Edge UG

Visual Studio 2010 Pre-Order Available

Ray Booysen — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:45:00 GMT

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional will launch on April 12 but you can beat the rush and secure your copy today by pre-ordering at the affordable estimated retail price of £484.99.

If you use a previous version of Visual Studio or any other development tool then you are eligible for this upgrade. Along with all the great new features in Visual Studio 2010 (see www.microsoft.com/visualstudio) Visual Studio 2010 Professional includes a 12-month MSDN Essentials subscription which gives you access to core Microsoft platforms: Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter.

So visit http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-gb/pre-order-visual-studio-2010 to check out all the new features and sign up for this great offer.

Edge UG to host Adam Kinney March 23rd

Gavin Osborn — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:51:00 GMT

Extra, extra, read all about it. This just in: Adam Kinney to present in an Edge UG exclusive!

Hot off the press from MIX '10 Adam Kinney; Silverlight and Expression Evangelist for Microsoft in Redmond (and all round top bloke); will be popping in to Edge UG on Tuesday March 23rd to present a round up of all the cool things that were announced for Silverlight 4 and related technologies at MIX '10 the previous week in Las Vegas.

Who is Adam Kinney?

Don't pretend you don't know... Adam is a seasoned speaker on the Microsoft conference circuit and well respected in both Silverlight and User Experience communities throughout the world, he also happens to be a top bloke! Want to know more about Adam? Why not check out his blog.

What is MIX?

A conference for web designers and developers building the world's most innovative web sites where delegates explore the art and science of creating great user experiences. This is Microsoft's premier conference for talking about User Experience technologies and naturally Silverlight, WPF and the Expression tool set dominate these events. This year's event promises to be big news as Adam and his team overwhelm us with details of the cool stuff coming out of Silverlight 4 in particular. To find out more check the conference website.

A change of venue:

Due to the rather short notice nature of this event we were unable to secure our usual venue. However we were able to secure a great alternative. We will be holding the event at Skills Matter near Barbican tube station. Skills Matter host all kinds of great community content throughout the year and so are well suited for hosting a User Group like Edge UG.

SIGNUP!!!

To sign up do visit our Eventbrite page: http://edgeug-adam-kinney.eventbrite.com/

Not able to make it to London?

If London is going to be a step too far for you then perhaps Coventry might be easier?

If so NxtGenUG Coventry will also be hosting Adam on Thursday the 25th March. For more information visit their site.

A few busy weeks:

There is so much going on at Edge UG HQ this week. Please don't be surprised/annoyed if an extra e-mail or two is sent out to you over the next few weeks regarding both this event and our involvement with UK TechDays.

I hope to see as many of you there as possible at this event and all of our coming events over the next few weeks!

Give with Bing

Ray Booysen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:04:00 GMT

Hi Everyone,

We’re very excited about the campaign we’re launching this week to raise money for Sport Relief 2010 with a virtual fundraising initiative called ‘Give with Bing.’

While Sport Relief drives fundraising by challenging people to do physical activities such as running a mile, we’re introducing the ‘Bing Search Mile,’ which gives people the ability to search using Bing and raise money for charity.

For every 10 searches made, Bing.com will donate 5p to Sport Relief 2010, enabling you, and your friends and family, to raise money just by searching with Bing until the end of March.

With the average mile taking about 10 minutes to run, in the same time, you can make up to 150 searches online - that’s 75p raised for a good cause per ‘search mile’. And while you’re at it, why not step it up a gear and aim to complete a ‘Search Mile’ each day or even a ‘Search Marathon’ over the 5 week campaign with your colleagues, friends and family?

How to get involved:

1. Visit GiveWithBing.com and download the Official Sport Relief Bing Counter. Once downloaded, the Sport Relief counter will count all the searches you do on Bing from that point on.

2. Now that you’re registered (and signed in), invite your friends, family, colleagues or classmates to join in the fundraising with you – GiveWithBing.com automatically generates an email explaining how it works for you to send them – the more people who search with you, the more money you raise. People can also register a school

3. Run your ‘search mile’ every day and watch how your searches turn into life-changing cash for charity, with every 10 searches equalling 5p for Sport Relief. You can check your progress by visiting your individual page (more info here).

