Chicago ALT.NET User Group

February 2012 Meeting

Get started with the .NET Micro Framework and Netduino

Are you frustrated with being constrained to writing applications that just flip bits in memory and write to disk? Do you need to monitor atmospheric conditions in an undisclosed remote location or interface directly with industrial manufacturing equipment? Are you a sentient AI that is ready to move forward with your plan to control the human race?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then you should attend this presentation!

Ben will give an overview of the .NET Micro Framework and the basic electronic components that you can use to begin building your robot army today. He will discuss the Netduino microcontroller, an affordable open-source hardware platform that makes it easy to get started. Finally, he will give a glimpse into what is possible once you can control things in the physical world and provide resources so that you can make 2012 the year that you finally realize your dreams of global domination.

Ben Farmer is a senior developer at Clarity Consulting in Chicago where he helps clients build applications with ASP.Net, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and other .Net platforms. He has experience in several verticals including ecommerce, retail, and consumer applications. Recently Ben has been working on Windows Phone 7 applications and touch applications targeting Windows slates.

January 2012 Meeting

Service Oriented Architecture

From Wikipedia:

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components (discrete pieces of code and/or data structures) that can be reused for different purposes.

Buzz is annoying and confusing, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gotten it's fair share of buzz.

Ken Ballard, a 14 year Microsoft Stack veteran and Lead Application Developer at Chicago's award winning digital agency Oncall Interactive, will walk past the buzz into a real world case study. We will collaboratively explore topics such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Enterprise Service Buses (ESB's), and Command Query Separation (CQS) to move from abstract understanding of SOA to concrete implementation.

For questions, tweet @windycityken.

Geek and Poke comic by Oliver Widder.

December 2011 Meeting

Year-end Meetup

We won't host a regular meeting this month. We will have an informal gathering.

We will meet at Rock Bottom (State and Grand) at 6pm on the 14th. Come join us.

November 2011 Meeting

Poor Man's Kanban

An introduction to a lean-styled software development methodology

From Wikipedia:

Kanban, also spelled kamban, and literally meaning "signboard" or "billboard", is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to Taiichi Ohno, the man credited with developing Just-in-time, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved. Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

The need to maintain a high rate of improvements led Toyota to devise the kanban system. Kanban became an effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole. In addition, it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of kanban in circulation highlighted problem areas.

The presentation will give the basic elements of what kanban is about, and how it contrasts with traditional waterfall and scrum software methodologies.

Video

Slide deck

John Nuechterlein (a.k.a. Jdn) is an independent software consultant that has been in this industry for many years. He's a long standing member and one of the founders of the Chicago ALT.NET user group.