Toledo Tech Events

Microsoft’s Windows 8 is looking to completely shake up the computing industry, from handheld devices all the way up to the desktop. It includes a bevy of new features, including many security enhancements, and a completely new way for the end user to experience Windows. With the public release of a developer preview at Build last September, everyone’s been able to see firsthand what Microsoft has been working on. This presentation will take you on a trek through the new operating system, starting with significant high-level changes, continuing on into the internals of the OS, and finishing with examples of Metro-style applications.

Speaker: Paul Burns – Marathon Petroleum Company

Meeting is Free. Pizza and pop are Free. Software, books and other door prizes at drawing held at end of meeting.

Pizza and pop served at 5:30.

PhoneGap is an exciting mobile platform that allows mobile developer to build a mobile application using HTML and JavaScript. This course is designed to get you started with PhoneGap by teaching you the basics of creating a PhoneGap application. In this course we will develop a PhoneGap application using the Windows Phone 7 tools and JQuery Mobile. We will also learn how to use some of the PhoneGap native APIs to access the native libraries of various mobile platforms. Finally, we will learn how to use PhoneGap Build to build our application for iOS, Android and more!

Speaker John Sonmez – NOTE This will not be a live presentation. We will be viewing a training video for this meeting.

John Sonmez is a software developer for TrackAbout. He has a passion for technology and strongly believes that simple is best when it comes to programming. He maintains a blog dedicated to that theme at http://simpleprogrammer.com.

Pizza/Geek Dinner Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – TBD).

In this talk, Jeremy will introduce PowerShell as a key developer tool. We’ll discuss how to start using PowerShell as well as how you create your own CMDLETs to make scripting available to users of your applications.

We’ll cover these topics and more: - Basics of PowerShell - Script Editors: PowerShell ISE and PowerGUI - Interacting with various CMDLETs - Creating your own CMDLETs with Visual Studio - Tips and tricks

Simplify Your Data Access

One of the very first things developers must decide when building a new application is how to get data in and out of some kind of data store. Typically, this data store comes in the form of a relational database where the data model looks and feels much different than the object model used to implement the application logic. To complicate things even further, many enterprises place constraints on how the database can be accessed which are commonly referred to as “best practices”. In response to this, numerous data access frameworks have been developed that attempt to place a layer of abstraction over the database so that developers can focus on the application object model instead of the database and SQL. This has been both a blessing a curse as object-relational mappers (ORMs), while being very powerful, add a tremendous amount of complexity and overhead that in many cases, simply is not needed for the applications we are developing. This presentation will attempt to explain some of the pitfalls of ORMs and demonstrate a new class of data access solutions referred to as micro-ORMs.

Speaker Nate King – Speedway

Pizza/Geek Dinner Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – TBD).

Tentative. Findlay Area .NET Users Group meetings are normally the last Tuesday of the month, but it is planned to be 1 week earlier in May. See http://www.fanug.org/ for details.

Microsoft released the 5th major version of Silverlight on December 9, 2011. Some of these new enhancements include new Binding features, graphics and media capabilities, and operating system integration. During this presentation we’ll discuss many of the new features and demonstrate some sample code.

Speaker: Sam Nasr

Sam Nasr has been a software developer since 1995, focusing mostly on Microsoft technologies. Having achieved multiple certifications from Microsoft (MCAD, MCTS(MOSS), and MCT), Sam develops, teaches, and tours the country to present various topics in .Net Framework. He is also actively involved with the Cleveland C#/VB.Net User Group, where he has been the group leader since 2003. In addition, he also started the Cleveland WPF Users Group in June 2009, and the Cleveland .Net Study Group in August 2009, and is the INETA mentor for Ohio. When not coding, Sam loves spending time with his family and friends or volunteering at his local church. He can be reached by email at sam@nasr.info.

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – TBD).

Tentative. Dennis Burton: Single Page, Real Time Web Apps Using Node.js And Windows Azure is the planned presenter & topic.

