<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"><channel><title>Vinay Ahuja : Events</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/category/1002.aspx</link><description /><dc:language>en-US</dc:language><generator>CommunityServer 1.1 (Build: 1.1.0.51101)</generator><item><title>Tallahassee Code Camp - Session Resources</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/09/25/1402.aspx</link><pubDate>Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:27:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:1402</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/1402.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=1402</wfw:commentRss><description>I enjoyed presenting in &lt;a href="http://codecamp.tlhdotnet.net/"&gt;Tallahassee Code Camp&lt;/a&gt; last weekend on September 22nd, 2007. I presented 3 sessions on C# 3.0, Design Patterns, and Scrum.  Here are the details on the sessions and the resources.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Overview of C# 3.0&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;This session will introduce you to the various new features of C# 3.0 – Automatically implemented properties, Object and type initializers, Lambda expressions, type inference, and LINQ queries.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TLH_CC_Overview_of_CSharp_30_September_2007.zip"&gt;Presentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TLH_CC_TLHCSharp30Overview_Source_Code_September2007.zip"&gt;Source Code&lt;/a&gt; [for complete solution, last state]&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TLH_CC_September_2007_CSharp30Snippets.zip"&gt;Visual Studio Settings File for Code Snippets in Toolbox&lt;/a&gt; [Use Tools --&amp;gt; Import Export Settings to import this settings file in your environment, once import is successful you'll see the code snippets I was using in Toolbox]&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I was using Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite VPC for my demos. You can download it from &lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3B72271C-E996-4989-898D-72D684966CE6&amp;amp;displaylang=en"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Other Resources on C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vcsharp/default.aspx"&gt;Visual C# Developer Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/default.aspx"&gt;Visual Studio Developer Center&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=47&amp;amp;p=1&amp;amp;SrcDisplayLang=en&amp;amp;SrcCategoryId=&amp;amp;SrcFamilyId=3b72271c-e996-4989-898d-72d684966ce6&amp;amp;u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3d17319EB4-299C-43B8-A360-A1C2BD6A421B%26displaylang%3den"&gt;Overview of Visual Studio 2008 - A Whitepaper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/5/0/9503e33e-fde6-4aed-b5d0-ffe749822f1b/csharp%203.0%20specification.doc"&gt;Overview of C# 3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/8/8/388e7205-bc10-4226-b2a8-75351c669b09/csharp%20language%20specification.doc"&gt;C# 3.0 Unified Language Specification&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_DataList1_ctl16_Label4"&gt;Have you worked on a 
design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to that? Have you 
thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories, facades, proxies, 
decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to this session to learn 
about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant, tested, well documented, 
and reusable solution to standardized software design problem. This session will 
look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are 
divided broadly into creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll 
discuss when, why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos 
would be in C#. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TLH_CC_The_Art_of_Design_Using_Design_Patterns_September2007.zip"&gt;Presentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html"&gt;Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.msquaredweb.com/DesignPatterns/HeadFirstDesignPatternsInCSharp.zip"&gt;C# Code Examples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/HeadFirstDesignPatternsCSharpVS2005.zip"&gt;C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;You would need &lt;a href="http://www.nunit.org/"&gt;NUnit &lt;/a&gt;to run the unit tests from the project.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_DataList1_ctl16_Label4"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_DataList1_ctl17_Label1"&gt;Agile Development 
using Scrum&lt;br&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_DataList1_ctl17_Label4"&gt;Welcome to the world 
of pigs and chickens, scrum lords, stand up meetings, product backlog, burn down 
graphs, and much more. We’ll introduce you to Scrum, an agile software 
development process. I’ll be explaining my experience from a current project to 
discuss what it takes to scrumify an existing/new project. This would be an 
interactive session and audience participation would be highly encouraged. Come 
prepared to learn and share best practices in agile development.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_DataList1_ctl16_Label4"&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TLH_CC_Agile_Development_using_Scrum_September_2007.zip"&gt;Presentation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Resources on Scrum&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.controlchaos.com"&gt;http://www.controlchaos.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.implementingscrum.com"&gt;http://www.implementingscrum.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast23ScrumAndScrumResources.aspx"&gt;Scrum Podcast - HanselMinutes - Podcast #23&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Please refer to the presentation slides for more resources. I prepared a 3 page sheet on various resources. If you need a copy, please send me an email.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The attendance in all my sessions was really good - from 20-35 people.Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions. I would love to hear your feedback. Please contact me with any comments/questions. I was very pleased with how the audience responded to all my talks.&amp;nbsp; The turnout in this year's code camp was much better compared to last year. According to Steve Lane (Primary organizer along with Jose Fuentes), there were 160+ people who attended the code camp.&amp;nbsp; It was good to see Shawn Weisfeld, Joe Healy, Jeff Barnes, Russ Fustino, Wes Dumey, Bayer White, Mike Mollenhour, Keith Rowe, Kelvin McDaniel, Jacob Sanford, and John Dunagan&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;As I was presenting a session on Scrum, I decided to listen to Rob Eisenberg's and Christopher Bennage's sessions on Agile Development.&amp;nbsp; I must say those sessions were very insightful. I learnt a lot from those sessions. Those were only the sessions that I could attend, beyond presenting my own 3 sessions.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Another notable mention was Jacob Sanford's book celebration in the after party. Jacob has written an excellent book on &lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/Professional-ASP-NET-2-0-Design-Themes/dp/0470124482/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-8196645-8754527?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;qid=1190778315&amp;amp;sr=8-1"&gt;ASP.NET Design&lt;/a&gt;. Congratulations to him.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Overall it was a very well organized event. Thanks and kudos to all the organizers.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=1402" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Jacksonville Code Camp - Session Resources - The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/08/27/1214.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:40:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:1214</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/1214.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=1214</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;&lt;a href="http://codecamp07.jaxdug.com"&gt;Jacksonville Code Camp&lt;/a&gt; this past weekend was a blast. I'll be writing a detailed entry on the event itself sometime later today. In addition to being one of the primary organizers for the event, I presented one session and coordinated a "Show your coolest code" contest (more details in separate post). I presented a session titled - The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET. Similar to &lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com"&gt;Tampa Code Camp&lt;/a&gt;, I had more than 40 people in this session. Thanks to everyone who attended. I hope you enjoyed the talk. This time I played some humor clips in the beginning and end of the talk and they seemed to be received well. In essence, one of the objectives of a Code Camp is to have fun as well (people coming on Saturday to learn).&lt;br&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;Here is the abstract for the session:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;&lt;span id="dnn_ctr393_HtmlModule_lblContent" class="Normal"&gt;&lt;b&gt;The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET&lt;/b&gt; - Have
you worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard
solution to that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary
to add factories, facades, proxies, decorators, and bridges etc? Come
to this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an
elegant, tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized
software design problem. This session will look at some of the standard
Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into
creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll discuss when,
why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos would be
in C#.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;Here are the presentation slides and demo source code:&lt;br&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Resources&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/JAX_CC_The_Art_of_Design_Using_Design_Patterns_August2007.zip"&gt;Presentation
Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html"&gt;Head
First Design Patterns - Book Home Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.msquaredweb.com/DesignPatterns/HeadFirstDesignPatternsInCSharp.zip"&gt;C#
Code Examples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/HeadFirstDesignPatternsCSharpVS2005.zip"&gt;C# Code
Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;







&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;You would need &lt;a href="http://www.nunit.org/"&gt;NUnit&lt;/a&gt; to
run the unit tests from the project.&lt;br&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;Thanks once again for attending this session. Please feel free to contact me with any questions / comments. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;font face="Times New Roman" size="3"&gt;Vinay&lt;br&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=1214" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Running for President</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/25/972.aspx</link><pubDate>Wed, 25 Jul 2007 19:35:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:972</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>2</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/972.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=972</wfw:commentRss><description>Well, I am not running for president of America, for which elections will happen early next year. I am not even runing for President of India, for which the elections concluded recently. I am running for President of &lt;a href="http://www.jaxdug.com"&gt;Jacksonville Developers User Group&lt;/a&gt;. Yesterday, I had sent Dennis Bottjer, the current president of the group answer to three questions - Who am I?, What I will do as&amp;nbsp; President? and Why I would like to be the President?&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;I wanted to share those responses with everyone here. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Who am I?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Technical&lt;br&gt;I have more than 8 years of experience in designing, developing, and architecting enterprise scale applications using Microsoft Technologies. I am a passionate software developer / architect and love to venture into cutting edge technologies. I am a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Visual C#. I am a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in .NET and working towards MCTS. I did my Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science from a prestigious university in India. I graduated with M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Dallas.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Community - Technical&lt;br&gt;Currently, I serve as Secretary and Special Interest Group (SIG) Coordinator for Jacksonville Developers User Group (http://www.jaxdug.com) (Since October 2005). I was instrumental in organizing last year’s Jacksonville Code Camp. I am a strong proponent of knowledge sharing and community development. I have spoken extensively in Code Camps in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.&amp;nbsp; Last year, for few months, I was also part of INETA’s Technology Committee.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Community – Non Technical&lt;br&gt;I love working with the community and helping them. Apart from my association with JaxDUG, I have been associated with Hindu Society of Jacksonville for the last 4 years and served as Chair of Youth Committee from 2004-2006. Since, 2005 I am also the Regional Coordinator for North South Foundation. This non-profit organization organizes spelling, math, essay, geography bee and other contests for kids of Indian origin. In 2005-2006, I was associated with a local toastmasters group as Treasurer and VP of Education as well.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;What I would do as president?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;We have done really well as a user group over the past years. There are some things I would like to see more structured and execute my ideas around. These items are in no particular order. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Speakers&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Develop local speaker pool by giving them structured opportunities&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Get UG Members feedback on which speakers they would like to see and present&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Meetings&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Explore different meeting styles – Discussion based, 2 speakers in one night, Bring your own presentation, Interactive debate on technology&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Meeting reminders and communication&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Feedback on meeting, future topics&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Attendance&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Events&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Keep Code camp as an yearly event&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Organize 1 day technology focused events on a weekend. These events can be based out of the need of the community / local businesses&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Web Site&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Shows meetings and events for the next 3 months preferably&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Refinement&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Collaboration with other User Groups&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Other User groups in the area in different technologies&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; User groups in Florida&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; INETA&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Collaboration with local businesses&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Assess needs of organizations from a training perspective (brought up by Marshall Harrison)&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Get speakers on those topics&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Newsletter&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Have a weekly newsletter with all events coming up locally and in Florida&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Special Interest Groups&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Encourage and support people who want to start focused groups&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Try to get financial support&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Raffle prizes&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;UG Meetings and Events Sponsorship Structure&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Structure around how organizations can sponsor meetings&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Associated benefits and costs matrix&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;UG Organizational Structure&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Role based organization&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Advertise opportunities to get involved&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Recognize all people involved&lt;br&gt;-&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Prepare for sustainability and growth of user group&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Actually, these are the items that came to my mind while thinking about it. I would take every suggestion as an opportunity and evaluate it with an open mind along with the group. We have to do things that make our user group one of the strongest knit communities not only in Florida but all over the nation. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Why I want to be the president?&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;•&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; To serve the technical community&lt;br&gt;•&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Bring ideas and refreshing changes for growth and betterment&lt;br&gt;•&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Develop my own leadership skills&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The president is only a facilitator that guides the leadership team and the community. I certainly look forward to the support of able volunteers and advisors. By being a president, I would be the torch bearer, however it is the community and the team that will strive for excellence.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Given the opportunity to serve, I'll do my best to implement the above mentioned ideas. If you would like to support me, or have any questions or comments, please reply to this post or come to the User Group meeting tonight - July 25th, 2007. More information on &lt;a href="http://www.jaxdug.com"&gt;JaxDUG Web Site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Actually, I just noticed that Dennis has posted a blog entry regarding &lt;a href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/news/archive/2007/07/25/1823.aspx"&gt;elections&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=972" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Power Tips for Orcas IDE for C# - July 14th, 2007</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/16/958.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:44:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:958</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/958.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=958</wfw:commentRss><description>



&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;Here are the resources for my Power Tips for Visual Studio
2008 (Orcas) IDE for C# session from &lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com"&gt;Tampa Code Camp&lt;/a&gt;. I had some problems with the Orcas VPC and
could not show my Linq examples. &lt;a href="http://www.arrownuke.com"&gt;Ryan Morgan&lt;/a&gt; was very helpful and let me use
his laptop that had Orcas installed. We did lose some time in this changeover.
However, I am satisfied that I was able to show some very cool tips for Visual Studio IDE for C#. &lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TMP_CC_Power_Tips_for_Visual_Studio_Orcas_IDE_for_CSharp.zip"&gt;Presentation
Slides – Power Tips for Visual Studio Orcas IDE for C#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;span&gt;Currently, I am working on a reference sheet for all
the tips and would be posting it in few days. I’ll also be posting a list of
resources for C# IDE Tips and Tricks.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;- Vinay&lt;br&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=958" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Design Patterns - July 14th, 2007</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/16/957.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:26:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:957</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/957.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=957</wfw:commentRss><description>








&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com/"&gt;Tampa Code Camp&lt;/a&gt;
was a very well attended event. I presented couple of sessions. One of them was
on Design Patterns. I talked about some of the &lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633612/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-1695118-7476666?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;qid=1184697083&amp;amp;sr=8-1"&gt;Gang
of Four&lt;/a&gt; patterns. It was in one of the first slots in the morning. There
were about 50 people in the room, some of them standing too. Honestly, I did
not expect so many people to show up. Thanks to everyone who came to this
session. I hope you liked the session. I tried to get feedback from people who
had used Design Patterns in their projects. Thanks to those who shared their
experiences and scenarios. It’s always good to learn from others’ experiences. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;Both my sessions had logistical challenges too. I was standing in the back of the room, near the control panel and laptop. The projector was in the front. I was not able to look at the participants for more than half the time. For this talk, &lt;a href="http://www.shawnweisfeld.com"&gt;Shawn Weisfeld&lt;/a&gt; helped me with progressing my slides. Thanks Shawn. I feel the presentation went really well. This time I did not know whether there will be session evaluations, so I had printed my own session feedback forms. The dozen forms that I receieved had encouraging feedback. Many people pointed out that there was too much content. I knew that was going to happen, however it is a hard problem to deal with when you're assuming that the attendees know the basics and have just 1 hour to get through. My main objective was to create an awareness around patterns, and I think I achieved that. I did emphasize that one should not over-engineer using patterns, considering today's agile world and other reasons.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;Here are the presentation slides and demo source code:&lt;br&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;b&gt;Resources&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TMP_CC_The_Art_of_Design_Using_Design_Patterns_July2007.zip"&gt;Presentation
Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in C#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html"&gt;Head
First Design Patterns - Book Home Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.msquaredweb.com/DesignPatterns/HeadFirstDesignPatternsInCSharp.zip"&gt;C#
Code Examples&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/HeadFirstDesignPatternsCSharpVS2005.zip"&gt;C# Code
Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;







&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;You would need &lt;a href="http://www.nunit.org/"&gt;NUnit&lt;/a&gt; to
run the unit tests from the project.&lt;br&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;There were couple of questions that came up during the talk.
