Each NETDA meeting starts at 7:00pm and is scheduled to end by 9:00pm. Arrive between 6:30pm and 7:00pm for free pizza and to network with others. Refer to Meetings page for location details.
Upcoming NETDA meetings:
09-13-10: TBD
09-27-10: TBD
10-11-10, 10-25-10
11-08-10
12-13-10
01-10-11, 01-24-11
02-14-11, 02-28-11
03-14-11, 03-28-11
04-11-11, 04-25-11
05-09-11, 05-23-11
06-13-11, 06-27-11
NETDA meeting 08-23-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
Business Application Development with Visual Studio LightSwitch – John Stallo
Simplified Business Application Development with Visual Studio LightSwitch LightSwitch is a new development tool for building business applications that simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. In this demo-heavy session, we’ll introduce you to the end-to-end experience for building and deploying a data-centric business application using LightSwitch. Next, we’ll look under the hood to understand the architecture of a LightSwitch app and explore how to customize and extend its UI and Data layers for when the app’s requirements grow beyond what is supported by default in the tool.
John Stallo is a Lead Program Manager on the Visual Studio LightSwitch product team. Born in Perth, Western Australia, he has been with Microsoft for over 9 years working on a variety of Visual Studio developer tools and is passionate about improving developer productivity.
NETDA meeting 08-09-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
ASP.NET MVC for Web Form Programmers – Paul Litwin
Are you comfortable creating ASP.NET Web Form applications but even a little curious about what all the fuss is about MVC and test-driven development? In this session, Web Form junkie Paul Litwin takes a critical look at the world of ASP.NET MVC, but not from any expert point of view. Instead, Paul shares his experience as a Web Form developer who decided to take a closer look at this radical new approach to ASP.NET development. Come hear what Paul learned and if he plans to employ ASP.NET MVC in his future ASP.NET applications.
Paul Litwin is a developer specializing in ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services, and related technologies. Paul is a Programmer Manager with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He is also the owner of Deep Training, a developer owned training company specializing in .NET developer training (www.deeptraining.com). Paul has authored a number of books and training courses on ASP.NET, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Microsoft Access. Paul is the conference chair of Microsoft ASP.NET Connections, a Microsoft MVP, and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau. He has spoken at a number of conferences and code camps, including Microsoft ASP.NET Connections, TechEd, and Seattle Code Camp.
NETDA meeting 06-28-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
Busy .NET Developers Guide to MongoDB – Ted Neward
“For the past two decades, we have lived under a ‘tyranny of the relational’, such that any discussion of data storage and persistence inevitably centers around the ‘big honkin’ centralized relational database’. But recently, a new idea, championed by the ‘NoSQL’ movement, holds that the relational database isn’t the only way to store data, and that, in fact, there are significant advantages to looking at alternative ways to store data. One of these implementations is the MongoDB document-oriented database, and in this presentation we’ll look at MongoDB, what it is, how it works, and how it’s different—in some cases radically so—from the relational database you’ve come to know, love, and loathe.”
Busy .NET Developers Guide to Multiparadigmatic C# – Ted Neward
“C# is a rich and powerful language, perhaps too much so. Drawing ideas from languages all over the programming language landscape, it can often be confusing and difficult to reconcile all these different ideas within the C# language. In this presentation, we’ll go over what a ‘multi-paradigm’ language is, why it’s important to identify these different paradigms, what the different paradigms are in C#, and how they all work together (or don’t).”
Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 10-person shops. He is an authority in Java and .NET technologies, particularly in the areas of Java/.NET integration (both in-process and via integration tools like Web services), back-end enterprise software systems, and virtual machine/execution engine plumbing. He is the author or co-author of several books, including Effective Enterprise Java, C# In a Nutshell, SSCLI Essentials, Server-Based Java Programming, and a contributor to several technology journals. Ted is also a Microsoft MVP Architect, BEA Technical Director, INETA speaker, former DevelopMentor instructor, frequent worldwide conference speaker, and a member of various Java JSRs. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, and eight PCs. Reach him at ted@tedneward.com or visit Ted's blog: http://tedneward.com.
