Our October 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group will focus on application development for the Windows Phone 7. Our speakers will be Tzvia Gitlin Troyna and Maxim Vainstein of Microsoft Israel.

Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development

WP7 brings a radically new approach to user interface to the phone. In this session we’ll discuss how you can utilize this approach in your application development, enabling the delivery of powerful user experiences that integrate tightly with the overall look and feel of “Metro,” the codename for the Windows Phone design system.

In this session we are going to show you how to create the classic "Hello World" application and introduce you to the tools and procedures required to build and test Windows Phone applications.  During the lecture, you will talk about the hot topics such as: Networking, Storage, Sensors, Multi Touch  and UX.

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please register for this event at:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032462222&Culture=he-IL

See you there !!

Important – Note new parking arrangements:

From now on, the entrance to the parking lot is from the East entrance – near the steps and across from the Eged bus station. You need to leave a “Day Pass” in your car window – this can be either your event registration confirmation or the form found at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/mailersFiles/Parking.pdf If you have not registered for the event, or once the parking is full, you will not be allowed to enter and will need to find alternate (paid) parking.

The September meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developer User Group (IDNDUG)
Wednesday October 20, 2010
Location:

Microsoft Israel

2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana

(09) 7625-100

Floor 0 , Dekel Room

It is the building across from Amdocs.

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   “Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development – Part 1”  
                      Tzvia Gitlin Troyna and Maxim Vainstein, Microsoft Israel.

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development – Part 2”

                      Tzvia Gitlin Troyna and Maxim Vainstein, Microsoft Israel.

About the speakers: 

Tzvia Gitlin Troyna

With 13 years of experience in the software Industry and intensive work with strategic organizations, Tzvia brings unique combination of technology expertise and business value, what made her the ALM (Application Life Cycle) discipline leader at Microsoft Israel.

In her role, Tzvia responsible for Enterprise and Public Sector organizations (EPG & PS), partnership with the academy institutes and business partners channel for MS Development Tools.   Tzvia has an MBA from Tel-Aviv University and she is MAMRAM (IDF) graduated.

Maxim Vainstein

Senior Development Lead in Microsoft Israel (ILDC)

Maxim is working on Windows Phone 7 last year. Prior to Windows Phone 7, Maxim worked on various Microsoft products and fields such as Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft Client & Server side security products. In addition, Maxim is a senior member of ILDC Academic programs, working close to Israel Academic Institutes on research and various student excellence programs. Prior to Microsoft, Maxim took a part in a number of Startup companies, focusing mostly on security and end-user computer health systems.   

Well, almost … :-)

Although yesterday’s Announcement by Microsoft that they are going to partner with WordPress to replace the Windows Live Spaces blogging platform, was quite a surprise, my intuition seemed to be moving me in that direction.  Over the past few weeks and months I have taken an interest in WordPress – I even attended the WordCamp event here earlier this month.  I’ve been impressed with the product and the people.  I’ll definitely be delving into this further.

Another hint of things to come that had caught my addition was the support of WordPress blogs on the MS Azure platform:

WordPress and Windows Azure

Windows Azure Companion: PHP and WordPress in Azure

If you want to get up to speed quickly with WordPress, be sure to check out the great WordPress tutorial  From Zero to Hero.

This is a one of those cute but oh-so-true blog posts that describes several typical types of clients we often encounter.   I know that I have encountered many of them at least once over the years that I have been in business.

I have been fortunate to have had several of #5 (appreciative) clients, a few #3 (Hands-On) clients and also a few painful  #6 (Get-A-Good-Deal) clients and potential clients.

What types of clients have you had?  How have you dealt with them?

Our guest speaker for our September 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group is Oren “Ayende“ Eini. We will take a look at developing applications without a SQL database – why and how.

Developing .NET applications without a SQL database

The buzz is on, everyone is talking about those NoSQL databases, but what ARE they? Do I really need to SQL behind? In this session, we will explore key / value databases, document databases, graph databases and column family databases. Their strong and weak points, and when you should use them. We will also discuss the options available for the .NET community on the NoSQL. In particular, we will look at Rhino DHT and Raven DB, two NoSQL databases on the .NET platform.

