Recent .NET User Group Sessions

The presenters will develop a simple line of business application in both Flex and Silverlight, the two leading Rich Internet Application (RIA) development environments. These applications will show:

• Basic page design and layout
• Data entry and validation process
• Communications back to the server

From this, the attendee will be able to compare the advantages of these two RIA environments side by side.

Silverlight is Microsoft's new cross-platform browser plug-in. This provides RIA user experiences utilising core dot NET common language runtime functionality within the browser. This means that windows style applications are able to run from within the browser. Silverlight also supports many rich media display options, such as vector graphics, animation and audiovisual playback.

Silverlight is radically changing the RIA landscape. Currently there are 1.5 million Silverlight downloads a day, this technology will be used by NBC for internet streaming video coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games.

Silverlight competes in the same space as Adobe Flash / Flex.

Presenting the Silverlight component of the presentation will be Greg Harris, an independent consultant/developer specialising in Microsoft tools. His recent focus has been on the new Silverlight tool set. Greg will be sharing knowledge recently acquired at conferences during March.

Presenting the Flex component of the presentation will be Flex experts Peter Davey and Max Nyman. Peter and Max have extensive Flex development experience in Australia and internationally.

About
The facebook platform is currently valued at 10 billion dollars with over 40 million users registering within the last year alone. It is predicted to overtake myspace in the next year or so.
In my work as the National Technical Director at EuroRSCG we’re required to meet an increasing demand to develop applications for social networks such as Facebook. This is because although internet and online advertising is still the heart of most ‘online’ business . Today industry leaders in marketing such as Sony, Tony Ferguson and Veet are recognizing that the real ‘gold’ in advertising is not through pushing end users to use a product that they know little about or bringing a banner in front of their face but through word of mouth.
The reality of the matter is if my friends have added a facebook application and have sent me action item on facebook. The psychology of ignoring such an action item would be anti-social. This has been the driving factor in the success to facebook applications.

Description
Materials that will be presented include:

• Explaination to the Facebook architecture & framework
• Facebook security and limitations
• ASP.NET Facebook API
• Facebook Markup Language (FBML)
• Facebook javascript (yes, specific to facebook)
• Facebook application development through IFrame

During the presentation I will be running through live examples in developing facebook applications for both Windows Application and Web Application.
In Windows application development example application will actually be tapping into the API to retrieve individual profile, friends information live from facebook.
In web application we will attempt to create a live facebook application during the presentation through both FBML and Facebook IFrame approach.

Audience
This presentation is vital to anyone working in the digital space and is interested in achieving a core understanding of the Facebook framework and how to develop on one of the most popular social network frameworks in the world.

Credentials
Tom Gao is currently working as the National Technical Director in Australia at EuroRSCG Worldwide one of the largest digital and marketing agency in the world with over 233 offices worldwide. Tom is also a representative on the body of Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AMIA). Tom is a MCAD, MCSD, MCDBA, MCT as well as the sole author to The Complete Reference to Professional SOA using Visual Studio 2005. Tom is also currently completing his Doctorate in Cryptography at the University of South Australia.

Speaking History
Tom has given seminar at University of Charles Stuart on the use and benefits of SOA in today’s world.

Every IT development group gets criticised by its customers (internal and external) for not getting their priorities right and not being open about what they are actually doing. If your group all worked as efficiently as possible, on precisely the things that your customer wanted in the right priority order in such a visible way that your customer could change priority and know all the impacts, it would be virtually impossible for the customer to be critical. While it's probably impossible to develop and execute all the processes to achieve this, we can get very close and have a lot of fun and pride doing so.

This talk is all about having all tracking and development information in one integrated system that does not include email. Emails should not contain information that needs to be referenced and should not be used for discussion; it is a a good medium for reminders but anything useful in them should be moved to the integrated system. From one end of the spectrum a business stakeholder (customer) should be able to view the work in progress starting from a high level e.g. drilling down into a programme and see any amount of detail they wish. Similarly, a developer should be able to view what they are working on and then link up to the associated requirements and programme giving the reason for each task. Every bit of time worked by anybody should also be recorded on the system for both accounting and historical reasons. These figures can then be used for changing strategy (e.g. spend more on support and less on development) and for helping future estimates and planning.

Having tried a variety of open source, commercial and home-grown systems, the presenter has chosen a combination of Jira and Confluence (both provided by Atlassian) and SVN. While these products are not the only solution, they demonstrate how well the processes of an organisation can be modelled and tracked. We are not talking bug tracking here, we are talking about tracking everything everybody needs and does. Each member of the company has a personal dashboard showing them their work outstanding together with priorities, dependencies, time estimates and due dates.

Mark Hetherington is the CTO of Tilefile. He graduated from London University with an honours degree In Computer Science and nine years with a UK software house before moving to Australia. Mark helped found the Australian Centre for Unisys Software (ACUS) and then became its director during which time he grew the organization to over 150 while managing other software groups in New Zealand and the United States.
In 1994, he joined his first Internet startup which went on to build the successful RSVP dating business. He grew this company to over one hundred staff before moving on. In 1999, he moved to Seattle to be responsible for building the first airborne Internet server which sent the first email from a plane less than a year later while growing the company from 18 to over 100.
After launching his own award-winning (Consensus Software Award) internet service in 2003, he spent a year in Vancouver rescuing a poor-performing gaming software organization by introducing good process and helping move the share price from a few cents to over $3. He was the CIO of Mooter Media from 2005 to 2007 where he built the software organization and deployed the application to dozens of servers in China where it served over 200 million individually selected advert impressions per day.
His expertise lies in software engineering process, operational process, high throughput web systems, system architecture & staff management.
He joined Tilefile in May 2007 where his vast experience has admirably complimented the young, talented and creative engineering team.

