Metro .NET User Group Meeting - Jan 11, 2007 - Toronto - -111

Topic: “O12 Server and O12 Server Development“ by Eli Robillard.

Stay tuned for event details, or check out the Metro .NET User Group Website at http://www.metrotorontoug.com/User+Group+Events/default.aspx

Bruce Johnson to Present at BitNet: Seven Steps to Sanity or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Consultants - Sep 19, 2006 - Burlington - -105

Bruce Johnson, partner and principal consultant at ObjectSharp Consulting, will be delivering a presentation at the next Business Information Technology Network (BitNet) meeting.  The topic of dicussion will be Seven Steps to Sanity or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Consultants.

Bruce will explore why every business occasionally needs outside help. From accounting to law to technology, it’s just not possible for business people to know everything about every topic. The problem is that a bad external resource can make things worse rather than being part of the solution. The challenge is to find the help that really helps.

In this session, the issues associated with using outside help will be explored, along with ways to mitigate the potential problems. The goal is to provide a framework by which the right external resource for you business can be identified and used with a minimum of trouble.

Join Bruce on September 19th, 2006, for an opportunity to network with associates and learn the value of strategic outside help.

7:30 Registration & Networking
8:00 Meeting and Guest Speaker
9:00 Networking


For more information, you may download the PDF here or visit BitNet.ca.

ObjectSharp's John Lam Interviewed by the MS Open Source Software Lab - Aug 11, 2006 - Toronto - -107

Sam Ramji of the MS Open Source Software Lab interviewed ObjectSharp’s John Lam at the LANG.NET symposium last week. The interview discusses Ruby CLR, the difficult issue of Open Source funding, and, finally, tours a demo of John’s Avalon Ruby Editor.

John is the creator of RubyCLR, a .Net to Ruby interoperability bridge, which allows developers to exploit the flexibility of dynamic methods to build higher performance solutions with Ruby.

The interview is available here at Port25: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/08/10/John-Lam-and-Sam-Ramji-discuss-RubyCLR_2C00_-Avalon-Ruby-Editor-and-Open-Source-Funding.aspx

John Lam Featured in eWeek - Aug 08, 2006 - Toronto - -106

In yet another impressive display of leadership, ObjectSharp’s John Lam received notable mention in eWeek today for his pioneering role in an emerging movement to make .NET more amenable to dynamic languages.   

John is the creator of RubyCLR, a .Net to Ruby interoperability bridge, which allows developers to exploit the flexibility of dynamic methods to build higher performance solutions with Ruby.

eWeek spoke with John at the recent Lang.Net 2006 Symposium to discuss Microsoft’s latest bid to phase in support for dynamic languages on .Net.  John, who has long been a forcible advocate for this new direction, limned of the vast performance potential that awaits developers beyond the horizons of this latest announcement.

Click here for the article.

John Lam at Tech-Edv - June 11, 2006 - Toronto - -103

John Lam, Principal Consultant and Partner with ObjectSharp Consulting, will deliver two presentations at this year’s Tech Ed.

CLR: IronPython and .NET Scripting Languages
Day/Time: Monday, June 12 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM Room: 257 AB
Session Type(s): Breakout Session


The first concerns the Common Language Runtime (CLR), specifically IronPython and .NET Scripting Languages. "IronPython" is the codename for a new implementation of the Python programming language on the .NET Framework. IronPython is fast-up to 1.8x faster than Python-2.4 on the standard pystone benchmark. It supports an interactive interpreter with fully dynamic compilation as well as static compilation to produce pre-compiled executables. It's well integrated with the rest of the framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers. This session shows how IronPython brings the power of .NET to Python and the power of Python to .NET. At OSCON 2004, the first public release of IronPython was announced. This session demonstrates the latest IronPython version in a range of situations from using GUI frameworks to driving Microsoft Office applications to working with a variety of external libraries. We also discuss other scripting languages on .NET.

Ruby and .NET
Day/Time: Tuesday, June 13 9:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Session Type(s): Birds of a Feather


The second session considers both the merits and maladies of Ruby in the .NET framework. Join John Lam and Scott Hanselman as they entertain the question "Why Ruby?" with you. Ruby is the dynamically typed language that has all the buzz this year, mostly due to the phenomenal success of the Rails web application framework. Can Ruby replicate Rails' success on the .NET platform? We'll show you what's possible using John's RubyCLR bridge, and we hope that you can show us what you've been doing with Ruby and .NET.

