HDNUG Meeting - 06/12/08 - Recap

I attended the June Houston .NET User Group meeting tonight. There were about 55 people in attendance which is a pretty good turnout. Still enough people to keep me from winning any door prizes.

The sponsor was Pariveda Solutions, an information services technology company.

Michael Steinberg , the HDNUG President, gave a high-level talk on the new features SQL Sever 2008. His talk was followed by an overview of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7, given by John Hellman, the HDNUG Vice President.

Other information provided

• In July, Marcus Egger will be speaking on the subject of Silverlight
• The 2008 Houston TechFest will be held September 13th at University of Houston

All in all, it was an evening of great information.

Great Podcast About The Development Community

On my commute to work this morning, I listened to a great .NET Rocks episode about the development community in general.

.NET Rocks show #344 is all about building communities.  Carl and Richard interviewed Chris Koenig, Toi Wright and Caleb Jenkins about their ideas of community.  It is an informative podcast episode and I highly recommend giving it a listen if you are interested in the development community.

Below is a list of Texas Regional User Groups (that I know of):

• Houston Area User Groups
• Austin .NET User Group
• Dallas ASP.NET User Group
• Dallas .NET User Group
• North Dallas .NET User Group
• Fort Worth .NET User Group
• Lubbock .NET User Group
• Alamo Coders

I really believe the development community is important and it was good to hear a podcast that addressed the subject.

Austin Code Camp 2008 - Recap

I drove to Austin to attend the 2008 Austin Code Camp on Saturday, May 17th.  There was a plethora of sessions to pick from and great speakers.  The total attendance was 203.  That is a great turnout!!

       

Below are the sessions I attended:

• Unit Testing in Silverlight 2.0 - Eric Hexter
• SQL Server Performance Monitoring & Optimization - Anil Desai
• Introduction to Domain Driven Design with NHibernate - Ben Scheirman
• Resharper-Fu - Ben Scheirman
• Intro to C# 3.0 - Jimmy Bogard
• Practical uses of Linq - Josh Handel

There were quite a few people there using Twitter to communicate information from the sessions.  Here is the track of the ACC08 Twitter posts on Summize.

There were people there from Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas and even as far away as Arkansas.  A day of great information was completely worth the trip from Houston.

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Related Content

• Google Code repository for Austin Code Camp sessions
• Austin Code Camp Rocked! (And I’m Tired) - Ben Scheirman
• Austin .NET Code Camp ‘08 == Awesome - Chad Meyers
• Austin Code Camp 2008 - Michael Koby
• Austin Code Camp 2008 post-mortem - Jimmy Bogard

HDNUG Meeting - 04/10/08 - Recap

I attended the Houston .NET User Group meeting Thursday night where there was a great turnout of well over 100 people.  The sponsor was Clearpoint Technology.

        

The presentation was given by Mohammad Azam and the topic was LINQ to SQL and Gotchas.  Mohammad is a very interesting presenter and really knows his stuff.  He is what I like to call a coding presenter.  A presenter that codes their samples on the spot and does not have a ton of slides in the slide deck.  Although, he did present his first slide that read “Slide 1 of 347″  (or something like that) as a joke to break the ice.  Well it worked, he had the whole room laughing.

Below are some of the items/points presented.

• CRUD operations using LINQ to SQL
• The DelayLoaded property in the data designer
• Data load options
• LINQ to SQL as an alternative to calling Stored Procedures from C# code
• Anonymous Data Types

Mohammad finished the presentation by going over some of the problems he encountered while working with LINQ to SQL.

There was a plethora of information in the presentation - so much it was difficult to note everything.

    

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Related Content

• My Presentation at Houston .NET User Group on LINQ to SQL - Mohammad Azam
• Houston .NET User Group Meeting LINQ to SQL Demo Downloads! - Mohammad Azam

HASSUG Meeting Recap - 04/08/08

I attended the Houston SQL Server User Group meeting today during my lunch hour.  The speaker was Randy Dyess with Solid Quality Mentors and the topic was SQL Server memory management.

There were about 30 people in attendance.  Up from the past.  When asked, several said they heard about the group via the Microsoft Launch last month.

It was an information-packed presentation.  So packed that there was not enough time to finish the entire demo.

[Download Presentation Materials] 

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Some of the items covered

• Memory Limits
• Memory Extensions

1. AWE - Address Windowing Extension
2. PAE - Physical Address Extension

• Cache Concepts (cache - Basically, memory broken into 8k pages)
• Memory Allocation

1. Dynamic Memory Allocation
2. Fixed Memory Allocation (SQL Server’s memory)

• SQL Memory

1. MemToLeave (aka Memory Outside Buffer Pool)
2. Worker Threads
3. Buffer Pool

• Linked Servers
• SQL CLR
• Memory Counters
• Extended stored procs run in unmanaged memory

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Houston Heroes Happen Here Event - Recap

I attended Microsoft’s Heroes Happen Here launch event today.  By attending this event, I gained knowledge on the newest features of the Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008.