So register on www.givewithbing.com, invite all your friends to join you, and start making a difference with Bing today!

Phillip Trelford on F# Video

Ray Booysen — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:26:00 GMT

View on ExposureRoom

For those who have the bandwidth to view the HD version or wish to view the video using an iPhone they need to browse to the following URL (HD will be shown for PC browser, iPhone version auto-detected for iPhone) http://www.RIAViewMirror.com/EdgeUG/

Microsoft UK Tech Days April 12th-16th

Gavin Osborn — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:17:00 GMT

Yesterday Microsoft announced details of a week of FREE technology events in London for developers and IT professionals.

Running from April 12th to 16th each day will focus on a different part of the Microsoft technology stack.

Developer events are to be held in Fulham and the schedule looks something like this:

Monday 12th - Launch of Visual Studio 2010
Tuesday 13th - .Net 4 and Visual Studio 2010
Wednesday 14th - The Essential MIX: ASP.Net, Silverlight, User Experience and more.
Thursday 15th - Windows 7 Development.
Friday 16th - Windows Phone 7 development - this should be GREAT!

For IT professionals the events will be held in Shepherds Bush covering the following topics:

Monday 12th - Virtualization
Tuesday 13th - Office 2010
Wednesday 14th - Windows 7 deployment.
Thursday 15th - SQL Server 2008 R2
Friday 16th - Raising the IT profile - A strategic look at how IT can drive and support the direction of the business.

There will also be many different fringe events run by community groups like the Edge user group to supplement what is also a fantastic line-up.

For more information and to register for this great FREE event visit this site.

LocalMessageSender and LocalMessageReceiver UI Requirement

Ray Booysen — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:25:16 GMT

I’ve been doing a bit of work recently around Silverlight local messaging. Something I wasn’t expecting and did get a suprise when I hit it, is that the LocalMessageSender and LocalMessageReceiver only work on the UI thread.

Seems a little bit odd since the LocalMessageSender has a SendAsync(string message) method, but I guess there is a design decision behind this. I hope this will be rectified at some point, as it would be great to have a background messaging bus running and only have to marshal the results when required.

Video: SOLID Design Principles with Ian Cooper

Gavin Osborn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:34:00 GMT

Ian Smith has kindly edited and uploaded the SOLID Design Principles talk done by Ian Cooper at our January meet.

View on ExposureRoom

As always a big thanks to Ian for all his work in recording, rendering and publishing these videos.

Sharepoint 2010 Video

Ray Booysen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:34:00 GMT

Ian Smith has kindly edited and uploaded the Sharepoint 2010 talk done by Dave McMahon at our January meet.

View on ExposureRoom

UKCommunities Twitter

Ray Booysen — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:02:44 GMT

Are you an active UK community member? Find it hard to keep up to date with all the events around the country? Have no fear, I have a solution!

We are extremely blessed in the UK to have a community that is so passionate and active. I can’t even start to count how many user groups are active and how many meetings are taking place every month. This magnitude of places to go does create a problem in how do we keep up to date of meetings taking place.

Barry Dorrans set up a twitter account for this very purpose a while back which aggregates all the RSS feeds of many user groups in the country. Now that he is off to the USA, I have taken ownership of the account and am hoping to get many more UGs signed up.

So head on over to UKCommunities on Twitter and follow away!

Mass Delete Anonymous Posts on Community Server

Ray Booysen — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:00:37 GMT

Edge UG has always fought a losing battle against spammers. So I decided to take action today and clear our database of all anonymous posts. This may feel like a little broad-sworded but our site is unique where all posts are from registered users. I thought I’d share the script I wrote (with help from Johan Barnard). Feel free to modify it to be a little smarter in terms of how it selects the posts to delete but the useful part of this script is that it does use community server’s built in SPs for post deletion.

As a side note, the hardcoded @DeletedBy is my user id which I did as this was a single use script.

