3-day 2007 SharePoint Power User (syllabus)

Mindsharp is also offering a 15% discount to this upcoming training event.

WHAT: June Portland SharePoint User Group (PSUG) Meeting
WHEN: Wednesday 06/25/2008
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

James Curry
James is a respected computer scientist and consultant with over 15 years of programming experience. In his role as a Mindsharp instructor, James uses his knowledge of Microsoft products to provide students with a dynamic, hands-on classroom experience.

James is a contributing author of a SharePoint products and technologies book. He has been invited to speak at user groups on subjects such as Customizing SharePoint 2007.

As a computer scientist with InfoPro Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, James developed information management solutions for organizations of all sizes. Prior to joining Mindsharp, James focused on developing Web applications for a large governmental organization. James currently resides in Huntsville, Alabama.

TOPIC:

Field Types and Field Controls
James Curry from Mindsharp will discuss Field Types and Field Controls. Fields are the underlying data types for SharePoint list columns and site columns. SharePoint provides a number of fields, such as Number, Counter, Multi-Choice, Boolean, and URL. Custom fields can be created to allow custom validation of data and presentation beyond what is possible with the native SharePoint fields. Field controls are Server Controls or User Controls that can be used to provide custom presentation of data stored in a given field type. Server controls allow information stored in SharePoint lists to be presented in a very rich manner. As an example, a single line of text that contains an address could be presented using a field control as push pin on a map. Field Controls provide a far superior method of custom presentation than using the options natively available in a Field Type.

Monday, 23 June 2008 09:56:30 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Friday, 20 June 2008

From George Clingerman:

We've had our third meeting of PAXNAUG and it went really well. We had an interesting discussion on sprite movement and the presentation and demonstration went swimmingly. We had quite a lot of snacks and refreshments as well. We had the room reserved, the signs posted and even put up reminders on the PAXNAUG site.

We did have one slight issue though. Small turnout.

It's ok. We know you were busy. But we did miss you just a little.

We want to start bringing in speakers from great faraway lands. Other XNA MVPS, book writers and community evangelists. Maybe even some of the legendary XNA team themselves! But we want to have just a few more people consistently coming to give them a decently sized audience.

It's our fault I know. We're pretty new at running a user group. We're getting better though. We swear! And we're making an even greater effort this time to spread the word about the next meeting. We're planning on contacting some of the local college campuses, getting in touch with the .NET user group and there's also a local game development group that we can get in touch with.

If you're reading this, help us out a little and spread the word yourself.

Here's the details.

WHAT: XNA MVP George Clingerman (that's me!) will be speaking on "An introductory look at creating games for the Zune"
WHEN: Wednesday June 25, 2008
6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
WHERE:

River East Center (next to OMSI) in Portland Oregon

WHO:

Portland XNA User Group (PAXNAUG)

Hope to see you there!

Friday, 20 June 2008 11:05:22 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 13 June 2008

The Code Trip is near its end at the MVP summit. Join us Thursday at the Corillian Cafe to cheer the team on through the final leg of their journey.

WHAT: June PADNUG SQL SIG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 06/17/2008
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. After Words at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse?
WHERE: Corillian Cafe, now part of CheckFree, now a part of FiServ
3400 NW John Olsen Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124
WHO:

William R. Vaughn
Bill retired from Microsoft (in 2000) after 14 years to focus on mentoring, speaking, and writing. His specialty is data access application design especially when connecting to SQL Server. Bill has worked in the computer industry since 1972. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Mary Hardin-Baylor and a Master's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas. He's also been awarded an Honorary PhD. from the University of Advancing Computer Technology in Tempe Arizona. Bill spent his early years working in the mainframe data processing industry and transitioned to the personal computer side in the late 70s. Along the way, he worked for the Texas DPS Narcotics Service, EDS (where he was recruited by and worked for Ross Perot), at Mostek/United Technologies, Challenge Systems, Digital Research, and CPT Corporation. After having surfed the PC industry for many years, he began his Microsoft years in 1986 working for the Windows developer liaison team at Microsoft in 1986. For the next 14 years, he worked in various divisions at Microsoft including Microsoft University, the Visual Basic documentation and Visual Studio marketing and Internal Technical Education teams before retiring in 2000 to form his own company, Beta V Corporation.

Bill has written seven editions of the popular Hitchhiker's Guide (the 4th, 5th and 6th published by Microsoft Press) and books for APress, including the bestseller ADO and ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices. Peter Blackburn and Bill also coauthored the Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services (Addison- Wesley). His latest work is Hitchhiker's Guide to SQL Server Everywhere-his first e-Book. He writes lead articles for SQL Server Magazine where he is a contributing editor, MSDN, and others. Bill also writes a bi-weekly editorial for Processor.COM magazine. Bill is a top-rated speaker at conferences worldwide, including keynotes and sessions at TechEd, DevWeek, Dev Connections, SQL Connections, VBUG, and many others - where his wit and no-holds-barred technical insights win him rave reviews. Bill is a Microsoft MVP.

TOPIC:

Visual Studio Reporting
The inside scoop on how to get the most out of the new ReportViewer control and how it's evolved in Visual Studio 2008. This discusses how to leverage your Reporting Services skills and RDL reports to create application-based reports and how to manage the myriad of issues that come up when trying to emulate Reporting Services functionality like parameters, connections, pick-list population and much more. This session previews the SQL Server Reporting Services technology coming with SQL Server 2008.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

.NET | Developer | PADNUG | SQL | Tips
Friday, 13 June 2008 15:27:56 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 03 June 2008

Late announcement as I've been a bit distracted this last week or so.

With such beautiful weather (!), it seems a great evening to come learn about mobile and related development with PADNUG.

WHAT: June PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 06/03/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Steven Gray

TOPIC:

Smart Device Programming with Visual Studio 2008
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 brings a host of new features and improvements for smart device developers with an updated emulator, new version of the .NET Compact Framework, on-device unit testing, and more. As a software architect and Microsoft certified trainer, as well as SoftSource's subject matter expert on mobile device application development, Steven Gray will walk through the practical steps for building smart device applications quickly as well as how to leverage existing investments by bridging those mobile applications to your current web service architectures. Time and interest permitting, Steven will also contrast invoking web services from other mobile platforms besides Windows CE-based devices as well.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 03 June 2008 08:50:43 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 22 May 2008

It's Nerd Movie time again already!

Of course, it's driven by the movie that is playing. After almost twenty years, Indiana Jones is back in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. How can any self respecting nerd pass this one up?

As usual, we'll do this at Cinetopia. The movie starts at 3:30PM. If you are under 21, there is a showing at 4:15PM in the Grand Theater, too, though. If this is right for you and you would like to see your fellow nerds, let us know and we can meet up before or after.

Speaking of that, Vinotopia - the restaurant at the theater - is great to bring your special someone to. Consider making that a part of your afternoon/evening.

Consider buying your tickets early. I'd imagine that there will be a pretty good turnout for this movie.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner Movie
Where: Cinetopia Theaters - 11700 SE 7th St, Vancouver, Washington
When: Monday, May 26, 2008, 3:30PM Showing in Living Room Theaters
Why: Indiana Jones is Back!

Let any and everyone that might be interested know. And of course...

...Be There and Be Square!

Thursday, 22 May 2008 13:59:34 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 18 May 2008

Nick Muhonen, a Portland area resident, has been working in and teaching Microsoft .Net technologies for the past 8 years. He currently works for his company, Useable Concepts, as a freelance certified trainer and software architect, helping others reach technical goals and new levels of understanding.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was released in November of 2006, yet very few developers that I talk to are using it. Learning WPF can be a daunting task, and really who wants to subject themselves to learning this when it is unclear what the reasons and benefits are for moving to this platform.

This presentation will briefly explain the Whys and then show how you can start learning and developing for what has become the new standard for Windows Client Development.

WHAT: May PDXUX.NET Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 05/20/2008
6:30 p.m. Pizza (by White Horse)
7:00 p.m. Presentation
WHERE:

Robert Half Technology
KOIN Center
222 SW Columbia Street
Portland, OR 97201

WHO:

Nick Muhonen
Nick, a Portland area resident, has been working in and teaching Microsoft .Net technologies for the past 8 years. He currently works for his company, Useable Concepts, as a freelance certified trainer and software architect, helping others reach technical goals and new levels of understanding.

TOPIC:

Using WPF Now - the Why and the How
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) was released in November of 2006, yet very few developers that I talk to are using it. Learning WPF can be a daunting task, and really who wants to subject themselves to learning this when it is unclear what the reasons and benefits are for moving to this platform.

