zz_Past User Group Sessions

July 2009

Eliminating No-repro Bugs - A look at the new Microsoft Visual Studio Team Test 2010 product

Presenter: Anthony Borton

Description: The July Sydney .NET User group meeting looks at 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.

About the Presenter: Anthony Borton is the ALM Practice Lead 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 myalmblog.com.

What Just Happened to Silverlight & Expression!

Presenter: Scott Barnes

Description: Silverlight & Expression 3 launch is an important moment in Microsoft's timeline, as this is our V3 moment!t!. In light of this point in time, Scott has vowed to ensure all within his beloved home, Australia, get a deep insight into what just happened in both Silverlight and Expression 3. Not only will Scott cover off some of the new stuff, but will highlight some of the existing brilliance within these products through examples and commentary of how the old and new features came to be (as well as hints to both product's future). In this session you not only will hear all of this, but this is also a perfect opportunity to lobby for what you want to see in Silverlight & Expression 4! - Yes, not only did we just finish work on 3, but we're keen to get started on the next version - given Scott's team is on the planning team, this is a great opportunity for you to influence the future of Microsoft's UX Platform.

About the Presenter: Scott is a Rich Platforms Product Manager for the UX Platform Team (Silverlight, WPF, Expression, ASP.NET, etc). He has been working with Microsoft/Adobe/Macromedia technology for the past 10 years with a main focus specifically on Internet Applications (aka. RIA, Rich Client Technology etc). Scott first started out as a UX developer in the late 90’s and over the years developed a passion for programmatic art (Designer + Developer mind). He recently has branched out further into 3D modelling, animation and XNA game development making full use of both his designer + developer mindset.

June 2009

Harness the Power of the Platform - Writing Windows 7 Applications

Presenter: Andrew Coates

Description: A smart developer stands on the shoulders of the giants that came before. Windows 7 is just around the corner. As a platform, it boasts a number of differentiating features that you as a developer can exploit for no additional charge. Come along to this demo-heavy exploration of the platform and the tools you need to make it shine. We’ll also have copies of the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 to distribute.

About the Presenter: Andrew Coates has been a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in Australia since January 2004. 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.

SharePoint - 8 Tips from the Trenches

Presenter: John Liu (aka Liuy)

Description: John Liu (aka Liuy) rarely gets out of the hot and sticky SSW trench. Come hear his war stories dealing with SharePoint solutions. John has delivered SharePoint sites for clients such as Microsoft, WorleyParsons and the worst one Adam Cogan. Topics he will cover are:

1. Getting the design right
2. Web Parts - All the good stuff you get for free
3. Performance tips for publishing sites
4. The dirty stuff deployment
5. Less manual steps via SPConfigModification
6. Dark data - CAML
7. The 3rd party tools you need
8. Things needed in SharePoint 2010<

About the Presenter: John Liu is a Solution Architect, a Microsoft Certified Partner specialising in .NET and SharePoint solutions. John is responsible for developing and maintaining SharePoint, ASP.NET and Silverlight applications using C# and SQL Server.

May 2009

Something About Mary (SharePoint and Office 2010)

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Adam Cogan explains what works well with SharePoint and Office for Mary and the other knowledge workers. First you will get an overview of what is great about having SharePoint in your business. Then see real world examples of:

• Using SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 together
• Where it fits with other important Microsoft products like CRM 4 and TFS
• Examples of how Word and Excel can be integrated into business processes (separate from SharePoint), and then followed by
• Examples of how Word, Excel, PowerPoint can be combined with SharePoint to improve visibility/searchability/versioning across the company
• Overview of how data can be synchronized between the two (e.g. using Access and Excel)
• Overview of what 'workflow' (really!) means
• How Office can be incorporated into company workflows with SharePoint
• Extending SharePoint with Office SharePoint Designer 2010 (free!)
• Where VBA and VSTO fit in terms of how solutions can be developed
• Examples of other interesting Office/SharePoint integrations (eg the the Atlassian SharePoint Connector and Atlassian Office Connector)

This is a good chance for you to consider new ways of using Office in your company, along with pitfalls to avoid. Adam gets excited about this session because too often companies limit Office to just an email application, word processor and spreadsheet - completely missing the positive impact it can have on the entire business process.

