2009.1

Brian Donahue is a software developer with 10 years experience with a variety of web application platforms, focusing recently on ASP.NET. His consulting company, Vitreo Solutions ( www.vitreosolutions.com), builds custom business software for its clients. As an organizer of the Philly ALT.NET user group (http://phillyalt.net), Brian tries to promote best practices and design principles proven throughout the software industry, and encourage continuous learning and improvement in the .NET developer community. Philly ALT.NET has recently started the "Foundation Series" , a series of workshops aimed at reinforcing fundamental software principles to help you improve as a developer. Brian blogs at http://persistall.com

Are you just a "code monkey?"  My hope and belief is that most software developers aspire to be more than that.  We'd like to offer more value to our employers than simply our knowledge of programming tools and languages.  The Foundation Series was created by the Philly ALT.NET User Group with the goal of teaching and reaffirming some of the proven principles and practices that provide a foundation for continuous learning and improvement as software developers.  This session will examine what it means to be a "Software Crafstman" (or Craftswoman!), and how we can better communicate these values to the business customers we work with.

Sathish TK is an enterprise architect with 11 years experience in both Microsoft and Java platforms, focusing primarily on integration applications. His experience lies in architecting, designing, and developing enterprise applications involving n-tier architectures, SOA & SaaS. TK's background also includes customization of EAI products and architecting solutions for a wide variety of industries. His current focus includes MOSS customization, Biztalk Adapters, SQL & BI, & ALM (TFS 2008).

SharePoint is a critical collaboration tool for many organizations.  In this session we will explore the various options for building highly available SharePoint installations including the use of SQL Server failover, clustering, network load balancing, and failover to alternate sites.

The WCF REST Starter Kit is a set of .Net Framework classes and Visual Studio features and templates that enable users to create and access REST-style Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. These services are based on the WCF web programming model available in .Net 3.5 SP1.

You'll learn about WCF without all the nasty configs, high fidelity REST services, leveraging HTTP symentaics,  and see a live service make operations against a production target.

This presentation will cover some of the developer features in SQL 2008 that I have found particularly appealing. The features I will be talking about are all T-SQL related. I’ll talk about the MERGE statement, change data capture (and I’ll tell you how this is different from change tracking), and the new/old T-SQL debugger. I’ll also talk about the FILESTREAM column property that’s finally ended a religious war that’s been going on since Sybase was first released more than 20 years ago. If time permits, I’ll also talk about row constructors. And, in the course of my demos, you’ll see why the famed Intellisense is both a blessing and a curse for T-SQL folk!

John Angelini is a Lead Technical Consultant with Perficient, and specializes in SharePoint architecture, development and customization. Mr. Angelini has a lengthy background in commercial graphic design and 3D animation. Additionally Mr. Angelini is the founder of the Philadelphia XAML Developers Group, Philly XAML.org and has done a lot of work with WPF, WCF, WF and other .NET 3.X technologies.

Want to know how to take your SharePoint branding from design to finished Master Page?  Want to know how to identify where SharePoint styles come from and where they are used on a site?  I'll walk you through the basics of how I branded my personal SharePoint site passing along tips from personal experiences so that you can make your SharePoint sites "not look like SharePoint".

- Cover the options for branding: Theme vs Master Page

- Show how to use the IE Developer Toolbar to drill down into a page and identify where styles are coming from

- Show how to go from Design to finished Master Page

- Show how to implement Page Layouts linked to content types

- Touch on other elements of a site that need to be modified (SearchLayout, etc.) to complete the branding

- Stress the importance of the !important CSS directive in MOSS Branding

Eric Fleischman started his career at Microsoft working on a variety of things related to Active Directory, both in the support world (go CPR!) as well as in the Server & Tools Division. He then worked in Windows Live on large scale services, and now finds himself building large scale services on top of HyperV as part of the Microsoft Virtualization team. He is interested in both building & running large scale services and spends most of his time figuring out how to build distributed systems that can be run in the simplest ways possible.