NETDA meeting 07-12-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
Overview of Cloud Computing and Windows Azure 101 - Mithun Dhar
The Windows Azure platform is a set of high-performance cloud computing services that can be used together or independently and enable developers to leverage existing skills and familiar tools to develop cloud applications. In this session, we’ll provide a developer-focused overview of this new online service computing platform. We’ll explore the components, key features and real day-to-day benefits of Windows Azure. Highlights include:
• What is cloud computing?
• Running web and web service applications in the cloud
• Using the Windows Azure and local developer cloud fabric
• Getting started – tools, SDKs and accounts
• Writing applications for Windows Azure.
An avid reader and Starbucks junkie, you will inevitably find Mithun riding a caffeine high with a book in his hand. Before joining the MSDN Events roster, he served as a product manager with the Microsoft Speech Server team, from the product’s incubation to the final release of Microsoft Speech Server 2007. Mithun also conducted a road show evangelizing and recruiting partners and ISVs to expand the Speech Server partner ecosystem and conducted trainings across the country. He’s passionate about the unified communications sector and loves applying his technical background and business savvy to make Microsoft a top player in the field. He’s spoken at numerous conferences, including SpeechTek, Microsoft Global Briefing, ICCM, Tech Ready, TechEd, and the Microsoft Mobile and Embedded Devices Conference. Before joining Microsoft, Mithun worked at Oracle on the 9iAS product and at Aditi/Talisma Corporation on a CRM product for mid-market users. He enjoys meeting customers with different backgrounds and profiles, and helping them build products that will simplify people’s lives. In his downtime, Mithun takes road trips and goes flying – after a round of double espressos, of course.
NETDA meeting 07-26-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
Software Testing with Visual Studio 2010 – Brian Keller
Are you tired of spending hours trying to reproduce and diagnose bugs? Do you have a hard time getting testers and developers to talk to each other? Is it difficult to determine which tests are most important to run after you produce a new build? If so, then this session is for you! Software testing is perhaps the #1 area of investment for the application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. During this session we explore the new software testing architecture offered by Visual Studio 2010. We also examine the various testing roles played by members of the development and testing teams and show how they will interact with Visual Studio 2010 to more effectively test software and eliminate bugs.
Brian Keller is a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft specializing in Visual Studio and application lifecycle management. Brian has been with Microsoft since 2002 and has presented at conferences all over the world. Brian is a regular personality on MSDN’s Channel 9 web site, and is co-host of the popular show This Week on Channel 9. Brian recently co-authored Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010. Outside of work Brian can usually be found enjoying the great outdoors while either rock climbing, backpacking, skiing or surfing.
NETDA meeting 05-10-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
06:45pm - Free pizza
06:55pm - News and announcements
07:00pm - Building Business Productivity Applications with VS 2010 - Beth Massi
08:10pm - Improving Developer-Tester Collaboration with VS 2010 - Doug Seven
08:55pm - Giveaways, raffles, and socializing
Note: Attendees must be an active NETDA member to receive free giveaways and to be eligible for the many valuable raffle prizes. Membership information, activation, and renewals on our Membership page ($20/year via PayPal, or credit card through PayPal).
Building Business Productivity Applications with Visual Studio 2010 - Beth Massi
The Visual Studio and Office teams have made significant investments in improving the developer experience for building and deploying Office and SharePoint applications. In this demo-heavy session, we will walk through a ton of demos and new tools that show you how to build business applications built on Office and SharePoint as well as how to integrate your line-of-business data via OData services. You’ll also see how to consume these services to create powerful BI data analysis in Excel 2010 and how you can extend Office client and server applications.
Beth Massi is a Senior Program Manager on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft and a community champion for business applications and Visual Basic developers. She has over 15 years of industry experience building business applications and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. You can find her on a variety of developer sites including MSDN Developer Centers, Channel 9, her blog at www.BethMassi.com , and on twitter @BethMassi.
Improving Developer-Tester Collaboration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 - Doug Seven
Effective collaboration between developers and testers is paramount and can make the difference between shipping quality applications on time, or slipping because bugs are found late. In this session you will learn how Visual Studio 2010 can help you improve the collaboration of development and test activities in your team, regardless of who does them. You will learn how Microsoft Test Manager 2010 helps you execute tests and enables you to file rich, actionable bugs so whomever they get assigned to can easily understand the issue and begin to fix it. You will see how IntelliTrace helps you discover the root cause of a defect quickly, and finally how to automate your functional testing with Coded UI Tests.