About the Presenter: Adam Cogan is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in custom .NET, SharePoint and CRM solutions (with a splash of Business Intelligence). At SSW, Adam has been developing custom solutions for businesses across a range of industries such as Government, engineering, banking, insurance and manufacturing since 1990 for clients such as Microsoft, Worley Parsons and Aurecon.

Data access in Microsoft CRM and SharePoint

Presenter: George Doubinski

Description: George Doubinski is going to show you how to get data in and out for two Microsoft flagship products: Microsoft CRM and Microsoft SharePoint. You will see:

• Two alter-egos attempting to do the tasks: Nancy, the ultimate end-user and Doug, the propeller head
• Importing data from Excel spreadsheets including the relationships
• Filtering, grouping and sorting your data and exporting the results
• Techniques from point and click (Nancy) down to Visual Studio code (Doug)
• See for yourself strengths and weaknesses of Microsoft CRM and Microsoft SharePoint in relation to external data

April 2009

Team Foundation Server (TFS) for Successful Project Management

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description:Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the best tool for Microsoft developers to have successful projects and a smooth software development processes. Come see the Chief Architect from SSW show you:

• The right way to use work items
• The way to complete a work items and send a ‘done?'
• Use templates for your standard work items
• The extra work items that developers always forget
• TFS handles repetitive tasks
• What is good and bad about Excel and Project integration
• What you can use from the built in reporting as well as the Project portals available on SharePoint
• The important reports to give your Project Manager
• The metrics to bother with
• Using useful tools like TeamCompanion and TeamLook

Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. VSTS is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by project managers. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help project managers' better support the software development processes. During this session we will cover the lifecycle of creating work items and tracking of releases using Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server.

About the Presenter: Adam Cogan is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in custom .NET, SharePoint and CRM solutions (with a splash of Business Intelligence). At SSW, Adam has been developing custom solutions for businesses across a range of industries such as Government, engineering, banking, insurance and manufacturing since 1990 for clients such as Microsoft, Worley Parsons and Aurecon.

Visual Studio Team System 2010

Presenter: Stephen Godbold

Description: Software quality is important. There is no debate about it. The question is, how do we achieve quality? In the application lifecycle management tooling space the current offerings are disparate at best ?requiring tools on tools to achieve productivity. Visual Studio Team System 2010 in conjunction with Team Foundation Server attempts to rectify this by unifying the underlying flow of information between design, development and test disciplines. In this session Stephen Godbold will highlight the enhancements made to the Team System offering that will drive up quality through a single source of truth and a shared application view across teams. He will demonstrate how this relates to you and your team by walking through the lifecycle of a bug in a typical application from discovery during testing to analysis, solution design, fix, and quality management before release.

March 2009

6 Design Patterns that Every Developer Should Know

Presenter: Justin King

Description: Based on real world implementations of the most common design patterns, it will be show you how to break code up in a modular and testable way. This session is looking to show off the following design patterns: Singleton, Command, Repository, Factory, MVC / MVVM / MVP, Decorator, Strategy.

About the Presenter: With over 13 years Software and Database development experience, Justin has worked on many large and small projects with varying technologies. Justin started out developing in CPM in the early 80's but professionally since 1996 from Visual Basic 3.0 moving into the web world in asp/asp.net 1.0 then 5 years as a Java Swing developer. During this time also providing interop solutions between C# and Java Axis webservices and legacy systems.

Security in a SaaS Environment

Presenter: Corneliu Tusnea

Description: The trend towards online and service-based solutions continues, as more and more applications move from traditionally locally hosted applications to the cloud. Services such as email, accounting, project, task management and support systems, and even development tools like TFS, once solely hosted locally, are now hosted in a shared environment. For developers and architects, designing such hosted applications introduces new risks and challenges, and calls for new security practices to be put in place. In this session, Corneliu will cover security challenges and patterns that apply when developing software in the new emerging market of Software as a Service. Topics will include distributed authentication, single-sign-on, white-labelling, multi-company/multi-role based authorisation, and designing solutions for multi-tenant environments.

