PDC Birds-of-a-Feather

We are pleased to announce that Wiley as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. Wiley will be donating books for door prizes at the event.

Founded in 1807, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. has been a valued source of information and understanding for more than 200 years, helping people around the world meet their needs and fulfill their aspirations.  Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 400 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace.

There core businesses publish scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly journals, encyclopedias, books, and online products and services; professional/trade books, subscription products, training materials, and online applications and Web sites; and educational materials for undergraduate and graduate students and lifelong learners.  Wiley’s global headquarters are located in Hoboken, New Jersey, with operations in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Canada, and Australia.  The Company’s Web site can be accessed at http://www.wiley.com.  The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbols JWa and JWb.

Announcing another timely and exciting BOF discussion for PDC09. Make plans to join the conversation! And don’t forget to checkout the roll-up of all BOF sessions that we’ve announced to date.

Behavior-Driven Development vs. Test-Driven Development: What’s What?

Automated testing is a hot item these days and Microsoft is jumping on board with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio 2010. Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven Development both try to significantly improve the quality of both the design and the product-under-development itself. What is TDD and how do you start? What does BDD add and when should you use them? What are best practices and common pitfalls? Join this session and share your experiences to give others a jumpstart.

Host: Dennis Doomen

BOF @Lunch: Fear and Loathing in IT Security

We are pleased to announce the third in our series of special lunchtime BOF sessions.

Thursday, 11/19 Lunchtime

Wherever we look we find security threats that are made out to be the end of the world as we know it. The problem is that there is a lot of wolf-crying going on in this space.

• Is this part of your job description or responsibilities?
• How do you assess what threats are real?

• How have security threats, real and hyped, affected the way you do your job?

Come join this discussion and let us know how you spot an overblown issue or an underappreciated threat and what you do about it.

Co-hosts: Patrick Hynds www.patrickhynds.com
Duane Laflotte, Critical Sites
Chris Bowen blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.

We are pleased to announce that Syncfusion as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. Syncfusion will be donating software for door prizes at the event.

Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive suite of all Syncfusion’s Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, Business Intelligence, ASP.NET MVC, and BackOffice components. Add sophisticated grid, grouping, charting, diagramming, Excel reporting, enhanced editing, and many more user-interface capabilities to your .NET applications. Essential Studio Enterprise includes Syncfusion Essential Tools, Essential Grid, Essential XlsIO, Essential PDF, Essential Schedule and much more. Dynamic and feature-rich, Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise has everything developers need to create enterprise-class applications.

We are pleased to announce Pearson Education User Group Program as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm.

The User Group Program will be donating a 10-product library as a door prize at the event, including: Essential Silverlight 3, WPF Control Development Unleashed: Building Advanced User Experiences, Programming .NET Compact Framework 3.5, ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed, Professional Excel Development, The Nomadic Developer, Effective REST Services via .NET: For .NET Framework 3.5, Essential LINQ, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007, and C# 2008 Fundamentals I and II.

Pearson Education is home to such renowned technology publishing and information portal brands as Informit.com, Addison-Wesley Professional, Cisco Press, Exam Cram, IBM Press, Prentice Hall Professional, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing. Visit Booth #1016 to see the latest releases for Developers and pick-up a free Silverlight 4 poster (while supplies last).

We are pleased to announce that Infragistics as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. Infragistics will be donating software for door prizes at the event.

Also check out Jason Beres, Director of Product Management for Infragistics, BOF Session on Developers on Better Design, User Experience and Why It Matters

Four Platforms. One Package. Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET controls empower Visual Studio 2005/2008 developers to build and style richly compelling user experiences, data visualizations and line of business application user interfaces on every platform WPF, Windows Forms, ASP.NET and Silverlight.

We are pleased to announce that O’Reilly as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. O’Reilly will be donating an assortment of .NET Books for door prizes at the event.

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, research, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly has been a chronicler and catalyst of leading-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and galvanizing their adoption by amplifying “faint signals” from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

The PDC BOF team is pleased to announce another Birds-of-a-Feather session.

Developers on Better Design, User Experience and Why It Matters

What is the return-on-investment of building better User Experiences (UX)?
How does User Interface (UI) design affect your business?

Come join the discussion on why User Experience matters and how it applies to the real world.

In the current world of web 2.0 and with talk of design being important, help us understand why it matters to you and what we get out of good User Interface design. Let’s talk about the technologies on the web and on the desktop that do and don’t support the development of well designed applications, and how we can apply better practices to our own projects. Equally important, let’s discuss how we can bridge the typical gap in cross discipline team dynamics.

Tell us about your secret sauce or just listen to what others have to say. From great enabling technologies like Silverlight or WPF to tried and true web development in ASP.NET using MVC, everyone has a story to tell about UI and design in the Microsoft world.

Co-Hosts: David Kelley (Seattle, WA), HackingSilverlight.blogspot.com
and Jason Beres (East Windsor, NJ) http://blogs.infragistics.com/blogs/jason_beres/

For more sessions, go to the latest list of BOF sessions for PDC09.

The Birds-of-a-Feather team announces another great BOF session for PDC09. Here’s a topic that is relevant to just about every software developer and architect: strategies for errors and exceptions.

Exception Management – Handling and Reporting Exceptions Effectively

There are many ways to handle exceptions in .NET. What do you do to ensure that exception information is not lost? How do you report exceptions to your end-user and to your system administrator? This BOF will explore various techniques for good exception management such as publishing exceptions and data-driven methods of reporting errors to end-users and administrators. Come share your techniques or challenges in this engaging discussion on exception management.

Host: Paul Sheriff (Tustin, CA), www.pdsa.com

Here is a list of all the BOF sessions that have been selected to date, and you still have time to propose a BOF discussion of your own.

We are pleased to announce GrapeCity as a sponsor for the INETA BOF Community Roundtable on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. GrapeCity will be donating a HDTV as the grand door prize at the event.

GrapeCity makers of FarPoint Spread and Data Dynamics ActiveReports is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, an international award-winning software firm and the world’s largest component vendor with headquarters in Japan and U.S. headquarters in Kirkland, WA, employing more than 850 worldwide. GrapeCity’s mission is to turn new ideas for software into marketable products and business solutions. For over 25 years, the company has provided enterprises around the world with state-of-the-art software tools, solutions, and services to help accomplish this goal.