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.

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...

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

We now have a GGMUG group on LinkedIn.com.

Click here to join.

Once you are approved, you will enjoy all the rights and privileges to which which LinkedIn group members are entitled. Namely, your LinkedIn profile will say you are a member of our group...

For anyone who is not familiar with LinkedIn, it is a professional networking site. You can post a variation on your resume and link up with people you know. I think it is a great way to stay in contact and both grow and formalize your network.

Microsoft Developer Evangelist Glen Gordon was on hand at last night's meeting and told us about the upcoming ASP.Net University to be held at their office over in Alpharetta.

This is a great opportunity to spend a day learning about ASP.Net directly from Microsoft. Did I mention the price? Free. Better than free, they will feed you and give away some prizes.

Check out Glen's blog for details here.

The meeting will be held at the usual time and place: 6:30 PM meet and greet followed by 7:00 PM meeting in Room 401 of Building 100 at Gwinnett Technical College in Lawrenceville.

For more information including directions, see our website: ggmug.com.

Heard about the new 3.5 version of .Net, but not sure what's really new? Come learn all about it this month as we hear from Cliff Jacobson, Senior Developer at Visioneering Games.

Cliff delivered this talk back in March at the Atlanta Code Camp.

Cliff is a great speaker and very knowledgeable about .Net.

Cliff Jacobson

Cliff is a local developer focused on web development doing both ASMX and ASP.NET plus AJAX development.  Cliff currently works for Visioneering Games, an Atlanta company building skill-based games including their prizewagon.com website that offers free Texas Hold'em poker.  Cliff was an MCT years ago and challenges himself with how to best present technical topics in a meaningful way to his audience.  Cliff can be found attending many of the local .NET groups, and presented at the code camp this last spring.

We're also proud to say that Cliff is one of our founding members at GGMUG

Operation Silverlight

At the last meeting we decided to extend our "Write-A-Silverlight-Game-To-Win-A-Zune" contest. The new deadline will be the September meeting. Everyone agreed that one month would be too little time, so hopefully the extension will encourage more people to enter.

The rules will be posted on the website, but the short version is here:

• You must attend TWO meetings in order to enter.
• You must be present at the September meeting(September 11, 2008) to win.
• You must submit an original game written in Silverlight that can be played by members in attendance at the September meeting.
• You must submit your entry to info@ggmug.com at least one week prior to the meeting.

Have a great week, and we'll see you next Thursday at Gwinnett Tech!

To go with Keith Rome's Games For The Web With Silverlight 2.0 presentation at our June 12th meeting we have our very first contest.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to develop a web game using Silverlight 2.0 before the July meeting.

Microsoft has been very generous in donating a Zune for the 1st place winner! We will be working with other companies to get more prizes donated for the 2nd and 3rd place winners as well.

The rules are simple:

1) You MUST attend BOTH the June and July meetings to win (6/12/08 and 7/10/08).

2) Judging will by by voting by all attendees of the July meeting.

3) In the event of a tie, there will be a head-to-head vote to break the tie.

4) You must be a member in good standing of GGMUG to enter. This is not an open contest for anyone in the wide, wide world of sports. Rule number 1 pretty much covers this one...

5) The game must be playable with the Silverlight 2 player in a browser.

More rules may be added (as we think of them...) and will be presented at the June meeting.

We're not a huge group yet, so your odds of winning a Zune look pretty good! Come on out to the meetings and let's have fun with this one!

Do we ever have a great meeting lined up for June! The date is Thursday, June 12 and the start time is 6:30 PM for socializing and 7:00 for the actual meeting.

Keith Rome of Wintellect is coming to tell us about Games For The Web With Silverlight 2.0.

Keith is a C# MVP and holds a number of Microsoft certifications including MCPD-EAD, MCSD, MCDBA, and several MCTS titles. Keith is a highly active development community leader in the Atlanta region, and either attends, coordinates or presents at nearly every .NET meeting and code camp in Atlanta. His current specialties include Deep CLR Internals, Systems Architecture, and Silverlight/WPF.

He is a Project Manager and Senior Technical Consultant for Wintellect, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner that focuses on high-end consulting and training in Microsoft core development technologies. He has been a developer and consultant in the Atlanta region since 1997, and has experience in a wide range of vertical industries, technologies, and platforms, but has been focused on the .NET platform since 2002. He is a C# MVP, and holds many current Microsoft certifications including MCPD-EAD, MCSD, MCDBA, MCTS-WSS, MCTS-WPF, and MCTS-TFS. He can most often be found speaking at user groups and other developer events about real-world Silverlight and .NET Internals topics.

Keith's MVP profile can be viewed here: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Keith.Rome.

His Bog is here: http://www.mindfusioncorp.com/weblog/

His company's website is: http://www.wintellect.com/

NOTE:  Our meeting time has changed.

We will have meet and greet from 6:30 PM until 7:00 PM and the meeting will begin at 7.

The location stays the same: Gwinnett Technical College, Building 100, Room 401. 

To go with Keith's presentation we have a CONTEST! More on Operation Silverlight in the next post! You could win a major award! Stay tuned!

GGMUG.com now has a job board complete with our first listing!

Be sure to check out the Pages links over in the left column. Here is a link directly to that page.

Our first listing is for the .Net developer position with the Gwinnett County Government's IT department that was announced at the May meeting.

So cruise on over, check out the listing and tell them GGMUG sent you!

jeffa

Just got back from our first meeting and it was AWESOME!

A HUGE thanks to Gwinnett Technical College for providing the meeting space. The room is absolutely perfect.

Huge thanks to Microsoft and SRA International for the prizes and speakers. Doug Turnure, Microsoft Developer Evangelist, gave a very informative intro to WCF and the RESTful model. Noah Subrin, SRA International Senior Developer, continued the WCF topic forward to inter-operating with Workflow. Thanks guys!

Another HUGE thanks to Magnic and Sergey Barskiy for our pizza feast.

Thanks to everyone who came out.

Here are a couple of pictures of Noah's presentation. Sorry for the quality, they are from my cell phone...

We had about 35 people, which is great for a first meeting! The next step is to promote, promote, promote and grow the group. So get the word out! Second Thursday, Gwinnett Technical College, 6:30 PM.