The School of Dev 2009 Conference is coming up soon on Saturday, March 28th 2009 is going to be bigger and better than ever!  This year the School of Dev is joining efforts with the first ever SharePoint Saturday Tulsa!

Offering something for everyone! SharePoint End Users, Developers, Administrators and Architects.  Of course, the School of Dev content will continue to deliver for everyone from beginner to advanced developer!

You think you already know it all? Show up and you'll feel like you should be a contestant on "Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?".

Registration will be open soon, so keep your eye on the School of Dev 2009 site for more details.

Main Presentation
Title: A Path to Automated Testing

Description: In this session we will discuss different ways of testing applications and the benefits of having an automated suite of tests.  We'll show you how to start unit testing your applications and techniques and strategies you can use in your application and your test cases to make them both easier to maintain.

Presenter: John Teague is a Co-Founder and Principal Consultant for Next Level Technology, focusing on Agile Software development, coaching and training. He is very active in the .Net community as an organizer of the Austin .Net Users Group CodeCamp conference, Los Techies Day of Test Driven Development and presenting at several .Net user groups.

Lighting Presentation
Title: How To Build A Resume

Description: Megan is going to show how to write a technology resume in a way that is clean and easy for potential employers to read in order to put your best foot forward and be able to get an interview.  This will involve a clean, easy to read format, bullet points with active words, and an eye catching objective that caters to each job opportunity.

Presenter: Megan Coger has 4 years of experience as an IT Recruiter in Northwest Arkansas with TEKsystems, the largest IT staffing company in the nation.  She specializes in helping IT Professionals with their careers; this involves helping with career pathing, career opportunities, and coaching with resumes and interviews.

When:
5:30 PM - 5:45 PM - Welcome and News, Sign-in and Food
5:45 PM - 6:00 PM - Lighting Presentation
6:00 PM - 6:10 PM - Intermission – Presenter switch over
6:10 PM – 7:30 PM – Main Presentation
7:30 PM – 8:00 PM – Closing and Prize give-a-ways

Where:
The Jones Center
922 East Emma Avenue
Springdale, AR 72764
Room 130 (Generations)
NetMeeting URL: http://snipr.com/nwadnug
Link RSVP URL: http://snipr.com/clkm7

Come join the NWA .NET User Group on February 10 at 5:30 PM and learn about Advanced LINQ and Agile Development!

(Please be aware that the NWA .NET User Group meetings have moved to the 2nd Tuesday of the month)

Lightning Presentation

Title: Advanced LINQ

Description: Since its arrival, LINQ has proved its power to me over and over.  I find that it speeds up development and leaves behind code that is more maintainable than ever.  The goal of this presentation is to show you how even the most complicated algorithms can be left dead simple with a little LINQ to help shine some clarity.

Presenter: Rob Tennyson works for Tyson Foods in Springdale, AR where he is a Lead Programmer Analyst.  He has been programming professionally since 2001 and loves all things a good architecture astronaut would love! Sometimes he actually gets real work done too.  For more information, see http://robtennyson.us.

Main Presentation

Title: Introduction to Agile Software Development

Description: In this presentation we will learn about what Agile Software Development.  We will also take a quick look at the Manifesto for Agile Software Development which guides many of the agile practices.   Will wrap up with looking at how an agile team gathers and plans, and accomplishes the work.

Presenter: Jay Smith works for Tyson Foods, Inc. where he is a PMO Architect and Evangelist, and is a former President of the Northwest Arkansas .Net User’s Group.  Jay currently serves on the INETA Speakers Committee and works diligently with others on test bed projects to learn new concepts and designs.  You can read more about Jay on his blog http://www.jaysmith.us or follow his tweets at http://twitter.com/jaysmith.
Jay regularly presents to user groups on various topic including Design Patterns, Visual Studio 2008, Enterprise Library, WPF, and Unit Testing.  He is a registered speaker on Codezone, you can make speaker request through there or contact him directly.

Swag:

• Progamming Linq
• Programming Robotics Studio
• Introduction Silverlight 2
• Windows Vista Ultimate
• Infragistics NetAdvantage
• Infragistics Resourse DVD

When:

• Date: Feb 10th
• 5:30 PM - 5:45 PM - Welcome and News, Sign-in and Food
• 5:45 PM - 6:00 PM - Lighting Presentation
• 6:00 PM - 6:10 PM - Intermission – Presenter switch over
• 6:10 PM – 7:30 PM – Main Presentation
• 7:30 PM – 8:00 PM – Closing and Prize give-a-ways

Where:

• The Jones Center
  922 East Emma Avenue
  Springdale, AR 72764
  Room 228 (Memphis Room)
• NetMeeting URL: http://sn.im/b70ve
• Link RSVP URL: http://sn.im/b71fh

Social Networks

Join the NWA .NET User Group groups on the following social networking sites:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook

Microsoft came through with its promise to put the Release Candidate of MVC out by the end of January. They barely made their promise, but the new version is out and ready to go. You can check out Scott Guthrie's great overview of the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1. Phil Haack has posted his review of the release as well.

There was a bug that Phil discusses that was found after the release with the head section of a web page. This issue should be corrected soon.

There are some great videos and tutorial on the ASP.NET MVC website that will help you get started using the MVC project type in Visual Studio.

Here are some of the great tutorials from the MVC website:

• ASP.NET MVC Overview
• Creating a Movie Database Application
• Understanding Models, Views, and Controllers
• Understanding Controllers, Controller Actions, and Action Results
• Understanding Views, View Data, and HTML Helpers
• ASP.NET MVC Routing Overview
• Preventing JavaScript Injection Attacks
• Creating Unit Tests for ASP.NET MVC Applications
• Using ASP.NET MVC with Different Versions of IIS
• Creating Custom HTML Helpers
• Creating Model Classes with LINQ to SQL
• Displaying a Table of Database Data
• Creating Page Layouts with View Master Pages
• Passing Data to View Master Pages
• Understanding Action Filters
• Improving Performance with Output Caching
• Creating Model Classes with the Entity Framework
• Authenticating Users with Forms Authentication
• Authenticating Users with Windows Authentication
• Adding Dynamic Content to a Cached Page
• Providing Website Navigation with SiteMaps
• Understanding the ASP.NET MVC Execution Process

Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of the familiar web browser you are most comfortable using, helping you get everything you want from the web faster, easier, more privately and securely than ever before.

Faster Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favorite news sites or other online services.

• Easier Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
• More Private Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
• More Secure Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.

Download Links:

• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 32-bit Edition
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 64-bit Edition
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows XP
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Windows Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 for Windows Server 2003 SP2 64-bit Edition or Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition
• Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1 release notes

John Resig announced that jQuery 1.3 has been released. jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. The big features of this release are:

• Sizzle - A sizzlin’ hot CSS selector engine.
• Live Events - Event delegation with a jQuery twist.
• jQuery Event Overhaul - Completely rewired to simplify event handling.
• HTML Injection Rewrite - Lightning-fast HTML appending.
• Offset Rewrite - Super-quick position calculation.
• No More Browser Sniffing - Using feature detection to help jQuery last for many more years to come.
• New API Browser - a new API browser developed by Remy Sharp.
  

The full details of the release can be found in the release notes: http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3.