Both Minneapolis and Saint Louis will be hosting a Build Your Skills event. This full day event will introduces developers to a range  of the best practices that developers can use to create better applications in a shorter amount of time.  Presented by independent developers with a proven track record of having “been there, done that”, each session will provide insight into what it takes to write applications that run faster, are easier to maintain, and are of the highest possible quality.  During the day, you will be introduced to important information and concepts in these areas:

The Fine Art of Profiling (Go Faster) presented by Scott Colestock

There are a set of tools that should be "closer to the top" of your toolbox - in particular, a good profiler.  We'll talk about the tools that you already have at your disposal, and a few others that deserve a close look.  We'll talk about how to get the most out of your time invested, and where profiling should fit in your development lifecycle.

Building Loosely Coupled Applications presented by Shannon Braun

As enterprise software development has evolved we have identified patterns and practices that help us write more extensible and maintainable applications. Patterns with the names of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and Composite View have emerged to simplify the reuse of existing components and aide us in wiring together disparate components. Frameworks have been built to support these patterns.  This presentation will explain the patterns, cover the frameworks and talk about the practices required to be successful in building loosely coupled applications.

Exceptional Development: Dealing With Exceptions in .NET presented by Jason Bock

NET provides a rich mechanism for creating and handling errors in software. Yet it can be (and has been) abused and manipulated, sometimes in very subtle ways, in the name of "reliable code." In this session we'll cover exceptions: how they are created, when should they be handled, and some best practices to follow.

Introduction to Unit Testing presented by Kirstin Juhl

This session will introduce attendees to the art and practice of Unit Testing. We will cover the basic fundamentals of what units are and why and how they should be used.  The presentation will cover common tools used in unit testing and contain a brief discussion of Unit Testing within the Test-Driven-Development context. We explore the tools and write some basic unit tests, and watch them run, fail, and pass. A question and answer session will conclude this presentation.

Advanced Unit Testing with Raymond Lewallen

In the Advanced Unit Testing session, we will look at Inversion of Control - Dependency Injection, services, repositories, mocking, behavior driven development, MSpec, aggregates, distributors and the tools behind these such as Castle.Windsor, RhinoMocks, Machine.Specifications, NHibernate, Castle Transacations Manager, NServiceBus and a few more if we have time.  And of course, we all revolves around writing unit tests and letting those tests drive the outcome of our code.

Space is limited for both events, so please register early.  Logistic details for each event are provided below:

Saint Louis Event – Register Here

Date:  3/24/09

Time : 9:00am-4:30pm

Location:  Microsoft Office – Saint Louis
                 3 City Place Drive              
                 Suite 1100
                 St. Louis Missouri 63141

Minneapolis Event – Register Here

Date:  3/31/09

Time : 9:00am-4:30pm

Location:  Microsoft Office – Bloomington, MN
                 8300 Norman Center Drive              
                 Suite 950

It was announced that CBS Sportsline and Microsoft are teaming up to deliver NCAA Basketball Tournament games using Silverlight!  I am a HUGE, HUGE NCAA Tournament junkie.  For the last 18 years I have taken the first Thursday and Friday of the Tournament off to do nothing but sit at home in my sweats with a lot of junk food in order to watch the opening weekend of games.  You may be asking why I think this is such a great announcement.  Well, outside the obvious that this is great news for Silverlight and Microsoft, this will also be the first time in a looong time that I will not be taking the first couple days of the tournament off.  I will be going to MIX 09 this year which means I will be working the conference the first two days of the tournament.  I will be crossing my fingers that the conference wireless will stand up to the load and I will be able to sneak a peek at an occasional game.  Of course, I may get lost and find myself in a sports book when my Michigan State Spartans are playing. ;-)

As many of you know, Win7 has the cool new taskbar thing that groups application windows (if you want it to) and provides previews of those windows when you hover over the taskbar icon.  That is pretty cool.  But with Internet Explorer, you get this cool effect when you are downloading a file...

What’s going on?  Well, the IE icon background fills with green as a download progress indicator.  Now that is rich, chewy UI goodness!

