GGMUG

Our December 2011 meeting will be a Fruit Cake Special.

That means it will be a grouping of 30 minute sessions that may or may not go together, but we pass around at the holidays. You know, like the proverbial fruit cake that has passed from one family to another since 1015 AD.

All the standard meeting details apply:

• 12/8/2011
• 6:30 PM
• Room 401 of Building 100
• Gwinnett Technical College

Our sessions will be:

Intro To C++

Alex Tocitu

Alex has done a great job with the talks he has given GGMUG in the past, and I am looking forward to his Intro To C++.

Microsoft seems poised to breathe new life into C++ with the coming of Windows 8, so now is a good time to start seeing what it has to offer.

Intro To CoffeeScript

Logan Gray

CoffeeScript is an up and coming scripting language that generates JavaScript. You can write very concise CoffeeScript and get good JavaScript.

Logan works with a variety of web technologies, so I look forward to hearing his take on CoffeeScript.

If you WERE going to eat a Fruit Cake, you'd probably want some coffee with it, right?

jQuery & ASP (Web Forms)

Jeff Ammons

Microsoft is shipping jQuery with Visual Studio for a reason: it's good.

The problem is that Web Forms doesn't play nice.

I'll walk you through some things you can do to make Web Forms behave itself.

Real post-Halloween treat coming for the November meeting!

Chris Eargle will be presenting Legend Of Lambda.

Legend Of Lambda

Lambda expressions are a powerful feature of C#, one that can be wielded for good or evil. Attend this session for an adventure through the evolution of the C# language, from the depths of the delegate keyword to the expressiveness of the lambda expression. Chris will show you how anyone can easily learn to wield and empower code with lambda expressions. It's dangerous to go alone! Take this: =>.

Chris is a Telerik Developer Evangelist, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional – C#, and two-time INETA Community Champion from Columbia, SC, USA. He has over a decade of experience designing and developing enterprise applications, and he runs the local .NET User Group: the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild. He is a frequent guest of conferences and community events promoting best practices and new technologies. His blog, kodefuguru.com, has been featured on ASP.NET, MSDN, and Reddit. 

Sign up NOW!

OK, now that I have that out of the way...

October 13, 2011, is the night of our annual contest. This year it will be a Team Programming Challenge: EXTREME!

Well, not that extreme.

Teams of 2-4 will compete in a series of challenges to see who wins bragging rights and fabulous prizes.

We have a limit of 5 teams, so if you are interested SIGN UP NOW!!!

Shoot an email to me to let me know you want to compete, TODAY!

Here's a picture from last year's NON-Extreme Challenge:

Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_081106-N-1057H-215_CM2_Aaron_Wymore,_Marine_Corps_Mixed_Martial_Arts_Program_(MCMAP)_instructor_for_NMCB-11,_grapples_with_EO3_Elliot_Bunek,_an_MCMAP_student_from_NMCB_74,_during_the_training's_final_evolution_while_oth.jpg

You can find all the sample code at Jim's website.

He gave an excellent presentation, and I'm sure everyone wants to dig in and play with the code.

I just posted a "review" of Pluralsight over on my blog.

I put quotes around "review" because it is not objective. At all.

Simply put Pluralsight sponsors our group, and I genuinely love their courses.

Their monthly passes are always amongst our most popular giveaways.

Short summary:

If you want to learn new development topics, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Pluralsight.

They get really smart people who are good presenters to walk you through each topic. You get to virtually watch over the shoulder of the presenter as he or she shows you what you need to know.

Thanks to Mary-Jo Foley (a one-woman, Microsoft-watching strike-team), GGMUG is now forming an Action Team for 2011.

It started with this article that links to this awesome video:

Suddenly I was transported back to the '70s (well, mentally at least) and every action/adventure show ever made.

What GGMUG needs is an Action Team to travel the land, righting wrongs and refactoring evil. A team known only as "The Delegates". We also need a boss van like the one in the video. Pretty much a non-starter without it.

If possible, I'd like to recruit Kris Kristofferson as seen in the movie Convoy (based on the moving spirtiual ballad of the same name) to be our team's leader.

Our Leader: aka The Code Avenger