Events

Saturday was Microsoft’s Dev4Dev’s event, where each presenter gets 20min to cover one topic. It is fantastic fun and a great way to learn.

For the event I decided to tackle CodedUI, which is just a great testing technology and in 20min I showed off a number of features using it. Below is the slides, which are not valuable - unless you jump to the hidden content where you find my demo script and some extra information!

If you are wanting to play with the demo’s you will also need my pre-constructed demo bits:

• The Xbox Super Store website: http://xbox360superstore.codeplex.com/
• My WPF application: Below
• The XML file with the values for the Data Driven test: Below

For those who attended and saw my second demo not go according to plan, I apologise again I’ve since run it again and it works every time, I guess the massive audience scared CodedUI into breaking

If you follow the IW website you may have seen that the September community meeting in Jo’burg would be about SharePoint 2010 Deployments. That has changed to something far more exciting: Double Demo Day!

Double Demo Day means we get to see two members of the community do a demo of something very interesting.The demos are:

Creating Workflows with SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath and Visio

Creating workflows with Visio 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 has never been easier. In this session I’ll go through the process of rapidly creating and deploying workflows in a SharePoint 2010 environment.

This will be presented by Ridwan Sassman, who helped us out last month with video taping the session.

Branding SharePoint 2010 with MasterPages, Layouts and CSS

One of the largest limitations of WSS3.0 and MOSS2007 is the ability to brand SharePoint without intricate knowledge of the platform and in some cases breaking a few rules and modifying out of the box system files to get the desired look and feel. Come and see how the theming engine in SharePoint 2010 together with CSS, Master Pages and Layouts can be used to brand your SharePoint site using the amazing new SharePoint Designer 2010.

This will be presented by Brent Samodien. If you have been to a SLAB’s you will know Brent as he helps us with the venue!

October

Looking ahead to October – there is no Jo’burg community meeting. Why? ‘cause we will all be at Tech·Ed Africa 2010! If you haven’t registered then you must do so NOW! Or you could try and win a free entry!

Win 1 of 4 Tickets to Microsoft Tech·Ed Africa 2010 worth R6 150 each!!!

Venue:    ICC Durban

Date:       17th - 20th October 2010

All you need to do is take a photo of a Microsoft Tag in a really cool/funny/practical place and upload the picture to the Facebook competition page.

More details in the competition animated video here.

Full Competition Rules on our Facebook page.

Dates for Submissions & Announcements of Winners:

• 25 Aug 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 1) (5pm)
• 27 Aug 2010    -    Week 1 Winner Announced
• 01 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 2) (5pm)
• 03 Sep 2010    -    Week 2 Winner Announced
• 08 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 3) (5pm)
• 10 Sep 2010    -    Week 3 Winner Announced
• 15 Sep 2010    -    Last Date For Submissions (week 4) (5pm)
• 17 Sep 2010    -    Week 4 Winner Announced

Submissions & Announcements of Winners:

• A new winner will be selected weekly.
• Last date for submissions for a particular week is 5pm Wednesday of that week.
• Winner for that week will be announced on the Friday.
• Submissions after 5pm will count towards the following week.
• Submissions which did not win in a previous week will still be considered in following weeks and need not be re-submitted.
• A person can only win once, thereafter all his other submissions will be ignored.
• You cannot submit on behalf of another person.
• Submissions are done by posting a photo to the Facebook page wall.

Terms and Conditions apply:

This competition is limited to Tech·Ed Africa 2010 entrance and does not include Travel, hotel or any other expenses. You will be required to help out at the Developers Community Lounge at Tech·Ed Africa 2010 for 3 hours a day if you do win. For Full list of rules please consult the Facebook page.

My favourite gathering of developers happens 2 or 3 times a year, it’s called Dev4Devs. This is a free event which Microsoft runs, where ANYONE can present a topic but they only have 20min! This means that in a morning you see 7 topics and rather than getting swamped in all the details you dive directly to the really important parts.

The topic list is below, and there is some exciting topics there and even some non-MS technology is covered too!

I am also really glad that the entire ATC team at BB&D, which is the team I work in, is presenting – they are highlighted in the list below!

The next one comes on the 4th September 2010 and it occurs at Microsoft’s offices in Johannesburg and you can register at https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032456806&Culture=en-ZA

Session List for Dev4Devs

Windows Phone 7 - Getting Started

A high level introduction to getting started with Windows Phone 7 development including: where to begin, options for developers, thinking about design and a demonstration application.

Presenter: Johannes van Schalkwyk

Making MVVM easy

Starting with WPF, Silverlight or WP7? Heard of MVVM but think it’s WAY too complex for your simple application? Join me for a crash course using the easiest MVVM framework available… Caliburn.Micro!
Presenter: Rudi Grobler (ATC Team Member)

Why you should care about Google Closure

Closure is a modularised set of JavaScript libraries that can assist you in building rich internet applications.

