Design Patterns provide common templates for solving the same family of problems in a similar way. They also provide a higher-level language for software developers to use to describe approaches they might choose when designing a component of an application. In this session, you'll learn about several of the most common, and useful, design patterns used by Microsoft developers today.

Steve Smith is currently a Senior Architect with The Code Project and CTO of Lake Quincy Media, which he co-founded in 2005.  He also founded and continues to run ASPAlliance.com, a popular resource for Microsoft programmers.  He is a Microsoft Regional Director, an ASP.NET MVP (profile), an INETA Speaker, and an ASPInsider.  He's written or contributed to several books on ASP.NET and related topics and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as DevConnections and TechEd.  Steve also founded and organizes the Hudson Software Craftsmanship group in Hudson, Ohio, where he and his wife Michelle also own office space and she manages their agile consulting company, NimblePros.com.
 
Steve is a US Army veteran who served in Iraq as a combat engineer platoon leader tasked with finding and destroying unexploded ordnance and clearing IEDs.  He received his honorable discharge as an army Captain in 2005 and is now happy to be 100% a civilian.
 
Steve lives in Ohio with his wife and business partner Michelle, their daughter Ilyana, and son Nikita.  When he's not trying to keep up with his business or technology, Steve enjoys games, bicycling, and karate.

This talk is a quick walk through core features of the .NET framework exploring overlooked features in the context of how they improve your code. You’ll see generic base classes to avoid semi-redundant code, static fields in generic classes and overloading rules. The history of encapsulating code (or more correctly safe pointers to code) through delegates, anonymous methods and lambdas clarifies the impact closures on local variables and opens up more functional approaches to writing code. Closures are critical to effectively using LINQ. After a quick review of familiar selection and filtering syntax, the talk dives into powerful set manipulation tools, data transformations, improved XML techniques and LINQ-friendly extension methods. .NET 4.0 is the most recent version of the .NET framework and introduced code contracts to improve reliability of code, tuples can simplify complex lists and arrays and covariance/contravariance to remove specific limitations when working with generics. You’ll also see how to use dynamic variables to simplify accessing external libraries, along with ways dynamic might surprise you. The talk will close with a quick introduction to MEF to clarify its intent and use.

Kathleen Dollard is .NET Coach for Crystal MEF Lab. She has been a Microsoft MVP since 1998 and has given hundreds of speeches around the world. She has worked extensively with compositional architectures in relation to specific development platforms. Her experience includes HTML5/Javascript, Silverlight, and WPF in both C# and Visual Basic. She’s interested in making core .NET technologies available to all coders to enable them to write better software faster. Her newest adventures include Windows Azure and SQL Azure. Kathleen is also a long-time advocate of generative techniques and is the author of Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (from Apress). She has published numerous articles on a range of .NET technologies. Kathleen is active in the Northern Colorado .NET SIG, the Denver Visual Studio User Group, and the Northern Colorado Architect's Group.

Michael Feathers defines Legacy Code as any code that doesn't have automated tests, and you agree that automated tests are an important facet of successful software development. Then it happens - you get your next assignment, and it's your worst nightmare! You have to maintain and enhance a large application that has no tests in place, and there are parts that are just plain scary. Where do you start? Traditional Test Driven Development techniques don't typically work, since they focus on an inside-out development paradigm.
I will show you the patterns and practices that will help you turn the scary big ball of mud into a tested code base.

An international speaker, Microsoft MVP, MCSD, CSM, and CSP, and a passionate member of the developer community, Phil Japikse has been working with .Net since the first betas, developing software for over 20 years, and heavily involved in the agile community since 2005. Phil works as the Agile Practices Evangelist for Telerik's Agile Project Management Division (http://www.telerik.com/teampulse), serves as the Lead Director for the Cincinnati .Net User’s Group and the Cincinnati Software Architect Group, and is the host of the Zero To Agile podcast (www.telerik.com/zerotoagile). Phil also founded Agile Conferences, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to advancing agile in all aspects of software development. Phil also serves as Cub Master for his sons’ Cub Scout Pack, volunteers for the National Ski Patrol, and is a recently retired Firefighter/Paramedic. You can follow Phil on twitter via www.twitter.com/skimedic and read his blog at www.skimedic.com/blog.

While PowerShell is great for automating IT tasks, developers have been quick to dismiss it as just another scripting language. In the first half of this talk, we look at the basic building blocks of PowerShell and syntax of the scripting language itself. In the second half of this talk, you will learn how you can use your developer skills to extend PowerShell for your business needs. You will see how to work with existing business logic and how to take existing .NET libraries and make their functionality accessible as cmdlets.