I’ll be posting the answers in a separate blog entry.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;- Using Composition over Inheritance&lt;br&gt;&lt;span&gt;- Singleton Design Pattern in Distributed Scenarios&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;Thanks once again for attending this session. Please feel free to contact me for any questions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;Vinay&lt;br&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=957" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Follow up to Jacksonville Developers User Group Meeting - July 11th, 2007</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/15/956.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:37:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:956</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/956.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=956</wfw:commentRss><description>


&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;It was nice to present at JAXDUG meeting on Wednesday It was
a small group that attended this meeting. We had some interesting discussion. I
talked on Design Patterns and demonstrated some of the Gang of Four Patterns
from the classic design patterns book &lt;b&gt;- &lt;/b&gt;&lt;span class="srtitle1"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633612/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/103-1695118-7476666?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;qid=1184697083&amp;amp;sr=8-1"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable
Object-Oriented Software (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;b&gt;.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;My talk was based on the code examples from the book - &lt;span class="srtitle1"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Design-Patterns/dp/0596007124/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-1695118-7476666?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;s=books&amp;amp;qid=1184697083&amp;amp;sr=8-2"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Head First Design Patterns (Head First)&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;. &lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;span&gt;This book takes a look at various design patterns in a very
lively manner with fun examples. I would strongly recommend this book. Although
the book is in Java, the fundamental principles of OOAD are the same and
explained very nicely.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;























&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;Resources&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/JAXDUG_The_Art_of_Design_Using_Design_Patterns_July2007.zip"&gt;Presentation
Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in C#&lt;/a&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.wickedlysmart.com/HeadFirst/HeadFirstDesignPatterns/HeadFirstPatternsIndex.html"&gt;Head
First Design Patterns Book Home Page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.msquaredweb.com/DesignPatterns/HeadFirstDesignPatternsInCSharp.zip"&gt;C#
Code Examples&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;The above C# code examples are
written using Visual Studio 2003 version. In my demo, I showed several class
diagrams from this code for various patterns. You can download the updated
package from the link below.&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/HeadFirstDesignPatternsCSharpVS2005.zip"&gt;C# Code Examples
with Class Diagrams in VS 2005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;The code examples solution
contains a project that has unit tests written using Nunit. You’ll need to
download &lt;a href="http://www.nunit.org/"&gt;NUnit&lt;/a&gt; for .NET 2.0.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;Thanks to everyone who attended the session. If you have any
questions, please feel free to contact me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=956" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Jacksonville Developers User Group -  July Meeting</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/08/874.aspx</link><pubDate>Sun, 08 Jul 2007 19:15:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:874</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/874.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=874</wfw:commentRss><description>
&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;This month's meeting is on July 11th. &lt;a href="http://www.devfish.net/"&gt;Joe&lt;/a&gt; was supposed to speak on Silverlight,
however he won't be able to make it. Instead, I'll be speaking on Design Patterns
in .NET.&amp;nbsp; Here are the session details:&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;The Art of
Design using Design Patterns in .NET&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;u2:p&gt;&lt;/u2:p&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;Have you
worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to
that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories,
facades, proxies, decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to
this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant,
tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design
problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF)
Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and
behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real
world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;I have
missed last few user group meetings due to travel. I am looking forward to this
one. It should be fun. See you all.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;







&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.jaxdug.com/"&gt;Jacksonville Developers User Group&lt;/a&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=874" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Speaking in Tampa Code Camp - July 14th, 2007</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2007/07/07/873.aspx</link><pubDate>Sat, 07 Jul 2007 23:30:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:873</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/873.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=873</wfw:commentRss><description>

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com/"&gt;Tampa Code Camp&lt;/a&gt;
is on Saturday, July 14th, 2007. I am presenting two sessions. Here are the
abstracts.&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;Session 1: The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;Have you
worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to
that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories,
facades, proxies, decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to
