September Meeting: AngularJS-beyond basics

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

Join us and Logical Advantage on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:00 PM in the Mt. Kilimanjaro/Mt. Everest rooms of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. AngularJS is an amazing JavaScript library with a high learning curve for the uninitiated. Everyone with MVC experience knows about Controllers in that world, but what is an Angular controller? How is it the same and how is it different? Directives are the building blocks of the DOM components of your Angular app. It’s important to know when to use them and how they interact with your app controllers and with their own controllers. You will learn how to create controllers, add directives, and how they interact with each other in a real application.

The meeting presenter is James Huston.

James has been working in web development and application architecture with a sprinkle of Unix system admin for far longer than he likes to talk about. From enterprise applications with PHP and MySQL (yes, used the E word with LAMP) to most recently realtime modern web apps using NodeJS and Angular he has a wide range of experience with web technologies. On top of that he loves to learn and share what he knows with anyone who will listen and a few people who don’t like to anymore. You can follow him on GitHub.

The meeting is sponsored by Logical Advantage.

Logical Advantage is a successful, results-oriented software consulting, application development and integration firm. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Logical Advantage enables enterprise excellence through pragmatic software consulting, workforce solutions and proven application development.

Logical Advantage delivers superior and measurable long-term results for its clients. We are a long-term partner and trusted advisor of choice for our clients and deliver full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) services, from recommending solutions and concepts to implementation to ongoing support. Learn more at www.logicaladvantage.com.

Downloads: Slides and Code (Note: You can view the slides by cloning the repository to your local machine. Then open ..\enterprise-angular-directives-demo\presentation\angularjs_and_scope\index.html in your browser.)

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August Meeting: Business Apps using AngularJS

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Join us and Signature Consultants on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR) of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. Who says writing Line of Business applications are a pain? Who says you can’t have compile-time exceptions? Gone are the days of slinging spaghetti JavaScript code in order to satisfy business requirements. We will look at what it takes to build a simple Line of Business application using TypeScript, HTML5, CSS3, and AngularJS. If you don’t know what TypeScript is but you do know JavaScript, look no further: JavaScript is TypeScript. TypeScript is a transpiler that provides a lot of syntactical sugar for developers but ultimately outputs JavaScript. We will also address designing our applications “mobile first” by using the popular framework Bootstrap. During this talk we will try to cover the following:

  • Project structure
  • Intro to AngularJS
  • AngularJS in a TypeScript world
  • Bootstrap 3, mobile first, and responsive web
  • Hosting your app with NodeJS and ExpressJS
  • Intro GulpJS for build automation
  • Intro to WebAPI for CRUD

This is just the tip of the iceberg but it should give you a good idea as to what it feels like building LOB apps.

The meeting presenter is Matt Duffield.

Matt Duffield has over 15 years working in IT. He enjoys building rich user centric applications. Matt is very active in the community speaking at user groups and code camps. He is the leader of the Charlotte ALT.NET user group. He is an INETA speaker member and has been a Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development. He started working in .NET as soon as it was available to the development community and was also an early adopter of both WPF and Silverlight. He believes good business intelligence (BI) architecture is the formula for a successful software package that looks beyond just data and provides insightful information. He is the co-author of the book: Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards. You can read his blog at mattduffield.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @mattduffield.

The meeting is sponsored by Signature Consultants.

Signature Consultants was established in 1997 with a singular focus: Provide our clients and consultants with superior staffing solutions. At Signature Consultants, it’s not just about the bottom line; it’s about the people. We focus on the relationships we have with our clients, consultants and candidates. Our motto, “Getting IT Right,” is reflected in every aspect of our company – it guides our decisions and actions and ensures that our consultants and clients always come first. Learn more at www.sigconsult.com.

Downloads: Slides

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July Meeting: Introduction to Open XML

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Join us and TEKsystems Tuesday, July 22, at 6:00 PM in the Mt. Kilimanjaro/Mt. Everest rooms of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. Eric Notheisen will introduce the concepts of Open XML as a standard methodology to interact with Microsoft Office applications. You will discover how easy it is to create Word documents and Excel spreadsheets using Open XML and C#.

The meeting presenter is Eric Notheisen.

Eric Notheisen is an Application Developer/Architect with more than 36 years experience in electronics and computer technology areas. He has been programming Microsoft and .NET for the past 19 years. Eric taught Visual Basic for both the Community College of Aurora in Colorado and has taught Visual Basic and C# for Central Piedmont Community College here in Charlotte. He has been presenting at the Enterprise Developers Guild meetings since 2002 and at their Code Camps since 2005.

