Special Speaker This Month: Chris Eargle

We have a very special guest speaker this month who is travelling all the way up from Columbia, SC, to speak to our group, so I hope EVERYONE will plan to attend.

Chris Eargle is a really great speaker who averaged more than 1 speaking engagement per week for 2009! Later this month he will be speaking at Codecamp Cairo. That ain't Cairo, GA, either, but the big one with the pyramids... :-)

Chris Eargle is a C# MVP and INETA Community Champion from Columbia, SC. Besides designing and developing software at South Carolina Farm Bureau, he runs the local .NET User Group: the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild. In his spare time he travels to conferences and user groups to promote best practices and new technologies in the development community.

Topic: C# Ninjitsu

C# has humble beginnings as an object oriented language of the purest kind. It was class-based, it was imperative, and it was component-oriented. For many years, the classic object-oriented design principles served class library designers well, and the programming world rejoiced.

Chaos began creeping its way into the world of C#. They were minor things at first: a generic list here, a nullable type there. Developers used these elements to enhance their work. But those that understood utilized them to varying degrees. Some applied the new techniques with wanton abandon. Some kept the old traditions in mind.

Then the dark specter of functional programming infiltrated the language. For those that were doomed to a life of incoherent language usage, there was no hope. But those that held onto the old traditions managed to get by.

There is another way. C# is no longer a purely object-oriented language. It is no longer just an imperative, class-based, component oriented discipline. It is also a generic, declarative, functional discipline.

I will introduce new principles in the context of the classic object-oriented and SOLID principles and show you how to master the C# language to be more declarative, more fluent, and more functionally cohesive.

Time and Place

We will be meeting in our usual time and place: 6:30 PM in room 401 of Building 100 at Gwinnett Technical College.

Again I sincerely hope everyone will attend this meeting and show Chris how much we appreciate his coming up to speak to us.

See you on the 11th!
jeffa

Short session meeting this month.

Topics (tentatively) are:

• Learn SQL Server For Devs in 20 Minutes Or Your Money Back!
• Intro To Azure SQL Services
• What's New In ASP.net 4.0
• Intro To SharePoint Development

Meeting will be at 6:30 PM in room 401 of Building 100 at Gwinnett Technical College.

Doh!

I was looking through older posts and realized I had left out the Honorable Mentions from our Speaker Idol contest!

Congratulations to Dick Perin and Shashi Prabhakar!

My apologies for that oversight.

Book Reviews

I will bring some of the books for reviewers to choose from, so if you signed up to write reviews, here's your first chance!

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and hope to see you at the meeting on Thursday!

Calling All Critics!

GGMUG is establishing relationships with several publishers of technical books, and we need folks who are interested in writing reviews.

The reviews will be published on our website, but you can also cross-post them on your personal blog if you like.

Please send me an email if you would be interested in reviewing books. Once I get a list of interested folks, we'll start parceling out the books and ordering new ones.

Email me today, and I'll get you on the list!

New book: Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, Second Edition

Microsoft has just released the second edition of their Application Architecture Guide and you Learn More Here.

The eBook version is a free download, but you can also buy a printed copy if you like.