This presentation will briefly explain the Whys and then show how you can start learning and developing for what has become the new standard for Windows Client Development.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

White Horse - http://www.whitehorse.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/store/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Sunday, 18 May 2008 20:54:13 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Thursday, 15 May 2008

PADNUGers are invited... [via Ben Hickman]

The monthly Microsoft Portland SharePoint User Group meeting will be held on Wednesday May 28th from 11:45am - 1:00pm in the Microsoft office:

10260 SW Greenburg Rd.
Lincoln Tower, Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

I am very happy to announce that we will have Jason Noble from Neudesic presenting on Master Page development. I saw Jason’s presentation earlier this year at the Office Developer’s Conference and it was excellent. Don’t miss this one.

Developing Master Pages with SharePoint Designer
The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies stack provides amazing out-of-the-box capabilities for enterprise and web content management, search, and business intelligence solutions. These capabilities can be further extended using custom .NET solutions developed in Visual Studio or using the no-code approach offered by Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007. In this discussion we will put forth a predictable process for creating master pages using SharePoint Designer. This will include the creation of wire frames, and provide clear direction on the various content regions available in SharePoint.

About Jason Noble
With over fourteen years of experience in building complex, mission critical applications, Jason Noble brings extensive knowledge in advanced enterprise applications, specializing in web, database and portal application development using SharePoint. Moreover, Jason has spent a number of years working with C# and ASP.NET, creating a variety of business applications, and has been actively involved with Microsoft’s .NET environment since it was introduced at the Professional Developer’s Conference in 2000. Lunch will be provided and begin promptly at 11:45AM. The presentation will be from 12:00PM to 1:00PM. A meeting invite is attached.

We will have a drawing for some give aways immediately following the meeting, so bring your Business cards to participate in the drawings!

Please register so we get an accurate head count for lunch. Click here to register. Please specify in the mail if you have any special dietary needs.

For questions or comments please contact Ben Hickman, SharePoint Technology Specialist, Microsoft NorthWest District.

Microsoft Portland SharePoint User Group
Microsoft Portland SharePoint User Group is dedicated to helping customers design, develop, deploy, and administrate applications on Microsoft SharePoint platform technologies.

Thursday, 15 May 2008 14:28:39 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 12 May 2008

Call this a Public Service Announcement. On the heels of publishing his new book, Code Leader, Patrick Cauldwell will be presenting at the monthly SPIN seminar at OGI.

You must sign up - so visit http://www.cpd.ogi.edu/course.asp?n=08-SPIN-0612 and register. It may seem like it is asking you to pay, but in the end, there is no cost for the event.

Details are as follows and posted on the site .

There is a lot more to delivering a software project on time and within budget than just writing code. In fact, in many modern software development efforts, the code is the least challenging part. The hard part is setting up a build, test and deployment infrastructure that allows developers to work together effectively and efficiently.

Working efficiently with your source control system, and establishing a Continuous Integration process can go a long way toward achieving those goals. We'll look at how to organize your team and use the right tools to make the development process as efficient and effective as possible.

Monday, 12 May 2008 22:50:29 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 02 May 2008

Tuesday may be a busy day for some of us. Microsoft is launching the new Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 at the Convention Center and then we will be rushing back to the west side for a fabulous PADNUG presentation.

Serge has been kind enough to provide us with licenses for CodeIt.Right for several months. Now, he's willing to travel down from Seattle to tell us more about code analysis and why it is worth the effort.

We've heard Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell talk about tools like Serge's many times. Now we'll see how it comes about.

WHAT: May PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Thursday 05/06/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Gustav's
WHERE:

Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223

WHO:

Serge Baranovsky

TOPIC:

CodeIt.Right the First Time
Use Code Analysis and Refactoring to produce quality code, enforce coding guidelines, find code pitfalls, performance issues and save your time.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 02 May 2008 20:59:38 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]

What a wonderful Spring that is upon us!

Let's have a Nerd Event.

Last time we did a movie (Portland Nerd MOVIE- Beowulf in 3D!), we had to go to the "Grand Theater" to enjoy the 3D view. This time, we return to the Living Room theaters!

The movie starts at 4:00PM. If you are under 21, there is a showing at 4:30PM in the Grand Theater, too, though. If this is right for you and you would like to see your fellow nerds, let us know and we can meet up before or after.

Speaking of that, Vinotopia - the restaurant at the theater - is great to bring your special someone to. Consider making that a part of your afternoon/evening.

Consider buying your tickets early. I'd imagine that there will be a pretty good turnout for this movie.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner Movie
Where: Cinetopia Theaters - 11700 SE 7th St, Vancouver, Washington
When: Sunday, May 04, 2007, 4:00PM Showing in Living Room Theaters
Why: Because Iron Man will Rock!

Let any and everyone that might be interested know. And of course...

...Be There and Be Square!

Friday, 02 May 2008 20:34:51 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 09 April 2008

The Code Trip is near its end at the MVP summit. Join us Thursday at the Corillian Cafe to cheer the team on through the final leg of their journey.

WHAT: April PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Thursday 04/10/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
~9:00 p.m. After Words at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse
WHERE: Corillian Cafe, now part of CheckFree
3400 NW John Olsen Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124
WHO:

The Code Trip Team

TOPIC:

Mix-a-Lot
Join us at the Portland Area .NET User Group (PADNUG) where we run through the newest technologies to emerge from MIX08, including Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 8, SQL Server Data Services, Windows Live, and more.

Also, don't forget to register for the PDX Webfoot event on Saturday! It should be a great event and it looks like it will be a fabulous day to bring the family out to an event. We're using Yahoo!'s Upcoming for registration at: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/468242/. There'll be food and lot's of give-aways.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/
SubMain and CodeIt.Right - http://submain.com/codeit.right
JetBrains - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

.NET | Developer | PADNUG | SQL | Technology | Tips
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 04:58:45 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 31 March 2008

You know it's been coming...

It's almost here...

PDX Webfoot is coming April 12 at the OGI School of Science and Engineering. For the latest information, go to the PDX Webfoot Website.

Some of the topics and people already on the agenda (subject to change at this point):

Topics:

  • Safe Internet Browsing
  • Silverlight 2
  • Internet Explorer 8
  • XNA
  • Adobe Flex/Air
People:
  • Scott Hanselman
  • Adam Kinney
  • Tim Heuer
  • Jason Mauer
  • Ryan Miller
  • Kelly White
  • Erik Mork

There will be good food (not just pizza) and there will be games and activities for spouses and kids (think Rockband and Mindstorms, though we can't guarantee either of those yet).

Monday, 31 March 2008 22:03:56 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]

InnoTech: Oregon’s Largest Technology Event

InnoTech – The Business & Technology Innovation Conference & Expo
Presented by Easystreet Online Services & Software Association of Oregon
April 16 & 17, Oregon Convention Center

The InnoTech folks have come through again to help our members attend the show. This year, you have two options: a discount for the full package or free access to the general admission portion.

Check out the Developers Track and the new Open Source Summit at InnoTech on April 17.
Information and registration at www.innotechoregon.com.

Option 1: Discounted InnoTech Oregon Conference & Exhibits Pass includes Breakfast Presentation with Don Tapscott, Author, WIKINOMICS, at the reduced rate of $45.00 per person ($60.00 per person standard price.) Click to select INNOTECH GENERAL REGISTRATION and enter Discount Code ES345 to confirm your place at the breakfast.

Option 2: Complimentary InnoTech Oregon Conference & Exhibits Pass does not include breakfast presentation with Don Tapscott. Click to select INNOTECH GENERAL REGISTRATION and enter Discount Code ES303.

This year includes an impressive line up of national and local sponsors and supporters (all posted on the www.innotechoregon.com web site...check it out!)

Here are a few of the InnoTech conference tracks & special events (ALL great reasons to take part in InnoTech):

  • Green IT/Clean Technology – April 16
  • Open Source Summit – (five distinct presentations about open source and the business of software)
  • Virtualization, data storage, cloud computing, security and much more
  • InnoTech Happy 45-Minutes (the perfect place to mingle over complimentary beverages, appetizers, live music and exhibits)
  • Developers Track – (Ruby, Agile, LINQ and more)
  • And more!
Monday, 31 March 2008 21:58:01 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 17 March 2008

Next week Adam Kinney will be coming down from Microsoft to present an "Overview of Silverlight 2" and answer questions about other content presented at this year's MIX conference. This is a meeting you'll want to be sure to attend. Details are included below and can also be found at http://pdxux.net/.

WHAT: March PDXUX Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 03/18/2008
6:30 p.m. Pizza (by White Horse)
7:00 p.m. Presentation
~8:30 p.m. Drinks and continued discussion
WHERE: Corillian Cafe, now part of CheckFree
3400 NW John Olsen Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124
WHO:

Adam Kinney
Adam works for Microsoft as "a guy who loves UI platforms like
Silverlight, WPF and Microsoft Surface." He often talks about these
technologies from a developer and designer prespective.

TOPIC:

Overview of Silverlight 2
Adam will be presenting an overview of Silverlight 2 and answering
questions about other stuff from MIX. I'm not one to speak for Adam,
but I'm betting you'll be seeing Deep Zoom related content, and maybe
even something about what the Olympics are doing with Silverlight.

