Nov 29th Meeting

Please join us on Wednesday, November 29th for our next meeting. We will have food and drinks provided by The ARS Group . Our topic this month is design patterns, presented by Mark Davey. As you may already know there are a large number of established patterns...far more than we can cover in one meeting. So Mark will be concentrating on three patterns: strategy, factory and singleton. We had a lot of discussion about this topic at our September meeting, so I'm sure everyone is excited about this meeting...I know I am!

Be sure to attend, we'll be giving away a copy of Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition! And, for presenting our topic, Mark Davey will be able to select an item from our giveaway merchandise (software, books, t-shirts, etc.). We will also have a couple random drawings to give away some additional stuff! The is merchandise has been donated to our group by Microsoft and Culminis .

We hope to see you all on Wednesday! Come...get some food, get some knowledge, and get some free stuff!

I hope that you all have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Bart A. Robinson

Meeting Notes

We had 20 people attend this month's meeting. Our topic was design patterns, presented by Mark Davey. I'd like to thank Mark for all of his hard work and doing a good job presenting his topic. It takes a lot of time and effort to present a topic in front of a group and we all really appreciate it. Anyone interested in presenting a future topic please contact me and we can make the arrangements.

I'd also like to thank The ARS Group for supplying our group with pizza and drinks for this meeting. I know everyone really enjoyed it. As always, if your company would be interested in supplying the group with food for one of our monthly meetings contact me.

Mark's presentation was focused around a book about design patterns titled: Head First Design Patterns. This book has a website that you can visit for some code samples and other info, here is the url: http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html. Here is a url with the sample code from this book in C# http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html.

Mark brought with him several other design pattern books that may be of interest to some of you. Here is a list, each title links to amazon.com if you'd like to purchase:

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools
Refactoring to Patterns
Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

Our new website is now up and running http://www.evansvillednug.org, I've uploaded the presentation materials to it so that they can be downloaded. Go to the site and go to the Resources section to download the materials.

For next month's meeting Matt Metcalf & Toby Kraft will be presenting SQL Server 2005.

Upcoming Meetings:

Wed, Dec. 13 from 5 - 7 PM [SQL Server 2005]

Wed, Jan. 17 from 5 - 7 PM [Windows Vista] ~tentative~

Tues, Feb. 13 from 5 - 7 PM [TBD]

Wed, March 14 from 5 - 7 PM [TBD]

Upcoming Topics:

Spring - MVC

Frameworks

.NET 3.0 - WCF

.NET 3.0 - Windows Workflow

.NET 3.0 - Presentation Foundation

Web Services

BizTalk

Sharepoint

Windows Vista (community launch event)

Google APIs, hacks, tips, etc.

LINQ project

If there is something that you'd like to hear about that we don't already have listed, please send it to me and we'll see about working it into an upcoming meeting.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me anytime.

Thanks.

Bart A. Robinson