Some great discussions in the FishBowl on TDD & BDD .. Then moved over to Inversion of control jump start and ended on advanced javascript & CSS session. Both of which were given by Ben Scheiman a Principle Consultant with Sogeti, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. (@subdigital)

BLOG: http://flux88.com/

About: http://www.flux88.com/AboutMe.aspx

laptop running out of juice notes will have to be inserted later.

John Teague talks about a business problem at his company Callaway golf that he ultimately solved with jQuery.

Notes:
--jQuery can be compressed to 12KB
--Easy to manipulate DOM
--TIP&TRICK: Essentially recommends combining your JavaScript files into one.
--Big fan of FireBug

Sites:

• www.VisualjQuery.com
• http://www.callawaygolf.com/Global/en-US/Products/Clubs/Drivers.html

Prescriptive Data Access in .NET 3.5
Brian Orrell

Description: Review the "right way" to develop data access and management applications using VS2008 and LINQ. Many things have changed with LINQ to SQL many developers have difficulty separating the hype from the real-world applicability of these new technologies.

BIO: Pariveda Solutions , Vice President
Brian Orrell is a Vice President with Pariveda Solutions. He has over fifteen years of technology consulting experience in a variety of industries and technologies. His emphasis is on the delivery of enterprise solutions utilizing Microsoft .NET. His areas of expertise include designing, developing and maintaining web-based and distributed object systems. Mr. Orrell has led large-scale development engagements for large utility companies, airlines, shipping companies, educational and non-profit organizations.

Notes:

• Do you check data during the time your user pulls it changes it and hits save???

I bounced around a little focusing on three sessions.

• Building Applications with Dynamic data
  Jason Kergosien
• Coding for Stupid Useres
  Gordon Montgomery
• Programming Microsoft Business Rules Engine
  Rick Garibay

These were all nice sessions. Notes will be Com'n

Attention User Group Leaders, INETA Volunteers, and Speakers! INETA would like to invite you to join us for a Mini-Summit on Monday June 2nd, 2008 at the Orlando Convention Center. We're going to be holding a somewhat informal gathering from 3-7 PM to provide user group leaders and chance to network, meet the new board members, and spend some quality time talking with us about community....

Read full article

Well we're here ... Ready to see what this place is all about.. There is a lot of Texas orange around here??? Not for sure what that is all about but I’m sporting my classic white & red Hog shirt! No funny looks as of yet wait until I break out the PIIIIIIGGG SSOOOOOOOOIIIIIIEEEEEEE on them though.

First session - [Unit Testing in Silverlight 2.0 W/ Eric Hexter](@ehexter)

BIO: AspInsider , Director Austin .NET user group, Organized 07 Austin code camp
BLOG: http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/hex/

Notes:
There are 3 DLL's inside the controls that can be used for Unit testing...Its those Dll's that make Unit testing in SilverlIght possible.

No VS2008 CTRL + R + T in Silverlight apps for Unit testing must use an add-on

Using Silverlight Test framework builds the XAP file packaged and ready for you silverlight app

**Jamie Kinsdell using Nunit with Silverlight (need to change some references web config entries.

Jeff Wilcox on Silverlight Project - project template && Item template

Code is in the Austin Code camp repository

I have heard a bunch of people threaten to start a SQL usergroup well congrats to these guys. Its now a REAL deal.

http://nwasql.com/

I look forward to going, the lunch time thing will be hard to make on a regular basis but hopefully I can square it away for the first meeting of this group.

Meeting Details

When:
Wednesday, May 14th, 11:30am - 1:00pm

Host:
Connolly Consulting

Address:
2703 SE Otis Corley Drive MAP

City:
Bentonville, AR 72712

I have been playing with Deep Zoom Composer since Mix. It was fun but painful all at the same time. Just in case you don't follow theADOguy I thought I would reference a blog post of his:  a new version of Deep Zoom Composer.

With the following added features Better exporting, Impoved Design Experience, Better Collection Exports & Help now works.

To get the download: An Update to Deep Zoom Composer

Thanks

Last week I got the opportunity to talk to some High School students about how easy it is to create Google maps & Virtual Earth maps on the Internet.

I have always been extremely impressed with the Virtual Earth interactive SDK site. If you have to do a project using this technology this is a great place to start!

There were a few things I didn't get the chance to mention thought I would do so here.

1. I stumbled across a post (Marc Schweigert) who took the ENTIRE Virtual Earth interactive SDK and provided the code in a Visual Studio project and available for download.
   
   To download the solution and all the code: Click Here
   
2. There is a really nice site I check regularly that showcases new Google maps: check this blog

Happy developing...

I've really been wanting to get deeper into BDD, but I'm having trouble getting the opportunity at work. I think it's a combination of two primary problems (I'm sure there are others as well though). First, it has been freaking ages since I've been present at the very beginning of a project. It seems like I'm always pulled in well after development has started which means well after project style and architecture have been established. Second, my company still hasn't made the shift to Agile practices. The word is starting to be tossed around quite a bit, but we're still primarily a big up front design kind of shop. This is affecting my ability to do BDD because of the first problem - if I'm not there in the beginning to sway the way things are done, then you can bet that by the time I'm there a ton of analysis will have been done and I'll have a pile of functional specs waiting for me.

Now then, I do, despite all of this, do my best to take the functional specs that I'm given and turn them into well formed behavior driven style unit tests.  The problem is that I'm still very new to it and completely suck. On top of that, I'm expected to teach others at the same time (yes, the blind leading the blind). So I need practice. That's where this post comes in. I thought I'd come up with a bunch of quick and easy side projects where I could experience the entire development life cycle. It didn't take very long at all to get stuck trying to figure out what the next step would be if this were a real project at work. I could of course dig in and just get it done, but I'm much more interested in the process than I am the product at this point (otherwise I would have written these apps years ago!). Enough chatter though, on with something interesting...

Powerball Management

This is the first app that I could think of. I've played the same lotto numbers for years and still after all this time go out and check manually every drawing. So, I thought I'd automate that. Below are the requirements that I could think of written in the "As a, I want, So that" style.

Now this is where I'm stuck. This doesn't seem to me enough information to get started, but acting as the end user, I can't think of anything else I want to say about it.

The initial requirements:

• As a player
  I want to be notified of whether or not I've won after every drawing 
  So that I don't have to check manually
• As a player
  I want to know how much I've won if I did win
  So that I'm not curious and have to go check manually
• As a player
  I want to be notified when I need a new ticket
  So that I don't have to remember
• As a player
  I don't want to have to re-type numbers on new tickets if they're the same
  So that I can save time

I'm going to elicit a bit of help on this and will definitely do a fair bit of reading. I'll post my progress and a link to where I end up putting the code.

Happy coding!