Visual Studio 2010 and Office 2010 Demos, Discussions, Giveaways, and Raffles!
NETDA meeting 06-14-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
06:45pm - Free pizza
07:00pm - News and announcements
07:10pm - Website Performance with Aptimize - Ed Robinson
08:00pm - Report Builder 2.0 (A New Beginning) - William Vaughn
08:55pm - Raffles and socializing
Report Builder 2.0 (A New Beginning) with William Vaughn
This talk discusses the new implementation of Report Builder that shipped with SQL Server 2008 and synchronized with Visual Studio 2010. That is, the 2008 RDL created or edited by the Report Builder is being incorporated in the newest version of Visual Studio. We discuss the mechanics of the client-side report process as well as a number of serious security concerns I voiced in my February 2010 SQL Server Magazine article. We’ll see how a Report User client can take a report and modify it and save it back to the catalog to show whatever information they wish—and we’ll see how to stop them from doing so. This session is extracted from my monthly Progressive webinar “SQL Server and Reporting Services”.
William (Bill) Vaughn is an industry-recognized author, mentor and subject-matter expert on Visual Studio, SQL Server, Reporting Services and data access technologies. He’s worked in the computer industry for over thirty-eight years. In 2000, after 14 years at Microsoft, Bill stepped away to work on his books, consulting, mentoring and independent training seminars. His latest books include Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) and Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server Compact Edition. He and Peter Blackburn also wrote the critically acclaimed Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services. He’s available for consulting, mentoring or custom training. See www.betav.com and www.betav.com\blog\billva.
Website Performance with Aptimize - Ed Robinson
Everything you need to know to have a fast website
Faster websites mean more business, happier customers, and better page ranking. Having the fastest quad core server, gigabytes of memory and solid state disks, doesn’t guarantee a fast website from the users perspective – So why are websites so slow? The Internet and number of HTTP requests have an 80% impact on your website’s speed. Let’s take a look at 14 technical tips for performance and how you can learn what effects website speed and how you can develop faster websites.
Ed Robinson is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aptimize. He is responsible for Aptimize's business growth, revenue, product marketing, product management, and strategy. Ed has 20 years experience in the Information technology industry in both the United States and New Zealand and has a global vision for adding business value with better technology and communications. His background includes six years at Microsoft shipping Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft Content Management Server, and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. Ed Holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Otago.
NETDA meeting 04-12-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
06:45pm - Free pizza
07:00pm - Visual Studio 2010 overview, demos, discussions, and cool giveaways!
Visual Studio 2010 Overview, Demos, Discussions, and Giveaways!
NETDA meeting 04-26-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
Data Services and OData with Alex James
Learn all about Data Services, in particular what’s new in V2 and OData. Data Services is a REST / ATOM / JSON based stack shipped as part of .NET by the Data Frameworks team for exposing Data to the web. OData is the open protocol implemented by Data Services to foster Data Interoperability, you can think of it as ODBC for the web.
Alex James is a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, who works in the Data Frameworks Team at Microsoft, specifically focusing on Data Services and OData. He has over 15 years of industry experience, and a long history working in the ORM field, including personally creating 3 “ORMs”, and working for a couple of years on the Entity Framework Team at Microsoft. He has a popular blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj) where you can find lots of Entity Framework and Data Services Tips. Alex has a passion for making APIs easy to use and his long term goal is to unlock the value in data.
WPF and Silverlight Data Binding Techniques with Robert Green
In Windows Forms, you can use the BindingSource component to keep track of the current item and add navigation, sorting, and filtering to a data application. What is the equivalent in WPF and Silverlight? Robert Green will show you.
NETDA meeting 05-24-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
New ASP.NET AJAX Library with Stephen Walther
Come learn about the new ASP.NET AJAX Library from a member of the ASP.NET AJAX Team. The ASP.NET AJAX Library is a free, open-source project which is fully supported by Microsoft. The new ASP.NET AJAX Library includes the entire AJAX Control Toolkit. Web Forms developers can build AJAX-enabled websites by dragging-and-dropping server controls from the Visual Studio Toolbox. Both Web Forms and MVC developers can create AJAX Control Toolkit controls in client code using jQuery. The ASP.NET AJAX Library enables you to build database-driven web applications that run entirely in the web browser. Build database-driven web applications by taking advantage of ASP.NET AJAX client data access, client templates, and client data-binding.