Microsoft has provided the tools required to build high scale applications using Active Directory as an authentication & authorization store, or even as a data store more generally. In this talk we’ll architect an application using AD/ADAM as the data store from the ground, covering the major design decisions & patterns one can use to build on top of the directory service. We’ll cover how to scale up the amount that a DC can do as well as scale your app out across many DCs, while thinking about how to ensure that operations can successfully run your application. Be prepared to talk about AD API nuances along the way!

Doug Henry is a senior systems engineer on Software Logic’s infrastructure team where he specializes in Microsoft System Center family of products.  His most recent work includes design and deployment of new virtualization solutions based on Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Learn how System Center Configuration Manager can help you centrally manage the deployment of operating systems and applications within your environment.  Doug will talk about the tools available and what you need to know to effectively deploy Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 / Vista.

Jason N. Gaylord is a developer from Northeastern Pennsylvania. Jason has received many honors including the MVP award for Visual ASP and ASP.NET, ASPInsider, and ASPElite. He is the current President of .NET Valley, the Northeastern Pennsylvania .NET User Group based in Wilkes-Barre. Also, Jason also teaches many .NET courses at a local college and also business and technical courses to small businesses. For more information about Jason, you can visit his website at www.jasongaylord.com.

It's difficult to keep up with the changing times in technology. New emerging technologies come out and become quickly popular. Over the past few years, Microsoft has really grown their development space. They've started to build features around design and development patterns such as MVC. They've looked at ways they can put information in the hands of site visitors by adding enhancements to Internet Explorer. They've even stepped towards the unthinkable -- embracing third party tools such as jQuery. During this session, we'll take a look at all of these and more as we build a functional website showcasing these technologies.

David Mann is an independent Software Architect and trainer focusing on Microsoft’s Information Worker and Collaboration stack. He has been working with portal, information worker, and content management technologies for just shy of 300 years (OK, really for 13 years). He has designed and delivered solutions for Fortune 500, international conglomerates, small family-run businesses, and everything in between--always with a focus on end users and making their lives easier. Dave is the founder of Philly Office Geeks (http://www.officegeeks.org/philly) a Special Interest Group of Philly.Net focused on developer and administrator topics covering SharePoint and the entire Office System. Dave blogs at http://www.kcdholdings.com/blog.

Workflow in SharePoint is an exciting new capability. By now, most people have conquered the basics. However, as organizations have increased their usage of SharePoint, they have found that these workflow basics don't meet their needs. What they need is the ability to run thousands or tens of thousands of workflow instances on documents and list items across their farm. What they find is that the out-of-the-box settings and basic workflow development and management operations are not sufficient. This session will explore why focusing on your workflow subsystem is important, and cover the needs of a large scale workflow environment from the farm level down to individual workflow design specifications. Learn why all workflows need to be looked at in light of performance and scalability as well as how to build workflows that scale in an environment that scales, monitor workflow processing and overcome common obstacles. This session assumes a thorough understanding of the basics of SharePoint workflow and how to develop new workflows in Visual Studio. This introductory material will not be covered. The session will be heavy on code and demos. It will assume a familiarity with SharePoint administration, development and an understanding of basic performance/load tuning and testing.

Marc Ziss is an independent consultant specializing in the development of data driven business applications with a focus on Microsoft Technologies. Marc’s company Z Consulting is centered in the Philadelphia area and has been providing solid business solutions to clients spanning many industries for over 18 years. Being an early adopter of .NET Marc has gained extensive experience in both C# and VB.Net as well as Sql Server. Marc is a regular contributor to Philly.net where he holds the office of “Pub Master”.

Each release of Silverlight has made dramaic strides forward in claiming ground in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) playing field; the introduction of Silverlight 3.0 may be the biggest leap yet.  In this session we'll explore the some of the new features that have just been announced in Silverlight 3.0 that will make programming in Silverlight a great platform for developing LOB apps.

Dr. Mark Pollack has worked extensively in the financial sector as a hands-on architect on several front office trading systems that involved a mixture of Microsoft and Java technologies. Always interested in best practices and improving the software development process, Mark became a contributor on the Spring Framework in 2003, which popularized dependency injection and Aspect-oriented programming in the Java community. He founded its .NET based counterpart, Spring for .NET, in 2004 which he continues to lead. Mark has been recognized as a MVP in Solutions Architecture and speaks frequently at user groups and conferences.

