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ColARC Meeting – March 2009

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I’ve heard the announcements for the meetings of the Columbus Architecture Group few times at the CONDG meetings and decided to check it out. They did a series of short presentations in the lightning talk (also known as blitz babble) format.

Brian Disbrow talked about company strategy as it relates to the tensions and trade-offs between achieving operational excellence, customer alliance (that’s not the term he used, I should take better notes), and market leader position.

Andrew Holowaty, who works for Agile Technologies, talked about a custom reporting framework he has been working on. He uses ASP.NET and the Enterprise Library to deliver customizable reports in a lightweight framework that is configured using angle brackets (ok, there’s some stuff between the brackets too).

James Bender was riding a bus in the clouds after spending too much time at the Mellow Mushroom.

Craig Stuntz talked about the ubiquitous URI and some subtleties surrounding its use in web-based systems. He gave some good food for thought regarding the benefit of immutable URIs that convey meaning without revealing much about the underlying system. If a URL (a form of URI) ends with .php or .aspx, for example, there is a greater chance that URL may change someday if the technology implementing the web resource changes.

Greg Malcom presented SAPS DAME which is an acronym for:

Scalability
Availability
Performance
Security

Deployability
Accessibility
Maintainability
Extensibility

Though I think he actually presented it as PASS MADE.

Sorry, it’s getting late.

CONDG Meeting – February 2009

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This month’s meeting of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group featured a presentation by Jon Kruger on unit testing and test-driven development in JavaScript.

Links related to the presentation:

Other links from the meeting:

Related search results:

I also saw someone playing with something called Microsoft Tag on their mobile phone. What’s that?

Delphi Users Group Hosts David I

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For a number of years, from the mid-1980s and through the 1990s, I made a living writing software mostly using Turbo Pascal and its descendants, Borland Pascal (with Objects) and Delphi. I was interested when I heard that Rick Ross of the Central Ohio Delphi and .NET Developers Group was going to host a presentation by David Intersimone. David “I” worked for Borland as Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist before Borland sold their developer tools division, CodeGear, to Embarcadero in June, 2008. David now works for Embarcadero and is on the road for their Delphi 2009 Productivity Tour.

In its early years, Delphi paved the way for competing RAD tools such as Visual Studio. Unfortunately (for us lowly developers anyway) Borland fell in love with big enterprise bucks and even changed its name to Inprise for a while. Borland was known as a developer tools company and the management at the time probably thought the name change would help break them out of that box. “Look, were not a Bor-ing developer tools company, we’re meant to be in your enterprise!” They eventually changed their name back to Borland (Borland Software Corporation) but did not lose their appetite for enterprise bucks. They did not seem to invest much in their developer tools but focused instead on ALM (an acronym I assume is taught to managers – stands for Application Lifecycle Management).

Picture of Rick Ross and David Intersimone
Rick Ross and David I

I attended the meeting on Wednesday, February 18th, in Dublin Ohio. The first thing I noticed about David I is that his beard is much more awesome now than in the pictures I’ve seen. David presented some demos of Delphi 2009 and Delphi Prism. Some of the demos are also presented by Nick Hodges in this video which is introduced by David I (check out David’s green tie-dye against the blue background – groovy, man!). The presentation was good but I enjoyed the “war stories” from his years at Borland even more. It’s also nice to see Embarcadero spending some cash on promoting their developer products.

David I’s blog: Sip from the Firehose

CONDG Meeting – November 2008

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Found my notes from the November CONDG meeting and decided to go ahead and blog some links for future reference. I did not attend the December meeting.

Mark Mydland presented Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010. I see that Jeff Hunsaker already posted a nice (and much more timely) summary of the presentation so I will not rehash that here.

I noticed Mark was using something called SlickJot. I found it is a feature of a floating command line utility named SlickRun.

Also mentioned at the meeting was Peter Provost – software architecture tools.

CONDG Meeting – October 2008

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Here are some links from notes taken at the October meeting of the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group:

Meeting dates were announced for the Columbus Architecture Group and MDC Detroit.

James Johnson of Data Dynamics gave a demonstration of the Data Dynamics Analysis component.

Alex Moore talked about Parallel Extensions to the .Net Framework and gave a brief but cool demonstration that used ray tracing as the computational load to show the difference in execution time with and without parallel functions.

Kishore Patel of Cyber-SWIFT talked about GIS mapping applications with .NET. He gave Buckeye Traffic as an example of such an application.

Steve Horn talked about jQuery. Steve also spoke highly of Firebug.

Mel Grubb who works for Quick Solutions talked about the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) rules engine and how to do stuff with it that I have no clue about. I have not worked at all with WF so I don’t see the big picture that would give context to the demo.

Greg Malcolm talked about Mono and showed a few examples. His PC was running Kubuntu. When he fired it up I wondered if there would be any moaning and groaning from the crowd of Microsoft developers. I didn’t hear any (and no objects where thrown either). I suspect many in attendance have an old PC at home with some flavor of Linux on it. Greg mentioned GtkSharp and MoMA, a tool to help with migrating .NET applications to Mono.

Craig McKeachie and Tim Hibner talked about Sitefinity, a Content Management System.

This was not a complete list of presenters (nor was it in order of presentation). Just some notes.