Findlay Area .NET Users Group meetings are normally the last Tuesday of the month.

See http://www.fanug.org/ for details.

For years, Web developers have been working with JavaScript frameworks, such as jQuery, MooTools, and Prototype.js / Scriptaculous. We all love how easy it is to create animations, effects, select and manipulate DOM elements, make Ajax calls, and so on. However, tasks that seem trivial become repetitive and can turn into maintenance nightmares later on. I will show you a better way for creating highly-engaging, highly-interactive, and maintainable Web applications by using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in JavaScript. This pattern is not just for Silverlight and WPF developers. It is made possible for client-side JavaScript by Knockout.js!

HTML5 includes a Canvas element that allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. Using this, web developers can draw images directly in their web pages with JavaScript, enabling applications such as games, mapping, and data visualization to offload the rendering to the client. One problem with the Canvas, though, is that the rendered image is just that: an image. The user is unable to interact with any of the shapes that are drawn to the Canvas. However, an open source library called Kinetic bridges that gap, allowing shapes or images to be drawn using the existing Canvas API, event listeners attached to them, and manipulated individually using mouse or touch (i.e., move, scale and rotate). This session will introduce how to use the Canvas API and Kinetic.js in a desktop or mobile web application.

What’s new in the Visual Studio 2012 IDE In this demo-paced session I’ll show off the most advanced IDE on the market by walking through the new features in Visual Studio 2012 designed to help you be more productive. Come see how we’ve improved the developer experience by streamlining the common tasks, simplifying the environment, and allowing developers to focus on the code that matters. You’ll see how we’ve reduced clutter and the new modern updated UI. Improved code understanding and new search capabilities to bring things right to your fingertips and let you find what you’re looking for faster. Experience the improved performance across the IDE for quicker response times, better usability, faster load times, and multi-threaded builds.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2012 for Application Lifecycle Management In this demo-paced session I’ll be showing the improvements in our ALM story. Microsoft’s application lifecycle management tooling is all about enabling teams to deliver great software. You will learn how to more effectively plan and track work by using the new web-based project management tools; how to bridge the divide between development and operations by utilizing IntelliTrace in your production environments; and how to help keep team members on-task and “in the zone” with the new “my work” and code review features. Also, I’ll show local workspaces, code compare, the unit test explorer and using fakes. In addition to making your team more productive, we will show you how you can boost your overall code quality with new features such as code clone and an overhauled unit testing story in Visual Studio 2012.

Speaker Randy Pagels – Microsoft

Technology providers move at “cloud speed”. Cloud computing platforms such as Windows Azure are updated more frequently than other technology platforms. The rapid pace of innovation makes it difficult to understand what features are available, and how to best utilize them in our applications. The positive aspect to the rapid updates is being able to quickly take advantage of new features and innovations. The Windows Azure platform is constantly growing and evolving. In this session we will take a quick look back at major milestones in Windows Azure’s relatively brief history, and then proceed into reviewing recent platform updates and new features now available. Coming away you will have a solid understanding of Windows Azure platform features available for you to use in your applications today.

Michael Collier is a Windows Azure MVP and serves as a National Architect for Neudesic, a Microsoft SI partner that specializes in Windows Azure. He has nearly 11 years of experience building Microsoft-based applications for a wide range of clients. Michael spends his days serving as a developer or architect – helping clients succeed with the Microsoft development platform. He also enjoys speaking about Windows Azure at local user groups, as well as regional and national conferences. Michael is also the founder of the Central Ohio Cloud Computing User Group in Columbus, OH. You can follow Michael on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MichaelCollier and on his blog at www.MichaelSCollier.com.