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please register for this event at:
https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032459320&Culture=he-IL

See you there !!

Important – Note new parking arrangements:

From now on, the entrance to the parking lot is from the East entrance – near the steps and across from the Eged bus station. You need to leave a “Day Pass” in your car window – this can be either your event registration confirmation or the form found at http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/mailersFiles/Parking.pdf
If you have not registered for the event, or once the parking is full, you will not be allowed to enter and will need to find alternate (paid) parking.

The September meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developer User Group (IDNDUG)
Monday September 13, 2010
Location:

Microsoft Israel

2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana

(09) 7625-100

Floor 0 , Dekel Room

It is the building across from Amdocs.

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   “Developing .NET applications without a SQL database – Part 1”  
                      Oren Eini

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Developing .NET applications without a SQL database – Part 2” 
                      Oren Eini

About the speaker: 

Oren Eini

Oren Eini is working for Hibernating Rhinos LTD, a Israeli based company producing developer productivity tools for OLTP applications such as NHibernate Profiler (nhprof.com), Linq to SQL Profiler (l2sprof.com), Entity Framework Profiler (efprof.com) and more.
Oren's main focus is on architecture and best practices that promote quality software and zero-friction development. Oren is the author of Rhino Mocks, one of the most popular mocking frameworks on the .NET platform, and is also a leading figure in other well known open source projects including the Castle project and NHibernate.

An internationally known presenter, Oren has spoken at conferences such as DevTeach, JAOO, QCon, Oredev, NDC and Progressive.NET and is the author of the book "DSLs in Boo: Domain Specific Languages in .NET", published by Manning. Oren, using his pseudonym as Ayende Rahien, is a frequent blogger at http://www.ayende.com/Blog/.
His hobbies include reading fantasy novels, reviewing code, and writing about himself in the third person. Oren is also a Microsoft MVP, a fact that he tends to forget when writing a bio.

For our August 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group we will take a look at the “Iron” technologies – IronRuby and IronPython.

Session #1: Introduction to IronRuby

Speaker: Shay Friedman

Ruby has been a home for some great innovative frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Cucumber and Rake. IronRuby has recently been released, unleashing the power of Ruby to the .NET world. In this session you will get familiar with the Ruby language and its amazing ecosystem and you will learn to take advantage of it in your everyday development tasks. Come and see how this great new addition to the .NET family makes your development process faster, clearer and happier!

Session #2: Introduction to IronPython

Speaker: Dror Helper

Do you want to learn about dynamic languages and their uses? IronPython is a good place to start. This dynamic .NET language can be used to develop just about anything – windows application, web services and Silverlight to name a few.

This session will explain what Python is all about and how to write .NET applications using IronPython. The session is intended for .NET developers without any previous knowledge of Python that want to learn about the power of Dynamic Languages.

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please register for this event at:

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032456794&culture=he-IL

See you there !!

The March meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developer User Group (IDNDUG)
WednesdayAugust 18, 2010
Location:

Microsoft Israel

2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana

(09) 7625-100

Floor 0 , Dekel Room

It is the building across from Amdocs.

Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking.

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   “Introduction to IronRuby”  
Shay Friedman

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Introduction to IronPython”
Dror Helper

About the speaker: 

Shay Friedman

Shay Friedman is a Microsoft Visual C#/IronRuby MVP and the author of IronRuby Unleashed. He works as a dynamic languages leader in Sela Group where he consults and conducts courses about dynamic languages and ASP.NET. You can read his blog at http://IronShay.com and contact him directly via his twitter account - @ironshay.

Dror Helper

Dror Helper is an experienced software developer and a programming language geek. 

Over the last seven years, he has designed and developed applications in various fields including video streaming, ecommerce, performance and unit testing tools. 

He is passionate about programming best practices and all things software development, and has been a guest presenter at several user group and ALT.NET events. Dror's blog can be found at http://blog.drorhelper.com where he writes about unit testing, development tools, programming languages and anything else he finds interesting.

http://www.newtechusa.com/ppi/talent.asp

http://www.informationtechnologyschools.org/blog/2010/30-old-pc-ads-that-will-blow-your-processor/

These ads certainly brought smiles to my face – even if it is a reminder of how long I’ve been in this industry …

Note the special date of this meeting - Thursday April 29, 2010

The April 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group will be held on Thursday April 29, 2010.   This meeting will focus on parallel programming – in general and the support in VS 2010.  Our speaker will be Asaf Shelly, a recognized expert in parallel programming.

