North Dallas .NET Users Group - NDDNUG

Taking advantage of the new wave of .NET build tools

The Admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 11:27:25 GMT

Meeting Information:

Taking advantage of the new wave of .NET build tools

For the decade since it was released, MSBuild has been the standard way to build .NET applications, due in large part to its use in Visual Studio. But while it is a reliable and even extensible tool, configuring anything more than trivial tasks in XML is often a challenging experience. In the past several years, a number of new build tools have been developed to make creating and managing build processes easier. These include Cake, Fake, and PSake. These tools are written in .NET languages (C#, F#, and PowerShell respectively) and allow you to configure your build using a simple DSL, while giving you access to the full .NET Framework when you need it. We will talk about why these tools were created, how they differ from MSBuild and from each other, how to choose one to manage your build, and what the future of the .NET build ecosystem might hold.

Speaker:		David Nelson
Date:		October 7^th, 2015
Time:		6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

David Nelson has been developing in .NET for 12 years. He is a Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks, where for the past several years he has worked in several different languages and platforms; but he still goes home and works in .NET to soothe his soul. He is passionate about automated testing, build tools, open source, and making software development more efficient. He is also the organizer of the .NET Unboxed conference in October (http://dotnetunboxed.net).

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

NDDNUG Kid's Night

MinecraftU will be back to help us learn how to program in Minecraft using the ComputerCraft mod. We'll split the group up so those who haven't been to our previous meetings can get help getting started.

Note: For your child to participate, they will need a laptop with Minecraft installed and a Minecraft account. We do not have extra laptops to use or free licenses to Minecraft, so come prepared!

====== RSVP for Kid's Night Here! =======

Enterprise Architecture and the Business of Software

The Admin — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 21:40:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Enterprise Architecture and the Business of Software

“IT by itself provides no value”. That’s a pretty bold statement and yet that’s where the winds of business are blowing. As a developer or IT professional you spend time understanding new languages and frameworks, but to deepen and broaden your impact, I recommend taking strides in understanding the business.

In this session we’ll focus on the business of software, from financial concepts, metrics, and the future of IT and enterprise architecture in the corporation. We’ll touch on why your CEO and VP may understand the role of technology more comprehensively than they’re given credit for.

As IT likely touches nearly all aspects of your company, going forward IT professionals will need to know more about business and the role IT plays in the broader organization. This session aims to better equip you to talk business with your company leaders or boss and to make yourself or your team more effective.

Speaker:		Tim Barcz
Date:		Sept 2^nd, 2015
Time:		6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Tim Barcz is a seasoned software professional having worked in the technology space for nearly 13 years. In that time he has been recognized as a Microsoft ASPInsider and a Microsoft C# MVP Awardee for contributions to the community. He is an advocate for well-architected systems that grow along with the businesses they serve. For several years he was the director of Marketing for a large ecommerce company before finding him in his current position as Vice President of Application Development for Motorsport Aftermarket Group, a family of top motorcycle related brands and retailers.

NDDNUG Kid's Night

At Kid's Night this month we looked at commands and command blocks in Minecraft and a bit at redstone. For a synopsis and examples of what we covered, you can take a look at Eric's blog post.

====== RSVP for Kids Here! =======

About Minecraft: To be involved in this activity, your child needs to have a laptop which they can use with Minecraft installed on it and a Minecraft account. You can get all that setup at https://minecraft.net/.

Parents: Parents may bring their kids but go in the main room and watch the adult presentation. However, unless you think your child can work independently on this in the kid's room, you should consider staying with them to help them out.

After this month we will begin working on projects that the kids can present to the parents and others. We haven't decided if we will take over the main meeting or have that presentation in the kids room though. Regardless, we figured this would be a good way to get the kids more actively involved in creating things.

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

Best Practices for Skunkworks RAD with MVC - 0 to MVP in 90 Minutes

The Admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 20:31:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Best Practices for Skunkworks RAD with MVC - 0 to MVP in 90 Minutes

Using a combination of precognition and blatant disregard for architectural purity, we'll build an MVP in 90 minutes (give or take). Whether it's proving an idea to your boss or client or scratching an idea itch, being able to knock out an MVP in as little time as possible is an important ability in today's agile development environment. We'll combine some prebuilt code that we use at Third Corner with some "learned the hard way" knowledge of what is really important to greenfield an application during the session.

