When: Monday September 20th, 2010, 6:00 pm to start 6:30 pm
Where: City Hotel (map) 347 Kent Street (Corner of King Street). Second floor at the Kent Street Living Room.
Cost: Free, but please RSVP
What: two great presentations, networking and good discussions over a great meal and beers.

This month Nick Randolph will show us how the Silverlight Analytics Framework will help us to understand how our application is used and Jose Fajardo will put Lightswitch on a different perspective. Here are the details.

Silverlight Analytics Framework
by Nick Randolph

So you’ve built your first Windows Phone application but do you know if anyone’s actually using it? Earlier this year Microsoft announced the Silverlight Analytics Framework and since your Windows Phone application is written in Silverlight, you should be able to use it! In this session we go on a quick lap around the analytics framework and how you can use it to track how, when and where your application is used.

Nick currently runs Built To Roam which focuses on building rich mobile applications. Previously Nick was co-founder and Development Manager for nsquared solutions where he lead a team of developers to build inspirational software using next wave technology. Prior to nsquared, Nick was the lead developer at Intilecta Corporation where he was integrally involved in designing and building their application framework.

Lightswitch, should you care or not ?!
by Jose Fajardo

A quick walk thru of a LightSwitch generated Silverlight app. Followed by an in depth discussion on the wizard process and how this impact’s us as Silverlight developers as we build our RIA’s manually.

Jose is a designer first, a developer close second. Specializes in all things Silverlight, but has also a strong appreciation for WPF/Surface and Azure technologies.

When: Monday August 16th, 2010, 6:00 pm to start 6:30 pm
Where: City Hotel (map) 347 Kent Street (Corner of King Street). Second floor at the Kent Street Living Room.
Cost: Free, but please RSVP
What: two great presentations, networking and good discussions over a great meal and beers.

This month we will have a great Windows Phone 7 presentation by Ducas Francis and some premium Tech Ed quality content by Chris Anderson. Here are the details.

A day in the life of a Metro developer
by Ducas Francis

What is Metro? How do I get started on Windows Phone 7? What cool things does it’s API let me do? And why would I come to a Silverlight user group to hear about this…? Take a journey with me through the phone. See what it has to offer. Dig deeper, past the UI, into the UX, and further to the API.

Ducas lives and breathes .Net. He is a Senior Consultant working for Readify for the past 3 years. He enjoys long walks on the beach and sunsets, but only if he can read twitter and RSS feeds along the way.

Running Silverlight Outside the Browser and with Elevated Trust
by Chris Anderson

Silverlight 3 introduced the ability to run your Silverlight applications outside the browser, and Silverlight 4 takes this one step further by enabling you to run your application with elevated trust. Silverlight is no longer a sandboxed browser-only platform now. This session will take you through the new possibilities enabled by this feature, including toast notifications, custom chrome, COM access, and direct file system access.

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for over 10 years now, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, pet cremations, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business (Peer Placements, as co-director) he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris is the author of two upcoming books – Pro Business Applications in Silverlight 4 (Apress), and Professional Visual Studio 2010 (Wrox, as coauthor).

Please notice that we changed the usual date and venue.

This month Jose Fajardo is back to show us a bit of what he presented at REMIX’s keynote. Miguel is going to present on some AOP techniques to keep your Silverlight code clean. And Matthew Wicks will go over the Rx Framework.

We will have some time to squeeze in a few more presentations in case you want to talk about something in 5-10 minutes.

After that, we will try out a new discussion format. We always had some informal conversations after the talks (and during them), but this time we want to structure it a bit more and chat about a topic that has raised some interest in previous meetings. 

This month we will have two real talks + a bonus lightning talk (if Chris leaves some time). Paul Stovell will talk about Magellan and Chris Anderson will tell us what’s new in the latest release of Silverlight. Also, I will be doing a quick talk on Design for Blendability going through some of the new features in Blend 4.

Please keep in mind that we’re NOT in Cynergy this month and we switched back the meeting to our previous venue in Elizabeth street.

This month Jose Fajardo and Chris Anderson will talk about all the exciting news released at Mix10. Jose has been playing with the Windows Phone for some time and will tell us everything about the development experience. Chris has been awake from the first day of Mix watching the live keynotes, all the recordings, writing like crazy and playing with the new tools just to give us the best summary of all of the new features in Silverlight 4.

