Next Meeting: Date - Tuesday, March 10, 2009. Time - 5:30pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Brian Print, Architect Evangelist, Microsoft
Food: Pizza will be provided by ITR

Brian H. Prince, this region’s Architect Evangelist, will be speaking on Cloud Computing, how it’s affecting our world, and Microsoft’s take on it.

Next Meeting: Date - Thursday, January 29, 2009. Time - 5:30pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Ryan Parnell, Enterpise Architect, Edfinancial Services
Food: Pizza will be provided by TEKsystems

Come hear, and see, how to use the power of MSBuild to build/deploy multi-teir web applications, including the database, to anywhere from the developer’s box to the production server using nothing but MSBuild and Cruise Control.NET. Team Foundation Server will not be part of the presentation.

Next Meeting: Date - Thursday, November 20, 2008. Time - 5:30pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Kyle Guerry, Software Engineer/Flex Architect, Affiliated Computer Services in Dallas Texas
Food: Pizza will be provided by TEKsystems

(Special Emphasis on MVC with Cairngorm and Prana)

Adobe Flex and Rich Internet Applications are gaining tremendous momentum. Whether you already know a little (or a lot) about the Flash Platform and Adobe Flex, or are a seasoned Java, .Net, or other type of software engineer, you won’t want to miss our presentation as Kyle Guerry demonstrates:

1. Flex Fundamentals – building with MXML and ActionScript 3
2. Connecting to external data via Blaze DS, Remoting, and Web Services
3. Cairngorm – an MVC framework for Flex applications
4. Prana – Spring-like inversion of control for Cairngorm
5. Run-time Shared Libraries – share the Flex framework and assets across multiple Flex applications
6. Modular Flex Applications – load only what you need, when you need it
7. Flex Unit Testing

There will be special emphasis on utilizing Cairngorm hand-in-hand with Prana. Though many in the community feel that Cairngorm is the leading framework for building Flex applications, the main argument against it is that it does not promote loosely coupled applications because of a heavy reliance on Singletons. I will show you how to utilize Prana to de-couple your applications and give you more control at run-time, as well as the ability to easily swap out the main pieces of your applications in order to perform unit tests, change data sources, etc.

Next Meeting: Date - Thursday, October 30, 2008. Time - 5:30pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Greg Ogle, Software Engineer, Pilot
Food: Pizza will be provided by TEKsystems

Do you work with ASP.NET Web Forms? Do you ever wonder if there is a better way of organizing your applications? Do you ever wish it were easier to test things closer to the UI? If so, then perhaps MVC (Model View Controller) is the answer to at least some of your development problems.

MVC is an architectural pattern used to isolate business, data, and interface logic for the purpose of maintainability and testability [Wikipedia]. We will explore these benefits as well as the drawbacks of MVC. Then, after investigating the whys, we will dive into the code to see how it is done in ASP.NET MVC. The examples will demonstrate configuring the Controller and Routing. Of course we be looking at the Model and View. We will discuss the transition from Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC.

[Wikipedia] Wikipedia MVC

Next Meeting: Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 6:45pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Josh Carroll, EdFinancial Services

Have you ever been looking at code and fantasized about pummeling the programmer who wrote it? Has that programmer ever been you? Do you have functions and classes in your solution that aren’t used at all? Has making modifications to your existing apps ever felt a little like playing Jenga, because you’re unsure if this change is going to cause the whole thing to collapse?

Test Driven Development is both a philosophy and a programming technique that helps to ensure you never have to answer yes to any of those questions if done properly. We are going to look at how TDD will help you to write cleaner, more succinct code that has full testing coverage. I will show you how TDD done properly can result in better design, and give you the confidence to aggressively refactor your code without fear of breaking existing functionality.

The first part of the presentation will be an overview of TDD, some design principles and patterns involved in effective testing, and the major benefits from using TDD on a project. The second part of the presentation will be a live demo where I will build a small application (with audience participation) using TDD in order to demonstrate the various techniques discussed in the first part of the presentation. We will wrap up the presentation with time for questions and practical steps to implementing TDD in your environment.