February 2009

How to implement a custom Site Map in SharePoint - RapidFire

Presenter: Sergio Otoya

Description: Have you ever wanted to show consistent navigation elements for all Site collections but SharePoint out of the box does not let you?. Let us show you how you can solve this with the new features in ASP 2.0 and custom site maps. No code required, just configuration.

Data View web part Tips and Tricks - RapidFire

Presenter: Sergio Otoya

Description: When you create a Listview based on a list in SharePoint using SharePoint designer, you are limited to only that site. If you then want to create a template out of this site you will face some challenges because the list is bound to the List ID. Wouldn't it be great if the dataview was bound to the Listname instead? Learn how to in this session and also how to create a Remote list viewer. No code required, just configuration.

SharePoint - follow the Yellow Brick Road to Public Web Sites

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description:Come join us as we learn how the largest public SharePoint site in Australia (www.WorleyParsons.com) got up and running. Adam Cogan of SSW will share his experience and lessons learnt on this project. Adam will also show you how to "sexify" the look and feel of your site (or "de-SharePointing with style). More info:

1. Why companies want SharePoint’s Web Content Management
2. How to sexify the look and feel (aka de-SharePointing with style)
3. Reducing use of tables via ASP.NET control adapters
4. Cross-browser compatibility - the easy way with JQuery
5. How to use the Custom Navigation Control Adapters - the golden pearl
6. Customizing SharePoint web parts
7. How to deploy (and how you can avoid three all-nighters)
8. Performance - targeting anonymous users
9. The lessons learned (aka rules)

About the Presenter: Adam Cogan is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in custom .NET, SharePoint and CRM solutions (with a splash of Business Intelligence). At SSW, Adam has been developing custom solutions for businesses across a range of industries such as Government, engineering, banking, insurance and manufacturing since 1990 for clients such as Microsoft, Worley Parsons and Aurecon.

January 2009

Top 15 SQL Server DBA Tasks for SQL Server 2005/2008

Presenter: Adam Cogan and Justin King

Description: Examine how to automate your SQL Server 2005/2008 servers and set them on "auto-pilot" for routine tasks. Examine how best to take advantage of the DB Maintenance utility to automate your backups and scheduled maintenance tasks. Take a look at how to configure your alerts and operators to get proper notifications when events occur. Examine administering proper security, testing your restores, and routine performance monitoring/tuning. Examine resources to help you diagnose problems as they occur on your SQL Servers.

Business Continuity with Backup and Restore

Presenter: Peter Ward

Description: The Backup and Restore commands are the most important SQL Server commands in a Database Administrators arsenal. In the event of a system failure or user error, the Backup and Restore commands provide the ability to recover from what otherwise could be a catastrophe. With the release of SQL server 2005 and 2008 these commands have been enhanced significantly. For example, the ability to take an adhoc backup without affecting the restore sequence and the ability to revert a database from a snapshot. In this session you will see how to utilise many of the new recovery features as part of your SQL Server business continuity strategy.

December 2008

Building data-centric applications in Silverlight 2

Presenter: Jonas Folles

Material: Silverlight 2 for Developers

Description: In this presentation you will get a good overview of how to build data-centric (line-of-business) applications in Silverlight 2 using LINQ to SQL and WCF on the server. The presentation will cover how to deal with authentication for your WCF services from a Silverlight application, tips on how to architect your Silverlight application, and how to build flexible, testable code your designers can work with. You will also get a sneak preview of an application framework Microsoft is working on to make building business applications easier.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Data entry made easy

Presenter: Eric Phan

Description: When working with databases, we often need to create some administrative pages to do all our CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations on the tables. This can be a long and repetitive process if you don't use a code generator. Thankfully in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Dynamic data allows us to create all those pages without writing a single line of code! In this session you will also find out how to customize these admin pages with different looks and data entry controls.