Web-Scale Computing

What’s possible in a post Web 2.0 world? Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in (imagine computers programmatically calling people to perform tasks), as well as introduce a concept known as “Web Scale Computing? The presentation will also provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how .NET developers are able to easily integrate data storage in the sky as part of an ASP.NET application.

More importantly, it’s an opportunity for an interactive discussion about what the future, shaped by Web services and Web Scale Computing, looks like.

Amazon spent over 11 years and over $2 billion developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers. Most people think “Amazon.com?when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched ten services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 290,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

Mike Culver joined Amazon Web Services after almost eight years in evangelism at Microsoft, where he saw .NET move from a provocative idea to the preeminent development platform for serious development.

As an Amazon Evangelist, Mike works in the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services. In that capacity he once again helps developers take advantage of cutting-edge technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications.

Security for Windows

Steve Riley is a Senior Security Strategist in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group in Redmond, Washington, USA. Steve specializes in network and host security, communication protocols, network design, and information security policies and process. His customers include various ISPs and ASPs around the United States, as well as traditional enterprise IT customers, for whom he has conducted security assessments and risk analyses, deployed technologies for prevention and detection, and designed highly-available network architectures. Steve is a frequent and popular speaker at conferences worldwide, often appearing Asia one week and Europe the next. When not evangelizing the benefits of Microsoft security technology, he spends time with customers to better understand the security pain they face and show how some of that pain can be eliminated. Having been born with an Ethernet cable attached to his belly button, Steve grew up in networking and telecommunications; the simple telephone still provides endless hours of exploratory joy. Besides lurking in the Internet's dark alleys and secret passages, he enjoys mountain biking, clubbing and the occasional rave, freely sharing his opinions about the intersection of technology and culture, and hanging with his family and friends in the centre of the universe otherwise known as Seattle, Washington.

Windows Workflow Foundation Part B

Adam Cogan and Mark Liu will continue on with their Windows Workflow Foundation presentation from the December User Group. They will discuss some real world scenarios, go over the architecture of the framework, and talk about some common problems people may face when adopting this new technology.

How to keep Google Rankings under Control

Adam Cogan will demonstrate a tool that SSW uses for itself and their clients that can help you achieve the Google ranking you want, and how to keep it.

Rules to Better Project Management

Cameron Shaw will give an introduction to SSW's rules for Successful Project Management which are a guide for negotiating through the challenges of software projects.

Best Practices for Team-Based Software Development

A highly cohesive software development team is critical to a successful project. In this session, we examine all of the different ways teams members, from project managers to developers and QA, can work together to help enhance team collaboration, and ultimately process success. We then take a look at how these opportunities map into Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and other Microsoft products to show you how you can take advantage of these best practices on your teams today. This is a must see session for anyone either considering adopting VSTS or wanting to increase their productivity with VSTS.

Anthony Borton is a VSTS consultant & trainer based in Brisbane. He is a Microsoft Team System MVP and runs the Queensland VSTS Users Group. He has been involved in training for over 15 years and is the Microsoft Technical Readiness trainer for Visual Studio Team System 2005/2008 and Windows Server 2008:Developer & Architect.

Windows Workflow Foundation

Adam Cogan and Mark Liu will be introducing Windows Workflow Foundation. We will discuss some real world scenarios, go over the architecture of the framework, and talk about some common problems people may face when adopting this new technology.

Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ

Come hear Adam Cogan and Eric Phan present Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ

Linq is the future of ORM on the .NET platform and with the release of Visual Studio 2008 only months away it will become mainstream. In this presentation you will learn about the different types of LINQ and how to use LINQ to quickly build data-driven applications.

Taking Your Application Design to the Next Level With Data Mining

Data mining as a technology is designed to analyze large volumes of data looking for patterns that accurately predict behavior. These patterns can then be used to derive knowledge about data, and in turn this knowledge can be used to enhance application designs and the user experience.

In this presentation, Peter Myers will present an overview of SQL Server 2005 Data Mining and will demonstrate how to develop data mining models that can be embedded into your applications. Demonstrations will be based on SQL Server 2005 Data Mining, using .NET Windows and web development.

This presentation is a must for any developer looking to embed “Artificial Intelligence?into their solution design to take their applications to the next level. It is guaranteed to thrill you with potential, and excite you with the ease in which it can be accomplished. Note that there is no requirement that attendees have any data mining background.

Peter Myers is a freelance BI practitioner, trainer and presenter. He has 11 years' experience working in OLTP database design and development, DBA support and Data Warehousing/Business Intelligence with SQL Server. Peter has a broad business background supported by a bachelor degree in applied economics, and he extends this with MCITP, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSE and MCT certifications. Currently he provides mentoring and technical training locally and internationally, and focuses on delivering training for the SQL Server database engine, Integration Services (DTS), Analysis Services, Reporting Services, ASP.NET and .NET programming (C# and VB.NET).

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

Come join us at the Sydney .NET User group to hear Adam Cogan talk about Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 is an integrated performance management application designed to help improve operational and financial performance across all departments and all levels of your organization.

With Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, you can monitor progress, analyse what is driving variances, and plan your business from budgeting to creating management reports. You can have metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and reports delivered to every desktop through intuitive scorecards, dashboards, and the easy-to-use 2007 Microsoft Office system environment. A key component of the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) offering, Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 can help you understand how performance can align with personal and departmental goals and objectives.