Author Archives: president@nashdotnet.org

February 16 – “Open” Lab Night

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Since starting the hands-on labs a year ago, it has continued to evolve and improve. This month we would like to try something a little different. We hope you’ll come out this Thursday and participate in an “open” lab, where we tackle the technology *you* want to learn about. Here is what we will do:

  1. As a group, we will list and vote on a number of topics.
  2. We all work together on one topic with one or more use cases.
  3. Or, we take the most popular topics, and assign one to each table. Move to the table with the topic you’re most interested in, or move whenever you feel like it!

We may also use the most popular topics as future labs dedicated to each one. Here are a few topic ideas that we may consider:

  • ASP.NET MVC 3 / Razor
  • SQL Server
  • RavenDB or other NoSQL databases
  • jQuery
  • HTML5
  • REST (e.g. Hammock, WCF Web API, NancyFX, or Service Stack)
  • Node.js
  • Knockout or Backbone
  • … Others?

Even if you can’t make the lab this month, we would still like to get your feedback on what topics and format you would like to see in the labs. Help us keep improving, and make these labs the most awesome night of hands-on learning possible!

January 12 Meeting Canceled Due to Inclement Weather

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The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory starting at noon through midnight, indicating road conditions may become unsafe. After discussing among the leadership, we have decided to cancel tonight’s meeting. We do not like the idea of canceling our first meeting of the year, but it is much more important for everyone to stay safe. Live to code another day!

One of our goals is get better at communications and announcements from the group. If you haven’t already, please register on the NashDotNet Google Group, as this is currently our best method for sending out timely messages to all members.

January 12, 2012 – Gaines Kergosien – “Testing with Microsoft Pex and Moles”

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The holidays are over. You’ve nearly recovered from all the food and festivities. And, you’ve written out your New Year’s resolutions. Desperately scrawled at the top of your list you find…

“Time to kick it up a notch, sharpen the ax, and become a better software developer in 2012.”

Good. Because, that’s what we are here to help you do!

Join us at 6:00 PM for free food and drinks. The lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by some great giveaways, such as books, training, and software. Our meetings are held at 22 Century Blvd, Nashville, TN (map).

Topic: “Testing with Microsoft Pex and Moles”

Pex is a testing tool that analyzes code and generates unit tests. Moles is a framework that isolates code with dependencies on other application layers or frameworks. With just a few mouse clicks, you can generate suites of tests against code that previously may have been difficult or impossible to test.

Links to get smart: Pex and Moles – Isolation and White box Unit Testing for .NET

Speaker: Gaines Kergosien

Gaines Kergosien is a .NET Solutions Consultant for Deloitte. Gaines is former president and current board member for the Nashville .NET User Group. With over 12 years in solutions development using Microsoft technologies, his work includes consulting for such companies as Lexis Nexis, Gibson Guitars, Cardinal Healthcare, and HCA Physician Services. Follow him on Twitter @gainesk.

Welcome to 2012!

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David Neal

Happy New Year! I am humbled and honored to serve as president of the Nashville .NET User Group for 2012. It is my goal to build on the great foundation and momentum of 2011. I definitely have some big shoes to fill!

I am also thrilled to be backed by such a talented team. Your 2012 elected officers are:

  • Josh Bush, Vice-President, in charge of sponsorship and swag
  • Csaba Toth, Secretary, in charge of recording and communication
  • Frank Grimmer, Treasurer, in charge of finances
  • Gaines Kergosien, Member-at-Large, in charge of providing experienced leadership and counsel

Our primary mission is to serve, encourage, and equip our developer community. We welcome and encourage your feedback! Any positive or constructive feedback will help us improve our group, the effectiveness of our meetings, and ultimately our entire developer community.

The Lectures

We will continue to have traditional lectures on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Last year we had a great mix of speakers covering a wide range of topics, including alternate technologies to broaden our perspective of what can be used to compliment .NET development.

