Your Spark Razored my NHaml: A comparison of popular ASP.NET MVC View Engines

By now, if you’ve worked with ASP.NET MVC, you’ve worked with the default WebFormsViewEngine that may feel like a step back 10 years into Classic ASP 3.0. But there are other options available. ASP.NET MVC was designed to use other View Engines, allowing you to to keep the same Model and Controller while using code in your Views that doesn’t bring back scary memories of COM. Spark, Razor, and NHaml are all popular View Engines that have each made a statement in ASP.NET MVC circles. Let’s see what they are all about, how they compare, and how they stack up to the default engine.

Speaker
Jay Harris – Arana Software

Jay is a .NET developer, a software consultant, and is president of Arana Software (www.aranasoft.com). He has been developing on the web for over 15 years, since the Blink tag lured him away from VB3 back in 1995. With a career focus on end-user experience, he is a strong advocate of practices and processes that improve quality through code, ranging from automated testing, continuous integration, and performance analysis, to designing applications from the user’s perspective. Jay is also an active speaker and leader in the developer community, serving as President of Ann Arbor .NET Developers and is co-founder for the Lansing and the Indianapolis Give Camp.

Pizza/Geek Dinner
Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. A Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Waldo Peppers).

When
5:30pm – 7:30pm
Tuesday November 1, 2011

Where
Marathon Petroleum Company – Findlay, OH

5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code

You understand the basics of AOP, and may know how to use PostSharp, but what it is good for? Your application might be full of cross-cutting concerns that are making your project difficult to keep under control. This session will take you through 5 real-world examples of aspects that will make your code more maintainable, easier to read, easier to write, and generally help adhere to SOLID principles. I’ll cover caching, logging, transaction management, dependency loading, and authorization, as well as some of the more advanced ingredients of writing good aspects.

Speaker
Matt Groves

Matthew D. Groves is a guy who loves to code. It doesn’t matter if it’s “enterprisey” C# apps, cool jQuery stuff, contributing to OSS, or rolling up his sleeves to dig into some PHP. He has been coding professionally ever since he wrote a QuickBASIC point-of-sale app for his parent’s pizza shop back in the 90s. He currently works from home on the Telligent Analytics product team, and loves spending time with his wife and 2 kids, watching the Cincinnati Reds, and getting involved in the developer community. He has a BS in Computer Science, an MBA, a PMP certification, and has experience in education, consulting, and product development.

5 Things you can do to be a bit more Agile (Lvl 100)

We all want to be more agile. We want a process that helps us deliver awesome code, but need to drag the rest of IT and the business along with us. How do you stop the nightmare of yesteryear, and sneak agile into your shop, right under the noses of the waterfall guardian trolls? We have five ways to be more agile without officially changing your process, or getting fired.

Speaker
Brian Prince

Expect Brian to get (in his own words) “super excited” whenever he talks about technology, especially cloud computing, patterns, and practices. That’s a good thing, given that his job is to help customers strategically leverage Microsoft technologies and take their architecture to new heights. Brian’s the co-founder of the non-profit organization CodeMash (www.codemash.org), runs the global Windows Azure Boot Camp program, and speaks at various regional and international events. Armed with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science and Physics from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, Brian is a zealous gamer with a special weakness for Fallout 3. Brian is the co-author of “Azure in Action”, published by Manning Press.

Introduction to Microsoft Workflow Foundation

Many applications require workflows to manage scenarios such as approval processes and complex business logic. Often these tasks can last for weeks and require status tracking, waiting for input from external persons and systems, and execution of parallel work. Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) assists developers in creating a workflow for an application by providing a library of common tasks, a framework to coordinate those tasks, and a graphical development environment. WF is built on top of the .Net framework and integrates seamlessly with SQL Server and with WCF. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the basics of WF, demonstrate how to create and call a workflow and the options for hosting a workflow. I will show how to use the task library and extend WF by creating your own tasks.

Speaker
David Giard

David Giard has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies since 1993. He is a Microsoft MVP and an INETA mentor and the President of the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group. David has presented at many of the conferences and user groups around the Midwest. He is a recovering certification addict and holds an MCTS, MCSD, MCSE, and MCDBA, as well as a BS and an MBA. He is the host and producer of the mildly popular online TV show Technology and Friends. You can read his latest thoughts at www.DavidGiard.com. David lives in Michigan with his two teenage sons.

An Introduction to Visual Studio LightSwitch

Visual Studio LightSwitch, first released on August, 2010, is now in Beta 2 release. LightSwitch is a new tool enabling a user to quickly build data-driven applications like an order entry system. It is designed for non-programmers but allows customization and extension by developers. LightSwitch is a unique application development tool because it uses model centric design. By auto generating forms over data, a user can quickly create an application containing detail, search, and master detail screens. Because the application LightSwitch builds uses Silverlight, the application can be targeted for desktop, internet, or cloud deployment. In this presentation Dan will give an overview of LightSwitch and demonstrate features of LightSwitch for building a business application.

Speaker
Dan Moyer

Dan is a passionate software consultant with over 30 years of experience developing business and system solutions. Early in his career he developed communication drivers to interconnect point of sale and mainframe systems implementing packages for async, bisync, X.25, tcpip, NetBui, SNA and RPC/Sockets protocols. He has worked on a development team which developed one of the first large scale object oriented (C++) frameworks. The framework abstracted OS interfaces to allow business applications to run on OS/2, Windows 3.1, Windows NT and Unix. During the Dotcom boom, he worked on web technologies and site performance and scalability for an ecommerce application. Following the Dotcom bust, Dan joined Microsoft to work in a distributed development team responsible for delivering a business framework. Today he works as a consultant, using his experience of many past projects to deliver quality solutions. His passion is learning and staying current with the latest DotNet technologies, particularly in the technology stacks of WCF, WPF, Silverlight, and Entity Framework. He is currently working on a project with ONeil Associates in Miamisburg using those technologies to implement a document production application.

Resources
Dan’s Blog: http://www.danlmoyer.com/
 
Starting point.  Links to How Do I Videos, Tutorials,  Training kit
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lightswitch
 
Video discussing LightSwitch architecture
http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Steve-Anonsen-and-John-Rivard-Inside-LightSwitch
 
LightSwitch team blogs
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lightswitch/
 
Two of the more prolific LightSwitch team bloggers:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/robertgreen/
 
Michael Washington and Paul Patterson’s related LightSwitch blogs.
http://lightswitch.adefwebserver.com/
http://www.paulspatterson.com/microsoft-lightswitch-article-index/