Everything you need to know about REST

RESTful services are the next big new, yet not so new thing. After years of dealing with SOAP Developers, Architects and even Users are looking for a simpler alternative for working with resources on the net. REST based services provide a simple and intraoperative way to use web services in everything from C to JavaScript. In this session you’ll learn everything you need to know about designing and developing REST services. We’ll discuss routing, HTTP verbs, return codes and designing service routes. You’ll be shown some simple and free tools to help you develop and test your services and you’ll learn how to quickly and easily create your own REST services (to return POX and JSON) in .NET using WCF, Web API or ASP.NET MVC.

Speaker: James Bender

James Bender has been involved in software development and architecture for 18 years. He has worked as a developer and architect on everything from small, single-user applications to Enterprise-scale, multi-user systems. His specialties are .NET development and architecture, TDD, SOA, WCF, Web Development, cloud computing, and agile development methodologies. He is an experienced mentor and author. James is a Microsoft MVP and former President of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group. James book “Professional Test Driven Development with C#: Developing Real World Applications with TDD” was released in May of 2011. His second book “JavaScript and HTML 5 for Windows 8 Development” will be available soon.

Pizza/Geek Dinner

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Logan’s Irish Pub).

The class that knew too much: Refactoring Spaghetti Code

The Single Responsibility Principle states that a class should have one (and only one) reason to change. Classes that don’t adhere to this principle can result in tightly coupled spaghetti code that leads to more bugs and higher maintenance. We’ll look at how to identify these classes by using some heuristics and looking for “code smells”, and we’ll clean them up using refactoring tools, design patterns, dependency injection and even aspect-oriented programming. Examples will be in C#, but the concepts can be applied to a variety of languages.

Speaker: Matt Groves

Matthew D. Groves is a guy who loves to code. It doesn’t matter if it’s “enterprisey” C# apps, cool jQuery stuff, contributing to OSS, or rolling up his sleeves to dig into some PHP. He has been coding professionally ever since he wrote a QuickBASIC point-of-sale app for his parent’s pizza shop back in the 90s. He currently works from home on the Telligent product team, and loves spending time with his wife and 2 kids, watching the Cincinnati Reds, and getting involved in the developer community. He is currently writing a book for Manning about aspect-oriented programming in .NET, and also teaches a class on web development at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

Pizza/Geek Dinner

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Logan’s Irish Pub).

By day, you are a master of the TPS report creation and all things virtual that make your bosses look good. By night, you create all sorts of marvelous electronic gadgets to aid you in your secret life of fighting crime. Or at least you would, if you could just get past all the hassle of correctly connecting up all the hardware and just focus on the programming. Well now you can, thanks to Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer, an open-source toolkit for building small electronic devices using the .NET Micro Framework and Visual C#. I’ll show you how to build and program your first device so you can finally begin your career as a crime fighter. Costume, faithful sidekick and cool superhero name not included.

Speaker: William Wallace

Have you ever refactored a routine and needed to measure the performance difference between the original and new code? Ever have a customer tell you your application is slow? As you add new features, do you know how performance changes in your latest deployment? Do you know how performance changes when server hardware is upgraded? Ever experienced performance issues as the number of users increase? How quickly can you identify bottlenecks in your application? How do you determine the relationship between memory and CPU utilization, network traffic, or database access and your application’s operations?

Before you can effectively respond to performance problems, you need to have baseline measurements. You need to be proactive and build instrumentation into your application as you develop it and acquire performance data during development and testing.

The Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) subsystem has been built into Windows since Windows 2000. ETW provides a low overhead mechanism to capture data from various event sources built into the operating system as well as from your application.

Prior to .NET 4.5, interfacing to ETW was a pain for .NET developers. With the introduction of the EventSource class in .NET 4.5, instrumenting your application using ETW has become as easy as falling off a log.

This presentation gives an overview of ETW and shows you various techniques to instrument your application. The presentation will demonstrate use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), using WCF custom behaviors to capture data inside the WCF call stack, using a Pub/Sub model via NServiceBus to consolidate instrumentation, and demonstrate the upcoming Semantic Logging Application Block (SLAB).

