We started out the year with Gregg Becky giving a presentation on using WCF (Windows Communications Foundation). In simple terms, WCF is a framework from Microsoft for building service-oriented applications. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the reliance on Web services to send and receive data.

This month, Rick Miller gave a very enjoyable talk about XML.

Mr. Miller explained what XML is, and talked about the different ways you can access, manipulate and control XML-formatted data, including using XPath and LinqToXML.

This month, Joe Mayo gave a presentation on Asynchronous programming.

Asynchronous programming (async) is emerging as a common programming practice, especially in .NET technologies such as Silverlight. In sophisticated scenarios, async can be complex, which is why Microsoft is adding language support in the next version of .NET. This talk covered the current state of async, what the challenges are, and how your job will be made easier with the new language features.

Joe Mayo is an author and independent consultant, specializing in Microsoft .NET technologies. He has written 6 books; including C# Unleashed/Sams, LINQ Programming/McGraw-Hill, and Visual Studio 2010: A Beginner's guide; and multiple articles for magazines such as CODE Magazine. He operates the C# station Web site at http://www.csharp-station.com and created the LINQ to Twitter open source project at http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com. For his community contributions, Microsoft has awarded Joe with several MVP awards. Joe can often be found tweeting something technical on Twitter - @JoeMayo. Additional contact information for Joe is located at http://www.mayosoftware.com

This month, Greg Becky returned to our exploration of web development and AJAX by talking about the basic of AJAX and elaborating a litte on the AJAX Toolkit.

This month, Craig Berntson came down from Utah to give a presentation on SOLID OPP.

SOLID is term coined by "Uncle" Bob Marin that stands for five basic patterns of object-oriented programming and design. By using the principles, you are much more likely to create a system that more maintainable and extensible. SOLID can be used to remove code smells by refactoring. Attendees will learn about the following SOLID principles: - Single Responsibility- Open-Closed- Liskov Substitution- Interface Segregation - Dependency Inversion.

Craig has been a Microsoft MVP since 1996 and is currently a Visual C# MVP. He has spoken at developer events around the world, and has co-author the book "Continuous Integration in .NET".

Richard Rosenheim continued his presentation on ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor by taking the application developed last month by adding AJAX capabilities to the application to update individual portions of the web page. The sample project, "States ASP NET MVC 3 Ajax Demo" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link States ASP NET MVC 3 Ajax Demo.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation on developing an web application using ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor. The sample project, "States ASP NET MVC 3 Demo" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link States ASP NET MVC 3 Demo.

This month, Gerardo Melendrez gave a nice presentation on doing Windows Phone 7 development. The presentation, "Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development (March 2011 Presentation)" can be downloaded from the Download section or using this link Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development (March 2011 Presentation)

This month was a round-table discussion on what employers are looking for from job applicants. If you was in the job market, it was a good chance to meet and ask questions of people that was involved in the hiring process.

The discussion panel consisted of:

• Rick Miller, a software development manager with eCommLink, a local company that provides secure prepaid processing for card programs around the world.
• Tyler McManus, a recruiter from TEK Systems, the nation's leading technology staffing and services company
• Chuck Berg, a consulting IT engineer with Station Casinos, a major gaming corporation.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation on doing owner-drawn (custom) listboxes in WinForms, and doing listboxes in WPF.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk about desktop widgets for Windows 7 (and Vista).

Rick Miller led the group in a discussion of Visual Studio and .NET in general.

Richard Rosenheim gave an introductory presentation on ASP.NET MVC 2, using the newly rewritten dotNet Group's website as an example of a MVC application.

Richard Rosenheim gave an overview of incorporating the PayPal shopping cart into a web application.

Mr. Craig Berntson. a Microsoft MVP from Utah, came and gave a very interesting talk on doing continuous integration in .NET.

Mr. Berntson's blog address is http://www.craigberntson.com/blog

Telerik hooked the group with Mr. William Moore, who gave a very nice presentation on Silverlight. He covered the history of Silverlight and went on to discuss what is new in version 4, including a demo of the new ability to add “bounce” to your animations.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of utilizing the built-in unit testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2008.

Richard Rosenheim talked about his approach in implementing word-frequency functionality to a web site.

Unfortunately, it was just one of those days, and the presentation on RESTful web services just didn't go that well. Below are the various links that was used in preparing for the presentation:

RESTful webcasts (courtesy of Pluralsight):



And how to configure IIS 7 (Windows Server 2008) to support services in IIS:

Richard Rosenheim presented a demostration of printing a flow document from a WPF application.

Steve Schwendinger finished up his two-part talk about Application Architecture for independent programmers. This month talk focused on moving code from Windows apps to the Web and back by moving the data portion to a separate layer.

Steve Schwendinger gave an enjoyable talk about Application Architecture for independent programmers. The talk touch upon such items as code reusability and business rules versus business logic.

In the second of a 2-part demonstration, Richard Rosenheim finished walking though the development of a WPF-application utilizing Expression Blend 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008.

The source code from the presentation can be download here.

The zip file contains three versions of the example application, one utilizing a XML document, another using a collection, and the third using a SQL database.

In the first of a 2-part demonstration, Richard Rosenheim started walking though the development of a WPF-application utilizing Expression Blend 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008. The second presentation will complete the development of the sample WPF application. The source code for the example project will be posted as part of the March 2009 meeting write-up.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk on using ASP.NET Routing. The example project can be found here: ASP.NET Routing Example.zip

The following Microsoft web pages were used as references in creating the demostraction:

From Visual Studio Magazine:

Richard Rosenheim demonstrated various .NET desktop applications running under Mono 2.0

A presentation of the Visual Studio 2008 Extension feature was given by Richard Rosenheim.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of using Public Key Encryption.

John Hilts and Justin Holman gave a presentation on using the MVP Patterns.

The presentation and demostrations are available in the download section or from this link: MVP Patterns Presentation and Demo

Gary Hanson gave a very nice talk on using Silverlight 2. The link to various items he used in his presentation is:

http://cid-6e1ccf3300f18def.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Silverlight%20Presentation

Shimon Klein gave a very nice talk on using Linq for SQL.

Richard Rosenheim gave a presentation of using Linq for XML. Shimon Klein also gave a brief introduction to anonymous data types.

Michael Stiefel, a published author, gave a very enjoyable and information loaded presentation on .NET 3.0 Workflow feature.

The code associated with the presentation can be obtained from his website: http://www.reliablesoftware.com/presentations.html

Richard Rosenheim demonstrated how to AJAX-ified a web page using both the pure AJAX and UpdatePanel approaches.

The presentation and demonstration are available in the download section or from this link: ASP AJAX Demo

John Hilts demonstrated three different testing frameworks (NUnitAsp, Watin and Selenium) for the web by showing a web application that illustrates some simple globalization features.

The presentation and demostrations are available in the download section or from this link: Web Testing Presentation (VB.net version) or Web Testing Presentation (C# version)

This month meeting was a demonstration of the Managed Speech API in .NET 3.0. The demo code is in the download section in the file SpeechDemo.zip.

Also demoed was the example speech application that was part of the article "Give Your Users A Voice" by Jeff Certain (Visual Studio Magazine, June 2007). http://www.ftponline.com/vsm/2007_06/magazine/features/jcertain/

The demo application can be downloaded from here: .NET 3.0 Speech Example

Other useful URLs are:

Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5E86EC97-40A7-453F-B0EE-6583171B4530&displaylang=en

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en

Due to my notebook deciding that week was a good time to die, the .NET 3.0 Speech demonstration was postponed until next month. A discussion and Q&A session was conducted instead.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demonstration of owner-drawn list boxes.

Richard Rosenheim gave a talk on using the PropertyGrid control.

Richard Rosenheim gave a demostration of using the EFIX metadata associated with JPEG and TIFF files.

As the scheduled speaker was unable to attend, the members that showed up sent the time helping another member with a programming problem.

Paul Barrett gave a very nice ad-hoc presentation on setting up and using TortoiseSVN, an open-source source code package which integrates the Subversion open-source package with Windows' Explorer.

