Most of our meetings are held at the St Luke's Community Health Center (3333 Squalicum Parkway) but we have met else ware depending on availability. Please check the particulars of the event. Unless otherwise indicated, evening events occur on the second Wednesday of each month. Smooze and pizza start at 6:00 PM followed by a presentation and discussion.

• Wednesday 6/10/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Umbraco: The Friendly, Free CMS Without Limits
  Real-code, Nabaztag Rabbits, SMS, and free stuff - oh my!
  Presented by Paul Sterling

  This session will give a quick overview of Umbraco and lots of live-code examples showing how Umbraco can be extended and integrated using the .NET code you already know. Umbraco is a developer friendly CMS that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco has award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls natively. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too.

  Paul is an Umbraco core team developer, Umbraco Commerce lead, and frequent presenter focusing on Umbraco. He was a featured presenter at the Umbraco CodeGardens 2008 and 2009. He is a certified Umbraco Professional, an Umbraco MVP, and a certified PayPal Developer. For a living Paul creates e-commerce sites based on Umbraco and runs the technology company Motus Connect.

• Tuesday 5/5/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Application Architecture 2.0 with Keith Pleas

  Please note that this presentation is one week earlier than normal and on a Tuesday night.

  Keith Pleas is one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked with the patterns & practices team for several years. Prior to that he worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and past Editorial Chair for the VSLive conferences. He is also a Contributing Editor to "Visual Studio Magazine", and has developed Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith was a founding board member of INETA where he also created the INETA Speakers Bureau.

  Keith will be talking about this current project, which had a CTP release a couple of months back and is getting near being in printed final form: http://apparchguide.codeplex.com/

  This is an INETA.

• Wednesday 4/8/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  ASP.NET MVC Jonathan Carter

  Jonathan is the technical evangelist for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework at Microsoft Corporation. He specializes in web development and data programmability. His background is in software architecture and design for government organizations and ISVs.

  In this presentation we will take a look at what ASP.NET MVC is and discuss why it was created. You'll see how to develop a custom MVC application as well as how to write unite tests against it. Most importantly, you'll learn whether or not ASP.NET MVC is right for you or your company.

  Pizza is sponsored by Logos Bible Software.

• Wednesday 3/4/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Please note that this talk is one week earlier than typically scheduled.

  RESTful .NET Jon Flanders

  Jon is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on connected systems technologies. Jon is most at home spelunking, trying to figure out how things work from the inside out. Jon is the author of RESTful.NET from O'Reilly,as well as Essential ASP for Addison-Wesley, and was a co-author of Mastering Visual Studio.NET for O'Reilly. Jon's current major interest is helping people to understand the advantages of REST, but he sees a bright future for modeling as a way to build complex systems. You can read Jon's blog at http://www.rest-ful.net/

• Wednesday 2/11/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  

  C# 4.0 Ying Peng

  A talk about C# 4.0 and the following new features:
  • Dynamic Types
  • Named and Optional parameters
  • NOPIA (Type Embedding)

  Ying joined the C# compiler team about 2 years ago. Before that, she worked on a number of different teams both inside and outside of Microsoft. She move to US about 12 years ago after having taught Compiler classes at a college in China.

• Wednesday 1/14/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  What the F# is that? with Ted Neward

  "If you're like most C# developers, you've probably heard (or maybe not) about this new language Microsoft is shipping in VS 2010, called Visual F#. And if you're like most C# developers, you probably thought, 'What the F# is that?' and thought you were funny. (It's OK; everybody does it.) But now your boss is asking the question, and he finds your geek humor somehow not quite satisfactory as an answer.

  "In this presentation, Ted Neward, author of the forthcoming 'F# in a Nutshell', takes an all-code, no-slides look at the language, its concepts and ideas, and a little bit of its libraries and syntax, and show you how to start answering that crucial question, this time for real. By the end of the talk, you will have a grasp of some of F#'s core syntax, some good background on how it works and what it's good for, and a little bit of how it interoperates with C#, Visual Basic and other .NET languages, in either web and desktop applications."

  Pizza is provided by Logos Bible Software.

• Wednesday 12/10/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Create Great .NET User Interfaces Phil Weber. Even the most beautifully coded application will flop if people hate to use it. And they will, if its user interface is not designed with their goals in mind. What makes a great UI? How can you apply the principles that work so well for the guts of an application to its front end? We'll examine specific techniques (with code!) that you can use immediately to reduce complexity for your users and improve your .NET presentation layer's efficiency and maintainability.
  
  With over 15 years of software development experience, Phil Weber's client list includes Intel, Kaiser Permanente and Wells Fargo Bank. He has worked with VB since 1993 and .NET since 2001. Phil is a Contributing Editor to Visual Studio Magazine and has spoken at numerous technical conferences in the U.S. and abroad. He currently works as a senior support engineer for Corillian Corporation, an eFinance enabler.
  