Stephen Walther is a member of the ASP.NET AJAX Team. He is the author of several books including ASP.NET Unleashed and ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed. His blog is located at http://StephenWalther.com.
NETDA meeting 03-22-10:
06:30pm - Doors open
06:45pm - Free pizza
07:00pm - News and announcements, summary of MIX10
07:10pm - Overview of the Entity Framework 4.0 with Jonathan Aneja
08:20pm - Overview of F# with Michael Hale
08:50pm - Raffles and socializing
Overview of the Entity Framework 4.0 with Jonathan Aneja
Come see how the ADO.NET Entity Framework enables new capabilities to leverage multiple development approaches, for example the use of code-first, model-first, and database-first. Hear how, regardless of the development approach, developers will benefit from the Entity Framework and the deep integration with the rest of the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, such as the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data, and Windows Presentation Foundation. Areas covered include:
• POCO support
• Better N-Tier API support, and the Self-Tracking Entities (STE) template
• Foreign Key Association support
• Enhanced TDD support
After graduating from the University of Toronto in 2005, Jonathan joined Microsoft Canada working for ISV Advisory Services. Soon after he transitioned to Redmond, WA to become the Program Manager for the Visual Basic compiler. For the past 3.5 years he's worked on LINQ and other VB language features. Recently he transitioned to the ADO.NET Entity Framework team, where he works on features pertaining to Object Services and LINQ to Entities.
Overview of F# with Michael Hale
Michael will give an overview of the syntax and language features of F#, with emphasis on the features that distinguish it from C# and VB on the .NET platform. The discussion and demos will show scenarios in algorithmic programming and web scripting where some developers find F# more suited to the task than C# or VB. The goal will be to encourage existing .NET programmers to consider adding F# to their toolkit.
Michael Hale is a program manager on the Visual Studio Languages team. He joined Microsoft 8 months ago after moving to Redmond from Atlanta, where he attended Georgia Tech. His work interests include programming languages, scientific/technical computing, and web design. His hobbies include seeing music shows, enjoying the great outdoors, aviation, and film history.
NETDA meeting 02-15-10: Special extended .NETDA meeting the evening before the start of the Microsoft MVP Summit 2010 conference, with a series of special guest speakers who are Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) who will be in town for the summit event. We will also have many additional MVPs and Microsoft employees attending this special event.
06:00pm - Doors open
06:15pm - Free pizza
06:30pm - Mitchel Sellers - DotNetNuke
07:00pm - Jeff Certain - Azure
07:30pm - Adam Cogan - TFS 2010
08:00pm - David McCarter - .NET Coding Standards
08:30pm - Claudio Lassala – WPF demos
08:55pm – News, announcements, Q&A, raffles, networking, etc.
Mitchel Sellers - A Developers Introduction to DotNetNuke
Mitchel will introduce developers to the DotNetNuke application framework and shows the steps necessary to create a development environment and to get a custom module built and packaged for deployment. Important discussions will include why DotNetNuke can be helpful to reduce time to implementation and development effort.
Mitchel Sellers, Microsoft C# MVP, Microsoft Certified Professional, is the CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. He has many years of experience in the software development industry and specializes in development using Microsoft technologies. He is the author of "Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming" which was published by Wrox Press in 2009. Mitchel is also an active participant in the .NET and DotNetNuke development communities, has been added as a DotNetNuke Core Team member.
Jeff Certain - An Introduction to Azure
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud offering, offers developers the ability to run services and store data in the cloud, with an emphasis on high availability and scalability. This talk will cover the basics of the Azure platform – Azure services, local storage and SQL Azure. By the end of this talk, developers will understand the value proposition of cloud computing, as well as being familiar with the concepts and development tools for Azure.
Jeff Certain is a software architect at Colorado CustomWare, a mid-sized ISV specializing in solutions for state and county governments. He is heavily involved in the technical community, and has been a Microsoft MVP since 2007.