Sarah Dutkiewicz is known for troubleshooting problems in various Microsoft-based realms - including ASP.NET, Silverlight apps, WPF apps, SQL Server configuration and administration, and general IT administration via PowerShell. From tech support to IT to software development, Sarah can apply her love for technology in various arenas.

You can find Sarah primarily attending, speaking at, and organizing various user groups and developer events.

She maintains a technical blog at http://www.codinggeekette.com and runs a technology-agnostic community site for the Cleveland, OH area at http://www.clevelandtechevents.com.

Sarah is the owner of Cleveland Tech Consulting, LLC.

The purpose of this session is to demystify the central ideas behind pattern recognition and machine learning by demonstrating two key elements of the same: namely classification and clustering. Most developers shy away from such algorithms simply because of their perceived difficulty while missing the inherent simplicity of these approaches. The first part of the session will demonstrate how a computer can learn from labeled examples in order to predict appropriate labels for future examples. The second portion will deal with learning the structure of data without having to know anything about it a priori.

Seth Juarez has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science where his field of research was Artificial Intelligence specifically in the realm of Machine Learning. He is a Technical Evangelist for DevExpress where he specializes in data analysis and shaping in conjunction with their reporting toolset. When he is not working in that area, he devotes his time to an open source Machine Learning Library specifically for .NET that is intended to simplify the use of popular supervised and unsupervised learning models.

Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group (GANG) would like to invite you to DevLunch at TGI Friday’s. (2nd Wednesday of each month). Come meet up with other Developers in the area to socialize and network over lunch.

There will also be a raffle which involves:

* TGIF Gift Cards (courtesy of New World Systems)
* Software
* Shirts

Please do tell your co-workers and friends. You can also tweet using the #DevLunch hash tag.

We look forward to see you there!

Just to get an idea of how many people are coming, please RSVP on this LinkedIn Event or send an email to Gerhard Weiss (secretary@migang.org). Feel free to still come if you do not RSVP, doing so will just help out on knowing how many tables to get.

p.s. The November 9th DevLunch had a nice turn our of 14 people attending.

Date: December 14th (2nd Wednesday of each month)
Time: 12:00pm-1:00pm
Place: TGI Friday’s (SE Corner of I-75 and Big Beaver Rd)
Location: 591 W Big Beaver Rd, Troy MI 48084
Phone: (248) 524-9489

If you are developer building web applications and web apis on the Microsoft platform, this talk is for you. First we’ll take a look at the new Microsoft Web Apis, a lightweight solution for building RESTful / HTTP services that can talk to a broad range of clients including native and browser-based applications on mobile devices or the desktop. Then we’ll jump over to some exciting work we’re doing to enable developers to build web applications and web apis on Windows with node.js. If you are not familiar with node.js you will be after this talk!

Glenn is a PM on the WCF team working on Microsoft’s future HTTP and REST stack. Prior to WCF he was a PM on the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. Glenn has a breadth of experience both inside and outside Microsoft developing software solutions for ISVs and the enterprise. Glenn has also been very active in involving folks from the community in the development of software at Microsoft. This has included shipping several products under open source licenses, as well as assisting other teams looking to do so. Glenn is also a frequent speaker at local and international events and user groups. When he's not working and playing with technology, he spends his time with his wife and daughter either at their home in Seattle or at one of the local coffee shops.

Glenn's blog can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock or you can follow him on twitter at you own risk at http://twitter.com/gblock

In October 2011, the Great Lakes Area .Net User Group (GANG) celebrates its 10-year anniversary. To celebrate, GANG will host an all-day event Saturday, October 1. Visit the Events Page then RSVP for a day of learning and fun.

Mark your calander to come and celebrate with us.

Topics and Speaker's Bio are located on the Events Page.

Find out how F# fits in to developing for the Windows Phone 7.

Daniel Mohl is a professional software engineer/architect whose interests include understanding the intricacies of various programming languages, enterprise application architecture, and how to bridge the gap between business and technology. He works with F#, C#, Erlang, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WCF, Silverlight, WP7, RabbitMQ, CouchDB, SQL Server, etc. He is a C#(F#) MVP, F# Insider, blogger, speaker, event organizer, and architect.

Blog: http://bloggemdano.blogspot.com/
Twitter: @dmohl

Onorio Catenacci
Email:  catenacci@ieee.org

Website | Twitter

This meeting is on September 21 but because of a website date sorting issue it had to be entered with a September 22 from date.