The Labs

The labs were a big success last year. We will continue to have a hands-on lab the 3rd Thursday of each month. The labs are the perfect opportunity to pick up new skills, experience the rewards of mentoring, and have a some geeky fun in the process!

I have already spoken to a number of awesome leaders in our community that are interested in speaking or facilitating labs this year. I am very excited about what is in store for 2012!

Organization

Bryan Hunter laid the foundation last year for our user group to become a true 501c3 non-profit. We are continuing to move forward with this effort. Becoming an official non-profit organization will provide a lot of advantages to our group. We will keep you updated on our progress and what impact this will have.

Thank you again for this opportunity. I look forward to serving this year, helping you grow, and sharing some fun along the way.

Cheers,
David Neal
President, Nashville .NET User Group, 2012
About.Me

December 10, 2011- NashDotNet Holiday Party

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The Nashville .NET User Group’s holiday party will be this Saturday, December 10 from 7pm-9pm at the Greenhouse Bar in Green Hills. Robert Half Technology has generously volunteered to sponsor this year’s event. A big tip of the Santa-hat to them!

Last year’s event was at the same place, and the space and food were both excellent. The Food Company will be catering. Bring family, friends, and co-workers for fellowship and geeky conversation. Should be a great time!

Inside the Greenhouse Bar. Click above for maps & directions

 

November 17, 2011 – Lab “F# in three hours”

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Special Theme Night: “F# in three hours”

Join us this Thursday as we “up our game” as a development community.

We are going to get started with Microsoft’s excellent functional programming language F#. No prior F# experience is expected. Dan Mohl (a Microsoft F# MVP) will be on hand to keep us moving.

We will start by getting everyone set up with the tools. We will walk through some language basics as a group. From there, we will each pick from a list of seven problems and (using the buddy system) we will solve them. In the third hour Dan Mohl will demo some new features of F# 3.0 (currently in Developer Preview) such as Type Providers.

We will wrap up the lab with a discussion on how we can build a functional programming community in Nashville. Do we want a new F# subgroup? How about a general functional meetup group (F#, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, …)?  Be there and help us decide.

About F#:
F# is a succinct, expressive and efficient functional (and object-oriented) programming language for .NET. It comes bundled in Visual Studio as a first-class language alongside C#, VB.NET and C++. F# has been described as a feeder language for C# which means new features will be introduced in F# first and will trickle into C# in later releases. F# helps you write simple code to solve complex problems.

Links:
- F# on MSDN
- Search Twitter for F# news (#fsharp)
- Don Syme’s F# 3.0 presentation from BUILD 2011

Hope to see you there!

November 10, 2011 – Elections, Burke Holland on “HTML 5″, and the winter job fair

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Elections (~ 6:20 pm)
We will hold officer elections for 2012. Nominations are open until the voting starts. Here are the current nominations:

  • President: David Neal is currently unopposed
  • Vice-President: Josh Bush is currently unopposed
  • Secretary: Csaba Toth, Delmont Jones
  • Treasurer: Frank Grimmer is currently unopposed
  • Member-at-large: Gaines Kergosien is currently unopposed

The Lecture (~ 6:30 pm)
Topic: HTML5 Techniques You Can Use Today
What is HTML5? What is a polyfill? How do I use a canvas? In this session we’ll take an in-depth look at what HTML5 is, and where it’s going. You should leave this session with concrete techniques and concepts that you can use immediately to jumpstart or accelerate your HTML5 development.

Links to get smart:
- HTML5 Rocks (http://html5rocks.com) has a bevy of videos, tutorials, posts and sample code for getting started with HTML5, and…
- HTML5 Doctor (http://html5doctor.com) is a dictionary of HTML5 terms, definitions and specifications for helping you do HTML5 development today.

Speaker: Burke Holland
Burke Holland is a web developer living in Nashville, TN. He enjoys working with and meeting developers who are building mobile apps with jQuery / HTML5 and loves to hack on social API’s. Burke works for Telerik as a Developer Evangelist focusing on Kendo UI. Burke is @burkeholland on Twitter.

The Winter Job Fair (~ 7:30 pm)
After the lecture we will open the floor for a discussion on jobs. We are assembling a panel to keep the conversation rolling. We will also have entrepreneurs, bloggers and open source contributors on the panel to discuss things you can do to control your own value on the market. We are also inviting three recruiting firms (TEKSystems, TrueBridge, and Alltech) to send a representative to discuss what their clients are looking for. Should be fun and illuminating.

October 20, 2011 – Lab “Dev Survival Skills”

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Special Theme Night: “Dev Survival Skills”
If you were thrown onto a deserted coding island with a group of strangers would it go more like “Gilligan’s Island” or “Lord of the Flies”? What skills and knowledge does at least one person on a team need to possess to prevent chaos and pain?

Here are three good places to start:

  • a way to coordinate and track effort – such as a Kanban board
  • a simple way to read and write data – with a Micro ORM perhaps
  • a script on how to do version control without server infrastructure – with Git if given a choice

This lab will be broken into three 50-minute sections. Jon Terry will give a crash course on using a physical kanban board to track “who is working on what”. David Neal will get us set up with two (or three) Micro ORMs that are simple-to-learn and simple-to-use. Finally, we will walk through some typical source control use cases using a memory stick as our central repository (primitive islands don’t have WIFI or source servers).

Don’t be a dufus and skip out– it should be a good one. To follow along, please bring a laptop with Visual Studio.

Special note:
Nashville GiveCamp is this weekend. If you are volunteering, this “dev survival skills” lab will be very handy.

October 11, 2011 – Alan Stevens – “Distributed Version Control with Mercurial”

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Topic: “Distributed Version Control with Mercurial: A new way to work
What’s wrong with the way we’ve been using source control? Nothing actually, but new tools have come along which empower developers and enable workflows that were not possible before. In this session, we’ll examine the reasons that distributed version control systems (DVCS) were created. We will step through the flow of changes when using a DVCS. We’ll discuss the DVCS alternatives available with demonstrations using Mercurial.

Links to get smart: http://mercurial.selenic.com/ and http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

Speaker: Alan Stevens
Alan Stevens is a father, geek, vegan and software artisan living in Knoxville, TN. Alan regularly speaks at conferences and user group meetings about how to be a better software developer. Alan is an Open Space Technology facilitator. Alan received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in C# in 2009, 2010 & 2011. Alan is a member of ASP Insiders. When Alan is not hanging out with his family, posting on Twitter, singing or playing his acoustic guitar, he occasionally updates his website at http://halanstevens.com.

Special Note:
We will be taking nominations for 2012 officers at this meeting. Elections will be held November 10.

Sept 15, 2011 – Lab “Up and Running with RabbitMQ”

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Special Theme Night: “Up and Running with RabbitMQ”
RabbitMQ provides robust messaging for applications. Rabbit is open source, easy to use, scales well and is supported on all major operating systems and developer platforms. What can it do for a .NET developer? Using Rabbit will help you write decoupled (better) C# code. It will also minimize the pain of writing reliable, distributed code in .NET. Another benefit is it makes interop between .NET and other languages (and platforms) very simple.

At the end the lab, everyone:
- will have RabbitMQ running on their laptop
- will be able to explain the benefits of messaging
- will have written code to distribute tasks among workers
- will have written code to broadcast messages to many consumers

To follow along, please bring a laptop with Visual Studio. We will start the lab by getting Rabbit installed on everyone’s laptops. No prior Rabbit/messaging experience is expected. If you have used Rabbit please join us, and offer to help out.

Happy to report Alex Robson (area Rabbit expert) will be on-hand to help.

Links to get smart:

  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#what-is-messaging
  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#scenarios
  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#managing-concepts-exchanges
  • Quick start posts and videos: http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.html#quickstart
  • Alex Robson’s devLink slides: https://github.com/arobson/rabbitmq-demos/blob/master/Messaging%20Patterns.pptx
  • Buy the book: “RabbitMQ in Action (Early Access Edition)” http://www.manning.com/videla/