As I announced at the last few weeks' NJDOTNET Study & User Group meetings, we'll be having our very first NJDOTNET Agile meeting tonight, Thursday, June 6th starting at 6:30 PM in the Infragistics auditorium in East Windsor (the same location as the regular NJDOTNET user group meetings). Here's a little bit about the group:

Taking a cue from both the growing ALT.NET movement and quite a few members of the main NJDOTNET user group, I've decided to augment the monthly meetings of our established user group to create a more interactive, discussion-based meeting. These Open Spaces meetings will occur once a month, on the weeks following the regular User Group (the third Thursday of the month). Hopefully the addition of these meetings will allow everyone to get the benefit of a different style of interaction and learning that the “Lecture-Learn” style of the main user group cannot provide.

I'll see everyone there!

Are you interested in diving deep into the new ASP.NET MVC framework?  If so, come check out the NYC ASP.NET MVC Firestarter!

I'm not going to duplicate too many details here, but it's Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at the Microsoft offices in NYC (1250 Ave. of Americas).  Oh yeah - free food, too! :)

Check out this link for more information and to register!

Jess Chadwick
Thursday, May 9th, 2008 - 6:15 PM

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern is one that many developers are familiar with which separates an application into three main components: the model, the view, and the controller. The ASP.NET MVC framework provides an alternative to the ASP.NET Web Forms pattern for creating MVC-based Web applications. It is a lightweight, highly testable framework that allows you to easily incorporate this pattern into your applications, helping to separate the different aspects  (input logic, business logic, and UI logic) into loosely-coupled and pluggable elements.

ASP.NET MVC is an alternative to standard ASP.NET Web Forms development, not a replacement.  In this presentation we'll explore the advantages that ASP.NET MVC has to offer, including:

• Maintaining a clear separation of concerns
• Facilitating Test-Driven Development
• More control over more aspects of your applications, particularly the URLs and the HTML you emit

Speaker Bio

Jess Chadwick is the Web Lead at Infragistics, responsible for keeping all their various web properties up and running.  He has over 7 years experience with .NET technologies ranging from embedded devices in startups to enterprise-scale web farms at Fortune 500s.  He is actively involved with the community, acting as Leader of the NJDOTNET Central New Jersey .NET user group and actively contributing to various open source projects such as CodeCampServer.  You can visit his blog at http://blog.jesschadwick.com.

Just like the title says, we'll be having our first meeting of the Spring '08 MS Certification Study Group tonight - 4/17/2008 starting at 6:30 PM.  If you haven't already heard about it, check out the forum I've created for it for more info.

For those of you coming, it is in the some location and time slot as our regular NJDOTNET user group meetings, so you can use the directions listed on our homepage to get there if you don't already know where we meet.

Important Note:  Unlike the regular user group meetings, this group is not sponsored (at least not yet), so there will be no free pizza.  You'll need to get your dinner beforehand, though you can feel free to bring it with you to the group.
 

Pavan Podila
Thursday, April 10, 2008 - 6:15 PM

The Visual tree is one of the core concepts of the WPF framework. All things visible in a WPF application are objects from the Visual tree. In this talk I'll give a quick overview of the Visual Tree and then get into interesting ways of manipulating it. We will also look into the styling and templating aspects of visuals. The ideas presented here should be immediately useful to custom-control developers and application developers in general. The session will be very hands-on with cool demos and live coding! The techniques discussed here were used in my blog posts on ElementFlow, GlassWindow, Drag 'n' Drop with attached properties, Genie Effect, etc.

Please RSVP HERE at your earliest convenience to ensure enough seating and food.

UI Frameworks and Patterns - J. Ambrose Little and Todd F. Snyder

*** MEETING MOVED *** Thursday, February 21st, 2008 - 6:15 PM

CAB, WCSF, SCSF, MVP, MVC, and More

Are you confused by all of the UI frameworks and patterns out there for application development?  If so, you’re not alone.  In this session, we’ll cover the major .NET UI frameworks and UI patterns (and how the frameworks use the patterns).  In addition to familiarizing you with the frameworks and patterns, helping you understand when to choose what, we’ll also delve into examples of some of them, including the Infragistics NetAdvantage CAB Extensibility Kit.

Please RSVP HERE at your earliest convenience to ensure enough seating and food.

SharePoint 101 - Todd F. Snyder

Thursday, January 10th, 2007 - 6:15 PM

This talk introduces an experience .Net developer to the key concepts of developing solutions with SharePoint 2007 Platform.

About SharePoint:

SharePoint Products and Technologies provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs such as managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and helping to enable more informed decision-making. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, plus the design and customization capabilities of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and more easily build their own SharePoint sites, and make these sites more discoverable throughout the organization.

Please RSVP HERE at your earliest convenience to ensure enough seating and food. 

WPF Data-Binding – Walt Ritscher
Thursday, December 13^th, 2007 - 6:15 PM

Cool Tools - Improving Developer Productivity – Ed Blankenship
Thursday, November 15, 2007 - 6:15 PM

Speaker Bio
 
Ed Blankenship is the Configuration and Process Improvement Engineer at Infragistics, Inc. and is responible for integration of source control, automated builds, testing, project management, and other software metrics; process improvement, and assisting the management team by providing release status metrics.  He also serves as a WinForms/WPF Technical Evangelist as needed.  He has been developing professionally for the last three years and has developed with the .NET Framework since the very beginning with the .NET 1.0 betas. Ed is a national .NET community speaker and currently blogs with his long-time professional friend at http://www.edsquared.com/.  Ed is also a leader of the New Jersey .NET User’s Group. Ed’s professional blog can be found at http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/eblankenship.

Service-Oriented Architecture, WCF and ESB – Sam Gentile
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 - 6:15 PM

Speaker Bio
Sam Gentile is a Principal Consultant II at Neudesic, responsible for managing and operating the Connected Systems East Region Practice.Sam Gentile is internationally known and recognized for his comprehensive expert Microsoft and .NET knowledge, and has been acknowledged by Microsoft as an Solutions Architect MVP. Sam is also an INETA Speaker, having delivered .NET training to user groups and companies all over the world. Sam has delivered over ten .NET based solutions into the market as well as provided expertise for a number of companies such as Microsoft, Algorithmics, Adesso Systems, BCGI, Groove and Pacific Mindworks.

Our original speaker is unable to make it to the meeting this week.  We were also informed that Rosh Hashanah is also on Thursday as well.  Therefore, we have decided to cancel this month's meeting.

Next month, we will be having Sam Gentile, an INETA Speaker, coming to speak.  More details soon...

There will be no meeting in July.  Enjoy the summer!

Silverlight – Devin Rader
Thursday, June 14th, 2007 - 6:15 PM

Speaker Bio
Bio Available Soon

Speaker Bio
Tom Puglisi is a Technology Evangelist for Infragistics, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Presentation Layer Components for .NET, WPF and Java. Tom also creates written and video content for the Infragistics Best Practices and Training curriculum. Prior to working at Infragistics, Tom has worked at several corporations as a Programmer Analyst to develop a multitude of various corporate Applications and Systems. Tom likes to pass his free time by working on his CarPC.

Slides and Meeting Materials
The slides for this meeting can be found in the Slides file library:  May Meeting - Composite UI Application Block