MikeFitz with overflow bit set…

Two fascinating topics for this month’s QMSDNUG meeting…

Patrick Klug, Novamind
A brief showcase of some fun WPF animations

and a look into how NovaMind used these animations in the new NovaMind Presenter.  Patrick will briefly share lessons about animation performance, shader usage and animation best practices along with some open-source project recommendations.

About Patrick Klug
Patrick is one of the guys behind the Windows version of the mind mapping software NovaMind (www.novamind.com) and is very comfortable with C#, GDI+ and WPF.

Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien, Soul Solutions
Kinecting The Dots - Developing with the Kinect SDK

The Microsoft Kinect holds the Guiness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever, selling 8 million units in the first 2 months.  With the recent release of the official SDK, you are the controller, with the ability to change the face of future applications.  Learn how to take advantage of depth sensing, skeletal tracking and speech recognigion in a sub $200 device.

We’ll cover some more advanced skeleton functions, integration with the XNA game engine and gestures.  Learn how to build a compelling application using the Kinect and your existing .Net skills.

About John and Bronwen
John and Bronwen are just back (a couple of hours ago) from the Build conference in Los Angeles.  They are Certified Specialists with many years of experience in a wide range of Microsoft Technologies, including Bing Maps, Windows Live, SQL Server and now, the Kinect SDK.
See the Soul Solutions Blog (www.soulsolutions.com.au/Blog.aspx) for more of their adventures.

Date: Tuesday 20 September 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00, finishing approx 19:30
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 28, 400 George St, Brisbane.

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
On this occasion, please do NOT respond via e-mail.  Registration via Eventbrite is essential at http://qmsdnugsep2011.eventbrite.com.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

At this month’s QMSDNUG meeting, we are fortunate to have Brendan Kowitz along to repeat his presentation to the recent DDD!Day in Sydney.

Brendan Kowitz, Readify
Building Windows Phone 7 Apps for the Enterprise

We already know that Mobile Phones are a powerful tool in the hands of the right people.  In this session we look at how we can use the Windows Phone 7 platform to integrate with the greater enterprise to deliver precise, clear, visual information to key stakeholders who are on the move.

We’ll also look at strategies around how to make data available by leveraging Windows Azure as well as how it can be consumed in respect to importance and urgency.  Lastly we’ll discuss all those important questions around delivering our enterprise apps to the right people.

About Brendan Kowitz
Brendan is a Senior Developer working for Readify.  All things .NET, Web, Mobile, HTML5, WindowsPhone, Project Management and Leadership.
His blog is at kowitz.net.

Date: Tuesday 19 July 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00, finishing approx 19:30
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 28, 400 George St, Brisbane.

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
On this occasion, please do NOT respond via e-mail.  Registration via Eventbrite is essential at http://qmsdnugjul2011.eventbrite.com.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

An MVC 3 double-header!
Two excellent and entertaining speakers this month.  A walkthrough of MVC 3 and then a look at how it can be applied to mobile devices.

Leon Bambrick and Joseph Cooney
Asp.net MVC 3 — “Third time’s a charm”

First up, Leon will run from the basics of MVC3 into some advanced scaffolding scenarios, with hard-won lessons from real world usage.  A transcendent experience is expected, though not guaranteed.  There’ll be free hugs for silverlight devs, as Leon welcomes them to his html and javascript world.

Update 21-Jun-11: Excellent turnout.  Photo courtesy @soulsolutions.

Then, using the MVC fundamentals described earlier by Leon, Joseph will show us how to create an ASP.NET MVC application targeting a variety of mobile devices, using MVC Razor, C#, jQuery Mobile and modern CSS.

If time allows, we might see an MVC media-centre add-in to allow you to control your Windows Media Centre application.

About the speakers
Leon Bambrick is a software development consultant, and miscreant based in Brisbane.
Joseph Cooney is also a software development consultant and Microsoft MVP based in Brisbane.
Leon and Joseph are both currently working for Microsoft Australia.

Date: Tuesday 21 June 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00, finishing approx 19:30
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 28, 400 George St, Brisbane.  Note our new meeting location; watch the QMSDNUG website for details of new entry/security requirements.

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

At this month’s QMSDNUG meeting,
Joel’s Back!
Regulars will recall Joel Pobar’s excellent presentations on F#, particularly using it to relate disparate datasets.  His low key, casual style belies the cutting-edge nature of the work he does.  Now that he has had opportunities to put it all into commercial practice, Joel is ready to share his experience.

Joel Pobar:
some high performance, high throughput .NET stuff he’s been working on with an “unnamed Investment Bank”

“From a clock cycle, to the loading and running of a managed .NET assembly over multiple CPU cores: come and have a bit of fun exploring the binary world of CPU caches, bus bandwidth, and instruction sets, abstracting right through to code execution, JIT compilation and managed execution.  We’ll cobble all this together and walk through some high performance, high throughput scenarios borrowed from the finance domain.”

About Joel Pobar
Joel describes himself as a .NET nerd and F# evangelical.  Learn more at his blog, callvirt.net/blog/.

Date: Tuesday 17 May 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00, finishing approx 19:30
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 28, 400 George St, Brisbane.  Note our new meeting location; watch the QMSDNUG website for details of new entry/security requirements.

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

We’re going out with a BANG!  A double-bunger for April, our last meeting at Waterfront Place^*.

Damian Maclennan, Readify
Turbo charging Coded UI Tests in Visual Studio 2010

Patterns for creating flexible and maintainable UI tests
With Visual Studio 2010 came a suite of testing tools including CodedUI Tests, a UI automation and testing framework.  These tools, while powerful, have a number of pitfalls which can trip up teams on agile projects.

In this session Damian will demonstrate some patterns for creating flexible and maintainable UI tests using Visual Studio Coded UI for testing without tears.

About Damian Maclennan
Damian Maclennan is a technologist and a strong advocate of agile project management and engineering practices such as TDD, CI and automated deployment.  As a Principal Consultant with Readify he regularly works with teams looking to improve their skills and processes and provides consulting, training and mentoring on the .NET platform.

Andrew Coates, Microsoft
LightSwitch

LightSwitch is a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to easily create business applications for the desktop or the cloud.  LightSwitch simplifies the development process by letting you concentrate on the business logic, while LightSwitch handles the common tasks for you.

In this demo-heavy session, you will see, end-to-end, how to build and deploy a data-centric business application using LightSwitch.  We’ll also go beyond the basics of creating simple screens over data and demonstrate how to create screens with more advanced capabilities.

About Andrew Coates
Andrew is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in Australia.  Before joining Microsoft, Andrew was an independent consultant specialising in database applications using Microsoft technologies including SQL Server, Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office.
Andrew’s wide range of experience includes telecommunications, SMB inventory, dispatch and accounting systems, using both web and rich client front ends.  He has developed and delivered class room training and has mentored a number of developers in Visual FoxPro and SQL Server technologies.
Andrew has spoken at international conferences on Geographical Information Systems, health statistics and database maintenance and is a regular presenter at TechEd both locally and internationally.  An MCPD, MCTS and MCSD, Andrew also holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering.  Andrew blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat

Date: Thursday 14 Apr 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00 (with 2 excellent speakers, we might be finishing a little later than usual.)
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

———————
^* Yes, after meeting monthly at Microsoft’s office in Waterfront Place for over 12 years, we are moving.  Actually, Microsoft are moving and have kindly agreed to allow user groups to continue meeting on their premises.  Our May meeting will be in their new office at 400 George St.

At this month’s QMSDNUG meeting we are pleased to hear from MVPs John O’Brien and Bronwen Zande, excellent speakers and always innovative with combining leading-edge technologies.

Bronwen Zande and John O’Brien, Soul Solutions:
Using .Net tools to visualise natural disasters

Australia is a country of extreme climates and is no stranger to devastating natural disasters. Join John and Bronwen as they show you ways you can utilise your current .net skills to prepare, monitor and analyse available information using historical flood maps, social media feeds, flickr photos and nearmap imagery.

Date: Tuesday 15 Mar 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

Welcome back to the first QMSDNUG meeting for 2011.

Sly Gryphon, Readify:
Web sign in with Windows Identity Foundation

This month’s presentation will introduce you to using Windows Identity Foundation to make your existing ASP.NET web applications claims-aware.  The WIF library from Microsoft makes it easy to provide federated access to your application, and talk will include a demonstration of implementing web single sign on (SSO) as a relying party

The evening will also include a brief overview of related security technologies from Microsoft, including Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and CardSpace.

About Sly Gryphon
Sly is a Senior Consultant at Readify, and has been working with .NET since being trained on the beta in December 2001.  He has over 15 years experience with the web, and has worked on some of Australia’s largest web sites.

Sly has recently moved from NSW to Queensland, and this will be his first presentation at QMSDNUG.  You can find Sly’s blog at http://sgryphon.wordpress.com/.

Date: Tuesday 15 Feb 2011
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

This month, partly due to room booking clashes but also because developers can never know too much about SQL Server, a joint meeting with QSSUG, the Qld SQL Server User Group.

Peter Ward, WARDY IT Solutions: A Quick Look at SQL Server Denali

This month we will take a look at the next release of Microsoft SQL Server, code-named “Denali”.  With the release of CTP1 it is now possible to share a number of these new and exciting features and demonstrate how these features will assist organisations to manage mission-critical solutions through a highly scalable and available platform.

In this presentation you will get an overview of some of the key new features in this release including SQL Server AlwaysOn and the new Column-based query accelerator as well as a number of other enhancements.

About Peter Ward
Peter is the Chief Technical Architect for WARDY IT Solutions, a consulting and training company specialising in Microsoft SQL Server solutions.  Peter is an active member in the Australian SQL Server community and President of the Queensland SQL Server User Group.  He is a highly regarded speaker at SQL Server events and a sought after SQL Server consultant and trainer, providing solutions for some of the largest SQL Server sites in Australia.  Peter has been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his technical excellence and commitment to the SQL Server Community.

Peter is an active member in the Australian SQL Server community and President of the Queensland SQL Server User Group.  In the last year Peter was a speaker for Tech-Ed North America, New Zealand and Australia.  He was also a Spotlight speaker for the SQL Pass Community Summit, the largest SQL Server event in the world.

Date: Thursday 16 Dec 2010
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

An always-entertaining speaker and a meaty topic for this month’s meeting on Tuesday Sept 21.

Joseph Cooney: Hidden Gems of the Windows Operating System for Developers

Come along to this session and learn about two interesting technologies for Windows developers that are hardly known outside of Redmond.  They’ve both been around since Windows 2000, are fundamental parts of technologies that you use every day and both are fast!  Can you guess what the two mystery technologies are?

Find out this month at QMSDNUG.

About The Presenter: Joseph Cooney
To find out more about about Joseph’s skills, interests (and sense of humour) check out his blog at JCooney.NET.

Date: Tuesday 21 Sept 2010
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.

A double-header for QMSDNUG’s April meeting with two speakers who are definitely worth going out of our way for.

Paul Stovell: Aspect Oriented Programming

AOP allows you to separate the concerns of your code and to change the behaviour of existing objects.  In this session we will look at three ways of utilizing AOP techniques from .NET: using PostSharp, Castle Windsor Interceptors, and the Microsoft patterns & practices Policy Injection Application Block.  We will dive into the .NET runtime technologies that enable AOP, and look at some useful scenarios in which it can be used.

Solon Edmunds: Experiences with Agile

Agile encompasses a lot of things these days, a lot of it marketing .. some of which resembles miracle cures.

But in the real world, it takes time to learn new skills - they don’t just fall out of the sky and land in your lap like some people wish they would!  And both organisations and software development are complex, so evolving them is a process, and it’s useful to understand this and plan accordingly.

Solon will be happy to share some of his philosophies, anecdotes, and recommendations he has developed over a decade of implementing and customising agile processes in development houses.

Date: Tuesday 20 April 2010
Time: 17:30 for 18:00
Location: Microsoft Brisbane office, Level 9, Waterfront Place, 1 Eagle St, Brisbane

RSVP
All welcome. Bring your colleagues.
If you haven’t already done so, an immediate rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

These details are also on QMSDNUG’s website at www.qmsdnug.org.