Almost 2 years ago a few guys in the Fort Smith area decided we needed a .NET User Group here. We’ve fairly consistently had a good 20 to 30 people show up to every meeting since then. Michael Paladino has done a great job serving as FSDNUG’s president since that time… but earlier this year he moved up to the Northwest Arkansas area. As you might imagine, it’s pretty tough to be the user group president when the group you’re presiding over meets a good 45+ minute drive away. Well, he finally stepped down this month which means someone else has to take the reins.

For good or bad, I’m his replacement

I just wanted to publicly thank Michael for the hard work he’s put into FSDNUG. I’m still pretty intimidated by the responsibility, but I’m also looking forward to it.

If you haven’t attended a meeting yet, stop by some time. The meetings serve as an excellent way to supplement the training and knowledge that we as developers have to have in order to stay afloat.

If you’re already attending the meetings but you’ve got some suggestions on ways we can improve, let me know.

Thanks to all the members - I’m looking forward to starting the meetings back up in January!

Tonight, the FSDNUG group participated in their first launch event ever – for SQL Server 2008! Woo!

The gist of it was that 4 of us took about 15 to 20 minutes to talk about different portions of SQL Server. It turned out to be more intro than deep dives, but I think the group got more out of the presentation this way.

My portion of the presentation was on SQL CLR.

I think my talk went alright, but my demo definitely didn’t work. I blamed the Windows 7 beta but it probably had more to do with my lack of knowledge. *shrug* If you’re interested in trying the example out for yourself, Bashar Kokash has a good post on it. The example worked fine on my machine without any problems the first time, but during the talk, the Visual Studio deployment apparently didn’t work. Oh well.

The other code examples that I had all are linked off of the MSDN overview of SQL CLR link from above, so knock yourself out. Keith Elder’s post on creating custom SQL CLR user-defined types is also a good start.

The final two links I used were this one from SQL Skills and this one… that provided most of my information Thanks Google!

I enjoyed the chance to present again! If you have any feedback, feel free to let me know.

I promised the slides, notes and links from my Memphis .NET User Group talk, so here they are… and wow, they haven’t really changed much from when I gave the PowerShell talk to the FSDNUG group. So, I’ll just link to the zip of the presentation from that talk.

The primary slide that I added to my presentation was entirely related to a StackOverflow question entitled, “how do you use PowerShell.”

I felt that the talk went fairly well, but I did have to rush towards the end because I added an overview of some real scripts that I use, but I didn’t remove enough of my prior content… thus, the rush.   No big deal, though. I did get the feeling that there were a few people who didn’t really feel that PowerShell applied to them, but hey, that’s fine. At least there weren’t any tomatoes!

I’ll be presenting one more time (as far as I know) this year at Harding University. I’m looking forward to it, too. I’ll be presenting for the Computing Seminar on October 9. The last time I spoke before Seminar was in 2003 when I talked about “Smart Client Software.” That was when it was for college credit! I’m planning on changing the talk up a little to direct it more towards CS students instead of professional developers. I imagine it will be a slightly different audience than the typical .NET User Group, too. We’ll see.

Back on the MNUG talk, thanks to Randy for driving and thanks to Colin for inviting me to speak. It was fun!

Colin is risking it I say. How is he risking it you might ask? By asking me to speak to the Memphis .NET User Group!

I think he’s crazy, but whatever.

Randy Walker and I will be traveling to Memphis, TN tomorrow night where I’ll be presenting on PowerShell. Randy is coming out to meet with the founding members of the Northeast Arkansas .NET User Group, which is very cool. Regarding my presentation, it will likely be a similar presentation to what I gave to the FSDNUG group, but I’m hoping to have more script examples. I think I gave the Fort Smith group a good picture of PowerShell, but I don’t think I showed them nearly as many practical uses of PowerShell as I would have liked. I’ve got a folder of scripts now, some that I’ve written for myself and a few that we’re using at work, that I’ll be showing and walking through during the presentation.

If you’re in the area, come on out!

