Whether you work in a cube or the comfort of your home office, there are many challenges facing the lone developer. Everything, from estimation to project management to coding changes when you are a single developer instead of a team. What are some things you can do to make life easier as a lone(ly) developer? In this session, I will discuss many of the lessons learned and practices I’ve developed working almost exclusively as a single developer for the past ten years.

Bio:

Michael Eaton is the owner and principal consultant of Validus Solutions, a custom software development and coaching company that
specializes in leveraging client-based technologies. He has been developing solutions using Microsoft tools and technologies since 1994
and serves clients throughout the mid-west. Michael speaks throughout the United States at various regional events, user groups and
conferences sharing his love of client development to other developers. He also spends time coaching and mentoring other developers. Michael runs the Kalamazoo X Conference and is a C# MVP. When not working on projects or spending time with his family, he treats his World of Warcraft addiction with ample doses of…World of Warcraft.

Lightning Talk:

We will also have a lightning talk on RavenDB from Ondrej Balas

Windows 8 is Windows re-imagined!  Join this session to learn about the new platform for building Metro style applications.  Get an understanding of the platform design tenets, the programming language choices, and the integration points with the operating system and across Metro style apps. We will dive into HTML5 code, showing the new features that you will need to learn, like snapping, contracts and charms, appbars, and tiles.  You will walk away with the fundamentals for building a Windows 8 application.

Bio:

Jennifer Marsman is a Developer Evangelist in Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, where she educates developers on Microsoft’s new technologies.  In this role, Jennifer displays her contagious enthusiasm for technology by speaking on a variety of Microsoft technologies.  She is a frequent speaker at software development conferences across the United States.  In 2009, Jennifer was chosen as “Techie whose innovation will have the biggest impact” by X-OLOGY for her work with GiveCamps, a weekend-long event where developers code for charity.  She has also received many honors from Microsoft, including the Central Region Top Contributor Award, Heartland District Top Contributor Award, DPE Community Evangelist Award, CPE Champion Award, MSUS Diversity & Inclusion Award, and Gold Club.  Prior to becoming a Developer Evangelist, Jennifer was a software developer in Microsoft’s Natural Interactive Services division.  In this role, she earned two patents for her work in search and data mining algorithms.  Jennifer has also held positions with Ford Motor Company, National Instruments, and Soar Technology.  Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering and Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  Her graduate work specialized in artificial intelligence and computational theory.  Jennifer blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/jennifer and tweets at http://twitter.com/jennifermarsman.

Last year Microsoft released the Kinect, a completely new way of interacting with the computer that turns the user’s body into the input device. Using XNA as a platform, you will learn about how the Microsoft Kinect SDK works and how it can be used to control the computer. You will also learn to overcome the new challenges the Kinect introduces into building a user interface in this session. The Kinect is just the beginning of “touch-free” computing. The techniques you will learn in this session will give you a jump start on creating truly natural interfaces for the touch-free future.

Bio:

During the day, Ben Barefield works as a software consultant for SRT Solutions where he works with clients to transform their needs into excellent software. At SRT he has spent learning time exploring many languages and technologies and continually expands his .Net knowledge for client work. His not-so-secret evening identity as a game developer has created games that have been popular with his friends and family.

Web applications having been getting increasingly sophisticated over the past couple of years. As usual, developers are pushing the boundaries of what the web can do faster than people can make tools to support their work. In-browser tools in all of the major browsers and IDEs have been charging forward, though. They provide a bunch of new capabilities to get things done quicker, and I’ll show off some of these new tricks and toys. I’ll also talk about where I think the tools fall short.

Bio:

Kevin Dangoor is product manager for Mozilla’s developer tools. Though he’s worked with many languages in many environments, he is best known for his Python work as the founder of theTurboGears web framework and Paver project scripting tool. He has spoken at numerous conferences and is a co-author of Rapid Web Applications with TurboGears. More recently, his work at Mozilla has involved the Bespin browser-based code editor, starting the CommonJS project, and a new generation of developer tools for Firefox. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Street: 24800 Denso Drive Suite 150
City: Southfield
Country: USA
State: Michigan

Topic

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.