Abstract:

(1) Parallel Programming in Microsoft's Environments. The fundamentals of Windows have always been parallel. Starting with message queues, File System as an advanced lock engine, Windows NT Kernel as a fully parallel system, and the advanced parallel API. These originate in parallel system design and are reflected with the .Net API.

(2) Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0. Microsoft .Net Parallel Extensions allow fast and simple utilization of all CPU cores. With fast and simple also come elementary bugs. We will show how and when to use this new technology, when and how not to use, and we will ask the important question: Do we need a multi-core CPU in order to benefit from a good parallel design.

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please register for this event at:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032445037&Culture=he-IL

See you there !!

The April meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developer User Group (IDNDUG)
Thursday April 29, 2010
Location:

Microsoft Israel

2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana

(09) 7625-100

Floor 0 , Dekel Room

It is the building across from Amdocs.

Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking.

17:30 - 18:00  Assembly
18:00 - 19:15  “Parallel Programming in Microsoft's Environments”   
                     Asaf Shelly

19:15 - 19:30  Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0”   
                     Asaf Shelly

About the speaker: 

Asaf  Shelly is a leading expert in the field of parallel computing. Asaf has presented ".Net Parallel Extensions" at the last TechEd in Eilat and "Parallel Programming for Embedded" at the last TechEd in Europe.

http://Asaf.Shelly.co.il and http://AsyncOp.com

While we as software developers are used to learning lessons and adopting techniques from other disciplines, it is not often that we look to the martial arts for new ideas on development approaches.  However, this blog post does just that.

The author end with the following thought:

In the end, follow Bruce Lee’s advice: Examine what others have to offer, take what is useful, and adapt it if necessary. I’ll close with an old quote: “The style doesn’t make the fighter, the fighter makes the style.” Or should I say: The process doesn’t make the developer, the developer makes the process.

I agree with this 1000% – we often try to blindly adopt the latest silver bullet, rather than taking the essential ideas and tailoring them for our particular environment/situation.

What do you think ?

Note the special date of this meeting - Wednesday March 24, 2010

For our March 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group we have the opportunity for a special meeting with Brad Abrams from Microsoft Corp, who will in Israel for the Developer Academy 4 event. Our user group meeting will be held on Wednesday March 24, 2010.   This meeting will focus on building Line of Business applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and VS2010.

Abstract: Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and VS2010

Learn how to build n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIA) on Silverlight by tapping the power of WCF RIA Services. Walk you through an example of building an application from scratch using the pattern run-time components and tools provided by RIA Services. See how it helps you write application logic to expose data and operations in a carefully controlled fashion using tools integrated into Visual Studio with support for validation, authentication, authorization and handling units of work. We will also cover how to componentize your application so it can be incrementally downloaded using the Managed Extensions Framework. 

As always, we'll have our special "Hatzilu" session at our meeting. So please come prepared to discuss your most frustrating problems (or at least some of them!) and to share some of your own techniques and solutions that you have found useful in your applications.

Please register for this event at:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032446300&Culture=he-IL

See you there !!

The March meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developer User Group (IDNDUG)
Wednesday March 24, 2010

Location: 
Microsoft Israel
2 Hapnina St,
Ra'anana
(09) 7625-100
Floor 0 , Dekel Room

It is the building across from Amdocs.
Turn right at the first traffic circle and then there is an area for (free) parking.

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   “Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and VS2010 – Part 1” 
                      Brad Abrams, Microsoft Corp.

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Building Business Applications with Silverlight 4, RIA Services and VS2010 – Part 2”   
                      Brad Abrams, Microsoft Corp.

About the speaker: 

Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft Corporation where he is currently the Product Unit Manager of the Application Framework team which is responsible for delivering the developer platform that powers Rich Internet Applications and core innovations in the .NET Framework. Specific technologies owned by this team include parts of Silverlight, the Managed Extensibility Framework.

