The Ottawa .NET Community Presents

Dealing with Real World Development Challenges

This is it; the 2006/2007 Season Wrap Up. It’s been a great season and we’re finishing it off with a collection of application development “Problems and Solutions” and a bit of a “Social”. 5 of our community’s top Solution Architects are going to walk us through the key development challenge that they were faced with in the past year and how they went about resolving it. Christian Beauclair, our Microsoft Senior Developer Advisor, will be hosting this panel of presenters and will be adding his own unique perspective on each of the Challenges/Solutions being presented. Following the presentation, we will be serving some refreshments and enjoying each other’s company before breaking for the summer. Come join us for this home grown community exchange and learn how to deal with some very real.NET development challenges.

This is How We Did It

Challenge 1: Creating Video Tutorials for Web Applications (Peter Hall)
Given a choice, most users would rather watch an instructional video than wade through a pile of documentation. Unfortunately not all developers know how to create an instructional video and attach it to their web applications. In this presentation, Peter Hall is going to walk us through the creation of an instructional video using Camtasia and the Microsoft Media Encoder, and then he’s going to show us how to attach it to a web application.

Challenge 2: Working with Embedded Real-time .Net (Michael Cox)
Developing an efficient Windows GUI based Application with real-time constraints in minimal time and maximum flexibility is a major challenge. Michael Cox is going to show us how he used Asynchronous I/O, Threading, Generic Queues, and Properties for User/Applications settings to come up with a solution that worked for him.

Challenge 3: Model Driven Development via the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer (Joel Hebert)
Developing applications that scale well, promote code re-use, and facilitate maintenance is not an easy thing to do. In this presentation, Joel Hebert is going to show us how to use the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer to create classes and layers that avoid many common application pitfalls; he’s going to talk about N-Tier Vs N-Layer architecture and the misconceptions that surround them; and he’s going to show us the basic steps involved in creating an N-layer application.

Challenge 4: Imbedding .NET User Controls into an MFC application (Graham Ross)
How does a Company with an existing product based on MFC and C++ move forward in order to take advantage of features and third party components available in .NET? Graham Ross is going to show us how he used the managed extensions in C++ to imbed .NET user controls into an MFC application.

Challenge 5: Organizing Your Development Environment (Wesley MacDonald)
Application development projects are made up of numerous artifacts (SVCS, Bug Reports, Project Plans, Requirement Docs,…) and managing them can quickly turn into a nightmare. Wesley MacDonald is going to show us how he uses Visual Studio Team Foundation Server to provide his team with an integrated development environment wherein all artifacts are stored under one roof and easily reported on.

About Our Solution Architects

Michael Cox is an Ottawa based Software Architect specializing in embedded real-time systems. He has spent half his career on embedded real-time system development for Defense based display projects and the other half with telecommunications embedded real-time development. Throughout his career Michael has strived for excellence in software development processes and optimum utilization of COTS hardware and software for embedded and real-time applications. When he’s not working on code; Michael enjoys cycling, hiking, dragon boat racing, and spending quality time with his wife and two daughters.

Peter Hall is the founder and CTO of SiteBenefits, a company that delivers web solutions to the Restaurant Industry. Previous to SiteBenefits, Peter spent 10 years as a Technical Architect at EDC; Product Manager for Corel CD Creator; Account Manager at Software AG; and started his career as a Production Engineer at Dofasco.

Joël Hébert is an Ottawa based consultant specializing in enterprise web application development. He has spent a major part of his career with CaseWare-IDEA Inc. and CaseWare International Inc. where he worked on large scale web applications and developed Computer Aided Audit Tools (CAAT). As an executive member of the Ottawa .Net Community, he has participated in “The Developers” TV show, was on the Inter User Group Challenge winning team, took part in a multitude of MCAD/MCTS study groups and introduced the Product Discovery Showcases for 2006/2007. When Joel is not coding he enjoys the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Denis Diderot and Montesquieu.

Wes MacDonald is a senior .NET Architect/Developer and the VP/CTO of MarketObject. Wes has been working with Team Foundation Server since its beta release and is currently helping government departments adopt it and the .NET 2.0 Framework as their primary development platform. In addition to his expert skills in .NET, Wes is well versed in Oracle, SQL Server, and J2EE. He is a well respected mentor and currently focuses much of his attention on web based e-Commerce applications, web administration applications, and Text searching applications via web services and the web.

Graham Ross has over 20 years of experience in the IT Industry. He has an in-depth knowledge of Microsoft .NET, COM, client server architecture, object oriented design and development. He has several years of experience developing scalable mission-critical desktop and server applications. His most recent experience was as lead architect for the development of a client-server product used by accounting firms for financial data analysis and fraud detection. As an executive member of the Ottawa .NET Community Graham has been involved in organizing and running community events, MCAD/MCSD study groups, and Inter User Group Challenges.