Speaker:		Sean Goodpasture
Date:		August 5^th, 2015
Time:		6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Sean Goodpasture has been developing software professionally since 1996. He is a partner in Third Corner, a local custom development company supporting Oil & Gas as well as Healthcare clients.

NDDNUG Kid's Night

Building off what we have done in previous meetings, in this meeting we will move onto functional/modular programming and work through an example of that on turtles. Specifically, we will make an automated tunnel digger with various functions for edge cases like lava fields, gravel falling into the tunnel, and monster spawning. This will also, of course, function as a refresher on concepts like control structures and argument passing that we have already discussed. If we have time at the end, this transitions smoothly into talks about API's.

If you haven't been before, don't worry. We'll have someone here to help.

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Missing Model Mysteries

The Admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 14:14:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Missing Model Mysteries

Just as most of the universe is thought to be made up of "dark matter" which we can not directly observe, most software is made of of missing models and lurking business requirements. In this session, we'll explore how to identify MissingModels and how to deal with them in Message based systems.

Speaker:		Kijana Woodard
Date:		July 1st, 2015
Time:		6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Kijana Woodard is a highly experienced software developer based in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Over a period of 19 years, Kijana has developed a wealth of applications using an array of technologies including C#, ASP.NET MVC, Javascript, HTML/CSS, NServiceBus, RavenDB, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Redis.

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

NDDNUG Kid's Night

====== RSVP For Kid's Night Here! =======

Setup

Step One: MultiMC

First we'll want to install MultiMC, a program that makes it easy to install mods and the mod loader.

Navigate to the MultiMC website and find the download link for your OS. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Once you've downloaded the correct version, open that file. On most platforms, this is as simple as double clicking it.
This will display a folder called MultiMC. Drag and drop this folder to extract it to somewhere safe. Choose carefully, as this will be the place your Minecraft game will be installed to.
Open the folder you just extracted and double click on MultiMC.exe (on Mac, drag and drop to install it like any other app).
You will be greeted with a window asking you to select your Java version, if you have more than one. Select the one with the highest number under the Arch column, and click OK.
You are now in the main window of MultiMC!

Step Two: Making The MCU Instance

MultiMC is a program that lets you handle different versions of Minecraft, and different sets of mods, very easily.

Look in the top left of the main MultiMC window for the Create New Instance button, and click it.
In the name box, type in Minecraft U 1.7.10 Opal.
In the window that appears, look for the checkbox marked Import Modpack, and click it.
Paste or type in this URL into the area next to the checkbox. http://minecraftu.org/modpack
Now just click OK.
Congrats! You are now on the most up to date version of the Minecraft U mod pack, and can play on our moderated servers, or alone.

Just double click the new icon in the instances area of MultiMC to start playing!

If you have trouble getting it working, please arrive early so we can help get you started.

During this meeting...

Last time we got started with ComputerCraft with the help of some instructors from Minecraft U. This time we'll move on to some simple programs and automations to make your life in Minecraft a little less tedious and a little more fun. We'll learn how to automatically cut down trees, and how to gather infinite* resources. We'll also talk a little about an experiment that Minecraft U is running on one of our servers, with the option to take part if you want to. From the guys at Minecraft U to you, we look forward to seeing you there!

* Infinity is hard to reach.

P.S. For more info on Minecraft U check our site @ minecraftu.org

NDDNUG Lightning Talks

The Admin — Tue, 19 May 2015 03:57:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

NDDNUG Lighting Talks

We are opening up this meeting for lightning talks. Instead of one interesting person talking, we are going to have a number of interesting people talking. Each talk will be 5-15 minutes long and can theoretically be on anything that might interest the group. And you can be one of those people! Email us at [email protected] if you are interested. We still have room for more!

The current speakers are as follows:

Kijana Woodard - Microservices
David Penton
Eric Sowell - Gulp
Chris Holt - Pattern Matching is your friend
Sean Arme - RFID
Casey Watson - Cloud 101
Russell Durham - Solr
You?

Speaker:		You?
Date:		June 3^rd, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Yours? :)

NDDNUG Kids Night

Held at the same location, one room over is our very first NDDNUG kid's night! MinecraftU is helping us out and will be running this first meeting.

We will use the Minecraft mod ComputerCraft to learn the basics of programming and then apply those skills via your own in-game robots. These robots can do anything, from build you a house to find and mine diamonds for you. The only limit is your ability to direct them. At the advanced level, we’ll discuss the limitations of computers and how to work around them. For ages 8-14 or younger.

