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Real world Conference data & a Windows Phone App! (CONDG meeting, December 8, 2011)

BP — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:08:28 +0000

Samidip Basu gave a very informative presentation on OData as it applied to the Columbus M3 Conference that took place in November of 2011, and how he put together a Windows Phone app that consumed the Azure hosted data.

As it was at the December CONDG meeting two years ago, I won a totally crappy T-shirt, and gave it to a former co-worker. Which made the evening that much more successful.

BTW, Happy Birthday to the Petrified Forest National Park, established this day in 1962. The petrified logs and the Painted Desert are fantastic, I highly recommend a trip there.

How to Move Your App to the Cloud (CONDG meeting, June 23, 2011)

BP — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 01:25:06 +0000

Brian Prince gave a presentation on Windows Azure at the Central Ohio .NET Developer Group meeting on June 23, 2011. The presentation was mostly talking the process of moving existing applications to Azure, and the pitfalls that can arise when doing so. It was a very interesting presentation, and very appropriate since the company I am now working at is looking at creating some cloud based services.

BTW, Happy 99th Birthday to Alan Turing. OK, he is not currently among the living, but Happy Birthday to him nonetheless.

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset (CONDG meeting, March 24, 2011)

BP — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 01:16:22 +0000

Jay Harris gave an excellent talk and demo on continuous integration at the Central Ohio .NET Developer Group meeting on March 24, 2011. The presentation was mostly talking about the concepts and pitfalls of continuous integration, but he did run through a quick installation and demo of a free continuous integration tool, and the demo gods smiled on Jay as it went pretty well.

Also, Shawn Wallace gave a quick presentation on the mysterious world of branching and merging, a subject that does not get nearly the attention that it deserves at most software companies.

On a personal note, my name was drawn as the first name on the door prizes, which meant that I could choose one of three unknown prizes. Of course, having the first choice, I drew the lemon of the lot (Windows Vista Ultimate, joyous day) and was embarrassed in front of the group. The second name drawn, a former co-worker of mine, also chose one of the unknown prizes, and got the best of the lot, a Microsoft Arc mouse. Oh well.

BTW, happy birthday to Steve Ballmer.

An Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development (CONDG meeting, August 21, 2010)

BP — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:30:24 +0000

Tonight I attended the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting at the Microsoft office in Polaris. Jeff Blankenburg gave a presentation on developing applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform, and Mel Grubb gave a short talk on the Should open-source testing library.

Jeff’s presentation was very high level, but still informative. He did confirm my biggest disappointment on the platform, and that is the glaring lack of a data store. I guess that Microsoft couldn’t find anyone to port over the SQL Mobile 2005 code. Or maybe even the SQL Server Compact code. Or the SQL Server Mobile Edition code.

2010 Central Ohio Day of .NET

BP — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:48:56 +0000

A co-w0rker and I attended the Central Ohio Day of .NET on June 5, 2010. There was quite a bit of good content at the conference, which is a real tribute to the organizers, volunteers, and presenters.

The highlights of my day were sitting in on Matt Casto’s regular expressions talk, Phil Japikse’s M-V-VM primer, discussing the etymology of the MongoDB project with Sam Corder (I still say it was named such after the character in Blazing Saddles), Michael Eaton’s talk on WPF, and Parag Joshi’s demonstration of XNA/Windows Phone 7 game development.

Demo days (CONDG meeting, December 14, 2009)

BP — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:52:58 +0000

The Central Ohio .NET Developers Group held their final meeting of the year last night at the Microsoft office in Polaris. Four people gave short demos of Xbox, Zune HD, Windows Mobile, and iPhone, and talked about developing for each platform.

The highlight of the evening was my name being drawn as winning the year’s final and perhaps most craptastic door prize, which I then gave to my coworker who was attending the meeting with me. He is into free t-shirts.