Adam Cogan - Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) for Successful Project Management
Visual Studio Ultimate (formerly Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are the cornerstones of development on the Microsoft .NET platform. These are the best tools for a project manager to have successful projects and for the developers to have a focused and smooth software development process. Visual Studio Ultimate is designed to help address many of these traditional problems faced by project managers. It does so by providing a set of integrated tools to help teams improve their software development activities and to help project managers better support the software development processes. During this talk, Adam will review the lifecycle of creating work items and tracking of releases using Visual Studio Ultimate and Team Foundation Server.
Adam Cogan is the Chief Architect at SSW, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner specializing in custom .NET, SharePoint and CRM solutions (with a splash of Business Intelligence). At SSW, Adam has been developing custom solutions for businesses across a range of industries such as Government, engineering, banking, insurance and manufacturing since 1990 for clients such as Microsoft, Worley Parsons and Aurecon.
David McCarter - Back-2-Basics: .NET Coding Standards For The Real World
This session will guide any level of programmer to greater productivity by providing the information needed to write consistent, maintainable code. Learn about assembly layout, code style, defensive programming and much, much more. We will even go over some real in production code and see what the programmer did wrong in "What's Wrong With this Code?". Code tips are included to help you write better, error free applications. Lots of code examples in C# and VB.NET.
David McCarter is a Microsoft MVP and a principal software engineer/architect in San Diego. He is the editor-in-chief of dotNetTips.com... a web site dedicated to helping programmers in all aspects of programming. David has written for magazines like the VB Programmers Journal and has published three books (the latest is "David McCarter's .NET Coding Standards" available at: http://codingstandards.notlong.com). He is one of the founders and directors of the 15 year old San Diego .NET Developers Group (www.sddotnetdg.org). In 2008 David won the INETA Community Excellence Award for his involvement in the .NET community. David is also an inventor of a software printing system that was approved by the US Patient Office in May 2008.
Claudio Lassala - WPF in Business Apps
Claudio will present demos of how EPS Software is using WPF in some their business projects.
Claudio Lassala is a Senior Developer at EPS Software Corp. He has presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America, Europe and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C# every since), and an INETA speaker. He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine, CoDe Magazine, UTMag, Developers Magazine, and FoxPro Advisor. Claudio can be followed on http://twitter.com/ClaudioLassala.
NETDA meeting 01-25-10 Agenda:
Topic 1: Implementing Parallel Patterns in .NET
Speaker 1: Reed Copsey, Jr
Topic 2: What’s New in Workflow 4
Speaker 2: Robert Green
NETDA meeting 01-25-10 Agenda:
Topic: Approaching the Speed of Light with CodeRush
Speaker: Dustin Campbell
Topic: Cool demos of using MSBuild in Visual Studio
Speaker: Chuck England
NETDA meeting 01-11-10 Agenda:
Topic: A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010 for C# and Visual Basic Developers
Speaker: Lisa Feigenbaum
NETDA meeting 12-14-09 Agenda:
06:00pm - Doors open
06:15pm – Early special bonus event: Round table with Sam Gazitt (VS marketing)
07:00pm - News and announcements
07:15pm – Visual studio Extensibility (VSX) in VS 2010 with Weston Hutchins and Quan To
08:15pm – Videos on msdn.com with Jeremy Kelley
08:45pm – Holiday party with extra food and white elephant gift exchange
If you aren’t already on the NETDA meeting announcement email newsletter list, you can now join on the right pane area of the website: http://dotnetda.org
Tonight’s meeting with have 3 speakers combined with a holiday party with extra food and a fun white elephant gift exchange party.
- Arrive to the meeting early to join Sam Gazitt on a special developer community round table
- Free pizza will arrive about 6:45pm.
- Attendees encouraged to bring extra food for the holiday party (cookies, desserts, etc.).
- For the special fun white elephant gift exchange, attendees are encouraged to bring one or more item (usually computer/geek related) that they no longer need to add to the gift pile. Examples of things to bring:
- Unused computer accessories, either useful or outdated like a 2400 baud modem!
- Unused computer books, from modern to collector’s like Using Visual Studio 97!
- Unused magazines, either recent CODE or MSDN magazine, to Byte or PC Magazine from 1984!
- Gifts brought can be wrapped or unwrapped, whatever you choose.
- During the holiday party, we will call out raffle numbers for people to come up and pick a gift, either one wrapped or unwrapped. The more stuff people bring, the more gift exchanges we have.