The next version of tools for the web will include more semantic markup, powerful APIs for JavaScript , and better native styling. In this presentation, I will show the important features of HTML5 and CSS3 and how you can use them today in your web applications.

I will demonstrate code that can be used today in browsers that support HTML5 features and that can be handled gracefully by browsers that do not support these features.

“You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.” — Czech proverb

It’s good to learn new languages and environments. Different languages solve the same problems in different ways. By learning several different approaches, you can help broaden your thinking and identify the right tool for the right job.

As someone who has spent the last few years using both environments on a daily basis, we will compare and contrast web development in the Microsoft .NET world vs. web development using the Ruby on Rails stack. We will compare the languages, the tooling, the communities, and the frameworks. This session will help the .NET developer get started down the Rails rabbit hole.

Speaker Jamie Wright

Jamie Wright is President of Brilliant Fantastic, a software development consulting service provider and an ISV for software management applications. He has over ten years of software development experience in Microsoft technologies and 3 years development experience in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. He specializes in application architecture, design patterns, object-oriented design, and test driven development. He blogs at brilliantfantastic.com and is currently seeking help for his gadget addiction.

Responsive Design with Bootstrap

Bootstrap – Sleek, intuitive, and powerful front-end framework for faster and easier web development.

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones) – Wikipedia

Speaker Nate King – Speedway

SQL Analysis Services for .NET Developers

Anyone who has installed SQL Server has seen SQL Analysis Services as one of the options. Often developers overlook the power of this tool and work with only the core services of SQL Server. In this talk we’ll look at the basics of SQL Analysis Services and how .NET developers can interact with it. We’ll cover the core concepts, creating cubes, using .NET to query multi-dimensional data and tips and tricks.

Speaker Jeremy Sublett – Composable Systems

Jeremy Sublett is a two-time SharePoint Server MVP recipient and is managing partner with Composable Systems, LLC where he focuses on designing and building solutions on mobile, Azure, SharePoint and everything in-between. Jeremy has been developing software with Microsoft technology for over 20 years. As a trainer, he has taught developer and end-user courses for many groups, including Microsoft, all across the country.

So we have all heard that you can store data in the cloud and that it is always available through an easy to use api. Well in this session I will show you how to use Icenium and then take and connect your mobile app to Parse.com so that you really can easily store and update data in the cloud. As a bonus I will show you how to use Parse’s cloud code and send emails through the cloud using Mailgun.

Speaker: Chuck Catron

I am a software developer that got started in computers in 1996. Before that I was in the U.S. Navy for 6 years after high school. When I started in computers I was programming in Pick Basic and it was crap. Then I converted to Microsoft using VB 5, then of course I moved on to VB 6. I got a great break in 2002 when I talked someone into letting me be their freelance web developer in ASP.Net 1.1 and C#. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but they didn’t know and I didn’t bill them for at least half the hours. I got ramped up pretty quick mainly because I quit sleeping and was really working my butt off. Now I have been doing C# and Asp webforms/MVC for the last 11 years and I love it. I have done the backend work building libs to get and save my data and that work is ok? I really like the UI stuff. I have been spending a lot of time with jQuery. I am also digging the Backbone stuff not for the whole thing but really how it organizes my jQuery and makes it really easy to figure out.

The nature of the web today is that more and more of the code ends up on the client side. Client side code can be structured but it’s often a disorganized mess. In this talk we will look at the basics of AngularJS and how it can help us with the development of rich web applications.

Speaker: Ryan Lanciaux

Ryan is a Professional Software Developer in Northwest Ohio. Although he programs in several languages, his current area of focus is in .NET and front end development. Ryan has been programming since the late 1990s (mostly with a focus on the Web). He attempts to contribute to the programming community through his (often neglected) blog.

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Logan’s Irish Pub).