this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant,
tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design
problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF)
Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and
behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real
world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt;Session 2: Power Tips
for Visual Studio Orcas IDE for C#&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;b&gt;&lt;span&gt; &lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Visual Studio 2008 (code named
Orcas) IDE for C# introduces many new developer productivity features. This
session will introduce you to those new IDE features and some of the advanced
existing features (from Visual Studio 2005). We’ll create an end-to-end
application using new features of C# 3.0 and LINQ to demonstrate various
developer tips and tricks. This would be a demo based presentation. Although,
code examples would be in C#, most of the IDE features are applicable for
VB.NET development as well. Developers of all levels will learn something new
from this session. You’ll be able to use the tips and tricks and be more
productive in your development right away. Come prepared for an interactive
session and enjoy the double sundae (C# and Visual Studio).&lt;u1:p&gt;&lt;/u1:p&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com/"&gt;Tampa Code Camp - Main Site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;
&lt;br&gt;
&lt;a href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com/agenda.aspx"&gt;Tampa Code Camp - Agenda&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;
&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;I hope to see you all there.&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p class="MsoNormal"&gt;&lt;span&gt;Vinay&lt;br&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=873" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Follow up to Orlando .NET Users Group Meeting on .NET 3.0</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/09/22/94.aspx</link><pubDate>Sat, 23 Sep 2006 06:36:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:94</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/94.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=94</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;p&gt;I went to Orlando yesterday to present in their &lt;a href="http://www.onetug.org/"&gt;Orlando .NET User Group's&lt;/a&gt; meeting. I gave an overview of &lt;a href="http://www.netfx3.com/"&gt;.NET 3.0&lt;/a&gt; features - WCF, WF, WPF, Windows CardSpace, and System.Speech. &lt;a href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/dennisbottjer/"&gt;Dennis&lt;/a&gt; drove along with me to Orlando. The meeting was in Orlando City Hall. It was a nice facility in the middle of downtown. &lt;a href="http://www.shawnweisfeld.com"&gt;Shawn Weisfeld &lt;/a&gt;does a great job organizing Onetug meetings. Other notable people who were present in the meeting were Ken Tucker (President, &lt;a href="http://www.scdnug.org/"&gt;Space Coast Dot Net User&amp;nbsp;Group&lt;/a&gt;)&amp;nbsp;and J. T. Taylor (Secretary, Onetug).&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Shawn started the meeting with some announcements. He handed it over to me around 7:15 pm. I spoke for around 90 minutes. The turnout for meeting was good. The attendees were excited and there was good discussion and questions. Then there was raffle for the give aways. After the meeting was over&amp;nbsp;- Shawn, Ken, Dennis and I&amp;nbsp;went to IHOP for dinner. Most of the time we talked about the idea of unifying all the user groups of Florida through a single web site. All of us agreed on the features and benefits that such a portal will bring. We discussed several options to develop such a web portal. Some action to watch out for. It was around 11 pm, when Dennis and I headed back to Jacksonville. A long day came to a satisfying end couple of hours after midnight.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Anyways, the session resources can be downloaded from &lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/ONETUG_NET30_Overview_September2006.zip"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I have also included the demos in the zip file. The demos for WPF data binding and WF - State diagram based workflow are standard samples (included in the download package). You can download the complete set of samples&amp;nbsp;for .NET 3.0 Framework from &lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=EA97A39D-6812-4904-8226-85F3DA99996B&amp;amp;displaylang=en"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The WCF StockService demo had a problem with security configuration. The problem was that app.config for WCF Client (StockServiceClient) had an identity element pointing to my domain user name. As there was no domain available when I demo'd it gave a security negotiation exception. Right after the presentation, I removed the identity element from the client's app.config and it worked like a charm. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I have included the list of resources in the presentation slides. In the next couple of days, I'll post that list and some other resources in a separate blog entry. &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I hope you enjoyed the talk. Thanks to Shawn and Onetug for giving me this opportunity to present. It was a pleasure to speak. Please feel free to contact me, if you have any questions or comments.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Download Links&lt;br&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/ONETUG_NET30_Overview_September2006.zip"&gt;Presentation Slides and Demos - .NET 3.0 - Overview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=19E21845-F5E3-4387-95FF-66788825C1AF&amp;amp;displaylang=en"&gt;.NET 3.0 Framework RC 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=117ECFD3-98AD-4D67-87D2-E95A8407FA86&amp;amp;displaylang=en"&gt;Windows SDK for .NET Framework RC 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E8232F93-48F0-4E74-B09D-B51F1D4231A4&amp;amp;displaylang=en"&gt;Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation RC 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=935aabf9-d1d0-4fc9-b443-877d8ea6eab8&amp;amp;DisplayLang=en"&gt;Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" CTP - Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=94" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Follow Up to ASP.NET SIG Meeting - Introduction to Microsoft Expression Web</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/09/15/92.aspx</link><pubDate>Fri, 15 Sep 2006 14:22:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:92</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>1</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/92.