GGMUG

Mark your calendar for the upcoming GGMUG meeting on Thursday, October 9 at 6:30 PM.

This month's meeting will be packed with great information you won't want to miss.

Our short session will be with Cliff Jacobson talking about Parallel LINQ.

The longer session will feature Magenic's James Ashley talking about WPF n-Tier Architectures.

As always, we will start with a meet, greet and eat at 6:30 with the program kicking off at 7:00.

I look forward to seeing you there!
Jeff Ammons

The September meeting was enormous fun!

We had three speakers who each did a mini-session and then concluded our Operation Silverlight contest with voting and prizes.

Prize Winners

First place went to Jason Rainwater and his Falling Blocks game. He chose the 8GB Zune donated by Microsoft.

Second place went to Anupam Chakravarty and his Duck Hunt game. For his prize he chose the copy of Office 2007 Ultimate donated by Microsoft.

Third place went to Cliff Jacobson and his Cheese Man game. He picked a book from our collection that was also donated by Microsoft.

Speakers

Our first session was presented by group president Jeff Ammons. He spoke about using LINQ to Objects and serialization as an alternative to an embedded database in some applications. He is going to post a blog about the topic and we'll link it here when he is finished.

Next was Jason Rainwater with a deep dive into WPF and how to extend the grid view and list view.

Finally was Thanh Le with an Intro To Windows Mobile Development.

Pictures

Here are some pictures from the evening:

This one is Jeff doing the intro.

Here we see Jason.

And finally Thanh.

We have a new map to Gwinnett Tech thanks to our official GGMUG Cartographer Cliff Jacobson.

http://ggmug.com/ggmugblog/page/Gwinnett-Tech-Maps.aspx

Thanks, Cliff!

jeffa

Our good friends Glen Gordon (Developer Evangelist) and Chad Brooks (Architect Evangelist) are hitting the road across the south to spread the word about Microsoft Technologies. Literally. They are getting in a van and hosting events in several cities and handing out a huge number of books.

Read the full story at http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/pages/MSDNSouthernFriedRoadshow.aspx.

They also have a Facebook site at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=25541521364.

They will also be appearing at the Techdays '08 in Atlanta. Read about that one here: http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/archive/2008/09/04/techdays-08-is-coming-to-atlanta-september-23-25.aspx.

Sounds like a great time rolling through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi!

OK, so the contest is officially heating up! I now know of THREE entries. I've seen two of them and they look good!

You still have this weekend, so you can still enter! Just send me an email by Monday to let me know you are in. info@ggmug.com

So what does this mean? Right now each of these competitors has a 33.33% chance of winning! (Repeating of course)

If you don't get the above joke, do a search for the name Leroy Jenkins...

Just a quick reminder that our September meeting is fast approaching. Time and place are the same as always: 6:30 PM in Room 401 of Building 100 at Gwinnett Technical College which is located off Sugarloaf Parkway near Hwy 316.

Our format this time will be different. Instead of one speaker presenting on a long topic, we will have three speakers each doing 20-30 minute mini-presentations.

After that we will be concluding our Operation Silverlight Contest by voting for our favorite game created by one of our members. So far I only know of ONE entry, so that person thus far has a 100% chance of winning the 8 GB Zune. There's still time to start! If you want to get in on some darned good odds, you can. Do send me an email at info@ggmug.com to let me know you are entering as soon as possible.

Meeting Lineup

Here's our agenda for the evening:

Thanks to our sponsors!

Keith posted a link to some sound effects way back in June, but I only just now realized it... doh!

http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/2008/06/19/Excellent+Free+Sound+Effects+Resource.aspx

For anyone who was at the August meeting, this is where I got the sounds for PracticePong.

jeffa

Our September meeting will feature demos, voting and awards presentation for our Silverlight Game Contest as well as a series of short (15-20 minute) presentations.

At the August meeting we all discussed several possible topics. Please email us at info@ggmug.com and let us know which of these topics (or any others you can think of) would be of interest to you.

• Logic Of Game Design
• Entity Framework -- Intro
• Enterprise Level WPF Architecture
• VBA Use In Enterprise Application Development
• Mobile Development -- Intro
• MVC Intro
• Alt.Net
• Expression Web
• Expression Blend
• Expression Design
• Expression Studio
• SQL Server -- Intermediate to deep
• Biztalk Server
• Virtual Earth
• Business Intelligence
• Development Process
• Windows Workflow
• IPV 6

Also let us know if there is a topic you would like to speak on.

The August meeting was a blast!

Jim Wooley's Intro To LINQ.

Jim Wooley is always a fantastic speaker, and we all learned a bunch about LINQ.

Here's a picture of Jim giving his presentation:

Thanks, Jim, for making the drive all the way over from Cobb County to be with us.

INETA Membership

Jim is also INETA's User Group Mentor for Georgia and announced that GGMUG has been accepted into INETA. INETA is an international association of user groups focusing on Microsoft technologies. This is a big success for us and will enable us to more easily draw from a larger pool of speakers among other benefits.

Operation Silverlight

We're coming into the home stretch for our Silverlight Game competition. At the September meeting we will vote for the winner and present the Zune to the first place winner.

To jump start entries, our President Jeff Ammons presented a simplified tutorial with a game he calls Practice Pong. You can read about it and download his source code on his blog at http://ammonsonline.com/jeffablog/post/Silverlight-Game-Programming-for-Total-N00bs.aspx.

Good luck to all entrants! Don't forget to email us at info@ggmug.com to let us know you are entering.

We have a real treat lined up for this month's meeting on August 14.

Jim Wooley, one of the authors of LINQ In Action, will be our speaker. Jim will be giving us an Introduction To LINQ.

Jim's bio from the book reads as follows:

Jim Wooley has been working with .NET since PDC 2000 and has been actively evangelizing LINQ since its announcement in 2005. He leads the Atlanta VB Study Group and serves as INETA Membership Manager for the Georgia region.

The summary from the back of the book reads:

.NET applications are object-oriented, but the data is not. That's the situation when you're using a relational database, XML, and many other data stores, and for each you need a separate programming solution. Microsoft's Language INtegrated Query, known as LINQ, is a set of .NET Framework and language extensions that offers a single, simple way to query data of any form directly from C# 3 and VB.NET 9. On top of that, your persistence code gets the same compile-time syntax checking, static typing and IntelliSense available to the rest of your code.

Don't miss this opportunity to learn about one of Microsoft's exciting new technologies from an expert!

As usual we will meet in Room 401 of Building 100 at Gwinnett Technical College which is located off Sugarloaf Parkway near Hwy 316.

We have meet and greet from 6:30 PM until 7:00 followed by the meeting itself.