Sure, adding SignalR into your web pages is a great idea for keeping the page up to date. However, with new opportunities come new challenges. What are the problems that occur in real-world systems once your need for live data increases? Suddenly you need to surface data in many additional ways. Windows Azure Service Bus provides several mechanisms for getting messages through your platform. You need to know how to build the routes, how to determine where you need guaranteed delivery vs. notifications, and when to use Storage Queues vs. when to use Service Bus Queues. In this session, we will look at how to keep information up to date even as you scale out to more servers.

Speaker: Dennis Burton

Dennis Burton is a web developer comfortable writing CSS and reading SQL Profiler execution plans. His diverse portfolio includes several single-page web applications, online learning management systems, precision measurement using high-speed data acquisition applications, and automotive diagnostic software. He has been consistently working with systems that require processing large amounts of data quickly. Dennis’s career has always been moving forward; forward, that is, from the back-end processing in systems to the feature-rich JavaScript applications on the web, today. As a web developer at Arana Software, Dennis has helped Fortune 100 companies as well as startups solve their problems with a variety of technology stacks.

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Logan’s Irish Pub).

This talk will focus on the server side tools for doing IIS troubleshooting with Microsoft provided tools. We will also go over using tools to look into the IIS processes to explore more process details.

Speaker: Brian Walter – Wipro

Brian comes from an infrastructure background and has been in the application development world for 10 years. Brian’s unique experience in the infrastructure side gives him experience in not only debugging and troubleshooting applications from the Development side but also gives him insight into how applications interface with the OS; giving the insight to troubleshoot both application issues along with application performance.

Pizza will be provided as a snack during the meeting. For anyone interested in continuing the discussion a Geek Dinner will be held immediately after the meeting (Location – Logan’s Irish Pub).

CSS Scaffolding systems have come a long way since Blueprint and 960.gs. Bootstrap extends beyond the basic grid system to provide a beautiful and powerful design framework, and its power increases tenfold when combined with LESS, the dynamic stylesheet language. Spend a session learning about simple, reusable, variable-based CSS with LESS, and the beautiful, responsive designs that you can build off of it when combined with the Bootstrap framework. When you walk away from this session, you too will know the power of LESS Bootstrap.

Today, users expect more out of web applications than ever before. They expect your web applications to be as rich and interactive as native applications. In this session, I will demonstrate how to use Web API to create RESTful web services; to call those services from client-side code with jQuery; and tie it together with HTML5. You will learn how to use the tools for building robust, interactive applications that run in a browser.

Speaker: David Giard – Microsoft

David Giard is a former accountant and a former biochemist, who has been developing solutions using Microsoft technologies for over 2 decades. Currently, David helps people build solutions in his role as a Microsoft Technical Evangelist. David has been very active in the developer community, speaking at numerous major conferences, code camps, and user groups; helping to lead user groups; and helping to organize conferences and other geek events. He is the host and producer of the mildly popular online TV show Technology and Friends. He is the co-author of the Wrox book Real World .NET, C#, and Silverlight. You can read his latest thoughts at www.DavidGiard.com. His hobbies include video, photography, sports, and embarrassing his sons.

OK, you have decided to write your first mobile application. First question, which platform are you going to target? This is a question that pops up in every developer’s head when they decide to enter the mobile space and with that space being as divided as it is, the answer is never clear-cut. Once you make that decision you potentially have cut off access to other marketplaces.

In this talk, I will show you how you can create one application that deploys across the three major mobile platforms – iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. To do this we will turn to Xamarin. Xamarin allows you to create a .NET backend for use with Windows Phone, iOS, and Android front ends. We’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this tool. When we’re done, you’ll know how to create a fully featured, standards-compliant, store-accepted app without the headache of maintaining three redundant codebases.

You have no excuse now not to get started creating the next great mobile app.

Speaker: Jerrel Blankenship

Jerrel is a software craftsman specializing in Microsoft technologies. He’s developed .NET projects spanning from traditional desktop to web and mobile apps. He’s a big proponent of agile development and spends his time working with and teaching developers who want to learn to build software more effectively. He’s literally written the the book about agile .NET development (Pro Agile .NET Development with SCRUM, Apress, 2011). When he’s not being a developer he invests his time and energy into his family, fishing, chess, Cleveland sports teams and gaming. You can read Jerrel’s ramblings at www.jerrelblankenship.com.