Gary Hanson gave a very enjoyable presentation on using Virtual Earth. He also touched a little upon Google Maps.

Top 10 security does and don't discussion.

There was two presentations this month. To begin with, Mark Junium gave a presentation on tips for getting better search engine rankings for your web site.

Then John Hilts gave a presentation on using authorize.net, a payment processing service.

This presentation was originally planned for March. But due to illness, this talk is being presented this month.

Mike Weeks has been experimenting with using XAML and the new Expression Interactive Designer from Microsoft. He has offered to talk about his experiences so far with the designer and XAML.

Just a quick introduction for anyone that hasn't heard of XAML. XAML is the new way of designing/implementing GUI designs in Windows Presentation Foundation. Windows Presentation Foundation is being utilized by Windows Vista and will also be available for Windows XP.

Originally, there was going to be a presentation on the Microsoft's Expression Interactive Designer and XAML. Due to illness, this talk has been postponed to April.

Instead, we had an open forum discussing various aspects of programming and computers. At the end, I quickly threw together a demo application of web services and a desktop applicaton that consumes the web services. The sample code will be posted shortly.

The February meeting had a presentation by Richard Rosenheim on doing AJAX programming in ASP.NET 2.0 web pages. The focus was on using the Ajax.Net framework.

Here's are the link for the Ajax.NET framework, plus links to two presentations on Ajax.NET:
http://ajax.schwarz-interactive.de/download/ajax.zip
http://www.polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/usingajaxnet/
http://www.clearlakeservices.com/Presentations/UseAjaxtoturbochargeyourASPNETwebforms/tabid/59/Default.aspx

In addition, Paul Barrett briefly described a number of open-source and free .NET related utilies that he has been looking at. He has collected them together and can be found at http://lvac.com/balrog/DotNetUtilities/

Paul also mentioned that .NET Rocks did a demonstration of using a data source and GridView. This can be found at their website, dnrtv.com.

The January meeting will have a presentation on how to do a data-bound grid and an open-forum discussion about the new features of SQL Server 2005.

Terence Carroll gave a presentation of doing deployments of a Windows application which included a SQL Server 2005 Express database. He demonstrated how to deploy applications using both the ClickOnce and MSI (i.e., Setup.exe) methods. The group discussion on the various issues associated with the ClickOnce deployment method was lively.

John Hilts gave a presentation on doing unit testing and using NUnit.

Please join us for an open discussion on "User Web Pages & State Management”

This presentation is by popular demand of last month’s meeting attendees..

Attendee’s are encouraged to bring their own examples and questions regarding data handling, display, validation, and persistence.

Please join us for an open discussion on "User Interfaces, how to get a consistent look with the least amount of work!”
(Just don’t tell the boss).

This presentation will highlight the attached DotNetGroup Control “GlobalFormatter”, which is also available as a download from our website.

Attendee’s are encouraged to bring their own examples of how they apply styles to their Window Apps.

How can we take a complicated data entry form and spice it up a bit in order to separate our ‘Style’ of work from the rest of the pack? Whether you inherited an existing project or created a form with many input boxes, you can add visual functionality and style without having to replace all of the controls on the form.

• Unzip the DLL file into a folder of your choice
• Add the control to your toolbox
• Drag the control onto an existing form that has many textboxes on it
• Add one line to the Form Constructor Method as shown below

(Object Names changed to protect the innocent!)

Properties that now impact all Textboxes and Checkboxes on the form.

Property	Default	Affects
		TextBox	CheckBox
ForeColor	Black	Yes	Yes
BackColor	Yellow	Yes	Yes
Cursor	Hand	Yes	Yes
Cursor Position	SelectAll	Yes	No

Please join us for discussion and demonstrations on Deploying Dot Net Solutions. (Web & Window Apps).

