This meeting will be held at the Microsoft Office in Edina

Topic: "Managing the .NET Compiler"

With the public release of Project Roslyn, Microsoft has finally let .NET developers get access to their long-awaited compiler APIs. The potential impact of having a compiler API available for all developers is immense. In this session, you'll get a tour of the elements behind this new API, such as syntax trees and engines, and how you can use them in code analysis and metaprogramming techniques.

Speaker: Jason Bock

Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic (http://www.magenic.com) and a Microsoft MVP (C#). He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", and the forthcoming "Metaprogramming in .NET". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He is a leader of the Twin Cities Code Camp (http://www.twincitiescodecamp.com) and runs the Twin Cities Languages User Group (http://www.twincitieslanguagesusergroup.com). Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.

This meeting will be held at the 701 Tower conference center in downtown Minneapolis

Download the slides and code from the presentation.

Topic: jQuery for the Enterprise

jQuery is widely known for its visual effects, interactive animations, and stylish jQuery UI widgets. However, jQuery also provides a less glamorous, feature rich enterprise offering. Come join me and explore jQuery in the workplace where we will discuss validation, data templates, and the extensible plugin architecture. This is an intermediate session. Attendees should be familiar with jQuery selectors and the basics of using third-party plugins.

Speaker: Jessy Houle

Jessy Houle is a Minnesota-based independent technical consultant and Web developer with 10+ years' experience leading Web-based and data-centric applications that have contributed to the success of client companies including GMAC, Allianz, General Mills, Best Buy, and Digital Marketing.

Jessy's passion for programming was sparked by the video games he played as a kid. He started his career with C and C++ applications, moving to VB and ASP, then on to VB.Net, C#, and ASP.NET, and most recently to ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, and Silverlight. He is also a fan of open source .NET frameworks like NHibernate, S#arp Architecture and StructureMap.

Jessy continues to build on his skills and can frequently be found at local meetings like TechMasters, the Twin Cities Developers Guild, Silverlight User Group, and .NET User Group.

Topic: NuGet

NuGet is a relatively new package management tool for the .Net framework. While many of us have used it, not many of us have really looked too deeply into it. In this talk, we'll learn what NuGet is, how to use it, how to get the most out of it and finally how to build your own NuGet package.

Speaker: Vince Bullinger

Vince Bullinger has been a passionate .NET developer and consultant since 2005. He has an MCSD for .NET with C#. In his spare time, he likes to do home projects, work out, play video games and learn everything there is to know about everything.

Topic: Demystifying CQRS

CQRS is the latest architectural shiny object that's been spreading like wildfire across the blogosphre and social media. It's been touted as the next generation architecture for scalable systems and the cure for complex monolithic applications. The purpose of this talk is to get real about what CQRS is, the problem it solves, and when it's appropriate in your solutions. It may not be what you think it is. Along for the ride will be discussion about the fallacies of distributed systems so that you can properly set the stage in your system to take advantage of what CQRS has to offer.

Speaker: Joshua Ramirez

Joshua has 12 years experience in .NET Software Development and is currently a Principal Consultant at ILM. He's passionate about developing, designing, and integrating enterprise class systems through service oriented principles. Recent work has included building distributed and enterprise systems at Ally Financial (GMAC), General Mills, Lender Processing Services, and other firms across the Twin Cities.

Topic: Windows Server AppFabric Cache

Developers are also increasingly tasked with requirements to deliver highly responsive and highly scalable applications. This is true not only for middle-tier services, but also for Web, mobile, and desktop applications. As demands on applications increase (e.g., a Web site becomes popular, or other groups start consuming your shared service), expensive data access can often present serious limitations to application performance and scale. While caching is a well-established solution in the database world, it is also becoming increasingly recognized as a fundamental component in delivering high-performance Web applications and composite services. In both cases, you can use the AppFabric Caching Services to improve the performance and scalability of your data-intensive .NET applications and services. The AppFabric Caching Services provide a highly available, distributed, in-memory cache that can easily scale elastically (scale-out/scale-in) independently of your application or data tiers. With a .NET API and seamless integration with ASP.NET and PowerShell, AppFabric Caching Services ensures that you can introduce caching into your solutions with minimal code disruption and a consistent management experience.

Speaker: Rick McGuire

Rick McGuire has over 20 years of experience developing with Microsoft technologies and leading software development teams. He is currently a Sr. Application Development Manager with Microsoft. Rick is a Certified ScumMaster and Scrum Developer and is focused on finding ways to improve the ALM processes for large enterprise customers. He is very passionate about the Microsoft stack and .NET development. Rick's hobbies include recording music in his home studio, playing guitar, XBOX, Windows Phone 7 development, and building various .NET applications. The most recent development experiment is a Taco Bell finder for Windows Phone 7 that leverages the Bing Maps API.

Links from the presentation:

AppFabric Blog: 
http://windowsazurecat.com/2010/11/basics-on-how-to-setup-an-app-fabric-cache-server-and-api-usage/

AppFabric Admin Tool: 
http://mdcadmintool.codeplex.com/

Performance White Paper: 
http://www.griddynamics.com/images/files/af_cache_benchmarking_1.4.pdf

MSDN link AppFabric 1.1: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh351389.aspx

Excel Planning Document: 
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=231392

Capacity Planning MSDN: 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg186017.aspx

Topic: Windows 8: Web, Meet Windows.  Hello XAML, My Old Friend

Interested in the how to develop for Windows 8.  Focusing on Metro-style applications and WinRT, this session will provide an introduction to the Windows 8 developer platform.  Covering both XAML and HTML 5, we will look at the platform, tools and services available to Metro applications.  From “Hello World” to leveraging Sharing contracts, along with a look at the Windows Store, we will cover a lot of ground to give you a solid starting point for developing and publishing applications.

Speaker: Jeff Brand

Jeff has been with Microsoft for over 12 years, starting with the company soon after the release of Windows 95. While at Microsoft, he has been a consultant, an ecommerce specialist, and an enterprise technology advisor. Prior to Microsoft, Jeff was in the Air Force stationed at Offutt AFB in Omaha, NE where he was Chief Network Engineer (his pre-developer days) for the USSTRATCOM LAN. Today, Jeff is a .NET Developer Evangelist for Microsoft's North Central District. He lives in Minneapolis and often travel to the surrounding states of Nebraska, Iowa, and the Dakotas. In his current role, he is responsible for working with developers and customers that are evaluating or using .NET and assisting in them in understanding and using Microsoft's developer platform.

Topic: RavenDB

Speaker: Phil Klein