While there are many qualities by which to judge an architecture, two technologies--dependency injection (DI) and aspect-oriented programming (AOP)--provide guidance on some of the most foundational. Not only do they influence how a system's components are designed and organized, they also determine how easily the system may evolve. In this talk, DI and AOP are presented from an architectural point of view, showing how the principles promoted by DI and AOP translate to tangible architectural benefits such as loose coupling and a separation of business and technical concerns. Concrete examples of how to incrementally adopt DI and AOP across a variety of technologies such as Microsoft ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and the Azure Services Platform are demonstrated based on several popular DI and AOP frameworks.

Matthew Podwysocki is a Senior Consultant with Microsoft. Matthew has been a self described language geek and working with .NET languages since the early Betas in 2001. Languages that currently interest him include Haskell, F#, Erlang and Ruby. He is the figurehead DC ALT.NET User Group which takes many ideas of the ALT.NET movement to the local level in the Washington DC area with monthly meetings. He is a member of the CodeBetter community and an active member of the Washington DC area developer community and participates and speaks at user groups, code camps and other conferences. Since joining Microsoft, he has been focused on projects in the Capital area specializing in large data problems , agile methodologies and various .NET and non .NET technologies. His blog can be found at http://podwysocki.codebetter.com/

You may have noticed a lot of talk lately around functional programming. As we start seeing more and more cores added to our systems, our traditional imperative ways of dealing with concurrency are no longer as effective. Instead, we need to focus on managing our side effects for which functional programming is well suited, as it emphasizes the lack of state and side effect free functions. It also allows for very concise and reusable code. With the inclusion of F# into Visual Studio and LINQ in .NET 3.0, functional programming is gaining momentum in the .NET space. Come learn about functional programming and how thinking functionally can help your code today.

Travis Laborde is a Senior Architect, Developer, and DBA specializing in ASP.NET and SQL Server, successful trainer, and mentor.

We will look at using tools like Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation as your primary development environment. We will cover benefits, tips, tricks, and real-life scenarios and hopefully leave you never wanting to work on a "real" PC again.

Jon Graves is a Software Engineer who has been working mainly with C# and .NET for the past 6 years. Currently he is working at Neat Receipts, a software company based in Philadelphia that builds paper management software (think filing cabinet on steroids). He has a passion for designing and building stellar user experiences. When he's not coding, you can find him scuba diving, playing piano, or drinking beer. Usually not all at the same time though.

 

Brian Frantz is a software developer with more than 10 years experience, mostly with .NET.  He is dedicated to continually improving his skills and enjoys sharing what he's learned, including having twice presented at Philly.Net.  Currently he is working at The Neat Company in Philadelphia, building software solutions that acquire, process, and send information from paper documents to just about anywhere.

Clean code is the first step to creating flexible, maintainable software, but without strong object oriented design, you can still create a mess.  The S.O.L.I.D. design principles (acronym coined by Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin) provide a core framework to follow as you write your code, to ensure that you are following best OO design practices, and that your code is readable and maintainable.  When the pressure is on to deliver, design principles are often the first thing thrown out the window.  But learning these principles, and some simple rules and techniques to follow can help you deliver quality software even when the pressure is on.

Terry Merriman is CEO of OAD Consulting, Inc. He has been designing systems for 30 years and has consulted for fortune 500 companies in the banking, insurance, pharmaceutical,  publishing and automobile distributor domains. He works with  companies to improve their architectural and development processes and tool usage and works on the front lines to help teams leverage those processes and refine them in light of real work. OAD also provides training on modeling Enterprise Architecture and offers tools for developing EA2M systems.