  You can read more about Phil on his web site.
• Wednesday 11/12/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Wayne's Perspective on the PDC, Azure and Windows 7: On wednesday Wayne fresh from the PDC will be talking about some of the latest Microsoft Technology, including a demonstration of Windows Azure running on his laptop, and the Microsoft focus around the new Mesh technologies. So if you haven’t been watching the conference online, or just want Wayne's unique perspective come join us Wednesday. As an added bonus before the talk Wayne will have Windows 7 running under a virtual PC on his laptop during "pizza time" which you can play with.
• Wednesday 10/15/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  SQL Server Performance Tuning and Advanced Query Tuning: This presentation will include SQL Server performance tuning tips and recommendations for both the developer and the database administrator. Topics covered will include index usage details, query tuning, understanding the procedure cache, and best practices to improve the performance of your SQL Server, and the programs using your SQL Server.

  About Steve Stedman: Steve has 18 years of software development and database administration experience. He has worked at Microsoft, Amazon.com, Wall Data and Innuity where he gained extensive knowledge in building scalable database applications. Steve is currently a freelance contractor in the Bellingham area focusing on programming scalable systems and database performance tuning. He possesses significant experience in troubleshooting and optimizing the performance of database systems including queries, indexes and database design.

• Wednesday 9/10/2008. 6:00 PM. St Joseph's Hospital Conference Rooms 5 & 6 (off of the cafeteria on the ground floor).
  Visual Studio Reporting: William Vaughn. The inside scoop on how to get the most out of the new ReportViewer control and how it's evolved in Visual Studio 2008. This discusses how to leverage your Reporting Services skills and RDL reports to create application-based reports and how to manage the myriad of issues that come up when trying to emulate Reporting Services functionality like parameters, connections, pick-list population and much more. This session previews the SQL Server Reporting Services technology coming with SQL Server 2008.
• Wednesday 6/11/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  ASP.NET: What is new in Windows 2008 and IIS 7: Aaron Dutton will give an overview of the new features found in Windows 2008 and IIS 7 specifically with regards to ASP.NET.

• Wednesday 5/21/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Joseph’s Conference Room 5 (off of the cafeteria on the ground floor).
  Successful Computer Consulting: Making Your Customer Happy.
  1. The beginning of the relationship: How to listen to a customer’s needs (without your programmer’s hat on).
  2. The middle of the relationship: How to be responsive and give frequent feedback (so you both know where you’re at, even if you’re behind).
  3. The end of the relationship: How to have a customer that will tell their friends about you – and keep coming back for more!
  
  Syd Cole runs Paige Data Management, a local web development company that uses .NET technologies. This presentation should help us all deal more effectively with our "customers" whether those customers are companies that we deal with as consultants or coworkers within the company that we work for. Many of you ask how does Sydney do it? Well, this is your chance to find out!
• Wednesday 4/9/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Handling, storing and processing XML with C# and SQL Server: Ken Lassesen will be present a talk on a variety of ways of handling, storing and processing XML with C# and SQL Server 2005/8. Ken has been involved in building systems for Lumension Security, Phoenix Arizona based on the the Security Content Automation Protocol developed through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (scap.nist.gov) and the Mitre Corporation (oval.mitre.org). There are 6 protocols involved with many having their schemas being updated 4-5 times a year. All content is issued and updated as Xml, often on a daily basis, for example there are 30000+ documents in the Common Vulernability Enumeration Database with about 20 new documents added daily (besides updates to existing documents). Ken will take you through a variety of ways of handling XML, their strengths and weakness as well as describing what he believes to be the future for robust database design, hybrid-XML-relational databases.

  Ken is know to many as part of the infamous "Dr.GUI" of MSDN (you can still find some of his articles on search.microsoft.com by searching on his last name). An abbreviated list of his articles is at: lassesen.com/publications.aspx. Ken has been running Lassesen Consulting, LLC since 2003 and recently located to Lake Samish area.

• Wednesday 3/12/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Life in a Post Web 2.0 World: What’s possible in a post Web 2.0 world? Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in (imagine computers programmatically calling people to perform tasks), as well as introduce a concept known as “Web Scale Computing”. The presentation will also provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how to extend a base ASP.NET photo-sharing site so that uploaded content is securely stored in (and delivered from) the cloud, while appearing to be part of your domain.

  Amazon spent ten years developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched ten services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 265,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

  Bio: Mike Culver joined Amazon Web Services after almost eight years in evangelism at Microsoft, where he saw .NET move from a provocative idea to the preeminent development platform for serious development. As an Amazon Evangelist, Mike works in the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services. In that capacity he once again helps developers take advantage of cutting-edge technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications.

• Wednesday 2/13/2008. 5:30 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. LINQ Overview
  Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. Charlie Calvert, C# Community Program Manager at Microsoft, explains how Visual Studio 2008 aims to unify the programming models through LINQ capabilities in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative Application Programming Interface (API) for manipulating and querying XML.