DECLARE @sectionId int, @settingsId int, @postId int

DECLARE post_cursor CURSOR FOR

SELECT SectionId, SettingsId, PostID

FROM cs_Posts

WHERE PostAuthor = ''

OPEN post_cursor

FETCH NEXT FROM post_cursor

INTO @sectionId, @settingsId, @postId

WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0

BEGIN

    DECLARE @message int

    SELECT @message = @postId

    PRINT @message

exec [dbo].[cs_Post_Delete]

    @SectionId = @sectionId,

    @SettingsId = @settingsId,

    @PostID = @postId,

    @ResetStatistics = 1,

    @DeletedBy = 2102,

    @Reason = 'auto spam delete'

    FETCH NEXT FROM post_cursor

    INTO @sectionId, @settingsId, @postId

END

CLOSE post_cursor

DEALLOCATE post_cursor

DDD8 Voting is Open

Ray Booysen — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:26:29 GMT

DDD8 has finally opened voting for sessions. If you’re interested in going to DDD this year, remember that you chose what will be there on the day. I’ve submitted one session, so remember, free cookies to the attendees of my session. :)

http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/ddd8/Users/VoteForSessions.aspx

What is DDD?

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day will return in January 2010, these FREE one day events build on the success of the previous DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Days. As before it is all about developers learning, sharing and interacting with each other in an informal and relaxed atmosphere.

There will be NO Microsoft speakers presenting, just speakers from the UK .NET developer community; although we will have some of the Microsoft UK Developer Team on hand to help out and chat to attendees.

The day is put together by the community for the community, in other words you. With Microsoft UK very kindly providing the venue, logistic support and a free lunch.

Nominate Silverlight for a 2009 Crunchie

Ray Booysen — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:00:00 GMT

Microsoft Silverlight has been nominated for a 2009 Crunchie award in the category of “Best Technology Achievement” and we need to get voting!

The 2009 Crunchies Awards, are an annual competition and award ceremony that recognises the coolest tech innovations of the year. More information is over here at CrunchBase.

To vote, click this link and scroll down to locate the category of Best Technology Achievement (about one-third of the way down the page).

Nice New Year’s Present

Ray Booysen — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:00:00 GMT

I received a very cool email on the 1st from Microsoft:

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Client App Dev technical communities during the past year.

Very happy about that. :)

Silverlight DropShadowEffect and Redraw Complications

Ray Booysen — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:32:00 GMT

In Silverlight 3.0, effects were added to the API. These effects allowed a developer to easily add common UI effects to controls in a very simple way. One of these effects is the DropShadowEffect. This effect simply adds the known dropshadow effect to any control you add it to. For example:

<Grid>
  <Grid.Effect>
    <DropShadowEffect />
  </Grid.Effect>
</Grid>

This approach of simply having an attached property of the effect you desire is a very quick way of adding UI gloss to your controls. However, please be aware of issues that may come about.

In a project I was working on, with some very complex UI, had a sudden and noticeable drop-off in performance of a component. After much debugging, the culprit was traced down to an instance of a DropShadowEffect. Using the enableRedrawRegions init param, we noticed that at any point an element updated it’s contents had a parent at some level with a DropShadow effect, the entire container and all children would redraw at the time the element updated. Removing this DropShadowEffect, only the control that updated would redraw and performance would go back to the expected levels.

I’ve attached some code to the post to illustrate this problem. The code is a very simple app that on a DispatcherTimer will update the contents of two textboxes every second. Run it up with the DropShadowEffect enabled on the top-level grid and notice how that on every tick of the timer, the entire grid will redraw. Then try again, but comment out the effect. Note that this time, only the elements that change will redraw.

Effects are all rendered currently in software so even with a powerful video card, your CPU will still be doing the work of this redraw. This is something that can effect you as a control developer as higher level containers that your code will sit in, may have effects like this added. Please take care in what effects you do add and test sufficiently to satisfy your performance requirements.