Be sure to join us afterwards at Cornelius Pass Roadhouse for drinks and continued discussion.

Monday, 17 March 2008 12:39:20 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 19 February 2008

Arnie is one of the top SQL Server people in the area. He is going to give us a look ahead at the coming release of SQL Server 2008.

WHAT: February Bonus PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 02/19/2008
6:00 p.m. Sandwiches
6:30 p.m. Presentation
WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Arnie Rowland

TOPIC:

SQL Server 2008 Intro Part 1
Come see what's new in SQL Server 2008. This is part one of two meetings we'll hold.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

.NET | Developer | PADNUG | SQL | Tips
Tuesday, 19 February 2008 05:22:08 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Tuesday, 29 January 2008

When I heard Matt on Hanselminutes, I knew we had to get him to come speak at PADNUG. It had been long enough since I'd seen him, I didn't realize that he was still right here in the Portland Metro area - Perfect!

Matt and Earth Class Mail are definitely ahead of the curve on using the .NET 3.5 Framework. Not only that, but they came to the platform from LAMP.

WHAT: February PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 02/05/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Matt Davis

TOPIC:

WCF and LINQ in the Wild
Come out and here first hand war stories and tips & tricks on .NET 3.5 from Matt Davis, Architect at Earth Class Mail. ECM recently converted their bread and butter application to .NET from PHP on Linux, and went live on .NET 3.5 Beta2. Matt will share real world stories and demos about what works and what doesn't, using WCF 3.5's new Web Programming model, LINQ, Compact Framework 3.5, and others recent Microsoft technologies.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 29 January 2008 22:47:55 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 07 January 2008

The answer, according to Scott, is:

No, it's pretty harmless. If you look in the Object Browser in Visual Studio you'll see that one assembly you already have has had some additions and its version rev'ed....

I wouldn't go slapping it on a production machine unless you're living on the razor's edge, but it should be fine on a development machine if you know how to pay attention to what versions your projects reference.

So, for those who got their appetite whetted with Scott's introductory presentation at the InstallFest or for those of you that haven't seen what the new extensions are all about, this will be a great chance to find out more.

WHAT:

January PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 01/08/2008
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Scott Hanselman

TOPIC:

Should I Fear MVC for ASP.NET?
ASP.NET MVC provides model-view-controller (MVC) support to the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime, which enables developers to more easily take advantage of this design pattern. Benefits include the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns, as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD). The ASP.NET MVC Toolkit provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support for MVC.

If you would like to get a jump on things, download the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions from <here>.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 07 January 2008 08:27:30 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 26 November 2007

We're having a PARTY!!!

Microsoft is running an InstallFest for Visual Studio 2008 and you are invited! Everyone that attends will have a chance to get a licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Pro for their very own.

We're meeting at Corillian for this one since they have more space. Also, note that we are starting the fun a bit early; this will give you a chance to install the trial copy of VS2008 and ask some questions before we begin.

Note that you must sign up for this event. The sign-up page is at
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032361177&Culture=en-US

WHAT: December PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 12/04/2007
5:00 p.m. Food (by Microsoft)
6:00 p.m. Presentation
WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Jason Mauer, et al

TOPIC:

Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest
ATTENTION DEVELOPERS! Are you ready to be one of the first to get their hands on Visual Studio 2008? Join Microsoft and the Portland Area .NET Users Group (PADNUG) for a Visual Studio 2008 InstallFest and Holiday Party on December 4th, 2007 at Corillian in Hillsboro.

Visual Studio 2008 is HERE and this event is your opportunity to get your hands on the released version before anyone else. Every person that installs Visual Studio 2008 on their computer at the event will receive a FREE fully licensed copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional in the mail shortly after public release. Don’t miss out on a great evening of food, fun, and your very own copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional!

Space is limited so register today.

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 26 November 2007 13:28:24 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 04 November 2007

Notice I'm calling it as it is now: November. One might look down the list of meeting announcements and think, "Gosh, there really wasn't an October meeting?!?" That's one way to look at it. On the other hand, we've had twelve meetings this year. So maybe we added a month, eh?

I've been looking for a chance to bring Wayne in to do an Agile presentation for a long time. Many of you may know Wayne from his time at Corillian. He's now working with Integrated Services, Inc.

WHAT: November PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 11/06/2007
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Wayne Allen

TOPIC:

Introduction to Scrum
Agile software development processes such as Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Feature Driven Development (FDD) and Crystal have become mainstream in many organizations. Come find out more about Scrum and some of the .NET tools that makes agile software development fun!

While you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Sunday, 04 November 2007 08:26:32 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 29 October 2007

It hasn't been that long since the last PDXUX.Net meeting, but I wanted to get the word out early on this one. A couple things to note up front:

  1. This meeting will be held at Corillian in Hillsboro
  2. The meeting will be on the 2nd Tuesday instead of the 3rd to avoid Turkey-Day conflicts.
WHAT: November PDXUX.Net Meeting
WHEN:

Tuesday 11/13/2007
6:30 p.m. Socializing & Pizza (by White Horse)
7:00 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Scott Vandehey
Scott is a web developer and CSS Ninja working at Pop Art who has been making websites for over ten years. He lives in NE Portland with his wife and baby daughter, and is probably not a Cylon.

TOPIC:

Introducing sIFR
Scott will be introducing sIFR 2.0, a method of inserting rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash. It is this technology which provides the nice looking custom type headlines you see on sites like Nike, ABCNews, Aston Martin, and others.

Look forward to seeing everyone there!

Monday, 29 October 2007 08:38:24 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 07 October 2007

Just in case you've missed it, we're going to have a bit of an event this week.

Halo 3 on the REALLY big screen.

Thursday, October 11 from 7PM to Midnight (vCal reminder), we are gathering at the finest of movie theaters - Cinetopia Theaters - in Vancouver for an evening of fun and function. All proceeds from the $25 admittance to this event will be given to the American Diabetes Association.

Cinetopia has come through with two theaters for us. This means we will be able to pit two networked teams against one another and enjoy the show on their huge, Digital Super Hi-Def projectors.

Popcorn and a soda will be available, but don't limit yourself; the theater hosts a fabulous concession stand and Best of Citysearch Audience Winner Vinotopia Restaurant and Wine Bar, too.

Thanks to the efforts and contributions of Aivea, Robert Half Technology, Microsoft, PADNUGSAO and others, we will be able to contribute thousands to the ADA in the Fight Against Diabetes, too. This is a big deal, folks.

Space is limited. Sign up now at http://iammasterchief.com with the RSVP code of "FIGHTDIABETES". Feel free to ignore the text mentioning the 'prelaunch' party; we're using the same site as was used for that event.

Scott is making it possible to prepay, too. You are welcome to visit his ADA site at http://www.hanselman.com/fightdiabetes/donate (takes you to the diabetes.org site) and make your contribution there. Print the receipt page and bring it with you to the event as your admission. All contributions made after October 2 will qualify. Otherwise, bring your contribution (feel free to bring more than $25 :-)) to the event.

Join us. You will have a great time!

Sunday, 07 October 2007 22:26:24 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Monday, 01 October 2007

To Everything, There is a Season

It's now the season for which the Strahl migrates back to the islands. But, before he leaves the northwest, he will come to visit us at our 'September' PADNUG meeting.

Note once again: we are meeting a week 'late' compared to what we would traditionally. As I mentioned last month, with the release of Halo 3 last week, it seemed appropriate to postpone our meeting to allow the most avid fans time to perfect their game. Availability will do the same for us next month, too.

We are also looking to move our meetings to Tuesday or Thursday. Obviously, for the remaining meetings, we are planning on doing Tuesday. I'd be happy to hear some feedback for when we want to schedule our meetings next year. Since Wednesday's will not be available, it's our chance to shake things up again.

WHAT: September PADNUG Meeting
WHEN: Tuesday 10/02/2007
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Rick Strahl

TOPIC:

LINQ to SQL in a Business Layer
LINQ to SQL is one of Microsoft’s new OR mapping tools that aims to bring a more object oriented mechanism to accessing data. This talk introduces LINQ to SQL and some of its features and shows how it works and what you can do with it . The focus of this discussion is on using LINQ to SQL in the middle tier for proper data abstraction which requires some additional considerations to be made beyond the ‘quick demo’ usually shown for LINQ to SQL. I’ll share my impressions and thoughts as well as the beginnings of a small light weight business framework built around LINQ to SQL that simplifies data access, provides a few additional required DAL operations and facilitates the process of creating an abstracted data layer.

And while you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 01 October 2007 08:21:00 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 21 August 2007

No folks, I didn't make a typo this time. In order to accommodate various schedule conflicts, our August meeting has moved to the first week of September. I suppose with the extra meetings and all this year, it won't be that big of a change.

Now, as to the subject, Tom gave a similar presentation to PADNUG about four years ago and it was one of the most well regarded presentations we ever had. This is a presentation you definitely want to see.

We will be meeting at the usual time and place... just a week late :).

WHAT: August PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 09/05/2007
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Tom Howe

TOPIC:

The Business Side of Software Development
Technical knowledge and skills are essential, but your business and financial success may equally depend on your business savvy. In this information-packed session, you'll find out how you and your software development business efforts can be more successful. Learn about sales and marketing of software products and services, setting your fee, negotiation strategies, handling customer objections, getting paid and other business issues. 100 business and legal documents will be provided with the session materials.

Tom Howe is a principal in two companies, Control Center Computing, Inc. and the Legal Technology Group. Both companies offer products and services to law firms, corporate legal departments and state attorney offices throughout the United States. He specializes in application development using ASP.NET and SQL Server. He is a regular speaker at Developer Conferences around the world.

Tom also co-authored "Access 2000 and 2002 Development Unleashed" by SAMS Publishing and “Electronic Discovery Technologies and is the technical editor of the Advisor Media .NET journal. He is also been a practicing attorney for 20 years.

And while you are at it, consider visiting our Premium Sponsors that make these meetings possible:

Aivea - http://www.aivea.com/
Microsoft - http://www.microsoft.com/
Ascentium - http://www.ascentium.com/
O'Reilly - http://www.oreilly.com/
Online Business Systems - http://www.obsglobal.com/
Robert Half Technology - http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 21 August 2007 09:10:24 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Thursday, 02 August 2007
image

For those of us that were there, John's PADNUG presentation last week was really good and, I'm sure for many, inspirational. Have you downloaded the bits yet?

For those of you who were not able to make it or if you would just enjoy reviewing the presentation, Scott has been kind enough to take the video he shot that evening and provide it via Silverlight.

For some details on how Scott made the video, visit his post.

Thursday, 02 August 2007 23:00:12 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]

Can you believe how long it has ben since we've been to a mall? Transformers was great last month, but the food was just a little too good up there at Cinetopia.

So, in an effort to get everyone's stomach back into the bad shape it should be, join us again at the Washington Square Food Court. We'll have a chance to give some feedback to the new Hanselborg as he prepares to join the collective.

For those of you that are members of facebook, we've got this event posted up there, too. Click here to visit the page and RSVP.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Food Court (Second Floor; typically, straight out from Picture People)
When: Tuesday, August 7, starting around 6:30 PM (vCal link)
Why: Welcome Scott to the Collective

Be There and Be Square!

Thursday, 02 August 2007 22:38:12 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 23 July 2007

We've got O'Reilly's Open Source Convention visiting here in town this week and it gave us the opportunity to invite John Lam to come speak to us regarding his work on RubyCLR and IronRuby.

A couple of notes this month: First, appologies for the late notice. We had some logistics issues to work through and, obviously, wanted to work around the OSCON schedule.

Second, note that we are meeting at Corillian this month and I anticipate that we will start a tad later than usual as we will be rushing John from the Oregon Convention Center after his engagement there.

WHAT: July PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Thursday 07/26/2007
6:00 p.m. Socializing (Pizza)
6:45 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

John Lam
John is the Program Manager on the Common Language Runtime team at Microsoft. John spends his days thinking about how dynamic languages can help improve the lives of developers everywhere. In his previous role, John was a partner at ObjectSharp helping customers write better software using the .NET platform.

TOPIC:

Open Source and Dynamic Languages on .NET
John, the creator of RubyCLR, will discuss IronRuby, an implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform that will be released under the MS-PL licence (BSD-style license). We will look at the implementation of IronRuby on top of the recently announced Dynamic Language Runtime to better understand how the DLR deferred compilation model can be used to obtain excellent performance and cross-language interoperability. We will also look at different scenarios where IronRuby can be used, including the recently announced Silverlight platform.

Look forward to seeing everyone there!

Monday, 23 July 2007 12:44:34 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 21 June 2007

It's summer time here in the Portland Metropolitan area and of course that means that Rick is back with us!

WHAT: June PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 06/27/2007
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Rick Strahl

TOPIC:

A Data-Driven Approach to Localization
This session provides an introduction to localization with ASP.NET as well as demonstrating extending ASP.NET with a custom data driven ResourceProvider. The focus in this session is on localization from a developer perspective and getting an application set up and ready to be localized. The session covers the basics of cultures, utilizing resource providers and setting up ResX resources and dealing with the complexities of locale mapping in your applications. In the second half of the session we'll dig deeper and explore how to extend ASP.NET with a custom ResourceProvider that can use a database to provide more dynamic access to resources for editing and more control of resource generation. The session demonstrates and provides a fully data-driven resource provider along with an online Web Resource Editor that can be used to edit resources in real time in your running applications.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Thursday, 21 June 2007 07:00:59 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 29 May 2007

Wow... it's time to cap off some of our busiest times for conferences and presentations by visiting with Stuart Celarier about Microsoft's CardSpace.

WHAT: May PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 05/30/2007 (Click for vCal link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Microsoft Portland Office located in Lincoln Tower
10260 SW Greenburg Road
Suite 600
Portland, OR 97223
WHO:

Stuart Celarier
Stuart is a staff software engineer at the Corillian Corporation, a leader in online banking software located in Hillsboro, Oregon. Stuart has 25 years of professional software development experience. He received the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) award for Connected System Developer in 2006. He is a director of the Portland Code Camp v3.0, and has served on the SAO Development SIG committee since 2005. He has been a speaker at user groups and Code Camps throughout the Pacific Northwest. Stuart is co-chair of the Birds-of-a-Feather track at TechEd 2007, and has co-chaired this community-led track at three previous national conferences.

TOPIC:

Protecting Users and Websites using CardSpace
The dramatic increase in online fraud threatens to drive business and other high-value information exchange off the Internet. Microsoft, working with the software security industry, has created CardSpace, an identity system that encompasses current and future security systems, using open standards so that all vendors and platforms can participate. CardSpace allows a website to authenticate users in a highly secure manner, and prevents users’ information from being compromised by phishing sites or other malicious online attacks.

Come learn how CardSpace works by examining how Corillian, a leader in online banking software, is using CardSpace in our software to protect banks and their customers who bank online.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 29 May 2007 21:46:23 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 08 May 2007

Want to remind everyone of a few events that are coming up shortly:

WHAT: BONUS May PADNUG Meeting and ADA Fund Raiser
WHEN:

Thursday 05/10/2007
6:00 p.m. Socializing (Food?)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Scott Hanselman

TOPIC:

Silverlight - It's Here
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

WHAT: Silverlight for Designers
WHEN:

Tuesday 05/15/2007
6:30 p.m. Mixer and Food
7:00 p.m. Housekeeping/Announcements
7:15 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Portland State University
Smith Memorial Center - Room 236
Portland, Oregon

WHO:

Kelly White

TOPIC:

Silverlight
Kelly will be opening up both Expression Blend and Expression Media, giving a couple demos, sharing what he learned from MIX and discussing the insights he got from talking to to the creators of Silverlight (e.g. Mike Harsh) about what advantages and disadvantages it has over other technologies like Flash.

WHAT: Portland Code Camp
WHEN:

Saturday & Sunday 05/19/2007 - 05/20/2007

WHERE:

Washington State University - Vancouver
14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave
Vancouver, WA 98686

Tuesday, 08 May 2007 09:37:56 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 04 May 2007

All the way from the building next door, Microsoft MVP and Regional Director Scott Hanselman will be joining us for a very special BONUS PADNUG presentation.

(Didn't you love the familiar tone of that paragraph?)

Scott has stepped this one up a bit, too. In his effort to raise funds for the American Diabetes Association, this meeting will also be a chance for you to step up and contribute to the cause. Not only will you be helping, but there are several folks that have pledged to match donations during this time period!

Let me give you one more reason to attend tomorrow night's presentation and donate to the ADA with Scott: PADNUG will also be matching donations from the meeting! Thanks to the generous contributions of our sponsors and the participation of all of you, PADNUG will match up to $500 in donations from this meeting to the American Diabetes Association.

Help Scott Fight Diabetes

Further, don't miss the opening meeting for PDXUX on the 15th. It will be a great follow-on to Scott's presentation.

WHAT: BONUS May PADNUG Meeting and ADA Fund Raiser
WHEN:

Thursday 05/10/2007
6:00 p.m. Socializing (Food?)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Scott Hanselman
Scott is Chief Architect at the Corillian Corporation, an eFinance enabler. He has over a decade of experience developing software in C, C++, VB, COM, and currently VB.NET and C#. Scott is proud to have been appointed the MSDN Regional Director for Portland, OR for the last three years. He's spoken internationally on Microsoft technologies, and has co-authored two books from Wrox Press. In 2001, Scott spoke on a 15-city national tour with Microsoft, Compaq and Intel featuring Microsoft Technologies and evangelizing good design practices.