Join Sam Gazitt and the Visual Studio marketing team in a discussion of the new features in 2010. The marketing team wants to hear what you have to say about Visual Studio (pain points, favorite features, etc) and will come armed with lots of SWAG to reward you for your time. All participants will receive 2010 key binding foldout posters and the first ten will get 2gb USB thumb drives.
Topic: Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) in VS 2010
In this session, we will discuss building extensions using Visual Studio 2010, extending the IDE with WPF tool windows and menu commands, extending the Visual Studio Editor using MEF, and publishing and sharing those tools with the rest of the world. We will demo building extensions, acquiring extensions through the new Extension Manager UI and discuss the new VSIX xcopy deployment model. Visual Studio team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/visualstudio.
Speaker: Quan To
Quan To is a program manager on the Visual Studio Platform team. Quan is responsible for the Extension Manager and Visual Studio SDK. Quan has been with Microsoft for over ten years and has also spent time working on the Tablet PC Team and the Visual Studio Deployment team. 
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Speaker: Weston Hutchins
Weston Hutchins started at Microsoft as an intern in 2005 and joined full-time in 2006 after receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida. For the past year, he’s been working as a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Shell team which is responsible for the core IDE services and extensibility architecture as well as the overall look and feel of Visual Studio. He has worked extensively with the Ecosystem team during the Visual Studio 2010 product cycle to design the New Project Dialog and the Extension Manager. Prior to that, he was the SKU manager for the Visual Studio Express products performing a variety of duties around Express feature development and release activities. 
Topic: Videos on msdn.com
Jeremy will demo and discuss the state and future of videos (How-Do-I videos, screencasts, etc) hosted on msdn.com developer centers and TechNet sites, how they relate to Channel 9 videos that also use Silverlight, various formats, and roadmap plans for 2010 with videos on msdn.com.
Speaker: Jeremy Kelley
Jeremy Kelley is a Program Manager in the Server and Tools Online group in Microsoft working on the video experience for MSDN, TechNet and other Developer and IT Pro focused sites. In his previous roles at Microsoft Jeremy has worked on Open Source Power Tools for Visual Studio, MSDN Forums, and http://blogs.msdn.com. 
Topic: Expression Blend for Developers
Visual Studio is a remarkable tool for writing and debugging your .NET code. Attempting to design your WPF UI with Visual Studio however is like using a hammer to dig a ditch – the wrong tool for the job. Fortunately there is a better tool – Expression Blend. Developers need Blend too. You'll learn the strengths of Blend when compared to Visual Studio; discover which tools are indispensible and the secrets that will drastically reduce the amount of XAML you’ll need to write.
Speaker: Walt Ritscher
Walt Ritscher has trained thousands of corporate developers during the last fourteen years. An active speaker, his teaching schedule has taken him throughout the world providing developer training at corporations, universities, and software conferences. He has collaborated on several books and videos published for the developer market including early adopter .Net courses at Microsoft Press. Walt is currently consulting and teaching .NET, Silverlight, WPF and Microsoft Surface classes for Wintellect. Walt's industry expertise has placed him on various national technology advisory boards. He is also deeply involved in the local developer community — founding the .NET Developers Association in Redmond, WA. Walt has accumulated plenty of experience as a developer —is currently a Microsoft MVP, and a member of the Silverlight/WPF Insiders and the WPF Disciples. As a web programmer he has worked numerous projects including; EPA sites and the Microsoft Community Starter Kit. He is the author of the open source Shazzam (WPF Pixel Shader Utility) Shazzam-tool.com and the Shader Gallery add-in for Expression Blend. 
Topic: Building an Office Business Application Based on Word 2007
Back in September, Robert showed an Outlook 2007 customer appointment management solution. This was the first part of a multi-part tutorial on using Visual Studio 2008 to build an Office Business Application for a fictitious automobile dealer. Tonight, he will show the next installment in the series. You will see how to use Visual Studio 2008 to add the following capabilities to Word:
• Generate automobile quotes using content controls bound to SQL Server data.
• Use the Actions Pane in a Word template to make it easy for sales reps to create new quotes and reprint existing quotes.
• Save quotes to PDF files or Word documents that can be sent to customers.
• Save quotes to SharePoint.