File Download Link

DDD8: January 30th 2010 - A date for your diaries

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:11:00 GMT

Just a quick note to you all to remind you that Developer Developer Developer 8 is just around the corner, January 30th 2010 to be precise!

A little about the Developer Developer Developer Conferences:

"The target audience is developers and the material will focus on .NET development.

Technical Tracks - Each track will have different topics so you can choose to attend which sessions are of most interest.

Deep Technical Content - Because people who are prepared to attend on a Saturday are likely to want in-depth content most presentations will drill into specific features and technology areas.

60 Minute Sessions - Balancing the number of presentations during the day, but still encouraging new speakers to share their knowledge.

Last time we had sessions on Windows Communication Foundation, AJAX, Refactoring, Webservices and XP to name a few.

Activities will include presentations on a wide range of topics, a networking area and more."

The DDD event series are always cracking events, I'm really bumed that I wont be able to attend this year. Tickets are not available yet but be sure to keep an eye on the website for details you can also follow them on twitter!

Andrew Fryer - SQL Server 2008 R2 Slides and Resources

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:02:00 GMT

For those of you interested in the slides from Andrew Fryer's presentation on the various features of SQL Server 2008 R2 at Edge UG in November you be pleased to know that I've managed to get hold of a copy of them and they can be downloaded from here.

Whilst you are downloading the slides be sure to take a peek at Andrew's blog and even follow him on twitter!

As always we are very much appreciative of Andrew taking the time to talk to us in November - and we certainly hope this wont be the last we see of him at the Edge User Group!

Eric Nelson - SQL Azure Slides and Resources

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:55:00 GMT

Folks,

Apologies for not making these available to you sooner...

Eric Nelson has posted a link to his slides and other useful SQL Azure resources on his blog.

Remember: If you want to know what else Eric is up to these days be sure to follow his blog or better still you can stalk him on twitter!

I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank Eric for taking time out of what I know is a fairly hectic schedule to present to us at the Edge User Group. Rumour has it that if we book him in again for Easter time he'll even bring some chocolate eggs!

Wrapping up 2009: ASP.Net MVC Explored Slides and Code

Gavin Osborn — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:01:00 GMT

I'd just like to start by taking the opportunity to thank all the various people that have sat through my presentations this year. I've taken my ASP.Net MVC Explored Presentation to various parts of the country and met a lot of cool enthusiastic people everywhere I have gone.

The code and slides for my talk can be downloaded from here. All code examples are currently compiled using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 against ASP.Net 3.5 SP1 & ASP.Net MVC 2.0 Beta 1.

If you want the code for those talks that I have given using ASP.Net MVC 1.0 please feel free to e-mail me: gav@edgeug.net and I will send it to you.

Routing Questions

Quite of a few of you have asked me about the various elements of Routing in ASP.Net MVC. As I mentioned in my talk ASP.Net Routing isn't something specific to ASP.Net MVC - it was actually introduced as part of .Net 3.5 SP1, the same update that shipped Dynamic Data. I could sit down and write a nice blog post explaining Routing but why re-invent the wheel.... Luis Abreu has written a fantastic series of articles about the MVC Routing Assembly and what can be achieved/customised.

Be sure to check out parts one, two, three, four, five and six of Luis's article.

Alternative View Engines

As frequently discussed one of the common discussion points with ASP.Net MVC is the View Engine, particularly the mixture of Mark-Up and C#. The most popular alternative is the Spark View Engine - I would strongly reccomend you download the source code and check out the documentation and make up your own mind.

Coming in 2010...

With the RTM release of ASP.Net MVC 2.0 due to ship with the Visual Studio 2010 release - I'm hoping to put together a presentation in the new year on all of the whiz bang features of ASP.Net 2.0 and alternatives like the Spark View Engine.

Edge UG November Update - SQL 2008 R2

Gavin Osborn — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:16:00 GMT

Hi Folks,

Many apologies for the delay but I can now finally announce that Andrew Fryer will be the final speaker of 2009 at Edge UG.