The meeting is sponsored by TEKsystems.

By working for TEKsystems you become part of our dedicated Microsoft Technologies Practice. Since its inception our Microsoft Technologies Practice has helped hundreds of Microsoft Specialists to find the most ideal job opportunities in the marketplace. Our program at TEKsystems specializes in the cornerstone technologies of the Microsoft stack – .NET, SQL Server and SharePoint. Our team consists of Delivery Experts, in key market geographies, with ties to the most cutting edge work opportunities.

As a member of the TEKsystems Microsoft Technologies Practice you will have access to a Market Delivery Expert that focuses on Microsoft Technology jobs around the clock in your local region as well as across the US. In some cases you will be afforded the opportunity to become a full time employee of TEKsystems and work as a Microsoft expert on our staff or at our key clients. Be sure to speak with your local TEKsystems contact Lindsey Thomka about our Microsoft Technologies Practice and how it can benefit your career.

People are at the heart of every successful business initiative. At TEKsystems, we understand people. Every year we deploy over 80,000 IT professionals at 6,000 client sites across North America, Europe and Asia. Our deep insights into IT human capital management enable us to help our clients achieve their business goals – while optimizing their IT workforce strategies. We provide IT staffing solutions, IT talent management expertise and IT services to help our clients plan, build and run their critical business initiatives. Through our range of quality-focused delivery models, we meet our clients where they are, and take them where they want to go, the way they want to get there. Learn more at www.teksystems.com.

Downloads: Slides and Code

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June Meeting: Publishing Unity Games

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Join us and Logical Advantage on Tuesday, June 24, at 6:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR) of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. Ever wonder what it takes to actually publish a Unity video game to the Windows Platform? Ever wonder what the gotchas are, how to do platform interop? Maybe need some tips on shader support? This is the session for you. We will be talking about what it takes to publish a game to Windows 8 Store and Windows Phone 8 Store. This will be a very technical talk.

The meeting presenter is David Crook.

David Crook is a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft. As a Tech Evangelist he works with game development and mobile development communities publishing starter kits, plugins, and runs workshops and seminars around game development for the east coast. His background is in enterprise developer consulting and game development. David enjoys brewing beer and Brazilian jiu jitsu when he isn’t coding. You can read his blog at MSDN Blogs and Indie Dev Spot.

The meeting is sponsored by Logical Advantage.

Logical Advantage is a successful, results-oriented software consulting, application development and integration firm. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, Logical Advantage enables enterprise excellence through pragmatic software consulting, workforce solutions and proven application development.

Logical Advantage delivers superior and measurable long-term results for its clients. We are a long-term partner and trusted advisor of choice for our clients and deliver full Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) services, from recommending solutions and concepts to implementation to ongoing support. Learn more at www.logicaladvantage.com.

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Call for Speakers

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

Have you ever had the experience of solving a complex programming problem in a unique way?

Have you been playing with some new technology or platform, like Xamarin or AngularJS?

Have you become interested in looking at process as much as product?

Have you thought you might like to share your ideas and solutions with a wider network of developers?

If any of these statements applies to you, the Enterprise Developers Guild wants to hear from you! Your ideas, solutions, and interests could make a great presentation. We all love seeing how others solve problems in new and unique ways.

The Enterprise Developers Guild meets the fourth Tuesday of every month, except December, at the Microsoft Campus in Charlotte, NC. Please contact us if you would like to be a presenter at an upcoming Guild meeting. We have openings throughout the year.

May Meeting: The Internet of Things

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Join us and Mindseeker on Tuesday, May 27, at 6:00 PM in the Mt. Kilimanjaro/Mt. Everest rooms of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. Every day there are more and more devices invented that enhance our lives. The Internet of Things, IoT, is upon us in a big way and more objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. It is easy to use a microcontroller to collect data and send to the cloud to analyze and make new insights with the data. Our homes, businesses, and cities are all becoming smart.

In this talk you will learn how to leverage your existing .NET skills for the IoT and connect to the physical world! You will learn how to use C# and the .NET micro framework to control Netduino microcontrollers that read sensors and control devices over the network. Additionally you will learn how to use the vision system of the Microsoft Kinect SDK in new and creative ways to control devices from both gestures and speech recognition.

The Internet of Things IoT is one of the latest popular buzz phrases, but has been my passion for three years. Devices that can both sense the environment and communicate become both tools for understanding and also allow you to control it.

