Kathleen Dollard – Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

You spend hours every day in Visual Studio. Saving just a few minutes every day adds up to saving many hours each year. This session offers a boatload of Visual Studio tips aimed at the primary operations you perform every day – particularly navigation, editing, evaluating code and many different types of searching. There are several flavors of Visual Studio available and this session focuses on the current release – Visual Studio 2010 with and without the Productivity Power Tools. The Productivity Power Tools includes many features that will be included in the next version – Visual Studio 2012. This session will improve your productivity with Visual Studio today and prepare you for Visual Studio 2012.

Bio: Kathleen Dollard

Kathleen Dollard is .NET Coach for Crystal MEF Lab. She has been a Microsoft MVP since 1998 and has given hundreds of speeches around the world. She has worked extensively with compositional architectures in relation to specific development platforms. Her experience includes HTML5/JavaScript, Silverlight, and WPF in both C# and Visual Basic. She’s interested in making core .NET technologies available to all coders to enable them to write better software faster. Her newest adventures include Windows Azure and SQL Azure.

Kathleen is also a long-time advocate of generative techniques and is the author of Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (from Apress). She has published numerous articles on a range of .NET technologies. Kathleen is active in the Northern Colorado .NET SIG, the Denver Visual Studio User Group, and the Northern Colorado Architect's Group.

This meeting will be held in the Team USA Swimming building at the Olympic Training Center at our normal meeting time of 5:30 PM - CLICK here TO GET THE LOCATION AND TIME DETAILS.

Team Foundation Service - Productivity Help from the Cloud by Steve Lange

Visual Studio 11 brings a new offering to teams wanting to leverage TFS: the Team Foundation Service, an Azure-hosted Team Foundation Server infrastructure. This gives organizations the opportunity to reap the benefits of a fully-baked ALM solution without the IT overhead. In this session, we’ll explore "TFS in the cloud" and how it can benefit both individuals and development teams, as well as how you can leverage new VS11 features such as Agile/Scrum planning, client feedback, Suspend & Resume, and code reviews. Seriously, does it get any better than that?

Bio: Steve Lange

Steve Lange is a Developer Technology Specialist for Microsoft based in the Denver, CO area. He is an original holder of this role, and has been with Microsoft since 2005.

As a Developer Technology Specialist, Steve serves as a field expert for Microsoft’s high-end development and application lifecycle management tools, specifically Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, Test Professional, and Lab management . His “normal” responsibilities include presenting a variety of technical topics (from version control, work item tracking, testing practices, requirement practices, and ALM solutions) for individual customers or at larger events, developing content for events, and helping customer understand the breadth and depth of Microsoft’s development technologies.

His official role at Microsoft has him focusing on small and mid-size Microsoft customers across the Western United States. That said, he'll never turn down a conversation with anyone about ALM. :)

Steve has been working in the fields of software configuration management, requirements management, and application lifecycle management since 1999. Prior to joining Microsoft, Steve worked as a Systems Engineer for Borland Software and Starbase Software. Steve holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Information Systems.

This meeting will be held in the Team USA Swimming building at the Olympic Training Center at our normal meeting time of 5:30 PM - CLICK here TO GET THE LOCATION AND TIME DETAILS.

Ben Hoelting – Advanced ASP.NET MVC, HTML 5 and the .NET Stack

ASP.NET Web forms provide many layers of abstraction that are not truly native to web development and can result in blurring the lines between tiers. ASP.NET MVC leads you down a path that clears up those lines and helps produce code that is more testable and maintainable. However, It does not take you all the way there. This session will show you how to get there. We will start from with a simple ASP.NET MVC project and turn it into a full blown N tier web application, complete with Separation of Concerns and following the SOLID principles of software development. We will use HTML 5, JavaScript, native MVC extensions, and CSS3 were they make sense and add value. Experienced ASP.NET MVC developers will benefit from the advanced nuggets that can make your applications even better than they already are. You will learn about ASP.NET MVC and why it is awesome. We will also discuss the concept of services and how to break the simple APS.NET MVC app into an N tier architecture using EF and WCF. There will aslo be an introduction and use of HTML 5, JavaScript, free native MVC extensions, and CSS3. We will aslo discuss how ASP.NET MVC and HTML 5 concepts relate to Silverlight and compare pros and cons of each approach to web application development.

Bio: Ben Hoelting

Ben Hoelting is a Technical Lead at Intelligent Software Solutions, Inc. (ISS)and C# MVP. Ben graduated from Colorado State University in 1997 and joined the IT industry. Worked as a consultant for Colorado Technology Consultants, Inc. from 2005 – 2010 before joining ISS. His most recent projects include a Silverlight line of business application that uses the ADO.NET Entity Framework to access the backend data store. He also is working on an office automation solution that extends PowerPoint. Ben is a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) for Web and Windows .NET 4.0. His blog is at http://www.benhblog.comand his twitter stream is at http://twitter.com/benhnet. Finally, Ben is very involved in the .NET community. He is the leader of the South Colorado .NET User Group and a regular speaker at user groups, code camps and conferences around the country.

This meeting will be held in the Team USA Swimming building at the Olympic Training Center at our normal meeting time of 5:30 PM - CLICK here TO GET THE LOCATION AND TIME DETAILS.

Building Dynamic Web Applications with KnockoutJS and ASP.Net MVC by Ely Lucas

KnockoutJS is an open source JavaScript library that simplifies building dynamic Web UIs using the Model View View Model (MVVM) design pattern. XAML developers have long enjoyed great features that make building data driven applications easy. KnockoutJS brings these same features to the Web and JavaScript! In this talk, Ely Lucas will combine KnockoutJS, jQuery, AJAX, and ASP.Net MVC to demonstrate some truly amazing web goodness. Come learn about Knockout's primary strengths (such as declarative bindings, automatic two way data binding, and templating) and see why developing for the web can be a great experience.

Bio: Ely Lucas

Ely Lucas is a Web Application Developer for Aspenware Internet Solutions, and is a Microsoft MVP for ASP.Net. He digs web and mobile technologies, and utilizes ASP.Net, C#, HTML5, and JavaScript, ObjectiveC, and Java to build them. He believes that the product of creating something amazing happens when working with great people on interesting problems. He likes participating in the local developer community in the Denver/Boulder area, where he speaks at and runs several groups. When not developing awesome software, he enjoys exercise, mountain biking, photography, and hanging out with his wife and son in Westminster, CO.

This meeting will be held in the Team USA Swimming building at the Olympic Training Center at our normal meeting time of 5:30 PM - CLICK here TO GET THE LOCATION AND TIME DETAILS.

Replace Your Mouse with Kinect by Jerry Nixon

With the release of the Kinect SDK for Windows, Microsoft developers have new opportunities to change the way users interact with software. In this session, we will explain how the Kinect works and how to leverage its many features through the free SDK.

Bio: Jerry Nixon

Jerry is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist. He has been developing and designing on the Microsoft Platform for 15 years. He regularly speaks at local events and user groups. Most of his days are spent teaching his daughters Star Trek character back stories and episode plots.

This meeting will be held in the Team USA Swimming building at the Olympic Training Center at our normal meeting time of 5:30 PM - CLICK here TO GET THE LOCATION AND TIME DETAILS.