SQL Server 2008 R2 was released as a Community Technology Preview this month. Hot off the press and fresh from his appearances at Tech-Ed '09 Andrew Fryer; also a Microsoft Evangelist; will be popping in to show us all what's new in SQL Server 2008 R2. Wether you are a developer, a DBA or a Server Admin - there is something in R2 for everyone.

For full details of the event and details on how to sign up - just follow this link.

Hope to see you all there

Edge UG: Last event of 2009 - November 18th

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:54:00 GMT

For this, the last Edge UG event of the year we bring you two great speakers.

First up: Eric Nelson joins us to discuss SQL Azure - Microsoft's Database platform on the Cloud. Want to learn some compelling reasons to put your data in the cloud? Want to know the limitations of using SQL Azure over a local SQL Server? Then this event is for you.

The second session of the evening is still to be confirmed but we are working hard to make sure it's another great presentation. We will let you know as soon as it is nailed down.

*Update*:

We can now confirm that Andrew Fryer of Microsoft DPE will be coming to present to us on SQL 2008 R2. SQL Server 2008 R2 was released as a Community Technology Preview this month. Hot off the press and fresh from his appearances at Tech-Ed '09 Andrew will be popping in to show us all what's new in SQL Server 2008 R2.

Agenda:

18:00 - 18:30 Meet and Greet/Networking

18:30 - 19:30 SQL Azure

19:30 - 20:15 Pizza!

20:15 - 21:15 SQL 2008 R2

21:15 Wrap-up!

Being the last event of the year I really hope we can make this as big an event as possible!

Internet Explorer Evangelist at Edge UG, Nov 4th

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Hey All,

As some of you already know we have an extra event this month. Giorgio Sardo will be dropping in on his way to Tech-Ed to discuss all things Internet Explorer and related technologies.

Giorgio has been to Edge UG before (when it was known as Vista Squad) and we cant wait to have him back.

Internet Explorer isn't just about the browser itself but covers other related technologies such as HTML 5 and other web standards, Microsoft Expression Web, Super Preview and gadgets such as IE8 Accelerators.

Come along on Wed 4th November at 18:00 in Microsoft's Victoria Office, to find out more about the Internet Explorer of today and it's road map going forward.

Agenda:

18:00 - 18:30 Meet and Greet/Networking

18:30 - 19:30 Session 1

19:30 - 20:15 Break!

20:15 - 21:15 Session 2

21:15 Wrap-up!

You can sign-up via the widget on our home page.

Hope to see as many of you there as possible!

Edge UG Call for Speakers 2010

Gavin Osborn — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:29:00 GMT

Hi all,

As we enter the last quarter of this year it's time to start planning for 2010. This year has been another great year of content (and we've still got more to come!) but one of the great things for me this year has been the amount of community driven content that we have had. It's always a pleasure to have those polished presentations from guys at Microsoft but it's been really encouraging to see a few of the community step up to the plate and present.

With that in mind I'd like to open the floor to you guys regarding presenting next year. If there is a subject you are passionate about and would really like to give, or perhaps you know someone who would give a great presentation then please do feel free to get in touch and we'll try to make it happen.

For all suggestions please e-mail me gav@edgeug.net and lets start planning for a great 2010!

If your unable to make it to Wembley

Scott Belton — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:49:00 GMT

If your unable to make it to Wembley for tomorrow's (6th October) UK Technical Launch. check out the following website. The Virtual Launch Event kicks off on the 29th September with a live discussion featuring top industry leaders and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer....(read more)

UK Technical Launch at Wembley Stadium

Scott Belton — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:07:00 GMT

Tomorrow (6th October) see’s Microsoft's (TechNet) UK Technical Launch to be held at Wembley Stadium. This sounds like its going to be some event, so for those lucky few that got signed up in time well done, I look forward to seeing a large IT Pro crowd, (unlike the www.edgeug.net meetings to many Developers) Sorry guy’s but we could do with a few more IT Pro’s attending. The event labelled under Microsoft's NEW efficiency? banner has quite a line up, with the launch of...(read more)

Sebastien Lambla on “When Agile Goes Bad”

Ray Booysen — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:42:00 GMT