|
|
-
The August 2008 Bloomington .NET Users Group meeting has been announced on our mailing list. You can find the details on our website. You can also go directly to the registration page.
Our August meeting will be a chance for us all to hang on and talk shop over some food and drinks. We will meet at JBuck's Restaurant and TEK Systems has graciously offered to provide some appetizers to get us started. This event will be a great time for us to talk shop, share some war stories, talk about B.NUG, and just hang out for a while. We will start around 5:30 and go until whenever.
This would be a great opportunity for you to bring a friend that hasn't been to one of our meetings and get them introduced to the group. I look forward to seeing you out there.
|
-
Britt King over at JetBrains, sent along this great blog post by James Johnson of Inland Empire .NET User's Group. The post describes their year-long incentive program that encouraged their members to become more active and also increase overall attendance. This sounds like something that may be worth trying out for the Bloomington .NET Users Group. 
|
-
Problem
I am developing a WinForm application using C# and I want to copy a file from one directory to another using System.IO.File.Copy(). I have the file's full path, including file name. I need to extract the file name out of this string. What is the easiest way to do this?
Solution
Of course, the first thing that came to mind was using regular expressions, or perhaps finding the index of the last backslash and removing all of the charcters using the string object's Remove function. However, this all seemed like too much work.
I decided to do a quick search on Google and found out from here that C# let's you simply do this:
System.IO.Path.GetFileName(filePath);
Fantasticly simple!
|
-
If you are interested at all in learning about F# and you were not at Tuesday night's meeting, you really missed out.
Aaron Erickson really knew his stuff and you could tell he is passionate about the topic. His talk was short and to the point. He wasn't trying to sell F# to us as something more than it is. Admittedly, I can't see how F# will benefit the kinds of applications I develop. But if I ever write an accounting/math program and feel the need for implicitly immutable types, I know where to go. Then again, who knows what might change between now and the expected release date of 2010.
Thanks for sharing your time and your expertise Aaron.
If you would like to learn more about F#, check out the Official F# Site.
|
-
The July Bloomington .NET Users Group meeting is scheduled for tonight, starting at 7:00 PM. Here is a summary of the event: F#: The Business Case In this session, Aaron Erickson explains why functional programming in general, and F# in particular, are becoming relevant for mainstream application development in the wake of the multi-core revolution in today's CPUs. This talk includes discussion on business cases for F# projects, how to get started using F#, and a primer over the key differences between functional programming using F# and imperative programming using more traditional object oriented languages. About the Speaker
Aaron Erickson is an author, speaker, and thought leader - an advocate for delivery of competitive advantage through the strategic use of technology. For over 15 years, Aaron has been helping companies in a diverse set of industries more effectively leverage their technology portfolio. In 2007, Aaron was awarded with a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for his contributions to the broader technical community, and currently serves the Magenic Chicago office, where he works with Magenic's Chicago client base to help them get the most from their technology investments. Register for the event here.
|
-
Title: Classic Mistakes Enumerated Author: Steve McConnell
Comments: I am currently reading through Rapid Development (by McConnell). I have had it in my library for nearly five years, but I have never gotten around to reading more than bits and pieces of it. The chapter I am reading through now is called Classic Mistakes. The chapter enumerates and describes classic software development mistakes. At the end of the chapter, McConnell suggests that you make a list of your own classic software development mistakes. See below, for the few I came up with. If I had more time, I am sure I could come up with many more.
My own classic mistake list:
- Not properly unit testing in the development environment.
- Not properly unit testing in the staging environment, prior to QA's testing.
- Squeeze in just one more “small” feature in the final build, for QA to test.
|
-
-
Title: Things You Should Never Do, Part I (aka Old Code != Bad Code)
Author: Joel Spolsky
Comments: This is an oldie, but a goodie. It is a reminder, to me, why rewriting an existing application can be both a financial and strategic mistake. Sometimes you cannot get around it, but the reasons I can think of have to do with building the applications on top of inadequate frameworks (read: Rewriting Reddit and MySpace moves to ASP.NET 2.0).
Favorite Quote:
There's a subtle reason that programmers always want to throw away the code and start over. The reason is that they think the old code is a mess. And here is the interesting observation: they are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It's harder to read code than to write it.
|
-
The April Bloomington .NET Users Group meeting is around the bend and it is going to be great! We are hosting a Microsoft Heroes {Community} Launch event. We have three speakers talking about Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 and we will be giving away 5 Heroes Happen {here} Launch Kits, which include the following: - 1 Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition
- 1 Visual Studio 2008 Standard Edition
- 1 SQL Server 2008 CTPS
- 1 voucher for SQL Server 2008 Standard redeemable when SQL Server 2008 has RTM'd and is generally available.
See more details on the BDNUG website and register here. I look forward to seeing you there.
|
-
Title: Maximizing Human Performance Author: Bruce Tognazzini Description: This is an excellent article on making your applications more efficient and giving the perception of being more efficient. Comments: This article really got me thinking about what is necessary steps in many of our applications and what are not. Several ideas came to mind on how we could improve a couple of tools to speed up the user experience. I highly recommend reading this article. Thank you Jeff Attwood for pointing out this helpful article. Further reading: Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug)
|
-
"How do you allow users of a web application tool to use tool while working off-line?" I was looking into Google Gears as a possible answer to the above question. In fact I was watching this very interesting Google Gears presentation by Aaron Boodman when a thought came to me: "Does Microsoft has something similar to Google Gears coming out?". 
Ironically enough, I googled "Microsoft's Answer to Google Gears" and found out that, indeed, it appears that Microsoft is firing back with their own off-line web application solution; the Microsoft Sync Framework. The CTP1 Refresh was released in December. Here are a list of features: - Add sync support to new and existing applications, services, and devices
- Enable collaboration and offline capabilities for any application
- Roam and share information from any data store, over any protocol, and over any network configuration
- Leverage sync capabilities exposed in Microsoft technologies to create sync ecosystems
- Extend the architecture to support custom data types including files
I will have to do some more investigation into this and get back to you with my findings. In the meantime, check out the following links for some information and the afformentioned application and you can download the latest CTP: Is this Google's answer to Google Gears? Regardless, will either one of these solutions make my life easier by giving me a way to allow my customers to work with their essential website tools off-line?
|
-
If you are not putting your database objects under source control, you should check out this article by Jeff Atwood. I have been investigating several methods and tools for database version control and I think I am going to settle on something as simple as using SQL Enterprise Manager to generate SQL scripts and store them in our existing source control tool ( Vault). In the past I have used ScriptDB4SVN, but it won't work in my current situation. If you do have your database under version control, what process and applications are you doing it with?
|
-
I invited Dave Bost to speak at our March Bloomington .NET Users Group meeting but he said he couldn't make it because that was the same day as the Launch Event (March 11th). For whatever reason, the fact that our monthly meeting is schedule on the same day as this large MS event slipped by my powers of perception. Seeing as this is the case and I can only assume that many of you will be at the all-day event in Chicago, I am canceling our March meeting.
|
-
-
If you were not at last weeks Bloomington .NET Users Group meeting, you really missed out. INETA provided Daniel Egan as our guest speaker, his topic was LINQ and he did a great job of presenting his material. Here is a summary of what else you missed: - Tasty pizza provided by TEKSystems.
- Lots of great prizes, including the following:
- Windows Office 2007 Ultimate Edition (Microsoft)
- Wireless Ergonomic Mouse and Keyboard Combo (Microsoft)
- Books (Microsoft & O'Reilly)
- ReSharper Personal License (JetBrains)
- Free subscriptions to asp.NET Pro magazine
- Networking and hanging out with a lot of great people.
A big thank you to Daniel for making the trip from sunny California to frigid (it is snowing again as I type this) Central, IL, and to our very generous sponsors who have repeatedly spoiled us with with food, prizes and more. Thank you to all of the attendees who braved the cold, inclement weather.
After reading the above, I know what you are thinking: "How can I get in on all of this action?" All you have to do is go to the BDNUG website for information on upcoming meetings and sign-up to our mailing list for the latest on local .NET developer related inforamtion.
|
|
|
|