The fact that Azure Table Storage and SQL Data Services are key/value databases instead of “traditional” relationship DBs always raises a few eyebrows.  Here is a good article explaining why and some of the pros/cons of that approach.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_the_relational_database_doomed.php

Check out the first wave of Azure HDI videos if you want to learn more about Azure and cloud computing.  More to come in the near future…

Visit here for the full summary of videos

Overall Page

Get Started Developing on Windows Azure?

If you’re a developer and you’re new to Windows Azure, start here! You’ll see what you need to download and install, and how to create a simple “Hello World” Windows Azure application.

Deploy a Windows Azure Application

You’ll see what it takes to move your application into the cloud – you’ll see how to request and register a token, how to upload your Windows Azure application and how to move it between staging and production in the cloud.

Store Blobs in Windows Azure Storage?

Learn how to leverage Windows Azure storage to store data as blobs. You’ll learn about blob storage, containers and the API that makes it easy to manage everything from managed code.

Leverage Queues in Windows Azure?

Learn how to use queues to facilitate communication between Web and Worker roles in Windows Azure.

Debugging Tips for Windows Azure Applications

The Windows Azure SDK includes a development fabric that provides a "cloud on your desktop." In this screencast, learn how to debug your Windows Azure applications in this environment.

Get Started with .NET Services?

.NET Services are a set of highly scalable building blocks for programming in the cloud. In this brief screencast, you'll learn about the registration process, the SDK and the built-in samples - everything you need to know in order to get started.

Harness the Microsoft .NET Service Bus?

The .NET Service Bus makes it easy to access your Web services no matter where they are. In this brief screencast, you'll see how to take a basic Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service and expose it to the Internet with the .NET Service Bus.

Get Started with the Live Framework?

If you are looking to get started developing with the Live Framework, this is the place to start! In this screencast you'll learn how to get a Live Services token and what you need to download in order to start writing Live Framework applications.

Use the Microsoft Live Framework Resource Browser?

The Live Framework Resource Model is a simple, straightforward information model based on entities, collections and relationships. In this brief screencast you'll learn how to navigate the relationships between entities by using the Live Framework Resource Browser, which is a tool that ships with the Live Framework SDK.

That’s right, you can win $5,000 bucks by building a game with Silverlight and getting the most votes.  Get all the rules and details at http://www.serverquestcontest.com/.

Spaghetti Code sits down with follow Microsoftie Bill Maurer to discuss what is new in VSTS 2010 and TFS 2010.  Code-named “Rosario”, this upcoming release marks the introduction of some ground breaking features for app dev and ALM.  Bill gives us the highlights of this release in a fun, fast paced interview.

I finally took advantage of NetFlix via XBOX the other night, becoming part of a million person movement and contributing to the 1.5 billion minutes of downloaded content (thank goodness there is no video minute cap and trade legislation in the works).  I wasn’t a NetFlix subscriber so I took advantage of the trial, and let me just say, I will be a subscriber now.  Wednesday night, with nothing on TV, my son (11 years old and avid XBOX Liver) tells me we should check out the NetFlix service to see if there was something we could watch.  In under 10 minutes, we were signed up and watching a stream of the movie Hoosiers (“Don’t get caught watching the paint dry!”).

All in all it was a pretty good experience.  It wasn’t perfect – the early part of the movie was bothered by some bandwidth issues and had some weird “shaking” going on in the background. But after a little bit, it either went away or I got used to.  I was a bit disappointed that I couldn’t browse the movie catalog directly from my XBox.  It seems a bit “long winded” to have to go to my laptop to pick a movie to watch on my XBox.  But I threw a bunch into my Instant queue so I won’t have to do that again for a while.  The selection is decent, not great, but it is supposed to be expanding over time so that is not a big concern.

All in all… I am glad to be part of the “movement”…

Make sure to check out next week’s Developers Guild meeting (Tuesday, Feb 10th). The topic is Silverlight.  Should be a good one.  I’ll be in the house so make sure you say Hi!!!!!

Check out the pics!  Running Win Mobile 6.1.  Wonder if it is upgradable to WinMo 6.5 when that releases????