TOPIC:

Silverlight - It's Here
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Scott will be presenting a high-level overview of the technologies with a well-timed follow up presentation next week at the PDXUX group at PSU (http://www.pdxux.net).

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 04 May 2007 09:41:49 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 18 April 2007

Okay folks, here we go. Unfortunately, the Microsoft office is not available this month, but since many of us will likely be downtown attending the InnoTech Conference, we've worked with the organizers (Thank You, Sean) to make room for us there.

As I sent out last week, the InnoTech Conference will be a great place to be even if we were still meeting on the west side. Feel free to run out to the site and register. Discount Code of "DEV999" will continue to be valid for a period of time... this will allow those that would like to attend the conference in conjunction with our meeting to do so at no cost.

Don't forget: the Max line goes right to the Convention Center, too. Don't get yourself caught in the Highway 26 traffic if you can help it!

WHAT: April PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 04/25/2007 (Click for vCal link)
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Ascentium)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: Oregon Convention Center
Room D137
777 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
Portland, Oregon 97232
WHO:

Phil Weber
With nearly 20 years of software development experience, Phil Weber's client list includes Intel, Kaiser Permanente and Wells Fargo Bank. He has worked with VB since 1993 and .NET since 2001. In addition to serving on the INETA Speaker Bureau, Phil is a Visual Basic MVP and has spoken at numerous conferences in the U.S. and abroad. He currently works as a technical instructor for Corillian Corporation, an e-finance enabler.

TOPIC:

The Last Data Access Layer You’ll Ever Write
Stop writing data access code! One reason for Ruby on Rails' popularity is that it frees developers from the drudgery of hand-coding data access. Sure, Visual Studio's TableAdapter Wizard is nice, but it takes a lot of clicks to generate a complete data access layer, and you get to do it again each time the database schema changes. This session will introduce you to some open-source ActiveRecord implementations that give you the benefits of Ruby on Rails without requiring you to abandon the comfort of ASP.NET.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Wednesday, 18 April 2007 23:31:38 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 11 April 2007

InnoTech, the region's most comprehensive business and technology event, offers two full days of conference sessions and one, focused day of exhibits (Thursday, April 26th only). This year's jam-packed agenda includes the return of the eMarketing Summit (now with two tracks!), the Oregon CIO Summit and IT Executives of the Year Awards, InnoTech's Happy Hour (a great networking opportunity!) on Thursday, April 26th, and, of course, the latest on Open Source, Agile, Security, and the latest, exciting innovations in business and technology.

This year, InnoTech is offering a new, Developers Track. Because of the involvement that PADNUG has had with organizing this event, the conference has offered a limited number of complimentary passes to the general InnoTech Conference.

The first 20 people to register using the Discount Code DEV999 will receive complimentary admission to InnoTech this year. Lead sponsors include Microsoft, Comcast, Akamai, OTBC and others. For a complete listing of presentations, speakers and to register visit www.innotechoregon.com.

Wednesday, 11 April 2007 23:34:25 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 25 March 2007

The excitement builds as Jason got the Portland Code Camp v3.0 site up this week! I'll blatantly plagiarize his blog post here to save some typing:

Head on over to the Portland Code Camp v3.0 site and register to attend, submit a session or two, or just check out what's going on with the event. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date with latest news about the event. It's happening May 19-20 at WSU-Vancouver and you won't want to miss it.

One word of note... changes have been made to ease the password requirements on the site. You no longer need non-alphanumeric characters in your password, so you actually have a chance of remembering your password now. As a result of the change we've blown away all the previous user accounts, so you will need to create a new account even if you have registered for a Code Camp in the past.

I'm sure this will the best Camp we've had yet. The campus and facilities are first-rate and it will be a great time of year for the event.

Sunday, 25 March 2007 19:34:59 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 02 March 2007

All the way from Australia, Microsoft MVP and Regional Director Adam Cogan will be joining us for a very special BONUS PADNUG presentation.

WHAT: March BONUS PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 03/07/2007
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Corillian Corporation)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE:

Corillian Cafe
3400 NW John Olson Place
Hillsboro, OR 97124

WHO:

Adam Cogan
Adam Cogan, all the way from Australia, is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Partner specializing in Office and .NET Solutions. At SSW, Adam has been developing custom solutions for businesses across a range of industries such as Government, banking, insurance and manufacturing since 1990 for clients such as Microsoft, Quicken, and the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.

TOPIC:

Rules to Better Code and Successful Projects
Managing a team of coders can be a tricky experience, especially as most coders like to do things their own way. During this session we go through a list of rules that help make the development process as smooth as possible. These rules govern the creation of specifications and schedules, best methods for testing and fixing bugs and even the employees working conditions.

He'll also likely cover some of his tools like SSW Code Auditor that can help you write better code.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 02 March 2007 17:47:39 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 03 January 2007

Happy 2007 Everyone!

It's shaken (not stirred) Martinis all year long folks and even though we can't have one at the mall, let's head out and have a Nerd Dinner! It'll give us a chance to exchange recipes in any event.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Food Court (Second Floor; typically, straight out from Picture People)
When: Thursday, January 11, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: Celebrate another New Year!

Be There and Be Square!

Wednesday, 03 January 2007 10:27:59 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 04 December 2006

INETA has been kind enough to get Bill Vaughn to make the trip down to Portland to present to us this month. This is going to be a fabulous presentation and I expect to gain a lot of knowledge on this one.

Come out to this months meeting to learn about ADO.Net connecting.

WHAT: December PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 12/06/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by INETA)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $3 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

William (Bill) Vaughn
An industry-recognized author, B will illustrate how to connect to SQL Server and other backend servers. He's been in the industry for over thirty years- working with mainframe,minicomputer and personal computer systems. Bill has written six editions of "Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Basic and SQL Server". Bill is a top-rated speaker and we are honored to have him.

TOPIC:

ADO.Net Connecting
Learn how you can use connection options that can help your application connect quickly and stay connected as well as encrypt your connection string. The session includes examples of the new SqlConnectionStringBuilder, the new User instance feature of SQL Express and even funtionality like FullTextSearch and Reporting Services.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 04 December 2006 11:05:42 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 23 August 2006

We always want to take advantage of Rick Strahl's time in the northwest. He's a fabulous presenter and really knows his stuff when it comes to programming ASP. He'll be heading home to Hawaii next month, so don't miss this opportunity to see him one more time!

WHAT: August PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 08/30/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Microsoft)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Rick Strahl
Rick Strahl is president of West Wind Technologies on Maui, Hawaii. The company specializes in Web and distributed application development, training and tools with focus on ASP.NET and .NET in general. Rick is author of West Wind Web Connection, a powerful and widely used Web application framework, West Wind HTML Help Builder and West Wind Web Store and Business Framework for .NET and Visual FoxPro. He also collaborates with Kevin McNeish on the Mere Mortals Framework for .NET. Rick is a Microsoft C# MVP, a frequent contributor to magazines and books and speaks frequently at professional developer conferences all over the world. He is co-publisher and co-editor of CoDe magazine. In the summer months, Rick spends his time in beautiful Hood River, Oregon to play on the river, forests and mountains.

TOPIC:

Taking ATLAS for a ride
This session presents ATLAS, Microsoft's new client side/AJAX extension for ASP.NET slanted for release as an Add-on for ASP.NET 2.0 later this year. ATLAS introduces a rich framework for remote scripting with a wide variety of tools and approaches available to build rich client applications. In this session he'll overview the features available in the framework and show business oriented examples of how to utilize the various features. We'll look at the server centric approach with ATLAS Server controls like UpdatePanel, and a client centric approach relying on core ATLAS network features and the client side ATLAS framework and contrast the two approaches.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Wednesday, 23 August 2006 07:58:07 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 24 July 2006

Come out to our July meeting to learn about Amazon Web Services.

WHAT: July PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 07/26/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by Centerstance)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Mike Culver
Amazon Web Services Evangelist, will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services and show you the possibilities created by these innovative offerings

TOPIC:

Amazon Web Services
Learn how you can create innovation applications and launch online businesses leveraging world-class technology and content platform that powers the Amazon web site for millions of customers everyday.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Monday, 24 July 2006 00:27:47 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 23 June 2006

Come out to our June meeting to learn source control best practices.

WHAT: June PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 06/28/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza (by InfoGroup NorthWest)
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Patrick Cauldwell
After completing a Bachelor's degree in the unlikely field of East Asian Studies, Patrick Cauldwell fell into the software industry. Since then he has written tools that helped Intel localize software into 17 languages; architected large E-Commerce web sites like 800.com and gear.com while at STEP Technology, and spoken nationwide about how to build large scalable applications. Patrick is currently an architect/developer at Corillian Corporation, where he designs and develops software for online banking.

TOPIC:

Making Good Use of Source Control
We’ll discuss source control best practices, and how those practices apply to some common SCC packages. The emphasis will be on practices and procedures, not the mechanics of a particular SCC solution. Specific attention will go to how source control fits into an agile development process and continuous integration.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Friday, 23 June 2006 00:06:35 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 14 June 2006

Let's have a Nerd Dinner!