Kids will want to bring their own laptops as neither MinecraftU nor NDDNUG will be able to supply them. Minecraft will need to be installed already. It would also make things go more smoothly if the mod is already installed, so do that as well if you can. Note that this is only for the full version of Minecraft, not the pocket edition that people play on their tablets and phones.

If you are interested in bringing your children, please RSVP for yourself above and for your kids below so we can know the rough amount of people coming to both events.

====== RSVP for Your Kids Here! =======

How We Built a Mobile Electronic Health Record App Using Xamarin, Angular, and Web API

The Admin — Sat, 02 May 2015 03:11:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

How We Built a Mobile Electronic Health Record App Using Xamarin, Angular, and Web API

UPDATE: Slides from the meeting

Slideshare

OneDrive

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Learn how our team built a cross-platform mobile electronic health record (EHR) app from scratch in less than a year using Xamarin, Angular, and Web API.

Discover the reason we chose the mix of technologies (Xamarin, Angular, Web API) we did.

You will get an overview of the implementation of the entire application from the front end to the back end. There will be plenty of app demos and code samples.

What will be covered:

The best way to build a cross-platform app
How we combined native Xamarin UI elements with Angular based web views
Our custom JavaScript bridge used to communicate between Angular and Xamarin
Lessons learned about cross-platform app development
Automated E2E testing on devices using Xamarin Test Cloud
Back end implementation using ASP.NET Web API modules

Speaker:		Matt Spradley
Date:		May 6^th, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Matt’s passion is building things. He started programing on an Atari 400 when he was 11. After graduating from A&M with a degree in Electrical Engineering, he spent 5 years in the semiconductor industry before returning to software. He’s cofounded 3 software companies. One resulted in a decent exit. The other two were “learning experiences.” In all 3 companies Matt was responsible for the software design and wrote a lot of the code himself. He is currently in charge of mobile application development at Aprima where his team is building a cross-platform mobile electronic medical record app. Matt has a website at www.mattspradley.com.

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

Ignition: Geek Parenting’s Lessons Learned…so far

The Admin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 13:27:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Ignition: Geek Parenting’s Lessons Learned…so far

“A 12yo presenting App Dev at TED? An 11yo presenting Spark to a tech conference? That’s crazy; my kids just want to play games!”

Do you remember what sparked your interest in technology? Everyone has a different story of how that spark ignited into a fire to #LearnAllTheThings.

In this talk, Cori Drew will share the experiences that–as a geek and a parent–left her surprised and enlightened, and will cover tactical ideas of how to ignite that fire in your own kids. Share in the retrospective that led her daughter from a video-gaming 7yo to an 11yo speaker, and walk away with concepts of how to carry our passion for programming to our youth.

Speaker:		Cori Drew
Date:		April 1^st, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

Cori Drew is a Senior Software Consultant at Improving Enterprises in Addison, TX. She started her programming career as a web developer before cutting her OOP teeth (& falling in love with C#) in 2003 in .NET Framework 1.1. Cori was a programmer for 8.5 years before discovering there was a developer community in 2009. Appreciation for growth & learning, enabled by our tech community, has inspired her to try to pay it forward. Cori blogs about tech community & code on her personal blog https://truncatedcodr.wordpress.com/ and can be found on Twitter @coridrew

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

Leveraging .NET, C#, and XAML to create Native iOS, Android, & Windows Apps with Xamarin

The Admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 15:01:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Leveraging .NET, C#, and XAML to create Native iOS, Android, & Windows Apps with Xamarin

Building cross-platform native UIs with one shared codebase was once just a dream. With Xamarin.Forms, this dream is now a reality. Xamarin.Forms allows you to build a native UI for three platforms with one shared C# codebase. Simply put, if you know C# then you already know how to build iOS, Android, and Windows Phone apps. Leverage the .NET Framework to build out your shared business logic including integration with web services and Azure Mobile Services and then build out your shared UI in C# or XAML. Xamarin.Forms also features a built-in two-way data binding, dependency service to help you implement platform-specific code, an advanced cross-platform animation system, support for custom controls, and lots of other powerful features to help you build the best apps possible in the least amount of time.

During this session we will cover the Xamarin platform and the brand new Xamarin.Forms library to share even more code across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Moreover, we will really focus on the code with several live coding adventures throughout the entire session. When you leave you will have the knowledge to create your first iOS, Android, and Windows Phone mobile apps in C# with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms.

Speaker:		James Montemagno
Date:		Monday March 9^th, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

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Speaker Bio

James Montemagno is a Developer Evangelist at Xamarin & Microsoft MVP. He has been a .NET developer for over a decade working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Prior to becoming a Developer Evangelist, James was a professional mobile developer on the Xamarin platform for over 3 years, with several published apps on iOS, Android, and Windows. In his spare time he is most likely cycling around Seattle or guzzling gallons of coffee at a local coffee shop. He can be found on Twitter @JamesMontemagno and blogs code regularly on his personal blog www.MotzCod.es

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

The Magic of NFC

The Admin — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 13:18:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

The Magic of NFC

Near Field Communication is already here. You might even be using and did not even know. In this talk, we'll be learning what NFC is and how to use it. This talk will include a demo for using NFC on Windows Phone and how to use it cross-platform.

Speaker:		Sean Sparkman
Date:		February 4^th, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

====== RSVP Here! =======

Speaker Bio

Father, Husband, Team Lead and Senior Developer at Infinity Interactive, Inc., and user group leader of DFW Mobile .NET.

Twitter: @seansparkman

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

Stack Overflow - The Architecture & Philosophy

The Admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 05:40:00 GMT

Meeting Information:

Stack Overflow - The Architecture & Philosophy

Lots of programmers use Stack Overflow, but not many know how the site really works or how the dev team behind it operates. In this talk, Ben explains how things are built, what problems they face, and how they do things at Stack Exchange.

Speaker:		Ben Collins
Date:		January 7^th, 2015
Time:		6:00 PM - 8:30 PM (see here for more detail)
Location:		MedAssets - Plano, TX Maps: Google \| Bing

====== RSVP Here! =======

Speaker Bio

Ben is a Texas native, currently living in a Greenville. After completing his engineering degrees at Texas A&M University, he started a family and is now a proud husband and dad of 5 (soon to be six!). Ben has been a contributor on Stack Overflow since August 2008 and got hired at Stack Exchange in 2013. He likes to read theology, watch sci-fi, and is also a budding triathlete. He has experience building software in embedded systems, mobile, and the web using a variety of technologies. In recent years his experience has been primarily with the .NET platform.

Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/users/3279/ben-collins

Personal website: benjamincollins.com

Github & Twitter: @aggieben

Door Prizes

Make sure to attend, because in addition to our awesome presenter, we have some way cool prizes!

North Dallas .NET Users Group - NDDNUG

Taking advantage of the new wave of .NET build tools

Meeting Information:

Taking advantage of the new wave of .NET build tools

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

NDDNUG Kid's Night

Enterprise Architecture and the Business of Software

Meeting Information:

Enterprise Architecture and the Business of Software

Speaker Bio

NDDNUG Kid's Night

Door Prizes

Sponsors

Best Practices for Skunkworks RAD with MVC - 0 to MVP in 90 Minutes

Meeting Information:

Best Practices for Skunkworks RAD with MVC - 0 to MVP in 90 Minutes

Speaker Bio

NDDNUG Kid's Night

Missing Model Mysteries

Meeting Information:

Missing Model Mysteries

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

NDDNUG Kid's Night

Setup

During this meeting...

NDDNUG Lightning Talks

Meeting Information:

NDDNUG Lighting Talks

Speaker Bio

NDDNUG Kids Night

How We Built a Mobile Electronic Health Record App Using Xamarin, Angular, and Web API

Meeting Information:

How We Built a Mobile Electronic Health Record App Using Xamarin, Angular, and Web API

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

Ignition: Geek Parenting’s Lessons Learned…so far

Meeting Information:

Ignition: Geek Parenting’s Lessons Learned…so far

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors for this event:

About The Judge Group

Leveraging .NET, C#, and XAML to create Native iOS, Android, & Windows Apps with Xamarin

Meeting Information:

Leveraging .NET, C#, and XAML to create Native iOS, Android, & Windows Apps with Xamarin

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

The Magic of NFC

Meeting Information:

The Magic of NFC

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors for this event:

MATRIX

Stack Overflow - The Architecture & Philosophy

Meeting Information:

Stack Overflow - The Architecture & Philosophy

Speaker Bio

Door Prizes