Mix10 was probably the best Mix ever thanks to all the big announcements and great content, so we’ll try to use it to make this one of the best SDDN meetings. You can’t miss it. 

This meeting we’re changing to a different venue. Cynergy will be hosting it, hopefully we will have less interruptions this way and a bit more space than in our usual venue. The best thing, it’s BYO and Readify will sponsor some pizza to keep those tummies full.

We will have one talk and open topics for lightning talks.

Readify will be offering a 10% discount for the Professional Silverlight 3 Workshop in Sydney on March 10th to March 12th to all of the attendees.

WCF RIA Services in real world LOB application
Sergey Klementiev

How to develop large scale LOB application with latest bits of WCF RIA Services. Problems, solutions, tips and tricks.

Sergey is a Senior Developer at Readify. He has been working for over one year on the mid tier of Silverlight Applications so he knows it all when it comes to the best way of saving and retrieving data efficiently.

When: February 2nd, 2010, 6:00 pm
Where: Crown Hotel (map) in 162 Elizabeth Street Level 2
Cost: Free, but please RSVP on our Facebook group.
What: Networking, two talks, dinner and beers.

MEF in Silverlight
Brendan Forster

MEF is an upcoming part of .NET 4 which enables developers to add flexibility and extensibility to their applications. But how useful is MEF to Silverlight developers? And what’s the best way to use it?  Get a grasp of the concepts; learn the benefits of incorporating MEF into your applications, and some tips and tricks to make life easier.

Brendan Forster is a Senior Developer at Readify. When not on the clock, you may spot him at your local watering hole, on the Twitterverse (@shiftkey) or contributing to the MahTweets project. He’s not sure how he first came across MEF, but he knows life would be a less interesting without it. He also has a neglected blog at brendanforster.com.

Sketchflow Rocks
Lee Goodman

When: December 1st, 2009, 6:00 pm
Where: Crown Hotel (map) in 162 Elizabeth Street
Cost: Free, but please RSVP on our Facebook group.
Prizes: 1 Zune HD courtesy of Segator.

What’s new in Silverlight 4
Chris Anderson

Announced at PDC09, Silverlight 4 brings a huge number of new features to Silverlight – particularly for business application developers.  Printing, rich text editor control, HTML editor control, commanding, right-click support, elevated trust, better validation, COM object access, drop target support, and much more.  See how Silverlight 4 truly makes cross platform business applications easy.

Chris Anderson has been a professional developer for over 10 years now, specializing in building desktop, web, and mobile business applications using Microsoft technologies for industries as wide ranging as accounting, property valuation, mining, the fresh produce industry, pet cremations, logistics, field services, sales, and construction. Now running his own business (Peer Placements, as co-director) he has turned to Silverlight as the ideal new technology for developing and deploying business applications. Chris is the author of two upcoming books – Pro Business Applications in Silverlight 4 (Apress), and Professional Visual Studio 2010 (Wrox, as coauthor).

Adobe’s Designer, Developer workflow with with Flash Catalyst, Flex 4 and IOC Framework Parsley.
Clinton Ennis

A demonstration to see how the other side do it. Building a real world LOB component using a GUI created in Adobe Illustrator by the Designer using Flash Catalyst to convert the UI artwork to components and finally wiring up the UI to Flex code using the IOC Framework Parsley.

Clinton Ennis: Principal Consultant for Geronimo Labs, a RIA consultancy specializing in helping companies with their Enterprise Rich Internet Application needs whether it be Flex or Silverlight just as long as its Rich!

When: November 3rd, 2009, 6:00 pm
Where: Crown Hotel (map) in 162 Elizabeth Street
Attendance is free, but please RSVP on our Facebook group.

.NET RIA Services – Building Data Driven applications in Silverlight 3

Learn how Microsoft is simplifying the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together ASP.NET and Silverlight. See the new application framework that removes some of the complexity for connecting to your data layer and see patterns for working with data, implementing reusable and independently testable application logic, ease of client side validation and  see how this relates to other patterns such as MVVM. We are sure this will lead to lots of architecture debates and pros/cons of this framework.

Testing in Silverlight

At first sight it looks like we don’t have a lot of options to test Silverlight Applications. Although it’s not an easy task, we do have a lot of alternatives. In this demo oriented talk, Miguel will present different approaches, techniques and types of tests from simple Unit Testing and Mocks to Visual Tests, UI Automation, REPL Testing, Performance, Memory Leaks and Recorded Web Tests.