  Charlie Calvert is the Community Program Manager for the Microsoft C# team. Working on outreach and bridge building to both external and internal teams through the web and live events, Charlie focuses his technical energies on LINQ. He has a degree in Journalism and Computer Science from the Evergreen State College. The author of ten technical books which have sold well over 100,000 copies, Charlie currently lives in the Seattle area where he enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and skiing in the mountains.

  Charlie maintains a blog that deals with all things C#: http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/

• Friday 2/22/2008. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch.
• Friday 1/25/2008. 12:00 Noon. The Shrimp Shack.
• Wednesday 1/9/2008. 6:00 PM. Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting.
  WebParts for SharePoint 2007: WebParts provide the fundamental building blocks for creating custom applications for SharePoint. This session will show you how to efficiently and quickly use your ASP.NET 2.0 and C# skills to develop WebParts for deployment into SharePoint 2007. Most of the development, testing and debugging will be done in Visual Studio .NET 2007. We shall then deploy the WebPart as a feature into Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0). We will also look at WebPart communication and modifying WebPart verb menus.

  Bio: Medhat Elmasry is an instructor at British Columbia Institute of Technology. He specializes in web development and is involved in most of the ASP.NET courses. He moved from Java to C# since the latter's inception. Medhat is also a senior software engineer consultant at Sierra Wireless Inc. He is the founder and president of the .NET users group in Vancouver (AKA. .netBC) and co-owner of bcjobs.com. Medhat holds a Masters of Computer Science degree from Bradford University in England.

• Friday 12/28/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch.
• Wednesday 12/12/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. Wayne Berry of XCache Technologies will present on the topic of his choice.
• Friday 11/30/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. One week later than normally scheduled.
• Tuesday 11/27/2007 - Thursday 11/29/2007. DevTeach Vancouver. Anyone want to attend?
• Wednesday 11/14/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. David Mitchell of Logos will present on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
• Friday 10/26/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch.
• Wednesday 10/10/2007. 6:00 PM. Phil Hustead of eboware will present on the Microsoft Membership Provider.
• Friday 9/28/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Cicchitti's Pizza.
• Wednesday 9/12/2007. 6:00 PM. Andrew will be presenting: Overriding base ASP.NET controls: Making controls work for you! A lot of the functionality that we all code into our applications is better placed in the controls. A little bit of effort goes a long way to improving reusability.
• Friday 8/25/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Web Locker.
• Friday 7/27/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. On Rice Thai.
• Friday 6/22/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Grand Avenue Ale House.
• Friday 5/25/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. ??
• Wednesday 5/9/2007. 6:00 PM. Chris Sandvig will present: Exploring ASP.NET 2.0's New UI Features: .NET 2.0 includes several new tools that make it easier to build usable and maintainable web sites. These include master pages, site maps and three new navigation controls: menu, treeView and SiteMapPath. The talk will overview the new features, look at examples and discusses implementation issues. It will be aimed primarily at people who are new to these features but the discussion will likely be of interest to those who have already used them.
• Friday 4/27/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Andrea's choice: El Gitano in Sunset Square.
• Wednesday 4/11/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "Building Data-Driven Web Applications with LINQ to SQL". Presented by Julie Lerman. Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a set of features coming in the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio that enable compilers to understand and implement query logic over in-memory collections of objects. LINQ to SQL is an implementation of LINQ that allows you to map .NET objects to your database and then query against the object using the common LINQ syntax, which gets translated to T-SQL automatically. This session provides a developer’s overview of leveraging LINQ to SQL to build data-driven Web applications including a look at the design tools that are being created. This session takes an in-depth look at LINQ to SQL support with ASP.NET Web Forms, building an Object/Relational Mapping layer, and using the ASP.NET Data Controls to leverage LINQ to SQL functionality.
• Friday 3/23/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Boss Tweed. Bob's choice.
• Wednesday 3/14/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "An Introcution to AJAX." Presented by Will Asrari. Pieces and components that fall under the umbrella of AJAX technologies. (This is not a talk about the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Library.)
• Friday 2/23/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. India Grill.
• Wednesday 2/7/2007. 6:00 PM. St Joseph Hospital. Evening Meeting. "Code Generation" An informal talk about data access layers. Inheritance and Code Smith. Given by Andrew Robinson.
• Friday 1/12/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Cafe Akroteri. Andrew's choice.
• Wednesday 12/13/2006. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "5 New things in .NET 2.0". An informal talk about some of the new things in .NET Version 2.0. Given by Andrew Robinson.
• Wednesday 11/16/2006. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Dos Padres. Andrew's choice.
• Monday 11/21/2005. 6:00 PM. Talbot Meeting Room in the Haggen Building. Evening Meeting. "Replication in SQL Server 2005". An overview of replication technologies in SQL Server, followed by a discussion of feature improvements and new replication features in SQL Server 2005, including Oracle publishing, peer-to-peer transactional replication, and Web synchronization for merge replication. Given by Michael Blythe. Michael works for Microsoft and has been the lead writer for SQL Server replication documentation for the last 4-1/2 years. He lives in Bellingham with his wife and two children.