About the Presenter: A geek at heart that loves to learn and play with new technologies. I am grounded with solid object oriented programming principles, but spread my wings across most of the Microsoft product stack: from ASP.NET MVC, WCF, Windows forms, Silverlight, Business Intelligence, PerformancePoint Services, VSTO to SharePoint.

November 2008

SQL Server 2008 Real World with Spatial Data

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: In this presentation Adam Cogan will demonstrate a real world web mapping application using SQL 2008 spatial capabilities and show you how to build location enabled application and services. Adam will also show a few gotchas in querying spatial data and tips on indexing to get the best performance for your spatial data.

October 2008

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: In SQL Server 2008, the report server has been re-architected to remove the dependency on Internet Information Services and provide better control over memory usage. Get an overview of the Reporting Services 2008 architecture and the impact on installation, upgrade, and reporting services management tools.

September 2008

JavaScript the way that it should have been - JQuery

Presenter: John Liu>

Description: John Liu will show you how to use JQuery to add some really fancy and cool client-side functionality to your Web Application. We’ll run through what it is, how to use it, and show as many add-ons as time allows. We can’t promise you will love JavaScript after this session, but we know you will love JQuery!

August 2008

Hardcore LINQ to Entities (Part 2)

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Adam will take a deep dive into LINQ to Entities showing you best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and answers to the most frequently asked questions, telling you exactly what you need to know. Adam will pull apart all the key components of the LINQ to Entities framework, discussing and showing how each part integrates with each other, and how you can quickly create and modify your data access conceptual schema. This session will provide samples on how you can use the power of LINQ plus the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, to build advanced and fully featured data access layers immediately, without pain.

Using LINQ to SQL with WCF (the Brad and Angelina of Data Access; Part 3)

Presenter: Cameron Townshend

Description: LINQ to SQL has been out for a while now. Come and hear SSW experiences and hear if it is ready or not. Find out how you can use LINQ to SQL with WCF, the right way to structure your projects and know 6 helpful tips.

July 2008

Hardcore LINQ to Entities

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Adam will take a deep dive into LINQ to Entities showing you best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and answers to the most frequently asked questions, telling you exactly what you need to know. Adam will pull apart all the key components of the LINQ to Entities framework, discussing and showing how each part integrates with each other, and how you can quickly create and modify your data access conceptual schema. This session will provide samples on how you can use the power of LINQ plus the new ADO.NET Entity Framework, to build advanced and fully featured data access layers immediately, without pain.

SQL Server 101

Presenter: Cameron Townshend

Description: Topics to cover are Intro to SQL Server for developers, Performance bottlenecks, 10 Dos and Don'ts, and Real world examples from the trenches.

June 2008

Do you want a connection with that? (An introduction to building applications that don’t rely on a network connection)

Presenter: Nick Randolph

Description: Most developers have this obsession with building applications that connect directly to a database. Whether they are a web application or a rich client application, connecting directly or via a web service, the reality is that these applications need to be served with a reliable connection. Using some of the latest additions to the .NET Framework this session will walk you through building applications that will continue to work long after your connection drops out. You’ll see how easily the ADO.NET Synchronisation Services can be configured to establish a local cache for your data and how the Client Application Services will help you extend your existing security infrastructure to include your occasionally connected application.

‘LINQ to SQL’ vs ‘LINQ to Entities’

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Topics to cover are Intro to SQL Server for developers, Performance bottlenecks, 10 Dos and Don'ts, and Real world examples from the trenches.

May 2008

Comparing Silverlight and Flex application development

Presenter: Greg Harris

Description: 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.

April 2008

Social Engineering with Facebook API using Visual Studio 2008

Presenter: Tom Gao

Description: 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.

Materials that will be presented include:

• Explanation 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.