It's been battle-tested by Google on sites like: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps.

Attend this short intro to get an understanding of how important these libraries are and why you should consider using them in your next big internet app.

Presenter: Simon Stewart

Introducing NHibernate 3

The daddy of .NET ORM is back with a new release, in this session you'll see a few of the newest features - such as a full IQueryable LINQ provider - that makes NHibernate 3 the best release yet!
Presenter: Kevin McKelvin

Branding SharePoint 2010 with MasterPages, Layouts and CSS

One of the largest limitations of WSS3.0 and MOSS2007 is the ability to brand SharePoint without intricate knowledge of the platform and in some cases breaking a few rules and modifying out of the box system files to get the desired look and feel. Come and see how the theming engine in SharePoint 2010 together with CSS, Master Pages and Layouts can be used to brand your SharePoint site using the amazing new SharePoint Designer 2010.
Presenter: Brent Samodien

Unit Testing - Code Coverage & Mocking

In this presentation William will demonstrate how code coverage tools help measure the effectiveness of your unit tests.  He will also show how Mocking tools can help to add value to your unit tests and ensure that all edge-case logic is properly checked.
Presenter: William Brander (ATC Team Member)

Getting ready for Windows Azure development

Heard about the cloud? Excited about the possibilities? In this session we have a 1000-mile introduction to Microsoft’s operating system for the cloud, Windows Azure, how it compares to the other cloud offerings that are out there and how to get your hands dirty with the skill-up process. Endless possibilities + new tech = fun stuff.
Presenter: Ryno Rijnsburger

An introduction to Mercurial Source Control

Want a quick introduction into a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)? Meet Mercurial it is a cross-platform, fast, lightweight source control management system designed for easy and efficient handling of distributed projects.
Presenter: Zayd Kara (ATC Team Member)

Making money with Coded UI

Coded UI is a brand new feature of Visual Studio 2010 which enables you to quickly build automated user interface tests for your application and run them as if they were unit tests. In the talk we will look at how Coded UI can change your life, one UI at a time!
Presenter: ME! (ATC Team Member)

Hack .Net in 10 Seconds - Why obfuscation is critical

Hacking 101 – I demonstrate how to bypass basic copy protection in an unobfusctaed .Net application through reverse engineering and show how obfuscation adds a layer of protection. I also demonstrate additional techniques for protecting your applications from hacking once they are released in the wild.
Presenter: Mark Pearl

Composite Applications with PRISM

In this session Stephan will demonstrate how to leverage the Composite Application Libraries to create modularized applications for WPF and Silverlight. He will also show you how to do multi-targeted development by sharing lots of code between the web and desktop applications.
Presenter: Stephan Johnson

An Introduction to Pex and Moles

An introduction into Pex and Moles, covering the basics of Mole Types and Mole Stubs and Parameterised Testing.
Presenter: Dave Russell

ASP.NET Dynamic Data

I will briefly introduce ASP.NET Dynamic Data by showing how to build a complete data maintenance web application with almost zero code.

Moving on, I will demonstrate some standard ways of customising a Dynamic Data application, and some more advanced non-standard customisation techniques. I will finish off by illustrating how Dynamic Data libraries and controls can be leveraged in other applications that don't normally use dynamic data.

Presenter: Brady Kelly

ASP.NET MVC 3

As you probably already surmised, ASP.NET MVC 3 is the next major release of ASP.NET MVC. Join us as we highlight the upcoming features and modifications to this popular framework.
Presenters: Jaco Pretorius and Kobus Brummer

A recent Saturday (31st July), we ran a free day of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010 hands on labs. This event was run at the Bytes training facilities in Midrand, who set us up with 50 machines for people to use. BB&D jumped in and helped out with snacks (and giving me and Zayd time during work to plan this).

Together with Brent, from Bytes, and Zayd we ran around helped people out and got a ton of setup done! The crowd was fantastic (we had 70% to 80% attendance) with loads of hallway conversation about everything from licensing, Microsoft and even Visual Studio!

We were very honoured by three attendee’s who flew up from Cape Town to come to this event! This really highlighted the value of this event and we were all proud of it.

We also recommended people bring their own laptops to copy from the Microsoft Community Drives which was a massive success. We only had two drives so there was a queue for them. One of my personal highlights was walking past someone copying from the drive I saw them using one of my quick reference posters as a desktop wallpaper  

Lastly, and definitely not least in value, was Devexpress gave us two Coderush licenses to raffle away and those were a great success and congrats to our two winners.

Thanks to everyone who attended and keep watching we have some ideas expand on this and are looking at running it again.

I’m sure you know that in a week 50 talented and interested people will be getting together for a day of FREE hands on labs focused on Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010! If you didn’t know, have a look here.