Do you understand the virtual spider web that exists within your data center? Do you know how many different yet redundant, licensed applications are being used to support the same business functions? Do you know what applications will be impacted if a given server fails, including the applications on live servers that require resources from the failed one? Do you know the impact that upgrading one IT component will have on the rest of the deployed environment? Do you know what assets are at risk due to loss of version support or because the technologies they require are at risk? Do you know the full impact to existing assets when introducing new technologies and retiring old ones? Do you have a clear path to the future? Can you see a direct correlation between the IT assets and the business functions they support? Are your business services aligned with the business processes and an enterprise-wide semantic information model to ensure reusability and agility across domains and services? Are your architectural assets readily available for and updated by project development efforts? Are you leveraging shared assets, providing sufficient guidance on their use, and ensuring that new development adheres to established guidelines? Is adhering to your architectural guidelines easier than not doing so? These and other questions will be addressed in our session on Enterprise Architecture Asset Management (EA2M). This session will demonstrate how to use an EA2M system, created by extending UML with frameworks, profiles, tagged values, and reporting mechanisms specific to the architectural views (business, application, service, information, technology, deployment, and operations), for use in strategic planning and project development.

Tobin Titus is a software engineer working with IIS at Microsoft. Tobin's 13 years of professional experience were preceded by a love for computers initiated at 9 years old working with Atari Microsoft Basic and Atari Assembler. His professional experience has been concentrated mainly on web technologies using the Microsoft stack, and have included work for some of the worlds largest companies and banks as well as government agencies. Achievements on Tobin's resume include four books and sixteen patents.

When Microsoft released IIS 7 in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 they had extensibility in mind. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the extensibility in configuration, UI administration, and runtime. If you've been frustrated by developing extensions to previous versions of IIS, let this presentation serve as a relief. We'll start by extending IIS 7 configuration and demonstrate how to update that custom configuration with delegated permissions through command line tools like AppCmd and Powershell. We'll demonstrate how to create modules that use the new custom configuration to dynamically change behavior. Lastly, this presentation will cover creating administrato modules that extend the IIS administration interface. If time permits we will also show you how to use unconventional tools such as twitter coupled with domain-specific languages to perform administrative tasks.

Someone just handed you an application (or a few dozen apps :)), a budget and a charter: scale the apps and the store behind them…Active Directory. Hundreds of millions of objects across many servers, 24x7 operations, with five nines of availability (or higher!). Now what?

This talk will cover the dominant problems and approaches used to scale the directory in countless ways. Be it deploying new domain controllers or debugging gnarly performance problems, we’ll look at a variety of problems and proposed solutions for them. Be prepared to think outside the box as we look at the different tools & techniques available to directory administrators.

Vince has been developing applications using Microsoft technologies for the past 13 years.  He began his career as a Visual Basic 3 developer for a third party software vendor and worked with VB 4, 5 and 6 until the .NET Framework 1.0 was release.  He was an early adopter of ASP.NET and C# and has concentrated on line of business applications for either the financial or pharmaceutical industries throughout his entire career.  He is currently the Director of Application Development at a pharmaceutical marketing company where he is the lead architect for .NET solutions and manages the development of internally developed applications written in ASP.NET and SQL Server.  He has worked as a consultant and in corporate development departments and has built a wide variety of applications ranging from a large corporate portal application for 4000 users to a small document approval application for 3 users.

He previously authored “ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development with Visual Studio 2008” and contributed as an author “Professional Visual Basic 6: The 2003 Programmer’s Resource”.

This session will demonstrate how to use LINQ to SQL to bind data to a DataView and enable add, insert, and update capabilities.  It will then show how to implement LINQ to SQL in a 3 tiered environment. I've written about this topic in the book ASP.NET 3.5 Enterprise Application Development Using Visual Studio 2008 by Wrox.

Bill Wolff is a Solutions Architect in the Microsoft Practice at Unisys Corporation. Prior to Unisys, Bill was an independent consultant, trainer, and architect specializing in Microsoft development technologies. His company Agility Systems was based in the Philadelphia area. He ran the consulting firm Wolff Data Systems for 15 years and directed armies of consultants in the dot com world. Bill is founder and President of the philly.net user group, a previous INETA board member where he served as Vice President, Speaker Bureau, and involved in several other user communities. Bill was a contributing author on several books. His certifications include trainer, systems engineer, developer, and Microsoft MVP for VB.NET.