Wouldn’t it be great to extend your application by just dropping in a DLL? Plug-in architectures make it possible, and I’ll show you how to make it easy. I’ll lead you through a quick refresher on dependency injection and then show you how to build onto that foundation to create a plug-in architecture. During a walk-through of a sample MVC application, we will discuss plug-in strategies and frameworks, as well as how to make decisions on where the plug-in points should go.

Ondrej Balas is the owner of UseTech Design, a small development company based in Troy, MI that focuses primarily on .NET and other Microsoft technologies. He began writing code at a young age and hasn’t stopped. Most of the work he does today is in big data, algorithm design, and software architecture.

Plastic SCM is version control the way it should be. You don’t have to convert all or nothing. Easily integrates with GitHub, Bitbucket, Visual Studio online, TFS Git, and even local Git. You don’t have to convert the whole team to switch, start using it for yourself today. Then when you wow your teammates they will want to use it also. Don’t be afraid to branch or implement new Agile methodologies because your version control system is holding you back. Plus see how Semantic Merge understands your code and frees you to re-factor at will without the fear of not being able to merge.

Speaker: Steven T. Cramer

Steven T. Cramer recently started as a developer at Marathon doing .net development. He founded and managed TimeWarp Engineering for 16 years. Specializing in Model Driven Architecture. He has vast experience in the software development and networking worlds.

TypeScript is an exciting new language for the web. It simultaneously improves upon JavaScript, while still compiling to JavaScript. Best of all, the transition to TypeScript is easy and straightforward. In this session, we will look at how your team can make the jump to a better language, without introducing undue risk to the project.

Speaker: Eric Potter

I am a Software Architect for Aptera Software in Fort Wayne Indiana, working primarily in the .Net platform. I have been developing high quality custom software solutions since 2001. I am also an adjunct professor of computer science at Indiana Tech. I love to dabble in new and exciting technologies. In my spare time, I love to tinker with Arduino projects. I have an amazing wife and 5 wonderful children.

Azure Active Directory is becoming one of, if not the, primary user identity management services for cloud applications. One of Azure Active Directory’s attractive features, especially for developers, is the Graph API. The Graph API provides a modern, REST-based interface into the directory, allowing us to easily read, write, update, and delete a wide range of data. In this session we’ll set the foundation for how the directory is structured and what features it offers. We’ll also demonstrate how to get started programming against the directory in order to utilize Azure Active Directory information in cloud and non-cloud applications.

Speaker: Michael Collier

There will be 2 featured topics for this meeting.

• Automated Deployment for .NET

Octopus Deploy is a friendly deployment automation system for .NET developers.

Octopus works with your build server to enable reliable, secure, automated releases of ASP.NET applications and Windows Services into test, staging and production environments, whether they are in the cloud or on-premises.

Speakers: Mani Anantharaman and Steve Robeson – Speedway

• Web API with Entity Framework

In this talk we’ll focus on what you can do with the Entity Framework. We’ll see how to quickly access and edit data. Additionally, this talk will cover how to expose that data through Web API so we can make OData calls.

Speaker: Jeremy Sublett – Composable Systems

Jeremy Sublett is an architect with Composable Systems where he focuses on designing and building solutions on Azure and SharePoint. Jeremy has been developing software with Microsoft technology for over 20 years. As a trainer, he has taught developer and power user courses for many groups across the country, including Microsoft.

