Events This Week – February 22nd, 2010

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

Visual Studio 2010 - UI Testing & Test Plan Management
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 1:00 PM, Online
In this WebCast will take a look at test planning and execution with the Microsoft Test and Lab Manager. You will learn how to create and manage test plans, execute tests using test runner, utilize the test impact analysis feature, and execute web and load tests. The target audience for this WebCast would be QA professionals, Development Managers, and Architects that use or are considering the use of Visual Studio 2010 Test Edition as a part of their Quality Assurance process.
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Microsoft Developer Dinner: Hands-on Natural User Interfaces: Multi-touch development with Silverlight and WPF 4
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 6:00 PM, Reston, VA
The Natural User Interface (NUI) is the next revolution of human-computer interaction. Microsoft Surface has shown the potential of multi-touch NUIs to uniquely engage users, and multi-touch tablets and displays are becoming more and more common. This talk is focused on how you can create multi-touch NUIs for these devices. You will learn the difference between manipulations and gestures, when to use each, and how to implement specific NUI design concepts with both Silverlight and the WPF 4 Touch API. The differences between the Silverlight and WPF 4 Touch APIs will be highlighted. You will hear about the roles of the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch and the Microsoft Surface Manipulations and Inertia Sample for Silverlight and how you can use them to jump-start your applications. The open-source multi-touch Bing Maps 3-D WPF control, InfoStrat.VE, will also be demonstrated. If you are interested in rich, engaging multi-touch interfaces for the web or client, then you need to attend this talk!
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DC ALT.NET 2/2010 - Getting the Right System
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 7:00 PM, Alexandria, VA
The business tells the IT department what it wants. The developers build it. The testers expect it to do something different. And neither of these turn out to be what the business had in mind. Has this ever happened to you?
IT departments have always struggled with getting clear and unambiguous requirements. Automated acceptance tests that check the system with examples make a big impact on coordinating the work of developers and testers. Unfortunately, they’re often incomprehensible code to the business people asking for the system. What if they test the wrong thing? What if the examples are wrong?
Advances in testing frameworks make it possible to express these examples in the language of the business. The person commissioning the development can look at these examples and say, "Yes, that's what I mean." The tester can automate the examples as acceptance tests without changing the way that they're expressed. The developer can check the code as it's being written and know when it meets the stated requirements.
Additionally, the automated examples form the basis for regression tests in the future. Automated scripts alone can't ensure bug-free applications, but they can provide a big step up in correctness and reliability - freeing testers to spend time looking for more elusive problems.
In this seminar, you'll learn how you can develop a specification language to bridge the gap between the business and IT. You'll see patterns of these languages that are easily automatable as tests that can be run throughout the development process - demonstrating the progress being made. You'll discover open-source tools that can help you get the right system more reliably, and ensure that it continues to stay that way as development proceeds.
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Visual Studio Tools for Architects
Thursday, February 25, 2010 10:00 AM, Online
Come learn how the new code visualization, UML, and Architectural Validation tools inside Visual Studio 2010 come together to help you understand existing code bases, model domain specific problem domains, and maintain the proper control and visibility of those software systems.
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MSDN Events Presents: Software Engineering 101 - WEBCAST
Saturday, February 27, 2010 8:00 AM, Online
This is a one-day, FREE event focused on core skills that modern developers need to have to be successful today. This isn’t about learning the basics of Silverlight or WPF, rather, this conference will help you understand how to build software that is better designed, more maintainable, and more testable.
We’ll spend the morning on fundamentals around object-oriented programming, the SOLID principles and a few other important skills.
The afternoon will focus on hands-on practice with the skills, since it isn’t enough to just watch someone talk about them. A programmers problem (think like an assignment in a CS class in college) will be given. Those that are attending the WEBCAST will participate in the same way via Live Meeting, writing the code on their laptop to solve the problems.
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Ft Lauderdale Online: Intro to Touch and Multi-Touch in WPF and Silverlight - Jason Rainwater - MVP, Consultant for Magenic
Tuesday, March 02, 2010 6:30 PM, , Online
03/02/2010 - 6:30 PM - Online / Live Meeting - Touch and Multi-Touch are quickly becoming a cool and efficient human-input interface concept. WPF 4 and Silverlight 3 have now provided some easy to use mechanisms to start building upon this. In this session we will be looking at what has been provided for us in these technologies that allow us to take advantage of this concept. We will look at code demo's that show how to do things like movement, resize and gestures. We will also see demo's on how we can think of and use some of these concepts to provide functionality outside of the obvious intent.
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MSDN Events Presents: The MSDN Mid Atlantic Roadshow
Wednesday, March 03, 2010 1:00 PM, Richmond, VA
Join your local MSDN Events team as we take a deep dive into cloud computing and the Windows Azure Platform. We’ll start with a developer-focused overview of this new platform and the cloud computing services that can be used either together or independently to build highly scalable applications. As the day unfolds, we’ll explore data storage, SQL Azure, and the basics of deployment with Windows Azure. Register today for these free, live sessions in your local area. If you register and attend this event, you will be placed in a raffle to win a chance to bring home one (1) free copy of Windows 7 – you could be the lucky winner! Register today!
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RVNUG March Meeting - Enterprise Library
Thursday, March 04, 2010 6:00 PM, Roanoike , VA
This month, Chris Hylton discusses the Enterprise Library. For those who aren't familiar, the Enterprise Library is a great way to take advantage of top-notch, best-practice code, without writing everything from scratch. Have you ever written an application with logging? How about accessing a database? The Enterprise Library has an application block that can help you! For those who have experience with the Enterprise Library, we'd love to hear from you! What works? What doesn't work? Come to the meeting and share your knowledge with the group!
[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

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You can also add your events via the Community Megaphone web service API, which is now live. You can get more information on the API, and how to sign up, at https://www.communitymegaphone.com/API.aspx. You can also email me for more information.