NJDOTNET

When do they meet and is it still open to join?

Jeanne Logan

Jeanne,

We'll be meeting every Thursday night at 6:30 PM in the Infragistics auditorium (where the regular user group meets).  Enrollment is still wide open, so feel free to email me and let me know (info at njdotnet dot net) and/or just show up!

-Jess
 

 Hi Jess. 

I Appreciate the offer and intend to just show up soon.  I was also wondering if you are a Linux advocate given your choice of avatar.  I am working on a project using Mono and Gtk which seems closer to WPF then WinForms (though obviously quite different).  Mono is much more mature than people realize though it might not be ready for all enterprises.  My experience is that tools and libraries are generally not as mature than on the Windows side.  Though those tools and libraries are not as mature and available as on the Java/C++ side.  It hurts to be on the bleeding edge!

Sun has been much better at fostering developers to contribute to open source projects than Microsoft.  Microsoft is moving in the right direction, but it is moving slowly.

Cheerio,

 Vlad
 

 I am indeed a very active Linux user!  Unfortunately, I haven't worked with Mono all that much since - as you say - the tooling just isn't there.  We are so spoiled with Visual Studio that it's literally painful to use any of the other, lesser, IDEs.  Though I saw that MonoDevelop finally "released" v.1.0 last month, I haven't tried it yet, mostly due to the fact that I don't expect it to hold a candle to Visual Studio.  So, once I'm forced to be in Windows to run Visual Studio, I don't have any real reason to run Mono (and especially not Gtk) over MS's implementation...
 

Jess,

I know the group started meeting last week, but I may be interested in joining.  I have a few questions:

First, is it too late to join? 

How late does the group run, and are there any materials (books/etc.) you are using? 

How many weeks does the study group run?

 Which MCTS certification are you pursuing?  2.0 Web, 3.5?

Thanks for your time!

 Take care,

Ken Roberts 

Ken,

It's not too late at all - we just had our first meeting last week so if you come this week you won't have missed much.  The group meets every Thursday between ~6:30-8:00/8:30.

At this point we have not determined how long the group will run.  Our current plan is go over 1-2 chapters a week until we cover all of the material (the MS Press book we're using has 16 chapters, so it may be up to 16 weeks for the first exam).  I polled the members who showed up at the first meeting, and we were overwhelmingly Web Forms developers, so the current goal is the MCTS certification for Web developers, which begins with the Foundations exam.  Since the 3.0/3.5 tests are not yet out (and the books and other materials are certainly not available yet), we're targeting the 2.0 tests, but hopefully we can switch gears to the 3.0/3.5 tests as soon as the material becomes available.

Hope this answers your questions!

-Jess
 

I will be attending my first study group next week.  What chapter is the study group up to using the "Microsoft  .Net Fremework 2.0 ... Training Kit"?

 Thanks.

 Jack

Hey Jack,

Thanks for writing.  I will be writing a full post on here with all the details, but at last week's meeting we decided to change the format up a bit.  We will still be using the book to an extent, but going forward we're no longer following the book a chapter (or two) at a time... at least not in the manner that we have been.

Instead we've decided to switch to a more question-and-answer format in which we use the meeting as a forum to test each other with questions of various topics, and focusing (to a limited extent) on a particular topic each week.

I'll have to check, but I believe our next meeting will focus on/around chapters 4 & 5 (collections, generics, and serialization).