Presented: Thursday, August 21, 2008 - 6:45pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: James Kolpack, Software Engineer, Jewelry Television

PowerShell, Microsoft’s long awaited interactive command line scripting language, has finally arrived. It features an object-based command shell integrated over the .NET framework. Borrowing from the Unix model, PowerShell contains a large number of small operations that, when combined in interesting ways, can quickly and easily tackle complex tasks. But unlike Unix, which uses byte streams to pipe data between commands, PowerShell uses object to communicate between its “commandlets” - lending new possibilities to this proven method. PowerShell also includes a rich dynamically typed scripting language, built-in data structures, regular expressions, and it is easily integrated with new applications.

But first - why would we need a tool like PowerShell? When working on a Windows platform, system admins and developers have never had a native scripting language with much power or grace. The Cmd shell can be useful for simple batch operations - but it is ultimately crippled by lack of visibility into the depths of the OS. VBScript somewhat addressed this need for a complex scripting language - it now has extensions giving access to XML, ADO data structures and IIS. These capabilities have been cobbled over of the language over course of 10 years - they can often be cumbersome and non-consistent. On top of this, some administrative tasks can only be performed inside a GUI. PowerShell was written with the intent to solve these problems.

The development team behind PowerShell have coined the term “Admin Development Model” to describe their design directive. In this model development occurs in three phases. The first could be thought of as “hair on fire” mode - you’re needing to get something done quickly and who cares what short-cuts you need to take. The next mode, presumably after the flames subside, you’ve got some time to look over the damage and develop some robust scripts based around the quick fixes. Finally, it might be that the scripts serve a business need - you could encapsulate the functionality in a nice GUI that anyone in your organization could use.

In this presentation we will be exploring PowerShell in a hands-on overview and interactive demo. We will cover the interactive shell, the scripting concepts, and GUI integration. Whether you’re a systems admin, developer, script wizard, troubleshooter, or average Windows desktop user, PowerShell can be a powerful tool in your technology arsenal.

Presented: Thursday, July 31, 2008 - 6:45pm
Presenter: Chad Vawter, Software Engineer, Jewelry Television

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has emerged and gradually matured as a means by which to make software assets available and reusable within and across corporate and geographic boundaries. What, exactly, is an SOA, though? What is an enterprise service bus, or ESB? What is a message bus? How are these concepts and technologies related, and how and when can they be used effectively?

This presentation, to be given by Chad Vawter at our next KNOTHead meeting (July 31, 2008 @ EdFinancial Services) will be given in an effort to illustrate message-oriented integration as a fundamental characteristic of successful ESB-based service orchestrations. The idea of an ESB will be presented within the context of an event-driven architecture (EDA) as a means by which to respond to “events” with reusable services and with reusable, message-based service orchestrations.

Protocol transformation and the variety of protocols supported by many of the leading commercial and open-source ESB products will discussed within the context of their defining characteristics-reliability (or lack of it), a transactional nature (or lack of one), and their synchronous and/or asynchronous features.

The predominantly message-oriented integration patterns described in the Enterprise Integration Patterns book will be offered as a common vocabulary for integration efforts, much like the Gang of Four design patterns book has served us as a vocabulary for object-oriented design.

Finally, if time permits, complex event processing (CEP) and event-stream processing (ESP) will be introduced as opportunities made available with an underlying messaging architecture.

Presented: Thursday, June 26, 2008
Presenter: Michael Moorman, Software Engineer, Jewelry Television

Speculation about the future of the World Wide Web revolves around the increased usage of semantic processing agents and machine intelligence, which promise to assist and automate tasks that are normally done manually. Although the promise of this new era has been around for a decade, adoption has been building slowly. However, the incremental developments in this area are promising, especially with social networking applications.

This presentation, to be given by Michael Moorman at our next KNOTHead meeting (June 26, 2008 @ EdFinancial Services, 6:45pm), broadly describes the playing field of the Semantic Web, presents the vision of Tim Berners-Lee, the Chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium, and demonstrates some of the frameworks of the underlying technology.