"Hi, I'm a Mac....and a PC too."
Ok, you've decided to make your next laptop a MacBook Pro, but how do you keep your day job? How do you right-click? Should you run Windows virtualized or dual boot Vista with Bootcamp? Where did the eject button go on the DVD-ROM? How do you do cross platform testing with Silverlight? And where is the best place to buy black turtlenecks? What's the deal with Office on a Mac? All will be revealed by a PC nerd turned Mac hipster.
Don't miss this DevTeach Session by Barry Gervin, a Principal Consultant with ObjectSharp Consulting. Barry, a technical leader with over 15 years experience, has helped many development teams architect and build large-scale mission critical applications.
Barry is skilled in the Architecture and Development of Distributed Applications and Databases. Some of his notable recent work is aimed at establishing best practices for .NET development. He has been deeply involved with Microsoft's .NET platform and is a convert from the PowerBuilder development community.
In addition to consulting, Barry has been a Software Development Instructor for over 10 years and currently holds a MS Certified Trainer designation in addition to .NET MS Certified Solution Developer and MS Solution Framework Practitioner designations.
Like the universe, the .NET Framework is vast and is growing larger every day. A challenge that we, as developers, face every day is finding information about what is available in the framework and how to use it effectively. This session will discuss techniques you can use to get this information in the minimum amount of time and ensure the information you get is of the highest quality possible.
Don't miss this DevTeach session by Rob Windsor, Senior Consultant with ObjectSharp Consulting in Toronto, Canada. Rob focuses on the architecture, design and development of custom business applications using leading edge Microsoft technologies. In addition Rob is also a top rated instructor for Learning Tree International where he teaches many of the courses in the .NET curriculum. Rob is President of the Toronto Visual Basic User Group (TVBUG) and, as a member of the MSDN Canada Speakers Bureau, is a regular speaker at User Group meetings in the Toronto area and across Canada. Rob has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his involvement in the developer community.
From May 14-18, Developers, DBA's and the ITPro community will meet in Montreal for DevTeach and SQLTeach.
ObjectSharp's own Barry Gervin and Rob Windsor are among the distinguished presenters. Both events will be held at the Marriott Chateau Champlain. Check out this link for more info and to register.
And don't forget to use ObjectSharp's rebate code which will save you 50$ off your registration! The Rebate Code is: TO000OBJSHARP
The Extending the ObjectDataSource talk is taken onto the road. This time, it's to the Calgary Code Camp. For more details or to register, check out http://calgarycodecamp.com
Back by popular demand, Bruce will be giving an expanded version of the Extending the ObjectDataSource talk from the Toronto Code Camp. This means there will be a more detailed look at the intricacies of the ObjectDataSource, with an eye towards extending it to support entity or business classes. For more details, check out the Toronto Visual Basic User Group web site at
http://www.tvbug.com/
The Toronto Code Camp will be returning on March 31, 2007. Mark your calendars now. As usual, it will be a full day event beginning at 8:00am. Once again, Manulife Financial has generously offerred to host the event at their facilities at 200 Bloor Street East in Toronto. Please visit http://www.torontocodecamp.net/ to register. Space will fill up fast.
Quality Assurance is often seen as the job of the "Testers", performed when the development is complete. The reality is that you can't easily add quality to software. Discovering issues after initial development can be costly and risky. How can tools and processes help us discover and resolve issues sooner, during design and development? Can we do this cost-effectively? Is this the job of agile test-driven development or a traditional quality assurance discipline?
This presentation will include demos and discussions of the newly released Windows WorkFlow Foundation component of .NET 3.0. Business workflows and how they can be designed and implemented using the WF framework will be discussed and demoed. Discussions will also include how Windows Workflow Foundation together with BizTalk Server can be used
to build a workflow/integration solution.
Check out the Metro .NET User Group website for more info and to register: http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/default.aspx
Matt Meleski is a .Net Consultant and instructor at ObjectSharp Consulting in Toronto who specializes in application integration. Matt is also a BizTalk Server MVP. His blog can be found here: (http://objectsharp.com/cs/blogs/matt/).
ObjectSharp Partner Dave Lloyd has written a VSTS Time Entry utility for use on projects that use Team Foundation Server. This system tray application will allow a team member to update a Task Work items Completed Work field automatically by just selecting the work item and hitting Start and Stop. This is a prototype and should be considered version 1.0 of an ever growing tool. If you are interested in getting the code, go to Dave’s Blog or 
Don't miss this event on Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) and Transactions.
By now, many of you know that Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) is the next phase in the ‘servicification’ of the .NET platform. Through WCF, it is possible to build secure and reliable connected system, something which has been a challenge to this point. However, there is an aspect of WCF which allows connected systems to easily progress beyond what was available in the past – transactions. While transactions have been used by developers at the database level for years, they have not been readily available to the developers of distributed applications. And this is something that WCF has changed. In this session, Bruce will look at the problems that developers have had working with transactions in Web services and, most importantly, how WCF can be used to solve this often overlooked problem.
For further information, please visit the Metro Toronto .NET User Group website at http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/378.aspx
Location: 200 Bloor Street East Toronto (Manulife Financial), Toronto - International A