This session will be presented by:

Please join us for a panel discussion on "How to Get Hired in the Las Vegas .NET Market." This lively discussion will encompass resume writing tips, interviewing from a hiring manager's viewpoint, current local .NET salaries, and critical do's and don'ts in the job search process. Whether you are in the market for another position or simply want to know more about the local .NET landscape, be sure to join us. The panel includes the following contributors:

Eric Kassan, MCSD, MCDBA, MCSE
Software Engineering Manager
MGM Mirage

Eric is currently a software engineering manager at MGM-Mirage overseeing many intranet applications as well as a major back-end processing system. He currently manages five developers, two of whom he was asked to hire. Eric has been managing staff for about ten years in a wide variety of companies from Fortune-500s to start-ups. He has spent most of his career in the financial sector, until moving to MGM-Mirage early this year. Before finding his opportunity at MGM-Mirage, he spent about three years looking for the right position (while working most of that time), so he is well acquainted with both sides of the hiring process.

Jon Von Tobel
IT-Director / Enterprise Architect
Station Casinos

Jon is a hiring manager at Station Casinos for .NET talent and has spent the last 25 years developing software and managing software developers. He has worked internationally as a technology consultant for organizations as diverse as United Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, TRW, and the Peoples Republic of China, designing and implementing multi-million dollar software systems. Starting in 1991, Mr. Von Tobel ran a small software consulting firm until last year when he accepted a position here in Las Vegas with Station Casinos. As Chief Software Architect for Station Casinos, he is intimately involved with the current state-of-the-art in software development, deployment and operations tools and technologies. Mr. Von Tobel sees .NET and related technologies as great tools to enhance productivity and to increase product speed to market but is firmly convinced that these, or any tools, are only as capable as the craftsmen who wield them. A solid foundation in OO design, SDLC, and other "base" software development concepts and techniques are as important to being a successful .NET candidate as in-depth knowledge of .NET itself.

Miguel A. Vega
Technical Instructor and Network Administrator.
New Horizons Computer Learning Center of Las Vegas, NV.

Miguel is an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience in designing, deploying and managing solutions for a variety of companies in three countries (Argentina, México and United States).

Certifications include: A+ Certified Technician,Network+ Certified Technician, Security+ Certified Technician, MCSE Windows NT 4.0, MCSA Windows 2000, MCSE Windows 2000, MCSA Windows Server 2003, MCSE Windows Server 2003, MCT, SCNP

Jet Mitchell
Recruiting Manager
Robert Half Technology

Jet Mitchell is a Recruiting Manager in the Robert Half Technology division of Robert Half International, the world's largest specialized staffing company. She has placed both programming and IT support talent in the Las Vegas area since 1997. She was recently honored for her technology recruiting efforts for the 6th consecutive year at Robert Half Technology's President's Club Awards Ceremony. Over the last 7 years, Jet has also served as an adjunct college professor at CCSN, where she has taught business courses.

This month’s presentation will be delivered by a very special guest speaker, Tim Heuer, Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation.

The next generation of Visual Studio will bring to the developer a full suite of tools to redefine the Integrated Development Environment. In this session we'll look at the advancements of the tool and introduce Visual Studio Team System, the full integrated suite of software development lifecycle tools. With VSTS, organizations can reduce the complexity of delivering software projects; facilitate collaboration among all the members of a software team speeding development time and ensuring the predictability and reliability of the development process. We will demonstrate the different aspects of VSTS and provide working demonstrations of some of these tools.

With over 8 years in software development consulting, and working exclusively with Microsoft technologies, Tim has developed a passion for developing software. He has worked on teams with small business development through Fortune 500 enterprise application development. He is an advocate of continual learning and mentoring junior developers.

Tim’s passion for technology and belief in community is what led him to work for Microsoft in his current role.

1st Presentation: Advanced ADO.Net techniques / data handing for Custom searching / reporting.

2nd Presentation: Open Forum on Dot-Net Issues

1st Presentation: Project Management: At the beginning of every new project, the Project Leader should document all the Need Assessments, Application Requirements, and Use Case Diagrams. Terry Phillips (Vice President) will discuss several methods to collate these documents and create presentations suitable for Management or Clients.

2nd Presentation: Securing & Billing for Web Services: Most of us have played with Web Services developed in Visual Studio. But how can we protect them? And more importantly Bill for usage? (Hint, if we can authenticate, we can invoice!)