Toronto Visual Basic User Group: Unit Testing with VB.NET 2005 - May 24, 2006 - Toronto - -104

At the next Toronto Visual Basic User Group (TVBUG), Dave Lloyd, Principal Consultant and Partner at ObjectSharp Consulting, will cover Unit Testing with VB.Net. Whether you are using VS 2005 Team System or a previous version of Visual Studio .net. Dave will show you how to implement unit tests so you can regression test your code and make changes with confidence.

NUnit – See NUnit added to a test project and learn how to execute the Nunit GUI right from Visual Studio, Dave will show you other tools that help to integrate Nunit right into Visual Studio.

Team System – With Microsoft’s latest release of Team Foundation Server comes unit testing completely integrated into Visual Studio 2005. Dave will show you how to write, execute, and manage unit tests with Visual Studio Team System. Other related topics such as Static Code Analysis and Code Coverage will also be discussed.

Location: Auditorium, Library 2nd Floor
Date: Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Time: 7:00 to 9:30pm


For further information, please visit the TVBUG website at http://www.tvbug.com

Developers' Night in Canada - May 16, 2006 - Toronto - -102

At Developers’ Night in Canada, John Lam of ObjectSharp Consulting discussed his work on RubyCLR and support for dynamic languages in the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

For a copy of the audio, visit http://dnic.ca/blogs/dnic/archive/2006/05/16/37.aspx

The Future of Programming Languages - May 10, 2006 - Toronto - -100

John Lam of ObjectSharp Consulting recently presented his VS Live! Keynote, The Future of Programming Languages, to the Metro Toronto .NET User Group. In this fascinating and timely lecture, John discusses how the tools that we use as software developers help us create new code faster. Yet, this is not what most of us do in our jobs; what we really do is transform existing code into version N + 1. The tool vendors have taken notice and given us new tools that support automated refactoring, unit tests and code coverage analysis. But perhaps the problem isn’t our tools; perhaps the problem is our programming languages.

We are rapidly approaching a tipping point in programming languages. Looming on the horizon are dynamically-typed languages such as Python and Ruby. These languages trade straight-line performance for increased programmer productivity and happiness. When coupled with the richness of the .NET platform, you have a remarkably powerful tool for creating business applications.

For greater insight into the future of programming languages today, visit John’s blog at www.iunknown.com.

BizTalk User Group Presentation: "Advanced Large Message and Complex Transformation Handling in BizTalk" - March 28, 2006 - Toronto - -99

Click Here to Register for this Event!

Handling Large Messages in BizTalk
 
When a message is moving through the BizTalk environment, one or more BizTalk operations may process/alter the message as below:
 
Pipelines,
Maps,
MessageBox Persistence
 
When large messages (1MB to 1GB) need to be processed by BizTalk, the above operations may tax the memory and CPU resources of the machine hosting the BizTalk server and the machine hosting the BizTalk MessageBox  database. This presentation will include discussions and demonstrations on methods to more efficiently process large flat file and XML messages in BizTalk.
 

 
Extending BizTalk Transformations into Sql Server

When designing complex transformations using the BizTalk mapper, it is sometimes difficult to create a complete working map using links and functoids. Often Custom XSLT must be used in the map to carry out a portion of the transformation or the entire transformation. In addition, when large messages are used as a source message for a map, the entire message is loaded into memory (BizTalk 2004). In BizTalk 2006 this has been somewhat alleviated by buffering the messages to the file system.  This presentation will include discussions and demonstrations using Sql Server 2000/2005 to perform complex transformations and to perform transformations of large messages.

Speaker: 
Matt Meleski is an ObjectSharp Consultant who has been helping customers build BizTalk 2004/2006 Solutions over the past two years.  His Blog can be found here:
(http://objectsharp.com/Blogs/matt)

Metro .NET User Group Meeting - Using BizTalk 2006 - February 9, 2006 - Toronto, ON - -96

Using Microsoft BizTalk 2006
 
Before considering using BizTalk 2006, it is useful to understand the features that BizTalk 2006 exposes in order to properly design, plan and build an integration or Business to Business application. This presentation will include demos and discussions that highlight the powerful framework that BizTalk 2006 exposes in order to implement common messaging patterns such as Message Broker and Messaging Bus.

The new features of BizTalk 2006 will also be highlighted, and demos will include the new out of the box BizTalk Adapters such as POP3 and Windows Sharepoint Services Adapters.

To register and for event details, please go to the Metro .NET User Group website via this link.