Speaker: Robert Green
Topic: Eliminating the No Repro problem with virtualization and integration virtualization into your development Process
A 300-level session on virtualized labs so that I can learn how to make a new build available to everyone on my development and test team every day. This talk will also cover Ops-Dev Integration so I can understand how to collect run-time data from production, automate bug submission from Ops and automatically deploy new apps into production in the future.
Speaker: Charles Sterling
Community program manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft.
Topic: Advanced Diagnostics, Historical Debugging and Test Automation with Habib Heydarian
As applications become more complex and pressures to decrease costs increase, we need tools to facilitate reducing the turn-around time for testers and developers to find and fix bugs. Microsoft Test and Lab Manager enables testers to collect more detailed diagnostic data during a test run leading to higher quality bugs that provide more insight to the developers on what actually went wrong when the bug occurred. With the addition of Test Strips, testers can generate automation as an artifact of their test runs helping to not only increase coverage of the application, but reducing the time it takes to manually test the application. Finally, we show how Test Impact Analysis helps developers test the right automated tests from within Visual Studio, while testers know what the right set of tests to prioritize and run are given recent changes introduced by the development organization. PDC session: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT16
Speaker: Habib Heydarian
Date/Time: 11-02-09, 7:00pm-9:00pm (free pizza starting at 6:30pm).
Location: Meeting at Microsoft campus building 41 cafeteria, Steptoe room.
Directions: Refer to Meetings page.
Topic: Practical Test-Driven Development with Visual Studio 2008 Team System
Speaker: Steve Andrews
Steve Andrews is a Team System MVP and INETA speaker, and has been working as a developer for more than 9 years. During this time, he has designed and developed applications in such widely varying areas as trust accounting, medical information management, supply chain management, and retail systems. Steve is also a MCTS, ICSOO, and community fanatic.
Topic: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 News
Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2: http://microsoft.com/visualstudio
Speakers: Doug Seven
Doug Seven is a senior product manager for Visual Studio Team System.
Raffle of MSDN Subscription: Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, retail value over $10,000.
Note: To participate in the raffle, you must be an active NETDA member. As of last month, annual dues are now only $20 (50% less than before).
Date/Time: 10-26-09, 7:00pm-9:00pm (free pizza starting at 6:30pm).
Location: Meeting at Microsoft campus building 41 cafeteria, Steptoe room.
Directions: Refer to Meetings page.
Topic: WPF In-Depth: Walkthrough a Real World WPF App
The StaffLynx application, developed by a team led by Billy Hollis, has been acclaimed for using WPF technologies in a business-oriented software system. In this session, Billy will cover the basic architecture of this application, highlighting architectural differences from previous generations: layered client design, service-based data access, and advanced UI capabilities. He will show how critical pieces are constructed, including novel coding concepts in WPF and XAML. Then he’ll discuss the design and prototyping process, show various prototypes with analysis of their strengths and weaknesses, and cover lessons learned from that process.
Speaker: Billy Hollis
Billy Hollis is an author and software developer from Nashville, Tennessee. Billy is co-author of the first book ever published on Visual Basic .NET, VB .NET Programming on the Public Beta. He has written many articles, and is a frequent speaker at conferences. He is the Regional Director of Developer Relations in Nashville for Microsoft, and runs a consulting company focusing on Microsoft .NET.
Date/Time: 10-12-09, 7:00pm-9:00pm (free pizza starting at 6:30pm).
Location: Meeting at Microsoft campus building 41 cafeteria, Steptoe room.
Directions: Refer to Meetings page.
Discussion on upcoming speakers, topics, and plans for meetings along with an open forum for feedback, suggestions, and ideas from attendee members. Ken Levy, new NETDA President, along with Brian Henderson (Secretary), and Robert Green (Speaker Coordinator), will discuss the NETDA roadmap our user group. Also included will be a demonstration for feedback of the new NETDA website at http://dotnetda.org and our existing Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/NETDA.
Two presenters to speak after the roadmap discussion and open forum:
Robert Green (MVP) with cool demos with .NET programming with Office.
Chuck Sterling (VSTS community program manager) to discuss upcoming Visual Studio Team System 2010.
Date/Time: 09-28-09, 7:00pm-9:00pm (free pizza starting at 6:30pm).
Location: Meeting at Microsoft campus building 41 cafeteria, Steptoe room.
Directions: Refer to Meetings page.
Notes from meeting:
