SSW Update - Where appropriate do you use text rather than images?
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SSW Tech Breakfast

[the cutting edge ]

G'Day Developers!

Thousands of hours go into designing fancy graphics. While the graphical impression a website has an impact, the benefits of using text far outweigh those for using images. Using text rather than images has multiple advantages:

  • Easier to read - especially if a client machine doesn't have the required plug-ins.
  • Downloads faster - a users patience extends to about 7 seconds.
  • Cheaper to update - a simple find and replace, and you don't need to worry about image size distortion.
  • Discoverable by search engines - if people cant't get to your site, what's the point of it being there?
  • Readble on an iPhone - you want your site to be accessible to mobile devices.
<h1>Welcome to My Page</h1>
Figure: Good example - this text can be easily rendered by the browser and recognized by search engine
<img src="Images/Heading_Welcome.gif">
Figure: Bad example - using image for text header

See more of the SSW Rules pages.

Adam Cogan

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Sydney .NET User Group -
The best place to learn .NET for free in Sydney

.NET User Group

5 days to go!

Sydney .NET User Group
Wednesday 21th April 2010
5:45pm - 9:00pm
Microsoft, Sydney
1 Epping Road, North Ryde

Windows Phone 7... Start... Hub... Pivot... Metro... Threads... All Systems are go! by Nick Randolph

In the last couple of months Microsoft has announced at WMC and then re-announced at MIX that they are back in the mobile phone game with a brand new offering, Windows Phone 7 series. In this session we’ll go back to where it all began to look at how the new user experience, Metro, came about. Once we get past all the airy fairy business you’ll learn about the technologies that you can use to build applications and games for Windows Phone 7. We’ll go on a short journey through the tools that you’ll be using and the features of the new platform, before wrapping up with a look at how Windows Phone 7 stacks up against the competition.

To see more details and RSVP, please visit our facebook .NET group or our LinkedIn .NET group.


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Canberra .NET User Group -
The best place to learn .NET for free in Canberra

Canberra User Group

3 days to go!

Canberra .NET Developers User Group
Monday 19th April 2010

Lunch: 12:30pm - 1:30pm
King O'Malley's Irish Pub
131 City Walk
Canberra City

Dinner: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Microsoft Canberra Branch
Walter Turnbull Building
Level 2, 44 Sydney Ave
Barton ACT

Windows Phone 7... Start... Hub... Pivot... Metro... Threads... All Systems are go! by Nick Randolph

In the last couple of months Microsoft has announced at WMC and then re-announced at MIX that they are back in the mobile phone game with a brand new offering, Windows Phone 7 series. In this session we’ll go back to where it all began to look at how the new user experience, Metro, came about. Once we get past all the airy fairy business you’ll learn about the technologies that you can use to build applications and games for Windows Phone 7. We’ll go on a short journey through the tools that you’ll be using and the features of the new platform, before wrapping up with a look at how Windows Phone 7 stacks up against the competition.

To see more details and RSVP, please visit our facebook .NET group or our LinkedIn .NET group.

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SSW Brain Quest -
Team Foundation Server and SharePoint 2010

SharePoint

35 days to go!

SSW Brain Quest
Full Day Event: 9:00am - 6:00pm
All Australian Major Cities
21st May - Canberra

Brain Quest - World Tour
Coming soon to Milan, Athens, London and Beijing

Team Foundation Server 2010 for Successful Project Management by Adam Cogan

Visual Studio Ultimate (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a project manager to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process.

Come and see Adam Cogan, Microsoft Regional Director, VSTS Champ and Chief Architect from SSW show you:

  • How to successfully gather requirements with User stories
  • 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
  • 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 from the SharePoint dashboard
  • The important reports to give your Project Manager

Walk away knowing how to see the project health and progress. Visual Studio Ultimate 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 Ultimate and Team Foundation Server.

Visual Studio 2010 Team System - An Overview

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Team System is an integrated software development platform to build the mission-critical applications that businesses depend on. It extends Visual Studio's integrated and productive experience from the developer to the entire development team by delivering powerful new role-based tools for software architects, developers, testers and project managers. In this session you will see an overview of these tools and how they can improve your software development cycle.

Visual Studio 2010 Testing with Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010 - the life of a bug

Visual Studio 2010 makes up a large part of a .Net developers life. This session will delve into the 'life of a bug' by taking a walk in the shoes of an everyday bug from discovery to release (and the steps that make up the in between). Come along and check out the new features that will make you happier by making your code better, your job easier, and your team more productive by reducing the obstacles you face in your everyday coding life. Learn:

  • What the new features for testers and developers
  • How you now care - even if the tester can't reproduce the bug
  • How to stop struggling to find the source of the bug in your code
  • How can you streamline the testing process and make sure you don't repeat the same bugs
  • How to automate more and reproduce bugs easier and discover problems sooner.
What's new in SharePoint 2010

In this session Adam Cogan will provide information about what is new in SharePoint 2010 and his personal favorites. The SharePoint Team has invested in many including:

  • UX support for Silverlight and Ajax
  • their Web Content Management System
  • Digital Asset Management System (for videos)
  • Visual Studio 2010 tools for SharePoint 2010
  • Developer Platform
  • Office 2010 integration
  • RESTful Web API
  • Tagging and Rating

Lets see what's good and what's not.

Something About Mary (SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010)

Come see Adam Cogan explain 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 (Comparing with what with had with 2007)
  • 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 synchronised between the two (eg using Access and Excel)
  • Overview of what 'workflow' (really!) means
  • How Office can be incorporated into company workflows with SharePoint
  • High level examples of using/integrating Office with other products (eg VSTS integration with Outlook)
  • Where VBA and VSTO fit in terms of how solutions can be developed
  • Examples of other interesting Office/SharePoint integrations (eg the Atlassian SharePoint Connector and 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.

