Chicago ALT.NET

March 2012 Meeting: Windows Phone 7

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Better description to be provided soon. Check back later.

February 2012 Meeting: Get started with the .NET Micro Framework and Netduino

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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.

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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

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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.

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Geek and Poke comic by Oliver Widder.

December 2011 Meeting: Year-end Meetup

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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.

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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.

October 2011 Meeting: JavaScript MVVM with Knockout.js and jQuery Templates

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Knockout.js is an MIT licensed, open-source all-Javascript framework that supports two way client-side data binding between a web UI and Javascript view-model. Knockout can be easily introduced into any new or existing website. Knockout substantially reduces the amount of data binding and event handling code you need to write to create dynamic or AJAX web apps. Knockout is compatible with any server side code.

In this presentation Jarrett will walk through getting started with Knockout, show its important features and cover how it relates to the MVVM pattern and jQuery Templates. Knockout is very powerful but only requires a basic understanding of Javascript to get started.

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Jarrett Widman is a Chicago based web developer and designer. He has a background in computer art and design from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a long term love of programming. Jarrett has worked as a designer, front and back end developer for many small businesses since 2002 through his own business, 24m2 LLC. His development focus is on ASP.NET and Javascript. Jarrett is also Director of Marketing at Sports Made Personal and Lacrosse America.

September 2011 Meeting: Objective-C and iOS for .NET Developers

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

iOS has become a very large target for application development with the popularity of Apple's mobile devices. It will become even more significant as it increasingly influences newer MacOS X versions. And even though there are several options to develop for iOS without knowing Objective-C, learning this native programming language allows you to use all the new technologies right away, without depending on third party developers.

In this presentation, Eduardo will be talking about what it is like for a .NET/C# developer to develop for iOS. The tools are different, and the language, and the platform, so knowing upfront what you will need can save you a lot of time.

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Eduardo Scoz is a software engineer/consultant/agilist based in Chicago, IL. With over 15 of experience developing business applications for the web, he currently works for Redpoint Technologies as a Senior Engineer and Agile Coach. During the last 6 years, Eduardo has worked on many different platforms, like .NET, Ruby on Rails, Adobe Flex, Objective-C and MonoTouch.

August 2011 Meeting: CoffeeScript

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

CoffeeScript is a small language that compiles to Javascript.

From the official website:

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

In this talk, we will discuss how Coffeescript tries to smooth over the warts in the language without abstracting away the power in it.

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Fawad Halim is a developer at Thomson Reuters who loves playing with random programming languages in his spare time.

July 2011 Meeting: Onion Architecture With ASP.NET MVC

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

Onion Architecture is a specific type of solution architecture that was first introduced to me by Jeffrey Palermo. Over the years nearly every project Ive worked on used a traditional layered architecture under the guise of loose coupling. Yet in every single case as the project progressed we realized more and more that our layer abstractions werent actually abstractions at all. Sure we may be coupling ourselves between layers using interfaces — but a giant DAL interface with 30 members is almost certainly going to be tied to a specific implementation, despite our best intentions.

Layering also opens to the door to too much developer decision making, causing a great deal of inconsistency. When you need to add a new feature to the UI, the developer is completely free to put the code for his feature in any layer he chooses — from the presentation layer on down, or perhaps in the dreaded “Shared/common/utility” project.

Onion architecture helps us fight this by enforcing true loose coupling. As you will see throughout the talk, our UI layer has no reference to any infrastructure/DAL, just the Core business logic. Even the business logic (Core) has no access to any infrastructure concerns. Rather than build on top of the database, it externalizes it. It defines what it needs using its own interfaces, and they are implemented as far outward as possible in Infrastructure. We then bind them together using an IoC container to bring the application to life.

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Matt Hidinger is a .NET developer and enthusiast. He is currently doing .NET consulting at Triton-Tek focusing on ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, and Windows Phone 7.

June 2011 Meeting: Let Cygwin Take You To a Whole GNU World

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

GUI's and IDE's are nice, but the command line lives on because of its combination of power and simplicity. Windows developers may shy away from the command line because the default command shell leaves a lot to be desired.

Two better alternatives exist: the Power Shell and the Unix shell. This talk serves as an introduction to the Unix shell and builds up to complex wizard commands.

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Ryan Gerry is a software engineer who is experienced using Open Source platforms. Ryan is currently working at Follett Software Company where he writes Ruby and Java applications. In the past he has worked in online advertising for Google and DoubleClick. His professional interests include cloud computing, web development, security, agile development methodologies and Open Source software. Ryan has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Western Illinois University.