The day started with breakfast served in a really nice insulated lunch box (lunch was in there too) and a walk through the partner expo to pick up numerous pieces of swag.  Next it was off to a packed auditorium for the keynote.  After the keynote, the breakout sessions began. I was on the Developer track so my sessions were as follows:

• Break Through Challenges With Visual Studio 2008
• Reach End-Users With next Generation Web Applications
• Creating Instantly Familiar Applications With The Microsoft Office System
• Defy Occasionally Connected Challenges With Smart Client Applications

After all sessions were complete, we turned in our evaluations and were given about $800+ worth of software.  Sweet!!!

If you have the opportunity and are like me and have no access to an MSDN subscription, I highly recommend you attend this event.

HDNUG Meeting - 03/13/08

I attended the Houston .NET User Group meeting this passed Thursday night. The turnout was great. It looked as if there were over 100 people in attendance. Seemed like it too, when it was time to pile out of the parking garage at Microsoft.

The presentation was given by Les Pinter. Les is well known in the FoxPro world and now in the .NET world. His specialty is helping clients convert FoxPro applications to .NET. In his presentation he went over several ways to build user controls. He also explained the importance of sub-classing as well as how to test user controls.

After his user control talk, Les took the time to tell many interesting and fun stories, such as the time Bill Gates bought source code from him that ended up becoming Microsoft Word. Wow, I was actually listening to the original creator of MS Word.

It was a very fun presentation to see.

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Related Content
Les Pinter Interview on .NET Rocks
Pinter Consulting
Les Pinter’s Books on Amazon

HASSUG Meeting Recap - 12/11/07

I attended the Houston Area SQL Server User Group meeting today which had an attendance of about 20 or so. The speaker was Tyler Chessman from Microsoft and his presentation was an overview of the enhancements included in the upcoming SQL Server 2008.

Some of the major enhancements discussed were: –

• Resource Governor
• Transparent Data Encryption
• Backup Compression
• T-SQL Intellisense
• Declarative Management Framework
• Merge SQL Statement

As a developer, I am really looking forward to the Intellisense and the Merge statement among other new features.

There are also some T-SQL enhancements. For example, you will now be able to declare a variable and instantiate it at the same time.

DECLARE @SomeInt int = 1

Reporting Services has also removed the IIS dependency.

Tyler is a great presenter. He know SQL Server well and is able to convey this knowledge to his audience. As always, it was an informative presentation.

Until next month.

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HASSUG Meeting Recap - 11/13/07

I attended the Houston Area SQL Server User Group meeting yesterday which had an attendance of about 20 or so.  The speaker was Bryan Oliver from Quest Software and he spoke on the topic of 101 things not to do on SQL Server.

Bryan went over the adverse side-affects that can affect SQL Server performance.  Some of the points he touched on are below.

• Monitoring software (antivirus, performance monitors, etc)
• Drivers
• Memory
• Disk Drives
• Network
• Database Configuration (poor indexing, lack of naming conventions, autogrowth, etc)
• T-SQL Development (ADHOC SQL, Inadequate testing, Temp table overuse, etc)
• DBA Practices (Failing to test backups, Backup to same disk, defrag, etc)

It was an informative presentation.

Until next month.

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Houston .NET User Group Meeting - 10.11.07

I attended the Houston .NET User Group (HDNUG) meeting last night and the speaker was Markus Egger. He spoke on the topic of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

Markus started off talking about the importance of User Interface and put up a graphic of an iPhone. What he said is very true, “All the user cares about is the UI”. He also went into the disadvantages of GDI which is the predecessor to WPF.

Great examples were supplied as well. He gave some great XAML code examples as well as good comparisons between using all XAML, all C# (or VB.NET) and a combination to create WPF applications. Markus also gave us some current applications using WPF, like the upcoming Yahoo Messenger and his own company’s creation Xiine. Xiine is a really cool online content reader. You may want to check it out.

Next he gave us a list of tools that can be used to create WPF applications. They are listed below.

• Visual Studio 2005 w/3.0 Extensions
• Visual Studio 2008
• Expression Studio (Blend, etc)
• XAMLPad
• Some Third Party Apps

The last thing discussed was Silverlight. Markus showed us the Silverlight Airlines website and boy is that sweet. Silverlight definitely looks like the future of the web.

All in all, the presentation was very informative. I walked away with enough information to start dabbling in WPF.

I will update this with a link to the presentation slides when they are made available.

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