Bio:

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.

This month will feature a talk on nodejs, an important upcoming technology. Delivering this talk will be Leon Gersing, one of our favorite technical speakers. If you have node questions, bring your laptop. Very few enjoy hanging out and hacking more then Leon.

Topic

5 Real World examples of putting Node.js to work This talk is getting back to my roots. Recently, my 6 year old had to do a presentation in her Kindergarden class. She brought in one of her favorite toys and presented a bunch of real-use information and experience that she had with her technology of choice: a my little pony. This is my Kindergarden class and you are all my classmates. Rather than an intro session, I’m going to show you some samples of where I’ve been able to use Node  (and some other wonderful javascript libraries) to really drive business value and solve real world problems creatively using this new and powerful framework.  This talk should be considered an intermediate talk with some expert level points and will cover the following technologies: Node.js, V8, Unix, mongodb, HTML5 topics (including web sockets), npm, underscore.js, coffeescript, express.js, connect.js, vows.js and expresso.js.

Bio:

Leon Gersing is a software artisan with EdgeCase. (edgecase.com) He works primary with web technologies providing custom solutions to our worldwide clients.  He has recently started a new endeavour No Spoon Software, with co-founder Jerry Nummi, that seeks to bring new and exciting solutions to the emerging mobile markets.  No Spoon’s first app is a Campfire business chat client called Sparks which is available now for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch in the Apple App Store.  You can read more about No Spoon Software at http://nospoonsoftware.com.

Topic

Test Driven Development (TDD) has been one of the biggest and most compelling paradigm changes to software development of the past few years. The ability to bake quality into your application as you develop it can change the way you think about software; it effects the way we approach, design and write applications. Test Driven Development is powerful. Yet many developers allow themselves to be intimidated by what they perceive as added complexity. Managers worry that the practice of “test first” will delay development. This presentation will explain the concepts behind TDD, outline the benefits, give you some concrete examples and some advice on how to sell it to your managers.

Bio:

James is the Vice President of Technology at Improving Enterprises in Columbus, OH. James has been involved in software development and architecture for 16 years. He has worked as a developer and architect on everything from small, single-user applications to Enterprise-scale, multi-user systems. His specialties are .NET development and architecture, TDD, SOA, WCF, WF, cloud computing, and agile development methodologies. He is an experienced mentor and author. James is a Microsoft MVP. James book “Professional Test Driven Development with C#: Developing Real World Applications with TDD” was released in May of 2011

Topic

 A lot of technologies were announced at //build/. In this session, we’ll ask questions and pose initial answers about what is now and will be important over the next few years.  We’ll offer ‘buy/hold/sell’ recommendations on different areas of the platform:  What should you invest more in (buy)? What should you continue working with (hold)? What should you de-emphasize (sell)?  For each of those recommendations, we’ll explain why we feel that way, and what we think justifies that feeling. However, past performance is no guarantee of future returns. We’re looking into the future. We’ll be wrong about some things. For each of our recommendations, we’ll point out the reasons we might be completely wrong.

Come to this session to get opinions about the Windows 8 //build/ announcements. Think about them, develop your own opinion, and decide for yourself how to manage the next phase of your career.

Bio:

Bill Wagner, SRT Solutions co-founder, is 25-year veteran of the software industry. He’s a recognized expert in software design and engineering, specializing in C#, .NET and the Azure platform. He serves as Michigan’s Regional Director for Microsoft and is a multi-year winner of Microsoft’s MVP award. An internationally recognized author, Bill authored the bestselling Effective C#, now in its 2nd edition, and its follow-up, More Effective C#. He also currently writes a column on the Microsoft C# Developer Center. Recently, Bill was awarded the Emerging Technology Leader Award by Automation Alley, Michigan’s largest technology consortium. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.