Brad has been designing parts of the .NET Framework since 1998 when he started his framework design career building the BCL (Base Class Library). Brad was also the lead editor on the Common Language Specification (CLS), the .NET Framework Design Guidelines and the libraries in the ECMA\ISO CLI Standard.

Brad co-authored Programming in the .NET Environment, and was editor on .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol1 and Vol2 and the Framework Design Guidelines.

Brad graduated from North Carolina State University in 1997 with a BS in Computer Science. Find recent musings from Brad on his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/BradA/

(from onstartups.com)

Please Notice Change in dates

The February 2010 meeting of the Israel Dot Net Developers User Group will be held on Sunday, February 21, 2010.   This meeting will focus on Refactoring Principles in developing cycle.  Our speaker will be Uri Lavi from the company Data Intensive.

Abstract: Refactoring Principles

Refactoring is a process of changing software's internal structure without modifying the external behavior in order to improve its internal quality: readability, maintainability and reliability. 
One of the successful examples of the process application is Test Driven Development (TDD) that is also known as: Red, Green and Refactor. 
During the lecture we will introduce and demonstrate the process, principles and best practices that will allow you to design and build more qualitative applications.

Lecture's Outline:

* Introducing Refactoring.
* Refactoring Demonstration.
* Refactoring Principles: When, Where and How?
* Refactoring\Design: What is the relation? (S.O.L.I.D principles) 
* Code Smells: What are they and how to tackle them.

17:30 - 18:00   Assembly
18:00 - 19:15   “Refactoring Principles”  
                      Uri Lavi , Data Intensive

19:15 - 19:30   Break
19:30 – 20:30  “Refactoring Principles”  
                     Uri Lavi , Data Intensive

About the presenters: 

Uri Lavi is a development lead with extensive experience in Data Intensive, Business Compound, Distributed and Scalable Software Systems. Uri specializes in mentoring, coaching and consulting for complex software engineering topics, among which: Software Architecture, Design Patterns & Refactoring.

While we can expect a lot of excitement, attention, and noise around the April release of VS 2010 and .NET 4, there are a few other strategic (i.e. longer term) technologies that I think we need to be paying attention to as well:

1. Windows Azure – Scalable Cloud Computing is all the rage these days (for many good reasons). Microsoft’s platform is not only compelling, but has also evolved to address many “real-world” issues. The offering goes live this month.

2. Silverlight 4 – Silverlight has come a long way from its version 1.0 Java Script beginning. The soon-to-be-released version 4 has added many of the missing pieces required to make it a serious tool for line of business applications. Without a doubt, Silverlight will increasingly become the primary Microsoft UI technology.

3. ASP.NET MVC 2.0 – While originally an “interesting” technology for the fringe of ASP.NET developers, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is clearly destined to become mainstream. Version 2.0 will be included as part of VS 2010 / .NET 4 and has smoothed some of the rough edges of the initial release.
(I elaborated on this here)

You can find PDC sessions, slides and videos on these topics at http://microsoftpdc.com/Videos

Have you been subjected to a job interview like this?

(from http://www.resumark.com/blog/)

While originally an “interesting” technology for the fringe of ASP.NET developers, the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework is clearly destined to become mainstream. Version 2.0 will be included as part of VS 2010 / .NET 4 and has smoothed some of the rough edges of the initial release.

One of the questions we have been struggling with at Renaissance is what browser development technologies to focus on for our in-house and client projects. Apparently we are not alone – I attended an audience-participation session at the PDC dedicated to the question of choosing between Webforms, MVC, and Silverlight.
Each technology has its pros and cons, and each development project must be analyzed for its particular needs and tradeoffs. Still, I would offer the following observations:

(1) The architecture encouraged by the MVC framework leads to more testable and maintainable applications, with a clear separation of roles – both in software and human developers and designers.

(2) For more “futuristic” applications, where you want more advanced graphics muscle and the power and familiarity of the .NET framework, go with Silverlight. As I said previously, it is the future of UI on the Microsoft platform.

While on the subject of MVC vs. Webforms,  check out the interesting post by Scott Guthrie:  About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular)