Recap: PGH.NET August 2010 Meeting

On August 10th 2010 I attended and presented at the PGH.NET User Group meeting named “5 Guys with Code.”  According to one of the PGH.NET leaders tweet it looks like the headcount was 60+

The following are some thoughts and highlights from the presentations.

Presentations

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  • John Sterrett (Blog | Twitter) – Table Value Parameters with SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft .NET  
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    • Download sample code and presentation here.
    • Download SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer Toolkit
    • Download SQL Server 2008 Developer Toolkit here
    • Table Value Parameter links

I presented a feature that is included in SQL Server 2008 and underused by many developers.  This presentation shows developers how to pass a  DataTable, DataReaders and Lists to SQL Server database objects with only two extra lines of C# or VB.NET code. 

As promised below are some reference links

• David Hoerster (Blog | Twitter) – jQuery Code Snippets in Visual Studio 2010

Time is money and David’s fifteen minute tip might just save you a lot of time and money.    He covered several tools that will help you generate some awesome JavaScript. 

I  really liked the jsFiddle.NET tool.  It looks like a great tool to mockup some a user interface (more on user interfaces later).

• Rich Dudley (Blog  | Twitter ) – A Quick Look at the New SQL CE Engine

Being addicted to databases I very happy to see that I wasn’t the only one presenting a topic based on databases.  Rich did a great job explaining what SQL CE can do and what it cannot do. 

Rich blogged about his experience (post includes photos, slides and more)

• John Hidey (Blog | Twitter) – Layout Controls for XAML

I have to admit that XAML and I don’t get along well.  We had a fling a few years ago.  XAML cheated on me and I haven’t been the same since.

Ok seriously, I tried XAML a few times and found it very hard to understand.  John did a great job going over the common things that are hard to understand when you get started with XAML.   John started with some very basic controls and then built a final example that included all the basic controls.

• Eric Kepes (Blog | Twitter) – Bowling for TDD

At this summers PGH.NET Code Camp we had a speakers session where one of the presenters said, “Code is considered legacy code when TDD is not applied.”  Eric bowling for TDD example showed how anyone can start developing TDD.