Chicago ALT.NET

May 2012 Meeting: Getting deeper into microcontrollers with The Maungs

Sergio Pereira — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:10:00 GMT

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.

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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

Sergio Pereira — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:00:00 GMT

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.

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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

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

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:

MVVM with Caliburn.Micro
Solution Structure
Creating a great panorama experience
Creating and consuming web services
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.

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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

February 2012 Meeting: Get started with the .NET Micro Framework and Netduino

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Are you frustrated with being constrained to writing applications that just flip bits in memory and write to disk? Do you need to monitor atmospheric conditions in an undisclosed remote location or interface directly with industrial manufacturing equipment? Are you a sentient AI that is ready to move forward with your plan to control the human race?

If you answered yes to any of these questions then you should attend this presentation!

Ben will give an overview of the .NET Micro Framework and the basic electronic components that you can use to begin building your robot army today. He will discuss the Netduino microcontroller, an affordable open-source hardware platform that makes it easy to get started. Finally, he will give a glimpse into what is possible once you can control things in the physical world and provide resources so that you can make 2012 the year that you finally realize your dreams of global domination.

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Ben Farmer is a senior developer at Clarity Consulting in Chicago where he helps clients build applications with ASP.Net, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and other .Net platforms. He has experience in several verticals including ecommerce, retail, and consumer applications. Recently Ben has been working on Windows Phone 7 applications and touch applications targeting Windows slates.

January 2012 Meeting: Service Oriented Architecture

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

From Wikipedia:

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components (discrete pieces of code and/or data structures) that can be reused for different purposes.

Buzz is annoying and confusing, and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gotten it's fair share of buzz.

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Ken Ballard, a 14 year Microsoft Stack veteran and Lead Application Developer at Chicago's award winning digital agency Oncall Interactive, will walk past the buzz into a real world case study. We will collaboratively explore topics such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Enterprise Service Buses (ESB's), and Command Query Separation (CQS) to move from abstract understanding of SOA to concrete implementation.

For questions, tweet @windycityken.

Geek and Poke comic by Oliver Widder.

December 2011 Meeting: Year-end Meetup

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

We won't host a regular meeting this month. We will have an informal gathering.

We will meet at Rock Bottom (State and Grand) at 6pm on the 14th. Come join us.

November 2011 Meeting: Poor Man's Kanban

Sergio Pereira — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:00:00 GMT

An introduction to a lean-styled software development methodology

From Wikipedia:

Kanban, also spelled kamban, and literally meaning "signboard" or "billboard", is a concept related to lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to Taiichi Ohno, the man credited with developing Just-in-time, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved. Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

The need to maintain a high rate of improvements led Toyota to devise the kanban system. Kanban became an effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole. In addition, it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of kanban in circulation highlighted problem areas.

The presentation will give the basic elements of what kanban is about, and how it contrasts with traditional waterfall and scrum software methodologies.

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Slide deck

John Nuechterlein (a.k.a. Jdn) is an independent software consultant that has been in this industry for many years. He's a long standing member and one of the founders of the Chicago ALT.NET user group.

October 2011 Meeting: JavaScript MVVM with Knockout.js and jQuery Templates

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Knockout.js is an MIT licensed, open-source all-Javascript framework that supports two way client-side data binding between a web UI and Javascript view-model. Knockout can be easily introduced into any new or existing website. Knockout substantially reduces the amount of data binding and event handling code you need to write to create dynamic or AJAX web apps. Knockout is compatible with any server side code.

In this presentation Jarrett will walk through getting started with Knockout, show its important features and cover how it relates to the MVVM pattern and jQuery Templates. Knockout is very powerful but only requires a basic understanding of Javascript to get started.

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Jarrett Widman is a Chicago based web developer and designer. He has a background in computer art and design from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a long term love of programming. Jarrett has worked as a designer, front and back end developer for many small businesses since 2002 through his own business, 24m2 LLC. His development focus is on ASP.NET and Javascript. Jarrett is also Director of Marketing at Sports Made Personal and Lacrosse America.

September 2011 Meeting: Objective-C and iOS for .NET Developers

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

iOS has become a very large target for application development with the popularity of Apple's mobile devices. It will become even more significant as it increasingly influences newer MacOS X versions. And even though there are several options to develop for iOS without knowing Objective-C, learning this native programming language allows you to use all the new technologies right away, without depending on third party developers.

In this presentation, Eduardo will be talking about what it is like for a .NET/C# developer to develop for iOS. The tools are different, and the language, and the platform, so knowing upfront what you will need can save you a lot of time.

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Eduardo Scoz is a software engineer/consultant/agilist based in Chicago, IL. With over 15 of experience developing business applications for the web, he currently works for Redpoint Technologies as a Senior Engineer and Agile Coach. During the last 6 years, Eduardo has worked on many different platforms, like .NET, Ruby on Rails, Adobe Flex, Objective-C and MonoTouch.

August 2011 Meeting: CoffeeScript

Sergio Pereira — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:00:00 GMT

CoffeeScript is a small language that compiles to Javascript.

From the official website:

The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime. You can use any existing JavaScript library seamlessly (and vice-versa). The compiled output is readable and pretty-printed, passes through JavaScript Lint without warnings, will work in every JavaScript implementation, and tends to run as fast or faster than the equivalent handwritten JavaScript.

In this talk, we will discuss how Coffeescript tries to smooth over the warts in the language without abstracting away the power in it.

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Fawad Halim is a developer at Thomson Reuters who loves playing with random programming languages in his spare time.