Tonight, I presented on PowerShell to the Fort Smith .NET User Group. It was my first presentation/speech since college! Fortunately, it seems to have gone over well and I think I helped drive some interest in PowerShell. Here are my slides and other relevant links for any of those who attended.

PowerShell Homepage and Download

PowerShell Blog

PowerShell Community Extensions

PowerTab

Start-Demo script that I used to automate some of the demos

Many thanks to Chris Green for allowing me to use some of the content from the presentation that he shared at Tech Ed 2007 Australia. Thanks also to Ben Pearce for his great PowerShell cheat sheet. Final thanks to Michael Paladino for helping me with a run-through of my presentation ahead of time.

I've zipped up my PowerPoint presentation along with my demo.txt (to go along with the Start-Demo script), the source for my PipelineDemo program, and my custom ps1xml file. You can get the zip with the presentation contents here. The PowerPoint presentation has a lot of relevant links that I didn't explicitly post here.

I hope everyone enjoyed the talk! I enjoyed giving it!

Let me know if you have any comments on ways that I could improve.

I didn’t expect to add a Speaking category to my blog just yet, but… well, here it is, my premiere Speaking post.

I’ll be presenting on PowerShell to the Fort Smith .NET User Group next Monday. The talk will be an introduction level talk, but I plan on covering quite a bit if time allows. My primary focus (goal) will be on how PowerShell can make us as developers be more productive, whether that is from script automation or just learning to more efficient by using our keyboards more.

If you’re in the area, drop by! You can even heckle me if you want!

I’m planning on posting the slides and examples after the presentation.

Just a reminder to anyone in the Fort Smith area - we'll be meeting next Monday night at 6:00 to hear Chris Koenig talk about Silverlight. Chris is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist located out of Dallas. I got to meet Chris last year for a grand total of about 5 minutes when I went down for the .NET Roadshow that was hosted at Microsoft's office in Dallas. Chris got to escort me and the others between floors on the elevator

Anyway, if you're in the area, swing by. We'd love to see you. For more information, check out the FSDNUG website.

Last night kicked out the Fort Smith .NET User Group's first meeting. It went great! I would guess that we had at least 20 or 30 people show up.

Raymond Lewallen spoke to us about Behavior Driven Design (BDD). I thought I'd share links to a few of the resources that he brought up last night.

• Dan North - He came up with the BDD idea
  • Also check out this blog post for more detail regarding BDD
• specunit-net - A set of extensions to strive for more behavioral tests (specifications) based on SpecUnit for Ruby
• NUnit - The testing framework Raymond used
  • MbUnit - I actually use MbUnit for most of my tests, but NUnit is fine.
• Castle Windsor - The IoC container that Raymond mentioned.
• Here are a few other IoC/DI containers available for .NET development
• StructureMap - From Jeremy Miller
• Unity - The Microsoft offering
• Rhino.Mocks - A mocking framework by Oren Eini.
• Automocking Container - An IoC container that takes advantage of Rhino.Mocks for mocking out dependencies.
• General BDD resources
  • Behavior-Driven.org
  • The Wikipedia entry on BDD

All in all, a great presentation. Considering the breadth of information that BDD covers, I think Raymond did a great job. I hope that FSDNUG can continue to bring topics like this to the area.

Last week, a small group of us traveled up to hear Jean-Paul Boodhoo present to the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group. JP presented on advanced uses of generics in .NET (i.e. more than just strongly typed collections) though we also had a great look at Test Driven Development as well as some of the new features in C# 3.0.

The presentation was great and it got me really excited about user groups in general, which is why I'm also excited to announce that Fort Smith will be getting its own user group! Many thanks to Michael Paladino for doing a lot of the work in getting this started. FSDNUG went live last week. I'm hoping to add a feed to the site at some point so that news can easily be pushed out without continually checking the site, but for now, it is just static HTML.

Raymond Lewallen will be kicking off the group with a presentation on Behavior Driven Development. I've read about BDD and am attempting to practice TDD, so I'm excited to hear Raymond's talk. If you live in the area, be sure to come out for the meeting!