What perfect timing: Next week there's this little MSDN Event. It's on Tuesday. It's across the street from the Lloyd Center. Doesn't this sound like a great reason to get a bunch of nerds together?

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Lloyd Center Food Court (Third Floor; typically, straight out from Billy Heartbeats - 2039)
When: Tuesday, June 20, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: We're Going to Be There Anyway!

Be There and Be Square!

Wednesday, 14 June 2006 23:14:26 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Saturday, 27 May 2006

Come out to this month's meeting to learn tricks to building a reusable ASP.NET toolbox. Mark your calendar and come join the fun.

WHAT: May PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 05/31/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Rick Strahl
Rick Strahl is president of West Wind Technologies on Maui, Hawaii. The company specializes in Web and distributed application development, training and tools with focus on ASP.NET and .NET in general. Rick is author of West Wind Web Connection, a powerful and widely used Web application framework, West Wind HTML Help Builder and West Wind Web Store and Business Framework for .NET and Visual FoxPro. He also collaborates with Kevin McNeish on the Mere Mortals Framework for .NET. Rick is a Microsoft C# MVP, a frequent contributor to magazines and books and speaks frequently at professional developer conferences all over the world. He is co-publisher and co-editor of CoDe magazine. In the summer months, Rick spends his time in beautiful Hood River, Oregon to play on the river, forests and mountains.

TOPIC:

Building a reusable ASP.NET Toolbox
This session demonstrates some re-usable tools, classes and components that every Web Application should integrate. Every application needs a core set of features, like managing configuration settings, handling and reporting errors consistently, logging requests, providing application status information, displaying consistent error and information message pages, managing application cookies consistently and more. In this session I'll demonstrate a handful of useful utility classes and processes that accomplish these tasks in a reusable fashion and show how they work under the covers.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Saturday, 27 May 2006 14:22:13 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 22 May 2006

It's coming this weekend! X-Men: The Last Stand is released as of Friday and we're going to celebrate immediately.

If you would like to Fandango, click <<here>>.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner Movie
WhereCentury 16 Cedar Hills Crossing (Cedar Hills Crossing used to be Beaverton Mall)
When: Friday, May 26, 5:20 PM (Get there early if you can! It's opening night!)
Why: 'Cuz it's the coolest movie this year!

Be There and Be Square!

Monday, 22 May 2006 16:10:02 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 25 April 2006

Come out to this months meeting to hear all about Developing on Windows Mobile.

WHAT: April PADNUG Meeting
WHEN:

Wednesday 04/26/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Rory Blyth
Rory is an author, former co-host of the .NET Rocks Internet talk show. He has experience with many different platforms and languages, but his passion lies in using and helping people with .NET technologies.

TOPIC:

Developing on Windows Mobile
A Presentation on Developing on Windows Mobile.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Tuesday, 25 April 2006 22:59:07 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 19 April 2006

It's that time again! Nerd Dinner!

Can you believe the great weather we're having this April?!? Let's celebrate the coming of this wonderful spring by getting together for some crappy mall food out Lloyd Center way...

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Lloyd Center Food Court (Third Floor; typically, straight out from Billy Heartbeats - 2039)
When: Tuesday, April 25, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: Look Folks! It's Spring!

Be There and Be Square!

Wednesday, 19 April 2006 23:07:32 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 22 March 2006

Come out to this months meeting to learn some more about Atlas (Microsoft's upcoming implementation of AJAX).

The reason is that although the hype around AJAX is sure to fade, the technology itself will be around for a long time. That is, AJAX/Atlas helps solve a long-standing problem (avoiding server round-trips), and this allows web applications that are (potentially) more responsive.

WHAT: March PADNUG Meeting.
WHEN:

Wednesday 03/29/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Erik Mork
Erik was trained as a biochemist. Currently, he works for Tranxition Corporation where he is heading up development of a secret application that will change how users manage their personal data.

TOPIC:

Atlas Shrugged
A Presentation on Atlas. While Microsoft only released a preview of Atlas, it is becoming increasing clear when the next-generation of web applications are made, they will be made (at least in part) with Atlas.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Wednesday, 22 March 2006 13:11:29 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Saturday, 11 March 2006

Awesome time to have a Nerd Dinner again!   

It's that time again! Nerd Dinner!

I suppose we could wait a day and have a wonderfully nerdy Saint Patrick's Day, but hey, even some nerds do that social kinda thing on Friday nights. So, we'll just have to start a bit early and call it St. Patrick's Eve.

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Food Court (Second Floor; typically, straight out from Picture People)
When: Thursday, March 16, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: 'Cuz we can't wait for St. Pat's

Be There and Be Square!

[http://nerddinner.com/blogs/portland/archive/2006/03/10/20781.aspx]

Saturday, 11 March 2006 00:06:17 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 28 February 2006

All I can say is: Wow! Nick, you really did a great job!

For those that missed it, Nick effectively showed how the .NET Framework already supports all that is neccesary to make LINQ possible by implementing the SELECTion bit in his own namespace. Then, dazzled by switching to the packaged namespace without changing the code.

If you would like to grab the presentation and/or code examples, <<click here>>. You too will be able to write code like this one day:

    1 partial class Program {

    2   static void DemoCode() {

    3     DataContext dc = new DataContext(

    4       "server=(local);database=Northwind;Integrated Security=true");

    5 

    6     Table<Customer> customers = dc.GetTable<Customer>();

    7 

    8     var results = from customer in customers

    9             where customer.CustomerID.StartsWith("A")

   10             select customer;

   11 

   12     Show(results, "Results from DLinq Query");

   13   }

   14 }

   15 

   16 [Table(Name="Customers")]

   17 public class Customer {

   18   [Column(Id=true)]

   19   public string CustomerID;

   20 

   21   [Column]

   22   public string CompanyName;

   23 }

.NET | Developer | PADNUG | SQL
Tuesday, 28 February 2006 23:32:25 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Come out to this months meeting to learn some more about how you may be using LINQ to improve productivity in your projects.

"The LINQ Project is a codename for a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities."
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/)

Personally, I find this technology very compelling.

WHAT: February PADNUG meeting.
WHEN:

Wednesday 02/22/2006
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Nick Muhonen
Nick is a Portland area consultant with over 5 years experience in the .Net Framework. He is currently certified as both an MCT and an MCSD.

TOPIC:

How LINQ Will Improve Your Everyday Life
A Presentation on the LINQ tool-set and the upcoming .Net C# 3.0 language extensions. The topic will compare current methods of Data retrieval in ADO.Net 2.0 with the new LINQ Tools. And of course- DEMOS for the faithful!

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Wednesday, 15 February 2006 08:00:21 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 03 February 2006

Many of you are probably in the know: Chris Tavares is going to be leaving the Portland area soon. He's taken up with this little software company in the Redmond, Washington area and we want to send him off right.

Fortuantely, Chris was able to get out of a trip north for some silly house-closing deal. Folks haven't told him how nice the sidewalks are up there yet.

And if you don't get the whole Last Supper deal, please feel free to contact Ted:-)

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Food Court (Second Floor; typically, straight out from Picture People)
When: Thursday, February 9, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: Because it's ChrisT's Last Supper!

Be There and Be Square!

Friday, 03 February 2006 17:14:04 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 06 November 2005

To celebrate Jason's return, we're going to have a great big Nerd Dinner this week! Looks like Mr. Sells will be joining us, too, to hear some thoughts on Model-Driven Development. To top it off, we'll do everything we can to get Scott out one more time before he enters the world of Parenthood

My gosh it's been too long. I'm not even sure if I know where the malls are any longer.

In celebration of Mahku's return from the Skywall Realm, We need to have some serious make-up mall food, sooo...

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Squaremall Realm (a.k.a.
Washington Square Mall food court)
When: Thursday, November 10, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: To Celebrate Mahku's Sabbatical!

Be There and Be Square!

This should be fabulous!

Sunday, 06 November 2005 22:15:47 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 06 September 2005

I had an incredible nerd week last week.

Tuesday, we had the monthly Portland Nerd Dinner. Turn out was great and the conversation just kept going until the Mall was closing. Chris wasn't able to join us as one of the Sells Brothers was celebrating his birthday, but those that were there couldn't get enough.

Oh, and Portland finally has a LEGO store :-)! I got my souvenier block!

Wednesday brought the PADNUG meeting. I was looking forward to seeing Ted present again after Code Camp, but it ended up being particularly fun. Scott made an appearance and the banter between he, Ted, ChrisT[avares], and Rick was fabulous.

What really impressed me is that Ryan Williams blogged his notes on the meeting. The next best thing to being there!

If you missed out, don't forget to watch for future meeting of both Nerd Dinners and .NET User Group here or on their respective sites. This next month, the Indigo Roadshow will be visiting Portland at the Intel Jones Farm Auditorium. Registration is required for this one, so sign up now.