Every day it seems that there is a new JavaScript library that comes onto the scene. It’s hard to determine which libraries to spend time researching and which ones to ignore. In this talk, we’re going to look at why the ReactJS library (used on high-scale websites such as Facebook and Instagram) is valuable to learn.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Queries that poll a database looking for changes can waste tremendous amounts of network bandwidth, CPU, and other precious database server resources. By changing the structure of your SQL client to use query notifications rather than polling, you can reduce computational load on both the client and the server. We’ll review how you can use query notifications from C# or VB.NET to receive notifications from Microsoft SQL Server. We’ll compare polling, database triggers, and query notifications, with respect to speed, reliability, and ease of implementation in a software bug tracking system.

Next, we’ll examine a case study of how these types of notifications can be implemented in an automotive assembly plant. The Toledo North and South Assembly Plants produce the Jeep Cherokee and Wrangler, respectively, and we’ll review a video explaining the assembly process at these plants with a special emphasis on some of the computer systems driving them. Given your newfound knowledge of query notifications, you’ll easily be able to understand why speed and reliability are so important in this environment. Examples of notifications include determining the positions of vehicles on the production line with RF-ID readers and real-time detection of production line failures.

Speaker: David Johnson

Over the past several years, Node.js has taken hold in the developer community and is being adopted by major corporations such as LinkedIn, WalMart, and Yahoo, as well as many others. This talk will start with the very basics of Node.js: understanding what it is, why it was developed, and what problem areas Node is suitable for. We’ll then move into building some basic Hello World applications using Azure as the hosting environment. Finally, we’ll end with a discussion of various Node.js frameworks, and then build sample applications using the Hapi framework that Walmart Labs has developed. By the end, you’ll be able to better understand when to use Node.js and how to quickly start with developing a rich Node.js application.

Speaker: Paul Burns

HTML5 includes a Canvas element that allows for dynamic, scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. Using this, web developers can draw images directly in their web pages with JavaScript, enabling applications such as games, mapping, and data visualization to offload the rendering to the client. One problem with the Canvas, though, is that the rendered image is just that: an image. The user is unable to interact with any of the shapes that are drawn to the Canvas. However, an open source library called Kinetic bridges that gap, allowing shapes or images to be drawn using the existing Canvas API, event listeners attached to them, and manipulated individually using mouse or touch (i.e., move, scale and rotate). This session will introduce how to use the Canvas API and Kinetic.js in a desktop or mobile web application.

Do you need an awesome analytics tool but don’t have much budget? Want to integrate your on-prem data with Azure, Hadoop, or OData sources too? Using Microsoft’s Power BI, you can create powerful self-service analytics integrating your on-prem data with other sources. All this with a minimal investment? Say it ain’t so.

In this talk we’ll review everything you’ll need to know to get started with Power BI. We’ll walk through creating connections from the cloud to your on-prem data through a variety of methods. Then, the fun stuff starts. We’ll walk through creating a few dazzling visualizations. Finally, we’ll deploy it Power BI and check out our creation on the web and mobile devices. And, if that’s not enough, we’ll exercise the Natural Query Language tool in Power BI by asking it real-world questions.

F12 – Tools and Tips for Tuning and Debugging The Web

You already know how to debug your C#/VB.NET but what about everything in the browser? The developer tools in IE (and every other modern browser) are packed full of features to help. Having trouble working with minified code? There’s a simple trick to deminify it all. Pages slow or rendering oddly? Profiling and timeline features can help solve this. Bonus topics will include tools like Glimpse and Fiddler that show what the heck the server is doing to your UI. Sites will still do strange things, but now there are ways to fix them.

Speaker: Jared Faris – HMB

ScriptCS – Using C# as a scripting language

Many of us use C# for developing web, mobile, and desktop apps. But ScriptCS allows us to use C# in a REPL and as a scripting language. This leads to many very useful tools. We will look at how you can use ScriptCS to leverage your C# skills in new and productive ways.

Speaker: Eric Potter – Aptera Software

In this session we will take a look at React Native, why it’s important and how to get up and running in short order. In addition to the basics we will go through a more functional app to see these concepts in action.

