Welcome to the home page of the Bloomington .NET User Group. We meet monthly at the Microsoft office located in Bloomington, Illinois.


May 2008 Meeting

Register online

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 5:30 PM - 8:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc.
404 North Hershey Road
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Dinner and networking will start at 5:30pm. The speaker will begin around 6:00pm.

Event Overview

Microsoft Project Astoria and the Semantic Web

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The Semantic Web brings to the Web the idea of having data defined and linked in a way that it can be used for more effective discovery, automation, integration, and reuse across various applications. Astoria applications are reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Chris will show how the Semantic Web can bring new opportunities to your business and/or clients using new technologies like the Astoria Project.

Speaker

Chris Woodruff is an Architect in the West Michigan Practice group at NuSoft Solutions. His work involves integrating new technologies, assisting development teams with architecture designs, and helping with development standards. Chris is the VP of the West Michigan .NET User Group and also is an Advisory Council Member at Capella University for the External Information Technology Advisory Council. Chris is the founder and coordinator of the Day of .NET West Michigan and also helps with other Day of .NET events in Michigan. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering at Michigan State University. In his spare time, Chris coaches his sons sporting teams and plays poker.

Additional Details

Microsoft has provided us with a copy of Vista Ultimate and more to give away.

Wrox has provided a copy of ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB.

Dinner will be provided by:

Levi, Ray and Shoup


April 2008 Meeting

Register online

Tuesday, April 8, 2008 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc.
404 North Hershey Road
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Heroes Happen {here} 2008 Launch Wave

The Bloomington .NET Users Group is very excited to be hosting a local Microsoft Launch Event during our April meeting. We will have esteemed speakers sharing what's new in Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. We will be giving away lots of great prizes, including 5 copies each of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 Windows Server 2008.

Schedule

6:00-6:15 Welcome and Dinner

6:15 - 7:00 Session 1 - What's New in Windows Server 2008

7:05 - 7:50 Session 2 - What's New in SQL Server 2008

7:55 - 8:40 Session 3 - What's New in Visual Studio 2008

8:40 – 9:00 Q/A & Wrap up

Current Prize List

Speakers

Dan Rigsby is a Senior Software Engineer and Team Lead for Interactive Intelligence in Indianapolis. He has been with Interactive Intelligence since March of 2000. Dan has been an avid .Net user since late 2001 starting with ASP.Net, but today concentrates on sever side pumping (Wcf), application architecture, and windows smart client applications. He has also been known to dabble heavily in xml, xslt, databases (his Master's focus), and other "buzzword" technologies. Dan is also an officer at IndyNDA and is always eager to help out in the community. As a certified ScrumMaster, Dan has been involved agile project management. Read more about Dan and development adventures at his site or connect with him on Twitter or Facebook.

Paul Hacker is a Principle Consultant at Lacerta Solutions, LLC in Indianapolis, with a passion for Team System. He has been working with the product since mid-2005. Paul has implemented Team System/TFS in numerous organizations. When not spending time with his family, you can find him presiding over the Indianapolis TFS SIG, Podcasting on RadioTFS, publishing the TFS Times monthly newsletter focused on Team System, or writing tools to enhance Team System.

Dave Paulson has worked for Microsoft Corporation in a pre-sales role as a SQL Server Technology Specialist for the past two years. Prior to Microsoft, Dave spent 11 years at Oracle and 5 years with Digital Equipment working with their relational database products.

Free Food

Dinner is being provided by TEKSystems.

Sponsors

The Bloomington .NET Users Group would like to thank our sponsors for making all of this possible.

Microsoft LRS TEKSystems TEKSystems Lacerta

February 2008 Meeting

Register online

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

LINQ In-Depth

To the untrained eye, LINQ may seem like a brand new technology but it has actually been over 7 years in the making. In this session we will uncover where LINQ came from and why you need to pay attention to it. (Anders Hejlsberg is the project sponsor) We will discuss what an ORM (Object Relational Mapper ) is and why you want to use one. We will explore the language enhancements that make LINQ possible and then dive into the fundamentals of the LINQ pipeline and language. We will wrap up the session by discussing how you should integrate Linq into your ASP.Net Application ( ie. not in your code behind pages).

Speaker

Daniel Egan - MCT, MCSD, ASP.NET MVP and an INETA speaker. Daniel is the founder of Odyssey Consluting Group Inc, a Southern California software development company. He has written several articles for asp.netPRO magazine, and is the author of several books including an upcoming title on design patterns from WROX. This is an INETA sponsored event.

Additional Details

Microsoft has provided us with a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo, and more to give away.

O'Reilly has provided a book to give away

Dinner will be provided by:

TEKSystems


January 2008 Meeting

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Automating SharePoint with PowerShell

PowerShell is Microsoft's new command line scriptable interface and SharePoint is Microsoft's premier Portal platform. What would be better than scripting and automating SharePoint using PowerShell? Even though MOSS and WSS did not ship with native PowerShell integration we can still leverage PowerShell to manage and automate MOSS and WSS. This session will overview PowerShell, Microsoft's new object-oriented scripting environment and demonstrate how you can create reusable PowerShell functions and scripts to create powerful automated SharePoint tasks.

