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.

Geek Harvest is a summer-long, parent-kid programming project that culminates in a 10-15 minute show-and-tell presentation to the user group (read more). We will be kicking off the lecture with these cool topics:

Ben and Will Henderson present “Scratch” Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Calvin and Kinzie Bottoms present “Project Euler” Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that require more than just mathematical insights to solve. The use of a computer and programming skills are required to solve most of the problems.

…and after the w00ts and hurrays! have subsided we will move on to the feature presentation

Topic: REST Easy
In today’s increasingly connected, service-oriented world, sooner or later you are likely to use or create Web services that are based on REST. In this presentation, we will learn why REST has gained great popularity, and look at some of the tools for .NET that make it easier to consume and create REST APIs.

Topic: “An intro to RavenDB with NancyFX”
Raven is an Open Source document database for the .NET/Windows platform and a relatively new addition to the “NoSQL” movement. Nancy is a lightweight web framework for the .Net platform, inspired by Sinatra. Through these, we will explore new and upcoming additions to .NET web development.

Links to get smart: http://ravendb.net and https://github.com/NancyFx/Nancy

Speaker: Justin Soliz
Justin is a developer out of Hendersonvile, TN. In addition to .NET development, he also has a passion for Node.js, Sinatra, and Rails. You can visit his blog at justinsoliz.com or say hi to him on twitter @justinsoliz

Special Note: 
devLink is next week (Wed-Fri). Quite a few of us are going, so next week’s lab will be cancelled. If you are interested in carpooling to Chattanooga join us on Thursday at the lecture and we will help you share a ride.

Topic: “Getting Started with CouchDB and .NET”
“CouchDB is a document database which is gaining popularity in the “NoSQL” movement. This session will introduce you to these non-relational concepts and describe how they compare/contrast with the relational solutions you’re already familiar with. We’ll go through the basics of CouchDB and show how easy it is to use it from .NET.”

Speaker: Josh Bush
Josh Bush is a Sr. Software Developer with 7 years experience developing software for the healthcare industry. He is passionate about web based technologies utilizing the latest that HTML5 and JavaScript have to offer. Josh has developed and maintains a few open source jQuery plugins. You can read the occasional blog post from Josh on his website at http://digitalbush.com or follow him on twitter (@digitalBush).

Topic: “Practical approach to implementing MVVM with Silverlight”
“You have probably seen a number of sessions that provide academic descriptions of how to use Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) in your projects, but have you implemented it yet? This sessions will walk through a practical approach of how to leverage MVVM without all the philosophical anecdotes. This session will be completely code oriented with minimal slides and expects attendees are familiar with XAML and C# at the basic level.”

* If you’ve never touched XAML, poke around here (http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/) some before Thursday and you’ll be A-OK.

Speaker: John Kellar
John Kellar is a Senior Enterprise Architect for Terenine and a regular technical presenter at local and regional events. He has delivered solutions in a variety of markets including healthcare, government, financial services, gaming and manufacturing. In addition to being Founder and Chairman of the devLink Technical Conference; John has served as a member of the Nashville .NET User Group Board of Directors and a charter member of the Little Rock .NET User Group where he served two years as Vice-President. He has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2007. You can view his blog at http://www.johnkellar.com or say hi to him on Twitter (@johnkellar).

Special Note: If you’re bummed you couldn’t make CodeStock and want information about devLink 2011 this meeting is a great time to ask– John Kellar runs devLink.

Topic: An Introduction to Symbiote
“Symbiote is a set of open source libraries with a lofty goal: make it simpler to write distributed, scalable systems that leverage best-of-breed open source libraries and open specifications. Symbiote’s libraries provide simple API abstractions which cover the most common use cases for logging, caching, messaging, persistance, and windows services. This talk will focus on Symbiote’s messaging system enables service oriented, distributed systems.”

Note: If you are “hardcore-geek” and haven’t made it to a meeting this year, this would be a good topic to come in for. If you’d like to take a peek at Symbiote beforehand it’s on GitHub: https://github.com/arobson/Symbiote

Speakers: 
Alex Robson is a Senior Software Developer and Architect obsessed with distributed architecture and the technologies that enable them. He enjoys contributing to one of many open source projects, reading about new languages and writing the occasional blog post. You can learn more about Alex from his blog (http://sharplearningcurve.com/blog) and on Twitter (@A_Robson)

Jim Cowart has over 11 years of experience in development – including time spent as middle-tier application developer, database developer, data architect, data warehouse architect, desktop and web UI developer. He’s particularly passionate about distributed architectures, and the role web clients can play in them. He currently works as a Senior Architect and Developer at Terenine in Chattanooga, TN. You can learn more about Jim from his blog (http://ifandelse.com) and on Twitter (@ifandelse)