Tuesday, 06 September 2005 23:10:56 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Tuesday, 21 June 2005

How could I have forgotten to send my congratulations last week to Scott?!? It appears that there is a new Hanselman in the works!

Just so you know, Scott, I have a lot of Uncle Experience :-).

Tuesday, 21 June 2005 07:21:45 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 12 June 2005

As was implied, I've spent the last week+ in sunny/storming Orlando for TechEd. Unfortunately, the wireless was not working for the first three days and I gave up by that point. That could have been better, but overall, it was a great experience.

I've got emails/blogs under 800 and will be having many things to say on here this next week.

 

Sunday, 12 June 2005 08:20:12 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 24 May 2005

Just to keep you really busy, we have our PADNUG meeting on the 25th, the Visual Studio Team System Technical Training on the 26th, and TechEd starting in less than two weeks. Shortly after that, we will be looking forward to the first Northwest Code Camp

In the mean time, I want to remind you of what we have planned for the May PADNUG meeting. Many of you have now met Jason Mauer at various functions from PADNUG meetings to Nerd Dinners. His knowledge ranges from databases to DirectX.

WHAT: May PADNUG meeting.
WHEN:

Wednesday 05/25/2005
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Jason Mauer
Developer Evangelist with Microsoft covering the Pacific Northwest. He recently switched to his current role from his previous one as a development consultant with Microsoft Consulting Services, where he specialized in .NET application development and SharePoint development for the past four years. Jason has extensive experience with customizing SharePoint and has worked on some of the largest SharePoint deployments in the world.

TOPIC:

The Ins and Outs of SharePoint Development
In this presentation we will cover different opportunities for developers to build on top of the SharePoint platform. We will walk through the SharePoint stack, demonstrating different means of customization and why you may (or may not) want to adopt a certain approach. Come and learn about how you can make SharePoint a part of your development arsenal.

Jason promises some extra special swag, too :-).

Tuesday, 24 May 2005 15:39:58 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 28 April 2005

Last evening we had our monthly installment of the Portland Area .NET User Group. We had Scott Hanselman and Patrick Cauldwell speak on creating an environment of continuous integration. To borrow from the description:

Continuous Integration is more than just a fad; it's darn near required to survive anymore.

Join Patrick Cauldwell and Scott Hanselman as they talk about one of Corillian's product's build processes. They will explore NUnit, NAnt, custom NAnt Tasks, automatic reporting of errors, and unit test failures as well as Cruise Control.NET which can enable you to create an Enterprise Wide Build Dashboard for all the pointy-haired bosses to oogle at. It'll be fun, informative, and fast pace.

Specifically, they discussed several tools that they use at Corillian to build their products. The major tools were:

  • Ambient Orb - The Ambient Orb slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or kid is on instant messenger.
  • Cassini - The ASP.NET Cassini Web Server Sample is a sample web server written using the Microsoft® .NET® Framework, and demonstrates hosting ASP.NET using the ASP.NET hosting APIs (System.Web.Hosting).
  • CodeSmith - CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template-based code generator that can generate code for any ASCII-based language. CodeSmith templates use a syntax nearly identical to ASP.NET syntax so that creating templates should feel immediately familiar to ASP.NET developers.
  • CruiseControl.NET - CruiseControl.NET is an Automated Continuous Integration server, implemented using the Microsoft .NET Framework.
  • MbUnit - MbUnit is an evolutive Unit Test Framework for .Net. It provides new fixtures as well as the framework to create new ones. MbUnit is based QuickGraph, a directed graph library for C#.
  • NAnt - NAnt is a free .NET build tool. In theory it is kind of like make without make's wrinkles. In practice it's a lot like Ant.
  • NUnit - NUnit is a unit-testing framework for all .Net languages. Initially ported from JUnit, the current release, version 2.2, is the fourth major release of this xUnit based unit testing tool for Microsoft .NET. It is written entirely in C# and has been completely redesigned to take advantage of many .NET language features, for example custom attributes and other reflection related capabilities. NUnit brings xUnit to all .NET languages.
  • TestDriven.NET - TestDriven.NET makes it easy to run unit tests with a single click, anywhere in your Visual Studio solutions. It supports all versions of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET meaning you don't have to worry about compatibility issues and fully integrates with all major unit testing frameworks including NUnit, MbUnit, & MS Team System.
  • Tree Surgeon - Tree Surgeon is a .NET development tree generator. Just give it the name of your project, and it will set up a development tree for you in seconds. More than that, your new tree has years worth of accumulated build engineering experience built right in.
  • Zanebug - Zanebug is an advanced tool for comprehensive unit and integration testing.

If these tools are not enough for you to satisfy your cravings, visit Scott's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for more.

Thursday, 28 April 2005 09:54:43 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 19 April 2005

As I mentioned here, I'm "hearding the nerds" tonight at Washington Square. With some luck, Jason will have acquired some Visual Studio 2005 disks to pass around :-)!

As it happens, it looks to be a nice evening, too. If folks are up to it, we might have a bit of Nerd Drinks after dinner, too. It'd be nice to spend a little time at McMenamins' Riverwood Pub - just a thought ;-).

In any event, it's time again to Be There and Be Square!

Tuesday, 19 April 2005 09:07:42 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 13 April 2005

This has been a hilarious set of videos that Scott and Rory have put together. They've finally made it to TechEd and it looks like they will sleep right through the keynote. The expression on Scott's face near the end is well worth the viewing.

I have to agree with others:

  1. This series should continue to be a part of our Dev food indefinately. Make More!
  2. A DVD would be an ideal gift for the nerd one loves
  3. That DVD should include a lengthy section of outtakes

Scott mentions the release of this here and you can view it here. Let's hope they take this beyond just the TechEd video series and make this a more regular feature of our blog experience!

Wednesday, 13 April 2005 08:33:57 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Sunday, 10 April 2005

If you missed the chance last month to meet Jason Mauer, Microsoft's new Developer Evangelist (formerly Jim Blizzard, the father of the Portland Nerd Dinner), then you really need to come this month. This guy is Great! He's going to rock our development world in all new ways.

So, with that quick introduction, let's all have a Nerd Dinner!!

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
Where: Washington Square Mall food court
When: Tuesday, April 19, starting around 6:30 PM
Why: 'Cuz it's Spring, baby and we've got a new DE in town!

Be there and be square.

Spread the word!

Sunday, 10 April 2005 23:48:18 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]

Hello Everyone! Spring is in the air!

It's once again, time to let everyone know what we have planned for the PADNUG meeting. I have to say how excited I am for this months presentation. Not only will the subject be interesting, but I've seen a lot of presentations from both of these gentlemen and know they are great to see and hear.

WHAT: April PADNUG meeting.
WHEN:

Wednesday 04/27/2005
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf
6:30 p.m. Presentation

WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Patrick Cauldwell and Scott Hanselman

TOPIC:

Continuous Integration is more than just a fad; it's darn near required to survive anymore.
Join Patrick Cauldwell and Scott Hanselman as they talk about one of Corillian's product's build processes. They will explore NUnit, NAnt, custom NAnt Tasks, automatic reporting of errors, and unit test failures as well as Cruise Control.NET which can enable you to create an Enterprise Wide Build Dashboard for all the pointy-haired bosses to oogle at. It'll be fun, informative, and fast pace.

Clear your calendar now! You really want to be here for this one.

Sunday, 10 April 2005 23:22:50 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 30 March 2005

My gosh! I can't believe our very own Rory Blyth is ready for the big step. It's been wonderful watching him grow from a timid young blogger into an internationally known blogger extrodinaire. Now, he's ready to take that final step to completely fulfill his life.

During their little vacation to Fiji, he asked Aydika the question. Although he doesn't explicitly say so, I think we can presume she said "yes," too.

Great big warm and fuzzy Congratulations to you Rory! You've made an excellent decision!

Wednesday, 30 March 2005 06:38:10 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Saturday, 19 February 2005

Hello Everyone!

It's time to let everyone know what we have planned for the February PADNUG (http://www.padnug.org) meeting. As has been the case for the last few months, meetings have moved to the **NEW LOCATION**. Please make a note of it!

WHAT: February PADNUG meeting.
WHEN: Wednesday 02/23/2005
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf (http://www.3leaf.com)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
**WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
( http://www.capital.ous.edu/directions.html)
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Chris Tavares

TOPIC: Microsoft Enterprise Library (formerly App Blocks)
Chris Tavares will talk about the MS Enterprise Library: Ever felt that you've done this code before? Enterprise Library is the new version of the Microsoft Application Blocks, providing implementations of common features like logging, exception handling, data access, and more. We'll look at what Enterprise Library provides, how to extend it, and what the differences are from the previous Application Blocks.

Saturday, 19 February 2005 23:52:34 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 10 February 2005

I guess it was bound to happen... Our Nerd Dinner Bell, Jim Blizzard is well on his way to his new home in Tampa, Florida.

