SDDN Sydney November Meeting

 

[NOTE: From now on, we will be publishing all Sydney SDDN info on http://sydney.sddn.org.au, please subscribe to the RSS. Starting next month I’ll stop publishing announcements on my blog]

For this month, Justin King will be speaking about RIA Services and Miguel Madero will talk about different Testing Approaches for Silverlight Applications.

As usual we will meet the first Tuesday of the month at the Crown Hotel (map) in 162 Elizabeth Street at 6:00 pm to get some dinner and start the discussion followed by the talks at 6:30 pm.

Please RSVP on Facebook.

.NET RIA Services – Building Data Driven applications in Silverlight 3

Learn how Microsoft is simplifying the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together ASP.NET and Silverlight. See the new application framework that removes some of the complexity for connecting to your data layer and see patterns for working with data, implementing reusable and independently testable application logic, ease of client side validation and  see how this relates to other patterns such as MVVM. We are sure this will lead to lots of architecture debates and pros/cons of this framework.

Testing in Silverlight 

At first sight it looks like we don’t have a lot of options to test Silverlight Applications. Although it’s not an easy task, we do have a lot of alternatives. In this demo oriented talk, Miguel will present different approaches, techniques and types of tests from simple Unit Testing and Mocks to Visual Tests, UI Automation, REPL Testing, Performance, Memory Leaks and Recorded Web Tests.

Geek Events in Sydney

 

Some people have asked me about making the information about events available. I maintain a separate calendar for Geek Events and I decided to make it public. You can use the following links respectively to subscribe from an RSS Reader, Add it to a Calendar App or just view the page in HTML. For more information about the links read this page.

This is the embedded version of the calendar.

Keep in mind that ATM this is just my personal list of events, it certainly doesn’t represent everything going on in Sydney. Please feel free to suggest me new events.

SDDN Sydney October Meeting – Tools

 

This month we’ll have three talks about tools.

• XAML Power Toys – Chris Anderson
• Html to XAML Converter – Jason Schluter
• Telerik Controls – Miguel Madero

As usual we will meet the first Tuesday of the month (October 6th) at the Crown Hotel (162 Elizabeth St). We’ll get there at 6:00 pm to start some open discussions and get a meal, to go on with the talks from 6:30 to 8:30 and then continue with the Networking part of the event.

Please confirm your assistance through the mail list (ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com) or the facebook group.

SDDN Sydney September Meeting - Lightning talks

 

For our September meeting we will do some lightning talks. You can't miss it. These are some of the talks we'll have.

• Expression Design – Lee Goodaman
• Rx Framework – Ali Shafai
• Debugging Memory Leaks – Miguel Madero
• Dashboards – Chris Anderson
• Html-XAML Converter - (not confirmed)
• New Network Stack – Paul Glavich
• Silverlight with Azure – David Burela
• Flex - (not confirmed)

The best is that we can still make some room for yours. Lightning talks can be the perfect opportunity for virgin speakers to have a quickie without worrying for having to prepare for an hour long performance. Experienced presenters will definitely have something to say and 10 minutes is the perfect time to deliver a Wow demo.

If you want to speak, just leave comment, reply in the mailing list or shoot me an email. If you’re not sure of what to speak about we can bounce some ideas.

• Validations
• Behaviours
• Using Blend
• Sketchflow
• Designer/Developer Workflow
• Games
• MVVM
• Animations
• Making your app look good
• Testability
• Architecture
• Design Tips
• Integrating Silverlight with non-.NET Backends
• Making money with Silverlight
• Scaling RIA Applications
• RIA Services
• Debugging in Silverlight
• Finding and Avoiding Memory Leaks
• Tools for Silverlight
• The coolest thing that you found last week
• Creating iPhone apps using MonoTouch and Silverlight

As always, we’ll see you on the first Tuesday of the month (September 1st) at the Crown Hotel. Try to get there early and leave late. The talks start at 6:30, but we meet half hour before to get some beers and have a chat. After the presentations we usually have dinner and discuss further the topics of the day.