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

March 2008

We work efficiently on the right things in a visible way? Looking at processes and tracking and time systems

Presenter: Mark Hetherington

Description: 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 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.

February 2008 Special Event

Web-Scale Computing

Presenter: Mike Culver

Description: 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

Presenter: Steve Riley

About the Presenter: 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.

February 2008

Windows Workflow Foundation Part B

Presenter: Adam Cogan and Mark Liu, and Cameron Shaw

Description: 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 is a guide for negotiating through the challenges of software projects.

January 2008

Best Practices for Team-Based Software Development

Presenter: Anthony Borton

Description: 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.

About the Presenter: 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.

December 2007

Windows Workflow Foundation

Presenter: Adam Cogan and Mark Liu

Description: 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.

November 2007

Visual Studio 2008 and LINQ

Presenter: Adam Cogan and Eric Phan

Description: 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.

October 2007

Taking Your Application Design to the Next Level With Data Mining

Presenter: Peter Myers

Description: Data mining as a technology is designed to analyse large volumes of data looking for patterns that accurately predict behaviour. 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.

About the Presenter: 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).

September 2007

Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: 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.

August 2007

Office Communicator 2007

Presenter: Johann Kruse

Description: Microsoft unified communications technologies tear down the walls that separate telecommunications and computing. And they do it with software that leverages your existing telecommunications infrastructure. Microsoft unified communications technologies are more than just VoIP. They break down all the traditional communications silos. Voicemail and faxes move over the network like email. They arrive in your Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 inbox where you can sort, prioritize, and forward them, just like any piece of email. And when you're on the road, you can dial in over any telephone to hear your emails and your calendars. You can even access your Microsoft Office Outlook directory and place calls from any telephone. Also hear about customising and extending the capabilities of the newly released Office Communicator 2007. The session will also cover the API solutions available to integrate Unified communications concepts into your line of business applications and business processes.

July 2007

Next Generation Visual Studio Team System

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Visual Studio Team System has given us the integration of development, project management, testing and analysis tool that was missing in the previous version of Visual Studio. In this talk you will learn about what’s coming up in the next version of Visual Studio Orcas, Visual Studio Team System 2008 (Rosario) and Team Foundation Server 2008. You will also see what’s currently hot on the Visual Studio widgets scene with a demo-driven session on the most useful tools for Visual Studio Team System. Features covered include:

• What’s coming in Visual Studio Orcas Beta 2
• What’s new in Rosario and Team Foundation Server 2008
• Hot widgets: Team Foundation Power Tools, MSSCCIs, Team Plain, Diff Dog, SSW Code Auditor, MS Build GUI and much more!

June 2007

MSBuild/Team Build Presentation

Presenter: William Bartholomew

Description: William Bartholomew will take us through an introduction to MSBuild before stepping up a gear and embarking on a journey to uncover the delights of the Team Build. Learn how to create a Build Type and see how you can simplify the entire end-to-end build automation process. You will see how you can customize the build process including things such as: build preparation, fetching source code, build number generation and labelling, compilation as well as deploying to a drop location and logging your build. To finish off, William will talk about extensibility and how you can write your own custom tasks.

Domain Modelling

Presenter: Paul Stovell

Description: When we design a solution, the architecture that we implement should act as a lever, allowing us to solve the increasingly complex problems we face with minimal effort. "Domain Modelling", the approach of designing applications by focussing on the natural needs of the problem domain, is one such lever; providing us with a solid, robust architecture that easily handles this ever-increasing complexity. In this session, Paul Stovell will describe a number of common but advanced domain modelling patterns, and demonstrate how they can be applied practically in .NET.

May 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Presenter: Mike Fitzmaurice and Joel Oleson

Description: The May .NET User Group meeting will be a Q & A session with Mike Fitzmaurice and Joel Oleson, both Microsoft Technical Product Managers for SharePoint Products and Technologies. You might remember Joel from his hugely popular User Group presentation last September. By all accounts, this promises to be another "standing room only" event. Dave Glover will also be presenting Windows Powershell.

Microsoft Windows PowerShell command line shell and scripting language helps IT Professionals and Developers achieve greater productivity and automation and runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server "Longhorn". The shell includes an interactive prompt and a scripting environment that can be used independently or in combination. Unlike most shells, which accept and return text, Windows PowerShell is built on top of the .NET common language runtime (CLR) and the .NET Framework, and accepts and returns .NET objects. This fundamental change in the environment brings entirely new tools and methods to the management and configuration of Windows, systems and business solutions.

The session is very interactive, lots of demos including working with the new Office Open XML File Formats with PowerShell, very cool indeed!

January 2007

Up and Running with Expression Web Designer

Presenter: Tristan Kurniawan

Description: Tristan Kurniawan is SSW Graphic Designer and the person responsible for the Web 2.0 look on SSW and other sites. He will begin by explaining how Microsoft’s latest offering can integrate Web design and development teams. Then Tristan will show how to use Expression Web through each stage of a website design and share his tips on real-world web development and modern web standards. You will see how this is a tool for creating great CSS-based, standards-compliant Web sites.

Microsoft Office Access 2007

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Adam Cogan will cover Microsoft Office Access 2007 new and improved features which can help you:

• Provide the ability to get you started quickly with prebuilt applications that can be modified or adapted to changing business needs
• Track and report information with ease
• Integrate Access 2007 with SharePoint
• Collect information through forms in email or import data from external applications

December 2006

Amazon web services

Presenter: Andrew Franklin

Description: Amazon have recently unleashed a series of new web services which enable scalable computing, mass storage and an accessible human work force which allow small projects to use facilities previously only available to large companies at a fraction of the cost. Andrew Franklin will give a short presentation looking at some of the services offered by Amazon and will discuss implementation issues with practical examples.

November 2006

Visual Studio for Database Professionals (Data Dude)

Presenter: Adam Cogan

Description: Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market- shifting database development product designed to manage database changes, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional.

Office 2007 & VSTO Second Edition

Presenter: Robert Green

Description: VSTO Second Edition is a downloadable add-in for Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office. This session will show how you can use VSTO SE to build Visual Basic and C# solutions that target Office 2007. You'll see how to build application level add-ins for Office applications, as well as how to customize new Office 2007 UI features such as the ribbon, the application Task Pane, Outlook form regions and more.

October 2006

Software as a Service - Catching the Long Tail

Presenter: Nigel Watson

Description: From small start-ups to large enterprises, software as a service (SaaS) is changing how software is designed, developed and consumed. This session discusses the business drivers behind SaaS, and then looks at how these in turn drive the architecture of SaaS solutions as opposed to 'on-premise' software. Along the way, we'll look at the technical issues that any current or prospective SaaS vendor will need to grapple with in order to successfully deliver software as a service.

September 2006

Microsoft Atlas

Presenter: Tim Kremer

Description: Introduction to Microsoft Atlas, including an overview of the framework, worked examples of the new client libraries as well as using the server side libraries to add Ajax functionality to your ASP.NET existing applications.

About the Presenter: Tim lectures at the University of Technology, delivering courses on SQL Server: Design Development and Administration, and .NET Application Development.

Simplify Content Management with DotNetNuke

Presenter: Kusal Wijewantha

Description: Overview of different ways of installing DotNetNuke, introducing key components of portal framework and Demonstration showing how to manage the content using built-in modules.

About the Presenter: Kusal is a member of the Open Source DotNetNuke Development Team. Presently he is contributing to the DotNetNuke Help Module Project.

July 2006

Using Partitioned Tables with VLDB (Very Large Database) space

Presenter: Geoff Orr

Description: Review of partitioned tables including how to create and use them, as well as how to keep active tables smaller.

Windows Forms 2.0 Data Binding

Presenter: Adam Cogan and Paul Stovell

Description: Demonstration of an approach to create asynchronous business objects as asynchronously loading collections, as well as how to use the Windows Forms Error Provider to remove nasty validation code from your forms.