How do you put a user group in the cloud? The Code Camp agenda is currently stored in a SharePoint site using Custom Lists, which is somewhat cloud based. We will use SQL Data Services and Azure Storage to put this data into the cloud. Then we will create some front end web sites using MVC, Silverlight, and traditional ASP.NET. This involves the Azure and SDS SDKs and associated Visual Studio tools.

Rob Keiser is a .Net developer, Architect and freelance writer for PC Today magazine. He has been building Windows application using various languages and tools for the past 15 years.

Creating a Web application Design view versus HTML view

Code behind

Basic navigation – how to program the interaction of pages

Master pages

HTML controls vs. Web controls vs. ASP.NET controls

How Web development is different from Windows development

How to get a web site on the Internet

Tony Testa is a Application Developer for the Philadelphia branch of Perficient, Inc. a leading information technology consulting firm serving clients throughout North America.  With over 6yrs experience with .NET and related technologies, Tony has programmed everything from web sites, windows apps, BI solutions and most recently focused on developing SharePoint solutions for customers.  Check out his blog at www.tonytestasworld.com.

Want to know how to encorporate the latest Web 2.0 technologies into your SharePoint sites and Web Parts?  I'll show you how you can easily encorporate MS AJAX, jQuery and Silverlight into your SharePoint sites and develop cutting edge Web Parts without all the hassle.  Learn how to use these technologies to make your sites stand out and make your sites easier to use.

Miguel Castro is a principal consultant and trainer with SteelBlue Solutions and specializes in building and teaching how to build, .NET solutions. He is a Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker, Conference Speaker, contributor to CoDe Magazine and DevSource.com, as well as an active blogger, and has been a software developer for over 20 years. With a Microsoft background that goes all the way back to VB 1.0 (and QuickBasic in fact).  Miguel has spoken at numerous user groups, code camps, and conferences around the country.  He has also been featured on the Internet Radio Talk Show, .NET Rocks, .NET Rocks-TV, Microsoft’s ARCast (Architecture Podcast), and The Polymorphic Podcast on numerous occasions.  His blog and other things of potential interest can be found at http://www.steelbluesolutions.com, where you can obtain his new CodeBreeze code-generator.  He currently resides in Lincoln Park, NJ with his wife Elena and his daughter Victoria.

If you've haven't gotten into WCF yet or are still bent on using Web Services or Remoting, you gotta get with the program.  Now's your chance.  I'll give you a design-to-implementation walkthrough on WCF fundamentals, internals, and usage; and I'll do it showing you best practices that most books don't teach.  Believe it or not, it really is easier to use than the predecessor technologies.

Kurt’s Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics opened up doors to the world of software development. 25 years later, Kurt’s professional experience has included ample opportunity to implement solutions on numerous databases, development languages, operating systems, and technologies.  From developing multimedia computer base training applications in “C” at AT&T in1984 to architecting C# based solutions at Prudential, a common key to success has been to insure that all work performed provides long range value to the business.

In today's world of doing more with less, one must be able to effectively manage the technical systems that are put in place to improve business efficiency.  Service level agreements, system uptime reports, problem tracking, and performance trending are used to quantify how systems are performing and growing.  There are two real challenges to producing and presenting reports of this type.  The first challenge is to collect business activity metrics without compromising sensitive data, often from a mix of platforms and development languages, then persist that information in a secure medium that is conducive to canned and ad-hoc reporting.  The second challenge is to insure that the collected metrics can be effectively communicated to business process owners in ways that demonstrate direct connections to business activities.  System performance reports rarely translate to business activities or terms and often result in a break down in communications and potentially funding.  The purpose of this session is to demonstrate how an extensible decoupled metrics collection infrastructure can be architected to enable these challenges to be addressed. The key technologies employed in this session are C#, MSMQ, SQL Server, Windows Services, and Web Services. IBM WebSphere MQ will also be discussed.