As you can see to the right, he's already beginning to look the part of an old beach guy with his new, thick glasses. Hey, if you look closely at the far temple of the glasses, you'll make out the tape holding them together.

Jim, we're going to miss you around here. I'm just so pleased that we live in a time where we can keep track of what's happening in your life through blog, email, chat, and whatever else you find yourself involved with.

It has been an honor and a privilege to know you here in the Portland area.

Folks in Tampa, it's time you learn what it's like to be caught up in a Blizzard. Get ready for some seriously crappy mall food!

Travel well, Jim. :-(

Thursday, 10 February 2005 22:43:37 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [2]
# Saturday, 05 February 2005

EMERGENCY NOTICE: Jim is leaving early - The Nerd Dinner will be on February 10th!

What: Portland Nerd Dinner
When: Thursday, February 10, 2005, starting around 6:30 PM.
Where: The Lloyd Center food court
Why: Because (sniff) this is it for Jim...

As mentioned on Chris' site, if you would like to contribute to the finale, either financially or personally, contact me.

Saturday, 05 February 2005 23:28:13 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 25 January 2005

Hello Everyone! Welcome to 2005!

It's time to let everyone know what we have planned for the January PADNUG (http://www.padnug.org) meeting. As has been the case for the last couple of months, meetings have moved to the **NEW LOCATION**. Please make a note of it!

WHAT: January PADNUG meeting.
WHEN: Wednesday 01/26/2005
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf (http://www.3leaf.com)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
**WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
( http://www.capital.ous.edu/directions.html)
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon
The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.
WHO:

Scott Swigart
(
http://www.swigartconsulting.com/)

Scott spends his time consulting, authoring, and speaking about the convergence of current and emerging technologies. He believes this is partially a result of having worked with a very wide range of technologies over his career. Beginning with Commodore 64 programming at the age of 12, then writing hardware diagnostics for UNIX systems in C++, moving into windows desktop, Web, and component development, and finally through XML, .NET, Web service, development, he has seen how technology evolves over time. Today, he focuses on helping organizations get the most out of today's technology, and prepare to leverage emerging technology as a way to be more competitive.

TOPIC: What's So Smart About Smart Client?

In this presentation, Scott will examine design criteria that factor in to choosing a Web or Smart Client implementation. You will then see how technologies like the Smart Client Offline Application Block, and the Application Updater Block combine to provide Smart Client functionality today. The presentation will finish with a look into the future at the compelling Smart Client functionality that Visual Studio 2005 will provide.

Plan to be there and enjoy the presentation. We'll be looking for you!

Tuesday, 25 January 2005 00:25:10 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 14 January 2005

I just can't believe it... the Father of the Portland Nerd Dinner is going to be leaving us. Jim, it has been an honor and privilege to get to know you and you will be missed here in the Northwest.

Tampa, get ready for the Blizzard of your lifetime! And learn to like crappy mall food!

P.S. Almost forgot - Big Congratulations on your quick house sale!!

Friday, 14 January 2005 22:43:28 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Wednesday, 29 December 2004

Here's an additional idea: Many employers and organizations have programs to match charitable contributions. Check with yours. I'll be able to double donations that I make because of my employer's matching program.

Note that Amazon has Amazon.com is now providing the ability to donate through 1-Click.

As we watch the number of casualties rise, we can see that there will be no end to the need any time soon. Anything that can add to the relief is worth doing.

Stuart Celarier's list of agencies that one may consider donating through:

Wednesday, 29 December 2004 09:54:12 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Monday, 27 December 2004

My buddy Scott Hanselman and his coworker (and often destination of referrals on my blog) Greg Hughes have a great idea: donate all of one's Google AdSense revenue to the relief efforts in South Asia.

I would say that one doesn't need to restrict one's self to just AdSense, but that is a great starting point. Further, Greg and Scott are beginning a campaign to encourage Google to help automate the process for users of AdSense.

Do the world a favor: Participate, Donate, and Contact Google along with all of us. It's worth it!

Update: Stuart Celarier has a great list of other agencies that one may consider, too:

Monday, 27 December 2004 22:42:06 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [2]
# Sunday, 26 December 2004

Today's news from south Asia is a monumental reminder of how precious life can be. Seldom will you see me make such a strong suggestion for getting involved, but this deserves it.

Take a few moments and visit the Red Cross site's donation page and give a little to the International Response Fund. Heck, give a lot. You can afford it.

Powerful earthquake, tsunamis strike South Asia, leaving thousands dead, injured and missing

Sunday, December 26, 2004 — The largest earthquake to strike the globe since 1964 has caused devastating tsunami waves that have killed thousands in south Asia. The 8.9-magnitude quake hit December 26 off the coast of Indonesia, triggering these extremely large waves that have brought massive flooding, damage and loss of life in the region.

Waves as high as 20 feet have crashed into the coastal areas near the Bay of Benegal. Among the worst affected countries are Sri Lanka and India, as well as Indonesia, Maldives and Thailand. Reports are that thousands of people are missing, and it is possible that the number of dead may tragically rise in the coming days.

International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in south Asia have begun to mobilize staff and volunteers to affected areas to assist with the immediate needs. Emergency assessment and first-aid teams have already reached some of the affected areas.

“The situation is fluid, with so many people affected in so many areas of southeast Asia, and it is likely that relief teams there may need many different types of assist in the coming days,” said Matthew Parry of the International Disaster Response Unit.

The American Red Cross continues to maintain contact with its partners on the ground and is prepared to support operations with relief supplies, financial assistance or personnel as requested by our sister International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies there.

You can help those affected by this crisis and countless others around the world each year by making a financial gift to the American Red Cross International Response Fund, which will provide immediate relief and long-term support through supplies, technical assistance, and other support to those in need. Call 1-800-HELP NOW or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish). Contributions to the International Response Fund may be sent to your local American Red Cross chapter or to the American Red Cross International Response Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, DC 20013. Internet users can make a secure online contribution by visiting www.redcross.org.

Update: Stuart Celarier has a great list of other agencies that one may consider, too:

Sunday, 26 December 2004 19:56:09 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Monday, 06 December 2004

Hello All Portland .NET-ers!

I wanted to let everyone know what we have planned for the December PADNUG (http://www.padnug.org) meeting. Due to a scheduling conflict with our regular venue, meetings have moved to a **NEW LOCATION**. Please make a note of it!

WHAT: December PADNUG meeting.
WHEN: Thursday, 12/09/2004
6:00 p.m. Pizza, Sponsored by 3Leaf (http://www.3leaf.com)
6:30 p.m. Presentation
**WHERE: PCC Auditorium at Capital Center
(http://www.capital.ous.edu/directions.html)
18640 NW Walker Road
Beaverton, Oregon

The auditorium is in room 1508 through entrance B. There is a $2 parking fee. The kiosk for paying for parking is located between entrances B and C.

WHO: Stuart Celarier, Owner - Fern Creek Corporation
(http://www.ferncrk.com)

Stuart is a consultant, course author, and instructor. He recently served as technical lead and author of a Web services course for Microsoft. Stuart is also editor for the Longhorn Developer FAQ on MSDN.

TOPIC: Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture

There is a huge movement in the software industry towards Web services and service-orientation. What is the essence of a service? What values do services provide to a software organization? How do you organize and combine services into systems that realize the full benefit of service-orientation?

These are increasingly important issues for developers and architects working on the .NET Framework. Today you create Web services using ASMX. Looking forward to Indigo - the communications pillar of Longhorn - service-orientation is at the core of all communication. That will profoundly change on how software is architected, designed, implemented and deployed. Service-oriented architecture can guide your use of Web services today, and prepare you for understanding and creating tomorrow's software.

Important topic and excellent local speaker! Look forward to seeing everyone there!

Monday, 06 December 2004 12:43:55 (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 17 September 2004

Here is my 4¢ on the rate information (zipped version) gathered at the August PADNUG meeting:

  • First, by no means was this a scientifically based survey – neither by methodology nor by sample.
  • As was pointed out by Ken, there was no differentiation between contractors and employees. Several of the respondents provided their hourly wage and some included their benefits as part of that number.
  • Also called out was the impression that VB rates were higher than C#. Well, when you see the actual data, you will find that there was only one person that indicated C# as their tool and I believe that person was an employee. There were eight people that wrote “.NET,” four people indicating “ASP.NET,” and nine that fell into the “other” category. Many of those persons are likely using C# and would have changed the balance substantially.
  • The “years of experience” written on the cards was interpreted differently by the audience. Some put their total programming experience, some, their experience with a given tool. Further, ten people did not provide the information. To provide more accurate data, we would need to better define that category.

If there is enough interest in PADNUG, we may want to formalize this survey and retake it with a larger group. Please feel free to let me know your interest level and we can go from there.

Friday, 17 September 2004 23:40:49 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]