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=92</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;Yesterday, I talked about &lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web&lt;/A&gt; (EW) in &lt;A href="http://www.jaxdug.com/"&gt;JAXDUG&lt;/A&gt; &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/events/archive/2006/09/10/1733.aspx"&gt;ASP.NET SIG Meeting&lt;/A&gt;. Thanks to all who attended this meeting. Most of the presentation focused on demonstrations with the tool's capabilities. Expression Web helps in creating standards based web sites. It has extensive CSS formatting options. There is style redundancy checking and renaming built in. EW comes with ASP.NET 2.0 integration.&amp;nbsp;The tool can generate several reports to check accessibility, compatibility, and CSS Usage. Finally, it is a full fledged development tool with deployment capabilities. As a bonus, you can optimize your deployed source with several options.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Comparing Microsoft Expression Suite with Dreamweaver&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;BR&gt;There were several questions and comments that came up in the session. One of the comments was that this tool definitely appears to be a strong competitor to Dreamweaver. I searched and found couple of comparison articles: &lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=43025"&gt;Microsoft's Expression Web Designer vs. Adobe's Dreamweaver - First Look: Let the rumble begin&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=602975&amp;amp;rl=1"&gt;Can Microsoft Expression Web Designer Touch Dreamweaver?&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;There were other questions also that were interesting:&lt;BR&gt;- Is EW integrated with Source Controls tools like VSS? I don't see anything in Beta 1, however I will have to check if EW team has plans to do the integration later.&lt;BR&gt;- EW combines the best of FrontPage and Visual Studio and targets the professional designers. Is there a possibility that EW designer capabilities will become part of the next version of Visual Studio (code named Orcas)? I am not sure, if the EW / Visual Studio&amp;nbsp;team is thinking on these lines.&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Resources on Expression Web&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/expression"&gt;Microsoft Expression Home&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web Home&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/demos.mspx"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web - Tours and Demos&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web Beta 1 FAQ&lt;/A&gt; &lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/wd_free_trial.aspx"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web Download &lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://blogs.msdn.com/expression"&gt;Expression Team Blog&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032306063&amp;amp;EventCategory=5&amp;amp;culture=en-US&amp;amp;CountryCode=US"&gt;Web cast - Introduction to Microsoft Expression&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.clintsteed.com/"&gt;First Look at Microsoft Expression Web by Clint Steed&lt;/A&gt;&lt;BR&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.expression.webdesigner&amp;amp;cat=&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;cr=US"&gt;Microsoft Expression Web Designer Newsgroups&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;STRONG&gt;Download&lt;BR&gt;&lt;/STRONG&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/JAXDUG_ASPSIG_IntroductionToMicrosoftExpressionWeb_September2006.zip"&gt;Introduction to Microsoft Expression Web&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Hope you enjoyed the presentation. Please feel free to contact me with your comments.&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=92" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Podcasts on Jacksonville Code Camp</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/09/05/86.aspx</link><pubDate>Wed, 06 Sep 2006 06:45:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:86</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/86.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=86</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/"&gt;Jacksonville Code Camp&lt;/A&gt; saw several fresh and innovative ideas surface. According to &lt;A href="http://www.devfish.net/"&gt;Joe Healy&lt;/A&gt;, the &lt;A href="http://www.bostondotnet.org/codecamp/default.aspx/CodeCamp/CodeCamp%20Manifesto.html"&gt;Code Camp Manifesto&lt;/A&gt; at Boston Wiki will see some changes soon.&amp;nbsp;During the code camp, &lt;A href="http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym/default.aspx"&gt;Wally McClure&lt;/A&gt; did a podcast with the code camp organization team.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;A summary of the ideas that we discussed are below:&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Highlights of Jacksonville Code Camp&lt;BR&gt;- Code Countdown - Xtreme Coders: We tried to setup similar drama and excitement as &lt;A href="http://www.thecoderoom.com/"&gt;CodeRoom.Com&lt;/A&gt;. Watch out for the video to come out soon.&lt;BR&gt;- Innovative tracks - Developing the developer, Bootcamp, Black Belt track&lt;BR&gt;- Keynote speaker - John Spence&lt;BR&gt;- Ask the expert sessions&lt;BR&gt;- Highlight Session - Show your coolest Code - 7 minutes to code fame&lt;BR&gt;- Donating used computers to a charity&lt;BR&gt;- MSDN Raffle - Charity for Red Cross&lt;BR&gt;- Media Publicity - Florida Times Union, GotDotNet&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;- Book signing by authors&lt;BR&gt;- Speaker and Volunteer Badges&lt;BR&gt;- Recognition for volunteers, sponsors, top speakers etc.&lt;BR&gt;- Ice cream - Ben and Jerry&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;O:P&gt;You can listen to the&amp;nbsp;podcast here:&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;O:P&gt;&lt;A href="http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2006/09/05/580.aspx"&gt;ASP.NET Podcast Show #70 - Memphis and Jacksonville Code Camps&lt;/A&gt;&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;O:P&gt;Wally did another podcast with &lt;A href="http://www.xmlpitstop.com/"&gt;David Silverlight&lt;/A&gt; on &lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/CodeCountdown/tabid/79/Default.aspx"&gt;Code Countdown&lt;/A&gt;. &amp;nbsp;You can listen to that podcast here:&lt;o:p&gt;&lt;/o:p&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;O:P&gt;&lt;A href="http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/blogs/asp.net_podcast/archive/2006/09/05/581.aspx"&gt;ASP.NET Podcast Show #71 - Code Countdown with David Silverlight&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/O:P&gt;&lt;/O:P&gt;&lt;/O:P&gt;&lt;/O:P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=86" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Wally is coming to Jacksonville</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/09/04/84.aspx</link><pubDate>Tue, 05 Sep 2006 02:13:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:84</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/84.