Thursday, October 18, 2007 Using Blend and Visual Studio 2005 to Build Distributed WPF Applications
Subject:	This session will provide an overview of the .NET 3.0 framework with special focus paid to Windows Presentation Foundation. The demos will show the new IDE, user controls, and data binding with tiered architecture to demonstrate WPF as a rich user interface technology for developers using Visual Studio or Blend.
Speaker:	Asli Bilgin, Microsoft Platform Strategy team Asli Bilgin is an industry recognized speaker on the latest advancements with Microsoft technologies. She currently serves on Microsoft’s Platform Strategy team for Financial Services. In this role, she advises the leading banking and capital market companies on the best practices for technology strategies. Asli is a well-respected speaker at international technology conferences, and serves as a contributing editor to various technical publications. She recently worked with CNET to host the video series: “At The Whiteboard” – an overview into Microsoft’s latest developer tools including Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System, and Internet Information Server 7.0. She’s also created and hosted DVD box sets for training series sets covering Visual Studio and ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX with Total Training. Her book “Mastering Database Programming With Visual Basic.NET," (Sybex) has been translated into six languages and serves as the curriculum for college and post-graduate institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, and India.
Date:	Thursday, October 18, 2007
Time:	Reception 6:15 PM , Program 6:30 PM
Location:	Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor
Directions:	B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

Please support the Tank from my website, Steve and the Tank run against Cancer. The Tank and I are once again supporting Fred's Team. The Tank's plea is below.

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Dear friends and family, 

    I am running the NYC Marathon again next year.

    I am honored to be running for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center as a member of Fred's Team to support The Aubrey Fund for Pediatric Cancer Research. 

    I am also running in memory of my friend and Deep Water Running Coach, Doug Stern.  Doug courageously battled kidney cancer over the past few months and passed in late June.  I owe him big time as Deep Water Running, running with a floatation device around my waist, helped me rehab while becoming a member of the Seven (Marathon) Continents Club.  Running and fundraising is the least I can do for Doug and others like him.

    At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, doctors and researchers are working on clinical trials that have the potential to increase the survival rates.  For instance, the overall survival rate of children with cancer has increased from 55% to 70% in recent years. 

    My fundraising minimum is $4,500 and I am almost two thirds there at $2,765.  The fundraising deadline is Friday, October 19, 2007.  Yes, this is before the marathon but the deadline was moved up from last year's deadline of December 15, 2006.  If you wish to donate at Sloan-Kettering's secure online server, please use the following hyperlink. 

   If clicking the "Donate" button doesn't work, please copy and past this link https://fredsteam.mskcc.org/fundraising/Controller?action=donateForm&user_id=35640&event_id=53 hyperlink into any Internet browser.  

    Please feel free to share this link with friends, family, co-workers, etc. 

    Thank you very much for your continued support of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.  See you at the finish line.

Sincerely,

Tom Djurdjevich

Tom with Cancer survivor Greta Waitz:

Next week I will be speaking at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is the second year in a row that Bulgaria has put on this awesome event. I'll be speaking on:

TSQL

BizTalk Services (The Ineternet Service Bus)

Agile Development: Scrum

I'll be speaking at my 10th (maybe more I lost track) SDC in two weeks, speaking on:

Database Design Patterns

XML in SQL Server 2005 & 2008

The Internet Service Bus-WCF, CardSpace, BizTalk Services

Thursday, August 16, 2007 WPF - The Beauty of the Beast
Subject:	You must register at http://www.clicktoattend.com/?id=120204 in order to be admitted to the building and attend. The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is the user interface subsystem of the .NET 3.0 Framework. Its architecture requires you to rethink how to design and develop in the presentation layer. In this presentation we will explore the exciting new UI framework, learn what capabilities it has, and examine some tools used in WPF development.
Speaker:	Josh Smith, New York Times (TimesReader Team) Josh Smith has been developing desktop applications in C# since the .NET Framework was first released. He was awarded the Microsoft MVP and CodeProject MVP titles in 2007 for his work in the WPF community. Josh has been a WPF fanatic since it was in pre-beta, and has helped share his enthusiasm for WPF with others via CodeProject articles and blog posts. He worked for a couple of years at Infragistics, as a developer in their Windows Forms Development Lab. During that time he became deeply interested in user interface technologies and design. After that he had a brief stint as a software consultant in the financial services industry, but found that it did not tickle his fancy. He did, however, have the rare opportunity to create a WPF application for the Elite Model Management agency, which was shown in a video at the Microsoft Windows Vista launch events. Josh is currently working for the New York Times on their fantastic Times Reader application, which uses WPF for the presentation layer. You can visit his WPF blog at http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com
Date:	Thursday, August 16, 2007
Time:	Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
Location:	Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor
Directions:	B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

Once again I am joining with my blog partner (from the Steve and the Tank blog) to raise money for Cancer. You can donate here.

Thursday, July 19, 2007 Distributed Caching: Essential Lessons
Subject:	In this presentation, we will cover application development considerations for maximum scalable performance and reliability in clustered .NET environments. This presentation focuses on improving scalability and scalable performance of applications through the use of clustered caching and data grids to reliably share live data among clustered application nodes, providing transparent fail-over as a key element of uninterrupted operation and reduced load on the database tier as a key element of scalability. We will also discuss how you can simply improve performance and scalability of the existing ASP.NET applications by storing session state in a data grid. The presentation will focus on: Caching Topologies: the limitations, trade-offs and benefits Cache aside, read/write through and write behind architectures, where and when to use Use cases and a topology quiz Scaling ASP.NET web applications The 12 essential lessons
Speaker:	Aleksandar Seovic, Managing Director, Solutions for Human Capital, Inc. Aleksandar Seovic is a Managing Director at Solutions for Human Capital, Inc. – a software development company specializing in enterprise document and content management. He has lead development effort on a number of engagements for Fortune 500 corporations, mostly in pharmaceutical and financial services industries, and has worked in the architect role on both .NET and J2EE projects. Most recently, Aleks took part in the design and implementation of Oracle Coherence for .NET, a client library that allows applications written in any .NET language to access data and services provided by Oracle Coherence data grid. Aleks is also a co-lead for Spring.NET, an open source framework for enterprise application development, and a lead developer for Web, AOP and Services modules of the framework. Aleks can be reached at aleks@s4hc.com.
Date:	Thursday, July 19, 2007
Time:	Reception 6:00 PM , Program 6:15 PM
Location:	Microsoft , 1290 Avenue of the Americas (the AXA building - bet. 51st/52nd Sts.) , 6th floor
Directions:	B/D/F/V to 47th-50th Sts./Rockefeller Ctr 1 to 50th St./Bway N/R/W to 49th St./7th Ave.

The 2007 version of the Pakistan Developers Conference was great. I had an amazing time in both Lahore and Karachi.

In Lahore I presented:

TSQL Tips and Tricks. Code and Slides here.

Database Design Patterns. Code and Slides here. (I also presented this in Karachi and TechEd Orlando so you can download too.)

Agile Development: Introduction to Scrum. Slides here. (Karachi too.)

In Karachi there was also:

WCF Overview. Code and Slides here.

Building a Scalable Environment for ASP. NET. Slides here. (Don’t forget n+1!!!)

Thanks for all of the memories, especially doing the Punjabi dancing at the end of the sessions in Karachi!!!

Say cheese: