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.

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!

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.

Great meeting last night!

Cliff Jakobson gave us a nice overview of what's new in .Net 3.5, Visual Studio 2008 and IIS 7.

You can get his powerpoint here: Whats_New_in_NET_3_5.ppt (1.29 mb)

We also started a new segment at the beginning of having a more basic topic done in a short format. Jeff Ammons spoke about table partitioning in SQL Server 2005.

You can read about Jeff's adventures in partitioning here and here. 

Here are a couple of pics: 

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!

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.