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=84</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href="http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym/"&gt;Wally&lt;/A&gt; is coming to Jacksonville to speak on&amp;nbsp;&lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/events/archive/2006/09/04/1713.aspx"&gt;Atlas&lt;/A&gt; on September 6th, 2006. Wally is a very interesting and entertaining speaker. His book &lt;A href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/explorer/047178544X/2/ref=pd_lpo_ase/002-0071528-5211279?ie=UTF8"&gt;Beginning AJAX with ASP.NET&lt;/A&gt;&amp;nbsp;has come out&amp;nbsp;recently. He is also working on another "Beginning&amp;nbsp;Atlas" book.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Apart from being an INETA speaker, he runs the ASP.NET Podcast Show. I met Wally last year in October in Birmingham Code Camp. After that, he sent me one of his Wally T-shirts, but I am still too scared to wear it and lose my own identity :)&amp;nbsp;Wally&amp;nbsp;is&amp;nbsp;making up for not coming to our&amp;nbsp;&lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com"&gt;Code Camp&lt;/A&gt;&amp;nbsp;on &amp;nbsp;August 26th. &lt;A href="http://weblogs.asp.net/wallym/archive/2006/08/23/Memphis-Code-Camp.aspx"&gt;Memphis&lt;/A&gt; had their code camp the same day. Wally, being a homer, had no choice but to&amp;nbsp;be there. But he did miss the ice cream! However, he was with us &lt;EM&gt;virtually&lt;/EM&gt; and did a podcast in the morning. The podcast will come out pretty soon.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Here is the abstract&amp;nbsp;of Wally's talk for &lt;A href="http://www.jaxdug.com"&gt;Jacksonville Developers User Group&lt;/A&gt;:&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;AJAX and client side technologies are all the rage with programmers.&amp;nbsp; Microsoft is working on a set of technologies for building client side web based applications.&amp;nbsp; These applications can rival the capabilities of Windows GUI applications.&amp;nbsp; We'll look at going beyond what’s available in AJAX and see what other features the MS Atlas Framework will deliver.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Wally has couple of videos on Wrox web site as well. One of the videos was done during Atlanta Code Camp (held in May 2006). Here are the links:&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-292414.html"&gt;Atlas Update Panel&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href="http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-292013.html"&gt;Building Real World Apps with Atlas&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Wrox has several other videos &lt;A href="http://www.wrox.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-291881.html"&gt;here&lt;/A&gt;. The complete feedburner feed of videos from wrox is &lt;A href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/WroxcomVideo"&gt;here&lt;/A&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Plan to attend!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=84" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Followup to Jacksonville Code Camp</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/09/03/85.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:32:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:85</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>0</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/85.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=85</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;&lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com"&gt;Jacksonville Code Camp&lt;/A&gt; went really well. I was one of the primary organizers along with Dennis and Jaremie. I am very pleased with the results and feedback we have received. Last few days, I have been busy doing post processing activities. We'll be posting some interesting statistics on the code camp web site very soon.&amp;nbsp;For the record, this was my 8th code camp in one year. It was homecoming for me as I&amp;nbsp;first spoke in last year's Jacksonville Code Camp. Since then, I have&amp;nbsp;presented in code camps in&amp;nbsp;several&amp;nbsp;cities across Florida. I have also been to&amp;nbsp;&lt;A href="http://www.atlantacodecamp.com/"&gt;Atlanta&lt;/A&gt; and Birmingham Code Camps. It has been a really great experience. I have grown and learnt a lot just&amp;nbsp;by speaking.&amp;nbsp;By doing this marathon run, I think I have lost the fear&amp;nbsp;of speaking now, which I used to have long time back. The feedback from attendees of my sessions has been very encouraging. The constructive criticism that I have received has helped me improve my speaking skills. &amp;nbsp;I still have to work on my writing skills though - one of my resolutions&amp;nbsp;for this year.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;I presented a session on Visual Studio Power Tips and also moderated a contest session - &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/codecamp_dbottjer_vinaya/archive/2006/08/20/1689.aspx"&gt;Show your Coolest Code - 7 minutes to code fame&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Abstract of my &lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/Sessions/tabid/72/Default.aspx#WIN_VSTIPS"&gt;More Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005&lt;/A&gt; Session:&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Many of us know how to use refactoring, short cuts, comment blocks, regions, and class designer. However, do you know how to write your own code snippets? How to create project and item templates to standardize processes among team members? How to share visual studio settings and profiles? How to speed up Visual Studio? How to customize list of recent projects? How to add an assembly to standard list of assemblies? This session will cover some known and many not so well-known features to make you more productive with Visual Studio. At least half of this session will have different or enhanced tips and tricks from the previous talks done in Tallahassee and Tampa Code Camps. Come prepared for this session to supercharge your Visual Studio IDE experience! &lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;The presentation slides and source code can be downloaded from &lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/JAX_CC_Power_Tips_for_Visual_Studio_2005_August2006.zip"&gt;here&lt;/A&gt;. If you attended my sessions, please fill your evaluations at &lt;A href="http://www.codecampevals.com"&gt;CodeCampEvals.com&lt;/A&gt;. I would love to hear your feedback.