Chicago ALT.NET User Group

June 2012 Meeting

Amazon Web Services

Better description to be provided soon. Check back later.

Note that this month our meeting is on the 3^rd Wednesday instead of 2^nd

May 2012 Meeting

Getting deeper into microcontrollers with The Maungs

Microcontrollers are wonderful. They have their pros and cons.

We will go over their pros and cons as well as basics in this session. Then we'll get into things we can do with microcontrollers such as driving motors and operating day to day items. We will actually use them to control physical items in our lives — beyond our basic toys and typical demo materials.

We can then get into actually making our own add-on boards(shield) for microcontrollers (arduino and netduino) and building a basic arduino Uno device from scratch.

Geeks of all trade, Lwin and Min Maung are the creators of Windows Phone Android for Android. Hackathon winners. They develop on Android, Windows Phone, and more.

Follow them on twitter: @Kluesman, @LMaung

April 2012 Meeting

Async Programming With .NET 4.5

The .NET Framework doesn't lack support for asynchronous programming. There are several ways to accomplish it. What we don't have yet is a way that doesn't obscures the intent of the code.

Consider the following question: What is more important, what the code is trying to do or the fact that it was written asynchronously? If your answer was the former, you'll probably like what you'll find in the Async CTP for Visual Studio.

Come to this presentation to see the new language features added to C# (and Visual Basic) that pretty much take asynchronism out of your way while still embracing it. Find out how a couple new keywords can make your code asynchronous and help you eliminate blocking calls without spawning new threads.

Sergio Pereira is a Lead Software Engineer with Thomson Reuters developing software for the Legal industry. For the longest time Sergio has had his eyes in the development of richer and more usable web sites. He believes in using the most basic tools to create web applications, while at the same time not giving up productivity.

You can find out more about Sergio on his blog or by following @sergiopereira on Twitter.

March 2012 Meeting

Real world Windows Phone Development

This talk complements an in-depth blog series titled RealWorldWPDev, currently consisting of six parts. The series walks through building a functioning, polished app (with full source code available), which will eventually be submitted to the marketplace.

The Series Introduction and Outline can be seen here.

Each of the parts will be discussed during the presentation, including topics ranging from:

1. MVVM with Caliburn.Micro
2. Solution Structure
3. Creating a great panorama experience
4. Creating and consuming web services
5. Page navigation and passing complex state

Since this is probably a 200-300 level talk, you may need a basic understanding of MVVM and Silverlight (or basic windows phone development experience) to get the most out of the content.

Video

Matt Hidinger lives in Chicago and works at Clarity Consulting focusing on ASP.NET MVC, Windows Phone, and Windows 8.
He can be found on twitter as @MattHidinger, blogging at http://matthidinger.com, working on various open source projects, and participating in the local community.
In his free time he has published two apps to the Windows Phone marketplace: CTA Watch and Transit Directions