Darrin Bishop is an author, speaker and developer focusing on Microsoft SharePoint Technologies. Darrin is the president and lead developer for Darrin Bishop Group, Inc. a Midwest-based Microsoft Partner focusing on SharePoint Technologies, portals and collaboration. He is the author of The Rational Guide to Building SharePoint Web Parts published by Rational Press as well as several articles in various magazines and frequently speaks at user groups and conferences. He will be presenting at Microsoft Office System Developer Conference in San Jose. Darrin has been working with SharePoint Technologies since the release of SharePoint Portal Server 2001. He maintains his SharePoint blog at www.darrinbishop.com/blog

Microsoft has provided us with a copy of Vista Ultimate, a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader, and more to give away.

O'Reilly has provided a book to give away

Dinner is being provided by TEKSystems.


November 2007 Meeting

Meeting Summary

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework (LINQ)

Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: relational tables, XML documents, in-memory objects, and so-on. Each data domain can have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today’s applications is the result of these mismatches. In this talk, Pete will explain how Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 aim to unify the programming models through LINQ capabilities in C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework.

This discussion will mostly focus on the language features that support the LINQ framework and demonstrate the use of LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, and LINQ to XML.

Presenter: Pete Maroun, Application Development Consultant, Microsoft

Microsoft has provided us with a copy of Office 2007 Ultimate and a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse combo to give away.

Dinner will be provided by Levi, Ray and Shoup, so bring your appetite and your business cards, for networking.


October 2007 Meeting

Meeting Summary

Tuesday, October 9, 2007 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Intro to Microsoft’s Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

Joe Kraft from Pearl Technology will present a high level overview of the Windows Communication Foundation (formerly Indigo), Microsoft’s unified programming model for building service-oriented applications. Discussed will be the WCF Architecture, Data Contract Versioning, Message Queuing, Transaction Support and Security aspects of WCF.

Joe Kraft is a Senior Application Developer and the Application Development Practice lead at Pearl Technology. He received his BBA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1994, and has merged his business knowledge with his love of technology throughout his career.

Joe brings with him 13 years of development experience, starting his career at an Internet startup company developing websites for area companies using HTML, JavaScript, and Perl CGI. From there he moved onto more advanced website development in Cold Fusion, Java, and Microsoft’s ASP.Net.

With over 7 years of consulting experience, he has had exposure to all facets of the development lifecycle, including requirements gathering, project management, working on a team, creating test cases, and developing rollout methodologies. He has experience with SQL, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2 databases, both on the administration side and with the T/SQL and PL/SQL programming languages. He has also developed, and managed, eCommerce sites with over $40,000,000 in annual sales.

As the manager of Pearl Technology’s Application Development vertical, Joe brings a unique perspective to projects as he has the business knowledge to look at a project from a management perspective and help guide the project towards the best possible completion.

O'Reilly has generously provided us with two WCF books to give away (Learning WCF and Programming WCF Services).

Dinner will be provided by Volt, so bring your appetite and your business cards, for networking.


September 2007 Meeting

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Meeting Summary
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Deploying SmartClient Applications with ClickOnce

An organization is more likely to adopt a smart client architecture if it has an easy, flexible, low-effort way to deploy and maintain client applications on a user's desktop. During this meeting, we will look at how Visual Studio 2008 (“Orcas”) can be used to deploy SmartClient applications in this manner using ClickOnce. ClickOnce also provides built-in protections during installation and at runtime for the machine on which you are deploying the application. We will discuss what security mechanisms are available, how they work, and how to best utilize them for a number of scenarios. We will also discuss and demonstrate how ClickOnce isolates applications and how permissions are granted. We also show how to use the Trusted Application Deployment technology to deploy applications with elevated privileges on a user’s machine, based on either user prompting or trusted publishers.

Presenter: Pete Maroun, Application Development Consultant, Microsoft

Food and drinks will be provided, courtesy of Microsoft.

Microsoft has also provided prizes, including Vista Ultimate, to be given away in a drawing at the end of the meeting.

O'Reilly has generously provided us with prizes, as well.


August 2007 Meeting

Tuesday, August 14, 2007 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Meeting Summary
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Tod Birdsall will be sharing how he uses CodeSmith to automate the tedious task of building classes to support your database schema. He will also explore other automated code generation tools, such as SubSonic.
TEKSystems has been generous enough to sponsore the meeting by providing dinner.

Tod Birdsall is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer, president of the Bloomington .NET Users Group, and the senior solutions architect at Kahuna Business Group, Inc.


July 2007 Meeting

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Meeting Summary
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Marcellus Duffy from Levi, Ray, & Shoup Inc. will be giving a presentation on Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 for our July meeting. Levi, Ray, & Shoup Inc. will also be sponsoring the same meeting by providing dinner. So, bring your appetite with you.
Items that Marcellus will be discussing:

Marcellus Duffy is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer with twelve years of experience as a technology consultant. He worked for Saint Louis University for six years where he provided the Pediatric physician group innovative ways to practice medicine.

Marcellus graduated from Saint Louis University Summa Cum Laude as a member of the Golden Key Honor Society, Alpha Sigma Lambda National Honor Society, and Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit Honor Society.


June 2007 Meeting

Monday, June 18, 2007 6:00 PM - Monday, June 18, 2007 9:00 PM Central Time (US & Canada)
Microsoft Corporation
2203 E. Empire Street
Suite J
Bloomington Illinois 61704

Event Overview

Join us for the June meeting of the Bloomington .NET Users Group, in Bloomington, IL, where Dave Bost will provide an overview of Microsoft's recently announced Silverlight technologies
Dinner (pizza & pop) is being provided by TEKSystems. I appreciate their support of the local .NET community.