MikeFitz with overflow bit set…

Our main speaker for QMSDNUG’s February meeting is Robert Crago who will take us through the 3D features of WPF.  But first…

Joel Pobar : Visualisations of myschool.edu.au data

Joel Pobar will briefly show us how he used F# to relate disparate datasets and create his amazing visualisations of myschool.edu.au data.

Robert Crago, Revelation Computing :
An Introduction to WPF 3D

Robert Crago is a long-standing QMSDNUG member and freelance developer here in Brisbane.  Robert has been working with WPF since mid 2008.  WPF is finding steadily-increasing use in development projects where the UI is important and supports a complete 3D engine “out of the box”.  To his knowledge the 3D aspects of WPF have not yet been explored at an MSDN meeting here in Brisbane.

This talk will cover both the concepts and code you need to get started with 3D in WPF.

1. What you can do in 3D
2. 3D basics using Expression Blend
3. A simple 3D example without writing code
4. Making a scene
5. Using 3D in Line of Business apps
6. Applying 3D to a real world example

RSVP:
All welcome.  Bring your colleagues.
An early rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

… then more developers might avoid basic mistakes and identify performance problems BEFORE deployment.

At QMSDNUG’s November meeting, Peter Ward will show us how to ensure, when it comes to SQL Server, noone can say “ur doin’ it wrong.”

Peter writes:
Bon Jovi had a hit song in the 90’s with a chorus that went something along the lines of ‘The server is running slow, and you’re to blame.  You give SQL Server a bad name’.  If you look at most Information Technology courses today this parody often rings true.  There are all sorts of exciting (and ‘sexier’) subjects such as Object Oriented Programming and Programming Abstraction but somehow the subject ‘SQL Server 101′ has been overlooked.

As a result there are set of common mistakes that are made time and time again by developers that cause an application to negatively affect the performance of SQL Server.  Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will walk through some of the common Gotcha’s when developing an application that accesses SQL Server and how to identify possible performance issues prior to deployment.

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A Patterns & Practices double-header for QMSDNUG’s October meeting…

Neil Macdonald, David Sinnathamby and Patrick Nolan from TechnologyOne Plus : Real World WPF

Many times members have said to me, “It’s good to learn about new and upcoming technologies, but it would be even better to see them being used in a real live project.“  Well, thanks to the team at TechnologyOne Plus, this month’s QMSDNUG meeting will showcase a live one.

TechnologyOne Plus is undertaking a multi-million dollar development using WPF, Prism and a number of the latest Microsoft Patterns, Practices and Tools.

Come and see the innards of a real-world application of WPF.  Hear why they have chosen the path they have and see the challenges that they have encountered.

Bill Chesnut from Stargate Consulting : An introduction to the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) 2.0 Toolkit

We are fortunate to have Microsoft MVP Bill Chesnut (a.k.a. “BizTalk Bill”) in town for one night only and we are taking the opportunity to hold a joint meeting with BrizTalk, the Brisbane BizTalk Community.  Bill will present an introduction to the ESB 2.0 Toolkit included with BizTalk Server 2009, focussing on the concept of itineraries.

More about Bill

Bill is also the founder of the Melbourne BizTalk User Group. His 25 years in the IT industry include 12 years of Windows development, including numerous enterprise projects using Microsoft C/C++, Visual Basic and SQL Server.  More recently, Bill has been driving various application integration projects using VB.NET, ASP.NET, XML, XSLT, SQL Server and BizTalk Server to connect a variety of Microsoft Business Solutions applications with other systems.  Bill is very involved in the Microsoft User Group Community as leader of the Melbourne .Net User Group.  Check out his blog at http://www.biztalkbill.com!

RSVP:
All welcome.  Bring your colleagues.
An early rsvp by email to mike@fitzsimon.com.au will help with planning.

This month’s QMSDNUG meeting is fortunate to be addressed by Joel Pobar in a re-run of his well-received Tech.Ed Australia 2009 DEV450 session.

Microsoft, Google, Netflix, Amazon and more, are using smart algorithms that leverage ever increasing clock cycles, and a plethora of user generated data, to find patterns that derive value.  They’ve brought smart software to the attention of the software development mainstream: PageRank, Machine Learning, Support Vector Machines, classification techniques, search and rank, and more.

We explore some of these algorithms and their implementations using a new functional programming language for the Microsoft .NET platform, called F#.  It has features and techniques that make working with data and building smarts much easier.

We’ll start with a walk through of the language, then get right down to hacking out smart algorithms that you can leverage in your own software.

Date: Tuesday 15 Sep 2009
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 our website at www.qmsdnug.org.

———————
Update 15 Sep 09
Joel has an excellent blog post, Why F#? (TechEd ‘09 DEV450) with links to the source code and the PPT slides used in his presentation to QMSDNUG.

A double-header for this month’s meeting…

• First up, Anthony Borton on: Eliminating No-repro Bugs,
  How Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Beta 1 can drastically reduce the “find and fix” time for bugs that are raised by your testers.
• Then, Scott Barnes, Microsoft, US: What Just Happened to Silverlight & Expression!
  This is the Brisbane leg of Scott’s Australia-wide Silverlight and Expression 3 roadshow.

PLUS! See below for details on how QMSDNUG members can SAVE $500 on Tech.Ed Registration.

Date: Tuesday 21 July 2009
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 our website at www.qmsdnug.org.  (At least they were until we encountered some difficulties with the hosting provider. Check back soon, or check here on my blog, mike.brisgeek.com.)

Happy coding …

Mike Fitzsimon

Anthony Borton, EnhanceALM: Eliminating No-repro Bugs

Anthony examines the recently released Microsoft Visual Studio® Team Test 2010 Beta 1 product and how it can drastically reduce the “find and fix” time for bugs that are raised by your testers. Today, significant time is often wasted trying to reproduce bugs with limited success and labelling bugs as “No-repro” can be frustrating for both testers and developers.

Microsoft’s new Test and Lab Manager Application allows testers to create, manage and execute tests quickly and easily in a dedicated user interface. Using Test Cases, Test Suites and Test Plans, testers will find the new features allow them to better participate as a full team member in Visual Studio Team System.
The session will touch on the following features of the Visual Studio Team Test 2010 product:

• Microsoft Test Runner
• Microsoft Test and Lab Manager application
• Bug Reporting and Data Collectors
• Unit Testing
• Coded UI Test
• Web Test
• Load Test

About Anthony Borton
Anthony is a Development Process Specialist for Enhance ALM Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in Application Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. He has been working with Visual Studio Team System full-time since 2005. Anthony has worked with a variety of companies ranging in size from just 3 employees up to some of Australia’s largest companies and financial institutions. Anthony is the lead Microsoft Technical Readiness Instructor in Australia for Microsoft Visual Studio and has presented at the Microsoft launch events for both VSTS2005 and VSTS2008. Anthony is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Certified Scrum Master and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. He is also the president of the QLD VSTS users group and maintains a blog at http://www.myvstsblog.com

Actually I have to admit that the title of Anthony’s talk made me think of this excellent xkcd cartoon:

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What have I done now?  Looking through the site stats I came across an inbound link from www.tsa.gov - the TSA or Transportation Security Administration!  Did I accidentally blog about that time I was strip-searched at LAX?  No?  Ok, well forget I said anything about that then.

Like any sensible organisation, the TSA operates a (Blogger) blog and welcomes feedback from its clients / customers / victims / the travelling public.

A recent post reviewed the TSA’s comment policy and chose to link to one of my more popular posts, Simple HTML for Formatting Blogger Comments, as an example of how to include hyperlinks in comments.

When linking to another blog or webpage, make sure there is no offensive content on that page. Also, long URLs knock our format out of whack, so we have to reject comments containing long URLs. There are a couple of fixes for this. Go to tinyurl.com. It is a free service that will convert your long URLs into a much shorter URL. Also, you can go here to learn how to hyperlink.

Not much of a link, is it?  Using the single word “here” as hyperlink anchor text guarantees the bare minimum of Google-Juice.  Still, a small drip from a large tap is better than nothing.

I also note that the TSA probably didn’t have to look too hard to find me.  As I write this, I’m in the #1 position on Google results for “Blogger comment formatting”.

I take my ability to write Valid XHTML seriously.  Consequently it has annoyed me that in some recent posts where I have included the online petition widget from GetUp!, my code was no longer valid XHTML.  This afternoon, I took steps to fix it.

Here is the code supplied by GetUp! which uses the now-deprecated <embed> tag.

<div><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,28,0"
 width="300" height="250">
<param name="movie"
 value="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"></param>
<param name="quality" value="high">
<embed src="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"
 quality="high"
 pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 width="300" height="250">
</embed></param></object></div>

By adding the correct parameters to the <object> tag, my code is now valid.

<div><object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,28,0"
 width="300" height="250">
<param name="movie"
 value="http://www.getup.org.au/flash/widget.swf"></param>
<param name="quality" value="high"></param>
<param name="pluginspage"
 value="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">
</param></object></div>

I’m no longer annoyed.

———————
See also: Valid XHTML to Embed a YouTube Video

This month, our QMSDNUG meeting is on Tuesday Dec 9 (a week early to avoid the Christmas rush) and one lucky attendee will walk away with the BEST Christmas Present EVER.

This month’s topic:
A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System 2010 presented by Anthony Borton.

Synopsis:
During this session, Anthony will examine a few of his favourite new features on show in the latest CTP release of Visual Studio Team System 2010.  You’ll see the new Architecture Explorer, layer diagrams, branch visualisation, gated check-ins as well as some great improvements to the team build environment.

About Anthony:
Anthony Borton is a Development Process Specialist for AB Training Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in software development process and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.
He is the lead Microsoft Technical Readiness Instructor in Australia for Microsoft Visual Studio and has presented at the Microsoft launch events for both VSTS2005 and VSTS2008.  Anthony is a Microsoft MVP (Team System), a Certified Scrum Master and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau.  He is also the president of the QLD VSTS users group.

Lucky door prize:
Anthony will be giving away a full retail copy of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite with a 12mth MSDN Premium Subscription valued at over AUD$19,000 rrp.  Best Christmas Present Ever!

Date: Tuesday 9 December
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 our website at www.qmsdnug.org.

Finally, many thanks to Paul Stovell for November’s Rich Client Pattern Safari.  The Past Meetings tab on the QMSDNUG website contains Paul’s links, slide deck and code samples.

Happy Code-cutting,

Mike Fitzsimon

———————
More Queensland Developer Events…

———————
Update:

Anthony Borton taking us on a lap around VSTS 2010

Anthony presenting Andrew Pardoen with his copy of VSTS 2008. Congratulations Andrew!

And while I wasn’t looking, Google released Chrome (BETA), a new f*#&ing browser.

Rob Cottingham at Noise to Signal captured the first reaction of many web developers:

Who said Facebook is just for the youngsters?  I don’t know when the Australian War Memorial created its Facebook page but a couple of days ago I saw this advertisement on my Facebook news feed.

Clicking on the ad took me to an Event page for the ANZAC Day Dawn Service at the War Memorial’s parade ground.  The Event page has an “Export” button so you can add the Dawn Service to your Outlook calendar.

Yes, I’ll be attending, and then it’s off to Code Camp Oz in Wagga Wagga.