Archive for the 'ILM User Group Initiatives' Category

Ping Pong Pairing October Event

Published
by
nick.nystrom
on October 2, 2008
in ILM User Group Initiatives
. 1 Comment

The October event for the Minneapolis/St. Paul .NET User Group was on Ping Pong Pair Programming, the combination of test-driven and pair-programming techniques in which one developer writes a unit test, a second developer writes application code to pass the test, and then they switch places.

I will be updating this post with the code written during the event, my short slide presentation, and possibly some other media.

Thanks again for attending my presentation, I hope you had a lot of fun. Please leave me any feedback on the event here, especially if you did or did not like the deviation from the standard lecture format of the group.

Presentation and Code

Volunteers needed for the new website

Published
by
farhan.muhammad
on July 28, 2008
in ILM User Group Initiatives
. 4 Comments

Ok, Ok, I know. The web sites for both user groups look hidous, so last century. Actually, if the internet was invented in the 16th century then that is how those websites would have looked like. :-)

So, it is time for you to stop complaining and start contributing. :-) We have setup a subversion source control at ilm (hush, don’t tell anyone at Microsoft, and yes we do have Team System practice at ilm and do use TFS for internal source control). However, we feel that Subversion is a better tool of choice for open source and community based development, because its free!!!

I would like to kick start the project ASAP. Help us by spending a few extra hours a week. I will buy you a nice dinner at the completion of the project. My way of saying thanks :-) You can volunteer by writing comment to this blog entry and explaining a little bit about your .NET and ASP.NET expertise.

Seeking speakers for the .NET and the SilverLight User Groups

Published
by
farhan.muhammad
on July 25, 2008
in ILM User Group Initiatives
. 3 Comments

This has been yet another exciting year for the developers community initiatives at ILM. The .NET User Group has held successful events this year on ASP.NET MVC, Identity Federation, Share Point CMS, Model based Testing, and WCF/WF working together. The SilverLight user group held its first three events attracting over 100 attendees for the first two events and around 45 for the third event. The first two events were focused on broad topics, whereas, the third event was focused on a specialty topic of search engine optimization.

I am now working to finalizing the speakers and sessions for the next few events. I am reaching out to all technology enthusiasts like you in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area, with the hope that you would be willing to contribute to these user groups by speaking at one of the upcoming events.

The sessions are generally 1 to 1.5 hours long and are usually given to a large audience in a seminar setting. I am very open to alternative ideas, however.

The .NET user group focuses on everything .NET and targets mid-level to expert level audience.

The SilverLight user group focuses on both developers and designers. I will be thrilled to see a few upcoming events on the designer focused topics. So, if you have something cool to show about your expertise with SilverLight, WPF, Expressions, or XAML I will be happy to talk to you about it.

If you are interested in speaking at either user group, please write a comment to this blog entry and specify the user group, the topic, and the approximate date that works for you. The .NET user group meets every first Thursday of the month from 5-7pm and the SilverLight user group meets every third Tuesday of the month from 12-2pm. You can visit both of the user groups at http://www.ilmservice.com/twincitiesnet and http://www.ilmservice.com/silverlight respectively.

Announcing Ask the Expert (ATE) sessions for the Twin Cities .NET User Group

Published
by
farhan.muhammad
on July 22, 2008
in ILM User Group Initiatives
. 6 Comments

I am very happy to announce the introduction of the Ask the Expert (ATE) sessions for the Twin Cities .NET User Group. I have been seeking for a while to diversify the user group’s format to be more than just speaker driven presentations, and this format came highly recommended by many members, friends, and co-workers.

This blog entry is intended to solicit questions that you would like to ask an expert. There are no strict guidelines. You can feel free to ask a technical questions regarding any area of the .NET framework, languages, developer tools, or just about anything that can make you a better developer.

You can enter your questions by simply writing a comment to this blog entry. The more questions you ask, the more succesful the user group events will become. I will continously scan your questions and seek experts in the Twin Cities area, who would be willing to visit the user group events, and answer these questions.

I am also dedicating the first 20-30 minutes of all future user group events to conducting the ATE sessions. There will undoubtly be some sessions where we will only get to answer a couple of questions, and then there will be sessions where we will be able to answer a lot more.

These sessions are your opportunity to engage the experts and enhance your skills.

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States