On Thursday, November 13th, the principal group manager of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers will be here in Cleveland, visiting various clients and then presenting for the GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG that night. All are invited to attend.

• What: Meet Mark Mydland, Principal Group Manager of Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers


• When: Thursday, November 13th, 6:30pm-8:30pm


• Where: Beacon Place Conference Center, Beacon Place Office Building, 6055 Rockside Woods Blvd, Lower Level, Independence, OH 44131

Mark will be giving a talk on VSTS 2010, code-named "Rosario".

Here's the abstract for his talk:

The phrase "drive quality upstream" has been abused so badly by ALM software vendors that it has to be relegated to the platitude junk pile along with such all time favorites as "work smarter not harder," "Think outside the box," and "Synergistic leveraging of code reuse." Before we drive quality anywhere we need to give quality a seat at the table. VSTS Rosario release will do this by automatically gathering critical information about the project and code and making that data available when, where and to whom it is needed. During this discussion we will examine how Rosario impacts quality across the application lifecycle by:

• Allowing testers to provide developers with details about what the code did instead of just providing the details about what the tester did.


• Allowing development leads and architects to visualize and understand their current code (not the code they wish they had, but the code they really have) so that they can minimize the impact of changes; and


• Allowing developers to understand the impact of their changes in terms of affected tests, concurrency and bounds checking.

The Rosario release of VSTS will bring all project stakeholders together to allow richer information to be shared across every role to make software quality accessible and achievable.

Mark Mydland is the Principal Group Manager for the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers product at Microsoft. In the past 12 years, Mark has worked as a developer and consultant across a wide variety of applications and industries. Mark first joined Microsoft in 2001 working as a member of the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD). During his time in that group, Mark was the development manager for a team focused on analytics for assessing the efficacy of natural language interpreters with a particular emphasis on driving authoring simplification and relevance quality for user assistance. Based on this work, Mark filed numerous patents and coauthored a paper for the SIGIR journal. In 2004, Mark left Microsoft to work as a Director of Development at Getty Images where he led a change in process from a traditional waterfall methodology to a scrum-based agile approach which brought the release frequency from 12-18 months down to 1 month. Since Getty made extensive use of VSTS, it seemed a natural fit for Mark to join VSTS on his return to Microsoft in 2006. Mark received his B.S. from West Point in 1991. He has also held positions with USWeb/marchFirst and Andersen Consulting/Accenture.

Please visit the GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG site to RSVP for this event. Hope to see you there!

Labels: GCPCUG, Mark Mydland, Rosario, VSTS 2010

How many of you are familiar with Live Mesh? If you aren't familiar with it, you should check it out. Better yet, go check out Jeff Blankenburg's blog, as he enjoys talking about Live Mesh.

Or better yet... come on out to the next Greater Cleveland PC Users Group VB.NET/C# SIG meeting, this coming Thursday, October 30th, where you can hear Jeff talk of the awesomeness known as Live Mesh.

• What: GCPCUG VB.NET/C# SIG Meeting on Live Mesh


• Where: Beacon Place Auditorium, Beacon Place Office Building, Lower Level, 6055 Rockside Woods Blvd, Independence, OH 44131
  
• When: Thursday, October 30th, 6:30-8:30pm

If you are planning on attending, please check out their site and contact them so that they have a good idea of how much food they'll need to order.

For those of you who follow the SIGs, this group does go out after their meetings, over to the Winking Lizard. So come on out for the meeting and come out to socialize afterwards! Hope to see you there!

Labels: .NET SIG, GCPCUG, Jeff Blankenburg, Live Mesh

Tonight, Jennifer Marsman came out and talked to the Greater Cleveland PC Users Group C#/VB.NET SIG about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Although I'm a web developer and I don't typically play with desktop apps, I wanted to see what WPF had to offer. (That and I wanted to see one of Jennifer's presentation, as I hadn't had the opportunity in the past.)

Jennifer started by getting into the technologies of .NET 3.0 - WPF, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and CardSpace and how they come together with the .NET 2.0 core to help make up .NET 3.0.

From there, she brought user experience (UX) into the picture. Whether it's using a can opener to open a can of soup (as opposed to the hardcore experience of using a knife) or getting with technology and using Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (as opposed to a VCR), the UX should be considered as an integral part of the software design process. WPF, as she put it, brings a unified approach to user experience, with key features including vector-based graphics composition, support for declarative and procedural programming, and easy deployment and application management.

She brought up the classic case of the headaches between designers and developers. Let's say you have a designer who wants a drop-down box with checkmarks within each option; as a developer, you may be prone to say "You can have the drop-down box, but you aren't getting that check mark unless you're willing to accept that it's going to take {insert ungodly amount of time here}". With WPF, that headache isn't as bad, since it brings XAML into the picture. Designers can use Expression Blend to make their pretty controls, and that software creates XAML files, that can be manipulated in Visual Studio on the developer's side. So there's a better chance that the designer will get their drop-down with the checkmarks within a reasonable amount of time.

After talking about user experience, Jennifer got into the three main types of WPF applications - XAML Browser Applications (XBAP), installed Windows applications, and controlled libraries. She must have been reading my mind, as she then got into the difference between WPF XBAPs as opposed to Silverlight. Those differences are:

• Silverlight is a subset of WPF. It doesn't have all the features of WPF, such as not as strong 3D support.


• WPF runs only on Windows. Silverlight has better cross-platform support, working natively on Windows and Mac. There's also a project called Moonlight, which adds some Silverlight support to Linux.


• Silverlight has better browser support. WPF works in Internet Explorer and in Firefox (with .NET 3.5); Silverlight works in other browsers, including Safari for Macs.

After talking about WPF in the first hour, Jennifer used the second hour for show'n'tell - demos showing off various features of WPF. The first demo she brought up was a hospital application, which showed various features of WPF, including 3D pivots of forms, moving graphs, nifty animations (like pages flipping), and working with video. There were graphs that she was able to spin around, and she mentioned that this uses something called Viewport 3D. If you want to know more about it, check out her blog and contact her - Viewport 3D is one of these topics that she likes to present on. Another demo was with Mercedes and building a car. The third demo showed how to create a spotlight in Blend and get it to animate along a path. After creating it in Blend, she opened the project in Visual Studio to show how the XAML is understood by both programs.

Overall, it was quite an interesting presentation. Thanks to Sogeti for providing the location and dinner, and thanks to everyone else who made it possible.

Recommended Resources:

Silverlight:
Silverlight.net

WPF:
Windowsclient.net

"How Do I" videos:
Part 1. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to create an animation

Part 2. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to start animations on events

Part 3. Animation Using Expression Blend: How to make an animation follow a path

Labels: Blend, Channel 9, GCPCUG, Jennifer Marsman, WPF