Price (ex GST)
TFS 2010
$110
SHAREPOINT
$110
FULL DAY
$190
HOSTED
Microsoft
Canberra
21 MAY 2010
Microsoft
Canberra
Sydney
12 AUG 2010
Microsoft
Sydney
Milan
12 AUG 2010
TBA
Athens
12 AUG 2010
TBA
London
12 AUG 2010
TBA
Beijing
12 AUG 2010
TBA

Register for other Major Cities now!

Process Improvement 101 for Software Teams -
What all software teams should know about Process Improvement

SharePoint

14 days to go!

Process Improvement 101 for Software Teams
Friday 30th April 2010
8:00am - 11:00am
SSW Office, Sydney
Suite 10, 81-91 Military Road, Neutral Bay
Cost: No Charge

Workshop Objective

This workshop will provide the attendees with:

  • Understand the benefits possible when software processes are improved
  • Learn the 9 signs of wastage and inefficiency and how to remedy each one
  • Learn a systematic measurable process for improving process
  • Understand the costs, timelines, staff involvement and commitment a business will incur when improving processes
  • Understand some of the best tools on the market that could realise the benefits to your organisation

This workshop is presented in layman terms so that staff in all departments understand.

Workshop Outline

  1. Why your business needs to consider improving your software processes
  2. The 9 signs of wastage
  3. The process for improving process
  4. Group Exercise
  5. Demonstration of SSW’s workflow for the development team using Team Foundation Server
  6. Case studies
  7. Some leading industry tools
Find out more and Register

Steve Forte Half-day Agile Seminar

SharePoint

33 days to go!

Steve Forte Half-day Agile Seminar
Wednesday 19th May 2010
9:00am - 12:00pm
SSW Office, Sydney
Suite 10, 81-91 Military Road, Neutral Bay
Cost: No Charge

Agile Development, Tools and Teams

One of the most popular Agile project management and development methods, Scrum is starting to be adopted at major corporations and on very large projects. After an introduction to the basics of Scrum like: project planning and estimation, the Scrum Master, team, product owner and burn down, and of course the daily Scrum, Stephen (a certified Scrum Master) shows many real world applications of the methodology drawn from his own experience as a Scrum Master.

Negotiating with the business, estimation and team dynamics are all discussed as well as how to use Scrum in small organizations, large enterprise environments and consulting environments. Stephen will also discuss using Scrum with virtual teams and an off-shoring environment. We?ll then take a look at the tools we will use for Agile development, including planning poker, unit testing, and much more. There will be plenty of time for Question and Answer. This seminar is a jump start for a certified scrum master exam.

Agenda

  • Introduction to Agile Development and Scrum
  • Agile Estimation
  • Implementing Scrum with remote and offshore teams
  • Agile Tools, Test Driven Development, and Continuous Integration

*SPECIAL* .NET User Group -
The best place to learn .NET for free in Sydney

.NET User Group

33 days to go!

Sydney .NET User Group
Wednesday 19th May 2010
5:45pm - 9:00pm
Microsoft, Sydney
1 Epping Road, North Ryde

Silverlight 4.0 Overview for the Business Developer by Stephen Forte

Learn how to build data driven, n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) with Silverlight 4.0. Line of business applications (LOB) in Silverlight 4.0 are easy by tapping the power of WCF RIA Services, the Silverlight Toolkit, and elevated out of browser support. This demo centric session will walk you through an example of building a LOB application with Silverlight 4.0. See how Silverlight and WCF RIA Services support domain logic, services, data binding, validation, server based paging, authentication, authorization and much more. Silverlight 4.0 means business!

To see more details and RSVP, please visit our facebook .NET group or our LinkedIn .NET group.


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Scrum Training Course

BI

17 days to go!

Scrum Training Course
May to August 2010
8:00am - 11:00am
Canberra, Sydney, Wellington, Milan, London, and Beijing
Cost: $3995 + GST

Overview

This Scrum Developer course is a unique and intensive five-day experience for software developers. The course guides teams on how to turn product requirements into potentially shippable increments of software using the Scrum framework, Visual Studio 2010, and modern software engineering practices. Attendees will work in self-organizing, self-managing teams using a common instance of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 to achieve this goal.

Find out more and Register

Featured Product: SSW SQL Deploy

SSW SQL DeployThe Easiest Way to Compare SQL Server Databases and Deploy Schema Changes

SQL Deploy is the simplest way for .NET developers to synchronize backend SQL structural changes, saving manual SQL script deployment. Use SQL Deploy in your application to automate schema changes. Full support for SQL Server 2008.

More on SSW's SQL Deploy

Advertise with SSW

If you would like to advertise your product or service with SSW or would like to find out more about various advertising opportunities, please email your enquiry to sophiebelle or call: +61 2 9953 3000.

SSW Update

April 2010

Tech Breakfast

Join us for Tech Breakfast 5 months to go!

SYDNEY: Something About Mary (SharePoint and Office 2010)

Friday, 24th September 2010
8:00am-11:00am

Come and see Adam Cogan explain 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 SharePoint and external data sources (eg 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.

Register Now

Employment

Due to the tremendous growth that our business has experienced over the last few months, we are seeking enthusiastic people to join the SSW team.

Our Company is based in Neutral Bay which is one of the most elegant and scenic areas of Sydney. SSW is an Australian owned progressive consulting firm specialising in building, implementing and maintaining Microsoft .NET software applications.

We are currently strongly looking for a SharePoint Developer.

We are also currently looking for:

  • ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#, OLAP, SharePoint Software Developer
  • Technical BDM in Melbourne, Brisbane, or Canberra
  • IT Senior Marketing Consultant (part-time)
  • Project Manager

Read more and Apply NOW...

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