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;I'll be posting another&amp;nbsp;entry on Show your coolest code - 7 minutes to code fame. We had several interesting &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/codecamp_dbottjer_vinaya/archive/2006/08/26/1705.aspx"&gt;entries&lt;/A&gt;. You can check the winners &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/codecamp_dbottjer_vinaya/archive/2006/09/02/1709.aspx"&gt;here&lt;/A&gt;.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Enjoy!&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=85" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Jacksonville Code Camp hits Florida Times Union and GotDotnet</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/08/23/69.aspx</link><pubDate>Thu, 24 Aug 2006 05:41:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:69</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>1</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/69.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=69</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;I have been silent on this blog for a while.&amp;nbsp;However I have been very active (read hyperactive but with care) with the organization of &lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/"&gt;Jacksonville Code Camp&lt;/A&gt;. &lt;A href="http://codecamp.jaxdug.com/Volunteers/tabid/74/Default.aspx"&gt;We&lt;/A&gt; have been really working hard to plan this event. We have thoroughly analyzed and planned for each and every aspect in this Code Camp.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Our primary goal has been to make the attendee experience superior.&amp;nbsp;The results are beginning to show and I am very happy with them. Margaret Thomas, a reporter for Florida Times Union, interviewed the organizational team yesterday. The result has been awesome - a story in the online edition of &lt;A href="http://www.jacksonville.com/community/cc/thomas/stories/082306/08230694756.shtml"&gt;Florida Times Union&lt;/A&gt;. Thanks Margaret. Margaret will be covering the event on Saturday,&amp;nbsp; August 26th&amp;nbsp;as well. It is quite possible that the follow up story will make it to the print edition.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Earlier today I had a surprise in store. One of my colleagues was venturing on &lt;A href="http://www.gotdotnet.com/"&gt;Gotdotnet&lt;/A&gt; forums and noticed that our code camp web site&amp;nbsp;has been mentioned as&amp;nbsp;the featured site (Thanks Robert!).&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;This is certainly an honor for us. Particularly &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/dennisbottjer/"&gt;Dennis&lt;/A&gt;, &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/bpmerkel/"&gt;Brady&lt;/A&gt; and I, who have worked on this web site for too many long hours. &lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Today has been an eventful day in the history of Jacksonville Code Camp 2006. We hit 300 registrants, had a florida times union story, and also featured on gotdotnet. Thats a &lt;A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat-trick"&gt;hat-trick &lt;/A&gt;for&amp;nbsp;me in cricket terms.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Last year Brady had posted &lt;A href="http://cs.jaxdug.com/blogs/bpmerkel/archive/2005/08/02/bpmerkel.aspx"&gt;The Top 10 reasons NOT to attend Code Camp&lt;/A&gt;. I hope those don't hold for you.&amp;nbsp;In a recent newsletter to &lt;A href="http://www.jaxdug.com"&gt;JaxDug&lt;/A&gt; mailing list&amp;nbsp;Dennis says - "I can’t think of many reasons why any self respecting Geek would want to miss this event." My view is well, if you are a geek come to&amp;nbsp;this code camp, if you're not then come to be ONE.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Come and see the unfolding of "The Code Camp" on Saturday, August 26, 2006.&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Vinay&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=69" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item><item><title>Tampa Code Camp - Session Resources</title><link>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/archive/2006/07/16/67.aspx</link><pubDate>Mon, 17 Jul 2006 06:30:00 GMT</pubDate><guid isPermaLink="false">c7b963bf-2100-42d3-a385-0e16055833c5:67</guid><dc:creator>vinay.ahuja</dc:creator><slash:comments>77</slash:comments><comments>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/comments/67.aspx</comments><wfw:commentRss>http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/blogs/vinayahuja/commentrss.aspx?PostID=67</wfw:commentRss><description>&lt;P&gt;Here are the session resources (Slides and source code) from &lt;A href="http://www.tampacodecamp.com/"&gt;Tampa Code Camp&lt;/A&gt;. &lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;I presented 3 sessions on two topics. One was a power tips session on Visual Studio. Another session was on Generics. I am extremely pleased the way sessions went. Thanks to all the people who attended. I would appreciate your comments and suggestions. Please fill the evaluations at &lt;A href="http://www.codecampevals.com"&gt;CodeCampEvals.com&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;The session materials can be downloaded from the respective links&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TMP_CC_PowerTipsforVisualStudio2005_July2006.zip"&gt;Power Tips for Visual Studio 2005&lt;/A&gt;&amp;nbsp;(Both for Part I and Part II)&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.thegenericguy.com/Presentations/TMP_CC_Real_World_Generics_July2006.zip"&gt;Real World Generics&amp;lt;.NET&amp;gt;&lt;/A&gt;&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;There were several questions and lot of discussion in both the talks. I would be posting follow up posts for each of the sessions in couple of days. &lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;If you have any questions, please feel free to email at vinay_a at [hotmail dot com].&lt;/P&gt;
&lt;P&gt;Vinay Ahuja&lt;/P&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.thegenericguy.com/cs/aggbug.aspx?PostID=67" width="1" height="1"&gt;</description></item></channel></rss>