William Foster is an Application Architect currently using SQL Server 2000/2005 and Oracle 10G at TD Bank, working on warehousing projects with the merger of TD Bank North and Commerce Bank, has been working with designing and performance tuning of relational databases for 21 years.

This session will show you how to use table partitioning in SQL Server versions 2000, 2005, and 2008. All code demonstrations will be running in SQL Server 2008. They will include how to effectively use both the SQL 2000 style and SQL 2005 style table partitioning. We will look at performance comparisons between both types.

Judy Calla has been developing and maintaining Visual Studio and SQL Server applications for five years, following several years of programming experience in a variety of environments and business applications.  She is the group leader for the Central Penn .NET Users Group in Harrisburg and she was awarded the INETA Community Champion Award in 2008.  She presents at user group meetings and code camps, specializing in beginner presentations for programmers new to Visual Studio.

Creating a Windows application

Intro to Basic navigation

Working with Controls

How Windows development is different from Web development

Deployment of the finished product

I am a Principal Consultant with Microsoft Services, specializing in application development and information worker technologies.  For the past several years I have spent most of my time helping customers deploy and develop on Microsoft SharePoint technologies.

Configuring MOSS with ADFS.  The talk will include some background on MOSS AuthN/AuthZ, zones, AAM, etc. but mostly hands-on configuration of a few VPC's to demonstrate MOSS WebSSO.

Steve Presley has been involved in the development, architecture and implementation of client/server, web, mobile and embedded applications since 2000. He likes to share his experiences from working as an multi-platform application engineer as well as commanding lead development, architecture and management roles in development shops for large organizations. With the experience of implementing dozens of applications that needed to be location and/or network aware and dealing performance and portability considerations, feel free to pick his brain on how fun, and sometimes pesky, application development can be. Steve currently resides near Richmond, VA and his blog can be found at http://dsaxman.com.

In this session, we will walk through converting a Windows Forms application into a Silverlight app. This application uses stored procedures and connects to multiple databases in order to perform its tasks while keeping the user updated with progress indicators.

Bob Bunson is an architect at Munich Re America.  He is currently involved in developing composite smart client applications with the parent company in Munich, Germany.  Over the years, he has architected, designed, and coded a wide variety of enterprise applications on the .NET Platform.  He has bought into Agile development, clean code, test-driven development, and object oriented principles and has evangelized those practices with varying success.

The Foundation Series, put together by Philly Alt.Net, seeks to present the fundamentals of software development.  For enterprise applications these fundamentals include the principles and practices of software architecture.  There is no best architecture, but there is an optimal architecture that fulfills the functional and non-functional requirements and addresses the forces and constraints on that architecture.  This session will discuss the process of creating and documenting a software architecture.  Since this is Code Camp, it will also take a look at how that software architecture looks in code.

So your developers have unleashed an app against your unsuspecting Active Directory...and all of a sudden things go wrong. The devs say it's your directory, you say it's their lousy code, it's dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! Come see how to unravel the Gordian Knot and create peace in our time...at least as far as teaching your developers how to integrate with Active Directory is concerned.

John Blumenauer is a Lead Software Engineer for Metrico Wireless, Inc. in Frederick, MD.  Before arriving at Metrico Wireless, he worked for General Electric Aviation (formerly Smiths Aerospace) as a Senior Software Engineer.  Prior to working at GE, John was a software engineer for several software product development companies, including MICROS and Orbital Sciences Corporation.  During John’s 13 year career in software development, he has worked with a variety of languages and has contributed to projects of all sizes, including large scale enterprise applications.  He enjoys sharing his knowledge and valuable experience with the development community.   John is the President and co-founder of the Frederick (MD) .NET User Group (www.frednug.org).  His blog can be found at http://geekswithblogs.net/jblumenauer/Default.aspx.

Struggling with how to make your applications more loosely coupled?  Unfortunately, while many developers strive for loosely coupled design, they end up with tightly coupled applications.  This presentation will briefly explain dependency injection and concentrate on how to use the dependency injection pattern using Microsoft’s Unity Application Block to develop loosely coupled WinForm, WPF, Silverlight 2 and ASP.NET MVC applications.