Today I am very proud to announce we have another sponsor for the event – Devexpress! Devexpress are makers of some FANTASTIC addon’s for Visual Studio and development.

So what are they sponsoring? TWO licenses for their Visual Studio productivity add-on: CodeRush!

These two licenses will be given away as prizes to two lucky people at the event (you must be there to win).

Update 13 July 2010: The event is fully booked now! If you want to add yourself to the waiting list in case a spot becomes free, please contact me.

I am very excited to announce that Zayd Kara, fellow Visual Studio ALM MVP, and myself have arranged a free hands on labs training for Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010. This is your opportunity to get some time learning about the new features in these products.

The event will take place on Saturday, 31st July 2010 and will run from 9am to 1:30pm and is completely free, but it is limited to 50 people!

You will be able to do the following labs:

• Authoring and Running Manual Tests using Microsoft Test Manager 2010
• Branching and Merging Visualization with Team Foundation Server 2010
• Code Discovery using the Architecture Tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Debugging with IntelliTrace using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Introduction to Coded UI Tests with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Introduction to Test Case Management with Microsoft Test Manager 2010
• Planning your Projects with Team Foundation Server 2010
• Understanding Class Coupling with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Using the Architecture Explorer in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate to Analyze Your Code

Click here for more details and registration form.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors for making this possible:

  &

I had a great time in Durban this week presenting at the DevDays event. I was a bit nervous for my first keynote but calmed down once I was up there. I was much less nervous for the sessions and they turned out to be great fun.

Knowing is half the battle

As part of my prep I did fully script the demos and those scripts are included in hidden slides in the slide shows – so if you are looking to recreate the demos please download the slides and have a look.

For both my sessions I made use of the excellent (but I’m biased) Rule 18 tool. So if you looking for the actual code, which I referred to in my scripts with Rule 18 key presses, you should really download that too.

All the demos were done using Visual Studio 2010.

What’s new in ASP.NET 4?

• Demo Bits
• Rule 18 Snippets
• Websites and tools mentioned in the talk:
  • jQuery
  • ASP.NET Chart Controls for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
  • Windows Server AppFabric (previous called Velocity), which is the distributed caching solution.
  • Web Platform Installer
    • Used to install web application to IIS, like Drupal or Joomla
    • Used to install MVC 1

What’s new in .NET 4?

• Demo Bits
  • To save size in the bits I have not included the IMDB data dump, which you will want to download and include to get the IMDB provider to work.
• Rule 18 Snippets
• Websites and tools mentioned in the talk:
  • .NET Reflector – used to see the IL and reflect the C# code of assemblies
  • Zune leap year bug
  • Visual Studio Extension for Code Contracts
  • Sandcastle – used to take your XML comments, code and code contracts and creates documentation
  • Geosense – the software based GPS for Windows

Brian Noyes will be in South Africa next week and for one night only he will be giving a free presentation on MVVM at Microsoft’s offices in Bryanston. Brian works at IDesign and is a Connected Systems MVP and is known for being one of the top Silverlight/WPF/WCF/WF experts and so if you interested in those technologies or the MVVM pattern then this is must attend!

Details:

• Date: 11 May 2010
• Time: 6:00 PM for 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM
• Address: Microsoft, 3012 William Nicol Drive, Bryanston
• Registration: http://sadev.wufoo.com/forms/sadevelopernet-event-brian-noyes/

My first time presenting at DevDays was a great experience with me presenting in the community slot. I told the attendees of my session that they were the smart ones because  being at the end of the day, only the dedicated people were left and those dedicated people got two presentations for the price of one timeslot.

The session itself covered how writing JavaScript easier with jQuery and Visual Studio 2010 which you can see below. Now the slides below are not being done using some special PowerPoint to web tool, but are HTML which uses jQuery. Using the same technology as I was presenting on and building it in Visual Studio 2010 really highlighted how powerful and easy this was to do. To navigate the slides click the grey dots at the top or click on the slide and press = to go forward and – to go back.

They are a little wide for the website, so to see them in a new window click here

The demo used jQuery and Visual Studio 2010 to clean up the page, and then connect to StackOverflow to pull down my stats and display them to the audience. The completed demo code (which is not included above, so the demo page won’t work) is as follows (this goes in the HEAD tags in demo .html page):

<script src="jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript"> 
$(document).ready(function () {
  $("#DemoButton").click(gapSO);
});

function gapSO(e) {
///<summary>Gets and parses Stack Overflow Points</summary>
  var sourceDiv = $(this);
  var replacementText = "I have ";
  var stackOverflowURL = "http://stackoverflow.com/users/flair/53236.json";
  sourceDiv.html("Loading...");
  $.getJSON(stackOverflowURL, function (data) {
    replacementText += data.reputation + " points and " + data.badgeHtml + " badges on StackOverflow";
    sourceDiv.html(replacementText);
  });
};
</script>