My killer IoT projects

  1. Combine with the Microsoft Kinect vision system to allow gestures to control IoT devices
  2. Steer a blimp from a mobile phone
  3. Aim a squirt gun from gestures or from a phone to nail the kids swimming in the pool
  4. Control the garage door
  5. Control watering of our garden
  6. Control the lights at home from the web, audio commands or from gestures
  7. Transmit IR signals to control TV and music from a website
  8. Scare the kids at Halloween with ghost and monsters that are controlled from a mobile app and interact with the kids through the Microsoft Kinect vision system

Microsoft Channel 9 Coding4Fun has featured my projects 6 times. See Microsoft Channel 9’s latest blog post on my project Home Automation with a little help from Netduino, Microsoft Kinect Point Cloud and Speech Recognition: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/Home-Automation-with-a-little-help-from-Netduino-Microsoft-Kinect-Point-Cloud-and-Speech-Recognition

My articles and videos on the topic have a combined total of nearly 400,000 views and I have all of the code available in open source projects.

The meeting presenter is Dan Thyer.

Dan graduated summa cum laude from North Carolina State University with dual degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. Dan attended NC State on full scholarship program with General Motors. After working with GM, Dan served as application development director for the largest Microsoft Business Solutions Partner in the Carolinas. During this time, Dan’s team won two Microsoft Pinnacle awards. For the past 11 years, as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of, Logical Advantage (www.logicaladvantage.com), a software consulting business, Dan has successfully architected and delivered web-based and mobile applications for many Fortune 500 companies. Dan focuses his energies on emerging technologies, and ensuring that all projects are architected to meet the client’s current and future needs. Dan collaborates with his architects to create technical standards, including coding standards, tools, and platforms. He holds a leadership role in the local Microsoft Enterprise Developer’s Guild and has been on the steering committee for over a dozen years.

When Dan is not being CTO, he is building cool stuff and writing articles about it. You can read his blog at Logical Advantage and follow him on Twitter at @logicaldan.

The meeting is sponsored by Mindseeker.

Mindseeker, Inc. is a certified, small business and minority owned Professional Services supplier focused on achieving efficiency and revenue targets for our clients. Headquartered in northern Virginia with regional offices in Charlotte, NC, Seattle, WA, and Pittsburgh, PA we are well-positioned to service most industries and provide top notch resource management solutions. We offer three distinct areas of expertise: IT Consulting, Process Re-engineering, and Financial Programs Delivery. Our Mindseeker Resources and Customers include highly trained and well-recommended IT Managers, Developers, and Program Managers. Learn more at www.mindseeker.com.

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April Meeting: CryptoCurrencies

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Join us and SQL Sentry on Tuesday, April 22, at 6:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR) of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. We are going to take the mystery out of CryptoCurrencies.

Maybe you’ve heard of BitCoin, but what about LiteCoin, DogeCoin, AmericanCoin or BBQCoin? (Yes, really.) These are just a few of the available CryptoCurrencies that are showing up. If you’ve wondered what they are, how to get them, how they work, or what Bitcoin Mining is, then this is the talk for you. Once you’ve got them, what do you do with them? We’ll cover some code and show ways to leverage BitCoin and other CryptoCurrencies in your applications. Whether it’s taking payments, or buying and selling the coins themselves.

The meeting presenter is Chris Williams.

Chris Williams is a Senior Developer for Level One. He is the author of Professional Windows Phone Game Development (WROX) and numerous articles in CODE Magazine. He’s also a Windows Phone MVP, MCT, MCSD (.NET) Early Adopter, blogger, cryptocoin enthusiast, freelance game developer, conference speaker, INETA Community Champion and 4 year Board of Directors member, and occasionally plays a pretty mean guitar in Rock Band. You can follow him on Twitter at @chrisgwilliams.

The meeting is sponsored by SQL Sentry.

SQL Sentry is a dynamic entrepreneurial organization that develops and markets premier software products for Microsoft SQL Server environments. We were started in 2004 as a business unit of InterCerve, a leading Microsoft hosting services provider, in response to the issues faced by organizations managing large SQL Server enterprises. Our unique software products grew out of our own experiences as Developers and Database Administrators.

We are an organization that values talent and are always on the lookout for the best people in the industry. If you are looking for a new opportunity in a challenging and fun environment, please send us your resume today! Learn more at www.sqlsentry.net/career.asp.

Downloads: Slides

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March Meeting: GruntJS at CPCC Harris Campus

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

Join us and The Select Group on Tuesday, March 25, at 6:00 PM in the Harris I Auditorium of the CPCC Harris Campus. As developers we are tasked with building applications which simplify lives of our end users but how do we manage the code for these applications? How do we deploy this applications to our users? The answer to this seemingly simply question can be pretty complicated. If you want go super simple you can simply xcopy your application to the server, but this is not saleable nor does it address any enterprise needs such as compiling, transformations, validation or code manipulations. If your project requires the ability to transform, validate, compile, along with much more you will need a higher level tool to perform these actions. One such tool is GruntJS. In this session we will learn how to use GruntJS to build, transform, validate and deploy our code to our users.

The meeting will be held at the CPCC Harris Campus:

3210 CPCC Harris Campus Dr.
Charlotte, NC 28208

Directions

Access to the Harris I Auditorium is through the main entrance for the building on the right.

CPCC Harris Campus

The meeting presenter is Derik Whittaker.

Derik Whittaker is a Software Architect who specializes in all things .NET. Derik has been building enterprise systems on top of the .Net technology stack for over 14 years and along the way has picked up a thing or two about how to create enterprise scale software systems.

During his 14 year career Derik has worked in many different industries ranging from Marking, Healthcare, Retail, Insurance, Automotive and Online Entertainment. Currently Derik is working for a Technology startup (orgspan.com) in Durham North Carolina leading their windows phone and windows modern UI application development. Derik believes that the job of a developer is more than just turning syntax into working 1’s and 0’s. He believes that our job is to produce a system which gets out of the users way and allows them to do their job better.

Derik has been awarded the Microsoft MVP in C# for the past 6 years. Along with being an MVP he is also a member of the ASPInsiders group. Derik is also a Pluralsight Author with multiple course under his belt. He is a community leader, helping to organize events such as Chicago Codeapalooza, Chicago Code Camp and the Raleigh Code Camp.

Outside of his day job you can find Derik hanging out with his beautiful wife Tiffany and his 2 awesome boys Brendan and Ryan. You can read his blog at devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker and follow him on Twitter at @DerikWhittaker.

The meeting is sponsored by The Select Group.

You’re in the business of being the best. We are too.

The Select Group takes a fresh and personal approach to recruiting. Headquartered in Raleigh, NC, The Select Group was founded in 1999 by Sheldon Wolitski, an industry leader and veteran recruiter. Seeing the need for more efficient and cost-effective hiring, he decided to venture out on his own and create one of the most unique and service-oriented recruiting companies in the nation.

We’ve based our business on honesty, integrity, and ethics. We believe in strong, long-term relationships, and in our commitment to represent only the top echelon of candidates for the best clients.

The Select Group Charlotte is one of our newest and most exciting offices. After officially opening February 6, 2012 we have already partnered with over 30 of the top companies in Charlotte. We specialize in the placement of IT professionals on contract, contract to hire, and permanently within these organizations. Learn more at www.selectgroup.com.

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February Meeting: Introduction to Unity 3D

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

Join us and TekPartners on Tuesday, February 25, at 6:00 PM in the Mt. Kilimanjaro/Mt. Everest rooms of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. INETA is turning 12 in February and you’re invited to celebrate with us! Matt Duffield will present a high level overview of Unity 3D and what it takes to build a simple game. With the release of Unity 4.3, you can now develop awesome games in 2D. Don’t worry; you can still use all of your awesome C# skills to develop your games. Unity allows developers to build really cool games and target pretty much every device and console that is available. Come out and see what it takes to build a game!

The meeting presenter is Matt Duffield.

Matt Duffield has over 15 years working in IT. He enjoys building rich user centric applications. Matt is very active in the community speaking at user groups and code camps. He is the leader of the Charlotte ALT.NET user group. He is an INETA speaker member and has been a Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development. He started working in .NET as soon as it was available to the development community and was also an early adopter of both WPF and Silverlight. He believes good business intelligence (BI) architecture is the formula for a successful software package that looks beyond just data and provides insightful information. He is the co-author of the book: Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards. You can read his blog at mattduffield.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @mattduffield.

The meeting is sponsored by TekPartners.

Power organizations with proven talent. Solutions start with understanding. TekPartners has been an industry trailblazer since the day it opened its doors a decade ago. The executives brought their years of experience together and a belief that it could be done better. Today, as we approach $115 million with multiple offices and divisions, the simple truths that got us here are stronger than ever.

TekPartners knows its business and wants to help yours. As a premier provider for workforce staffing and solutions, TekPartners clearly understands that technology needs require the most qualified consultants, contract staff and recruitment solutions. We are thankful for our elite commercial and government clients nationwide and are always looking for smart-fit clients to be a part of our extended family. Learn more at www.tekpartners.com.

Downloads: Slides and Code

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January Meeting: Introduction to Unity 3D

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

We have decided to cancel tonight’s meeting.

As you are likely aware, a winter storm is expected to come through the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area this afternoon/evening. We’ve been monitoring weather and road conditions throughout the morning to determine the best course of action. With safety at the forefront of our decision-making, we have decided to cancel tonight’s Guild meeting.

We will work to reschedule Matt Duffield’s Introduction to Unity 3D for a future monthly Guild meeting. Please be sure to join the new Guild mailing list for updates. Please be careful driving home and stay warm.

Best regards,

Bill Jones Jr., MVP
President and Co-Founder
Enterprise Developers Guild

Join us and Mindseeker on Tuesday, January 28, at 6:00 PM in the Multi-Purpose Room (MPR) of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus for a high level overview of Unity 3D and what it takes to build a simple game. With the release of Unity 4.3, you can now develop awesome games in 2D. Don’t worry; you can still use all of your awesome C# skills to develop your games. Unity allows developers to build really cool games and target pretty much every device and console that is available. Come out and see what it takes to build a game!

The meeting presenter is Matt Duffield.

Matt Duffield has over 15 years working in IT. He enjoys building rich user centric applications. Matt is very active in the community speaking at user groups and code camps. He is the leader of the Charlotte ALT.NET user group. He is an INETA speaker member and has been a Microsoft MVP in Client Application Development. He started working in .NET as soon as it was available to the development community and was also an early adopter of both WPF and Silverlight. He believes good business intelligence (BI) architecture is the formula for a successful software package that looks beyond just data and provides insightful information. He is the co-author of the book: Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards. You can read his blog at mattduffield.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter at @mattduffield.

The meeting is sponsored by Mindseeker.

Mindseeker holds exciting opportunities with a variety of well-known and well respected clients in both the public and private sectors. We support a number of government agencies as well as companies that range in size from small start-ups to the Fortune 500. If you are actively on the job market or passively searching opportunities, please send us your resume and contact your local Mindseeker representative today. Learn more at www.mindseeker.com.

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December: No Meeting

Posted on by Enterprise Developers Guild

As you know, the Enterprise Developers Guild does not meet in December. (Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 28, 2014.) However, we do want to extend season greetings to one and all. We also want to thank all our sponsors and volunteers who work all year-long to help make the Guild a success.

From all of us on the Board to all of you and your families, we wish you a very Happy (belated) Chanukah and best wishes for a beautiful Winter Solstice, a Merry Christmas, an uplifting Kwanzaa, a delightful Boxing Day, a Happy New Year…and we’ll see you in January!

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November Meeting: Windows Azure IaaS

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Join us Tuesday, November 26, at 6:00 PM in the Mt. Kilimanjaro/Mt. Everest rooms of the Charlotte Microsoft Campus. For this month’s talk we’ll explore everything you always wanted to know about Windows Azure IaaS but were afraid to ask. Ubiquitous cloud references often obscure the underlying technology. Last April Microsoft released Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This presentation explores specific questions that are on most people’s mind when they consider Microsoft’s IaaS offering. How much does it cost? What do I need? What can I do? With multiple cloud choices available, we’ll explore how the Microsoft IaaS offer differs from Amazon Web Services.

The meeting presenter is William Bellamy.

William is a Principal Escalation Engineer responsible for supporting Windows Azure developers. For 23 years, he has incubated support for numerous new Microsoft products. He published Azure troubleshooting and created the Channel 9 video series Windows Azure Troubleshooting. Originally from Pennsylvania, he earned a B.S. degree from Georgia Tech and a PhD from the Univ. of Paris I (Sorbonne). He moved to Charlotte in 1997. You can follow him on Twitter at @WilliamCBellamy.

The meeting is sponsored by Vircon.

Vircon has earned a reputation for consistently providing the highest quality services always with an emphasis on integrity, and has thus built strong, trust-based relationships with both our clients and our consultants. If you’re interested in joining a dynamic organization which fosters the opportunity for professional development and career advancement, you’re ready for Vircon. With clients all over the country and projects in a variety of technical and business domains, we offer stability, growth and continuous opportunities for expanding your professional experience. Learn more atwww.vircon.com.

Downloads: Slides

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