React Native Website : A framework for building native apps using React

Speakers: Ryan Lanciaux and Scott Sanzenbacher

Ryan Lanciaux is a software developer in Northwest Ohio. Although he programs in several languages, his current area of focus is front-end development. He attempts to contribute to the development community through his (often neglected) blog.

Scott Sanzenbacher is a developer who runs Black Mutt media. He creates lots of web applications in a variety of languages. When he’s not programming, he’s riding his bike or critiquing movies.

You’ve probably heard of Agile or Scrum before, and that it’s used by a lot of companies for software development. What is the Scrum methodology? How does it work? How could it help me? In this introduction to Agile Scrum, we will discuss the differences between waterfall and scrum, walk through the entire scrum process at a high level, discuss the roles involved, what metrics are used, and what benefits it has – especially for developers!

Speaker: Dan Korzeniewski

The Visual Studio Diagnostics window contains a wealth of information, but many developers don’t know what all it can do for them. In this presentation we will look at how it can help you diagnose performance issues, track down bugs, or just understand what the code is doing. You will learn to debug code more effectively.

Speaker: Eric Potter

Knowledge is power. Whether you are trying to fix a defect, optimize performance, improve the user experience or increase the return on investment of your software for the business, if you learn how to listen to what your software is telling you it will improve the outcomes of your actions.

In the first part of this session we will demonstrate a number of tools & techniques to log data from the operating system, the .Net framework, and from your application in order to capture what is actually taking place in your software.

The second part of this presentation will provide an overview and demonstration of free tools to help you query and analyze your logs to extract information from raw log data. By the conclusion of this session you will have everything you need to capture better log data as well and extract greater value from your log data.

It seems like we’ve be building our systems using layers forever. UI layer, business logic layer, repository layer, etc., etc. What if we were to take these over-weight, over-engineered horizontal layers and break them up into focused, vertical slices based on individual features of our application? This talk will demonstrate how to do just that using some common design patterns (CQRS, mediator, etc.) and a proven technology stack (NancyFx, AutoMapper, MediatR, Dapper, etc.) by breaking down a real-world application that is currently being developed.

JavaScript keeps growing up. Modern JS is more than jQuery “click” events and Angular tutorials. To build powerful, maintainable apps, you need more than basic language features. ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) adds concepts like classes, variable scoping, arrow functions, promises and more. ES2016 and the WHATWG and W3C standards groups are adding even more. This talk will cover how to use these new features, and what to do when they aren’t supported by all browsers yet. You’ll leave better equipped to survive in the strange and wonderful world of JavaScript.

With the explosion of the cloud comes the explosion of compute power to solve complex problems. We have been playing with artificial intelligence for many years. Cloud services are now powerful enough that you can begin to build AI into your applications as simply as adding a reference to an API and a few lines of code. In this talk, we will explore and demo a few cross-platform APIs for building smarter and more personal experiences into your applications.

Brian Sherwin is a Sr. Technical Evangelist with Microsoft from Columbus, Ohio. He has been a consultant and trainer for over 19 years. One of his core passions is helping companies make decisions based on value and not a particular technology. When he’s not trying to figure out some new technology, he spends time reading, Scouting, and drinking enough coffee to keep up with his five kids.

Application development and data storage needs are changing constantly. Today you might find yourself using ASP.NET MVC, but tomorrow you might need to use ASP.NET Core. Maybe tomorrow you find yourself needing to store a more diverse set of data than you did yesterday, creating a challenging data upgrade path. What if you suddenly decide that you need to include a mobile application as well as a web application? How do you prepare your enterprise to be able to accommodate these various technology shifts as the years pass?

In this session we will talk about what is different about this generation of web applications and how a solid development approach must consider the latency, throughput and interactivity demand by users across both mobile devices, web browsers, and IoT. We’ll see how to include a NoSQL database in such applications to support a flexible data model and easy scalability required for modern development.

We will see how to create a full stack application that makes use of .NET, Couchbase NoSQL, and AngularJS, but can very easily be altered to meet the needs of your organization should things change in the future.