Previous Meetings

December 2009 meeting

Dynamic C# and a New World of Possibilities

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Yes you have heard it right. We are having our December 2009 meeting. And, to say goodbye to 2009 and think about what 2010 will bring us, we will take a look at a new CLR 4.0 feature that is likely to significantly change the way we code in C#.

Do you remember when generics were introduced in the .NET runtime 2.0? That was the the biggest new feature in that version of the framework and it's almost 5 years old. Time for a new runtime release with new and exciting features.

In this talk, we focus on the only new feature in C# 4 that really matters — the dynamic keyword. There are some new, amazing possibilities that, previously, were only elegantly achievable with dynamic languages like JavaScript and Ruby. We will touch on ways that using dynamic can change the way that you code, including things like a true ActiveRecord pattern, Expando objects, and more.

Aaron Erickson is a software developer/technology writer/agilist based out of Chicago, IL. His life's work is to help convert the human intellectual capital into results for companies that empower both the knowledge workers who produce software, and the people for whom that software is designed to serve. He frequently speaks at events such as TechEd, VSLive, and .NET user groups - with a goal of furthering the exchange of ideas - be they technology contributions - or observations about the technology consulting business.

He is the author of the book, The Nomadic Developer, a career guide for technology consultants. In his spare time he likes to buy random ingredients at the store and have "iron chef" night with his wife, play video games with his kids, and occasionally, log on to World of Warcraft where he has a level 80 Rogue named EffSharper on the Bloodscalp server.

 

You can also download the slide deck .

When: 12/9/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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November 2009 Meeting

Building OpenSocial Applications

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

From its official web site:

Friends are fun, but they're only on some websites. OpenSocial helps these sites share their social data with the web. Applications that use the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network itself, or access a site's social data from anywhere on the web.

OpenSocial is the platform that MySpace, Orkut, Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, and pretty much every social network but Facebook supports for creating games and other applications that run on these social network sites.

In this talk, we focus on the MySpace platform and how one builds a MySpace application. This involves interacting with the OpenSocial JavaScript as well as receiving and sending OpenSocial requests on your own servers.

Scott Seely is a Senior Technical Architect at SAVO Group in Chicago, IL, one of the founders of the Lake County .NET Users� Group, and one of the partners in Tech in the Middle.

He worked at MySpace during the development of OpenSocial 0.8.1 through OpenSocial 0.9, acting as the editor and specification shepherd for version 0.9 of OpenSocial.

In 2009, Scott helped write Effective REST Services via .NET (2009). He lives in northern Illinois with his wife, three children, and two dogs.

When: 11/11/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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October 2009 Meeting

Get Comfy With CouchDB

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Couchdb is one of the more mature schema-less map/reduce object dbs out there. In this talk we'll cover the basics of what CouchDB is, and why it's cool, and then we'll run through a sample application. The application will show off LINQ to Couch, basic persistance, views and full-text search with CouchDB-Lucene.

Alex Pedenko has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

 

You can also download the slide deck and sample code.

Alex is also involved in a number of Open Source projects like Bistro and NDjango, and the .net side of CouchDB via Divan and LoveSeat

When: 10/14/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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