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Silverlight Designer and Developer Network Sydney - August Meeting

This month Jose Fajardo from Cynergy Systems will talk on “Don't lose site of what's important, Interactivity and Experience” at the Crown Hotel. Here are all the details:

Crown Hotel
162 Elizabeth St
Sydney
August 4th. 6:00 pm for drinks, 6:30 for the talk
Use the registration tool on the top of the SDDN Site.

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If you are interested in a particular topic or have any suggestions for future meetings, please let us know.

Here are the details of the talk.

Don't lose site of whats important, Interactivity and Experience

by Jose Fajardo

Patterns, Frameworks, MVVM, Prism, MEF, these are all great aides to helping us deliver a RIA solutions, BUT what they all lack is a designers perspective. Experience has shown me that the majority of a project is spent in xaml and creating interactivity through animations and styling. The view model is lean and clean BUT the view layer through evolutions of the WPF/Silverlight technology has gotten much heavier and more complex. I want to walk through with you the new features in SL and Blend from the perspective of bring order to the chaos in our view layer, and in so doing helping extend our frameworks to be relevant for designers.

Silverlight Designer and Developer Network Sydney - July Meeting

This month Ali Shafai will talk on Silverlight, Prism and Unity and Miguel Madero will do a mini presentation on a less attractive, but important topic, Security in Silverlight at the Crown Hotel. Here are all the details:

Crown Hotel
162 Elizabeth St
Sydney
July 7th. 6:00 pm
Use the registration tool on the top of the SDDN Site.

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Silverlight, Prism and Unity

The holy trinity

by Ali Shafai

Ali will be building a LOB application with Silverlight 3 using prism (with MVVM) and will be showing how to use Unity to inject the dependencies into your classes. The application will have the skeleton of a minimal prism application.

I will also share some of my findings on more advanced topics such as:

• dynamically creating views
• region managers and how to use them
• best practices on wiring events
• loading essential data before application loads
• showing a splash screen while the essential data is being loaded
• tricks on styling your controls beyond what you thought possible
• How to break the application into smaller assemblies

Ali Shafai started programming a few months before he could touch a computer, during this time, he was the programmer, the program and the computer. Then he got his hands to real computers and learned COBOL, PL/I, BASIC, C, Prolog, X86 Assembly, C++, Object Pascal, C# and Python in that exact order. He can still remember the first program he wrote and the joy he felt writing it. He moved to Sydney in 2001, was introduced to XP, TDD, CI and some other acronyms. In 2004 the company he was working for (EDI) won the 2004 Consensus Software Award and Microsoft Realizing Potential Award, he then joined forces with Chris Anderson and Mark Wallis and formed Peer Placements, a software talent management company. He is still enjoying programming and does freelance software development. His latest joy is Silverlight/Prism/Unity.

Security in Silverlight

by Miguel Madero

Miguel will show in several demos different Application Security concerns specific to Silverlight Applications commonly overlooked. He will teach us how to avoid being hacked and protect our data with some basic tips. These are some of the topics covered in this lightning talk:

• Common Hacking Techniques
• Security as an Aspect
• End to end data protection
• UI Level Security
• Authentication Mechanisms
• Authorization and User Context
• Service Level Security

Miguel has been programming for fun for the last 15 years when he realized that it was better to play with QBasic and Pascal than Prince of Persia. He found out that he could actually get some money out of this hobby so he started a couple of web companies 5 years later and then a Development Shop before moving to Australia to work for Readify where he’s now having fun coding some of the coolest projects in Australia. He discovered Silverlight two years ago and it’s still keeping him busy and entertained.

Silverlight Designer and Developer Network – June Meeting

 

Next Tuesday, June 2 at 6:30 at Microsoft in Sydney (1 Epping Road, North Ryde NSW) we will have the SSDN Sydney’s June Meeting. This time Tatham Oddie will be talking about the new Out of Browser features in Silverlight 3 and Sergey Klementiev will presenting “LOB applications in Silverlight Lap around middle tier”. You will also have the opportunity to win a copy full of Expression 2 Suite and the best of all network amongst your Silverlight peers. So don’t miss it.