Alabama Tech Events

The Birmingham Area Linux Users is having its June Social Meeting Next Tuesday at Dave’s Pizza in Homewood. Please come join us for Good Food, Good Beer, and Interesting talk about the latest in FOSS/Linux.

The meeting starts at 8:00 but we usually have people there early. We usually have a sign that will let you know who we are. Though it shouldn’t be that hard anyway just look for the geeks in the back corner of the room. Here are directions.

If you want to learn the latest about building applications for Windows Mobile devices, be sure to check out the FREE Mobile Developer Roadshow in Atlanta on June 24th.

For details visit the blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/glengordon/archive/2008/05/20/mobility-roadshow-coming-to-atlanta-and-charlotte-in-june.aspx

Mark your calenders, the next RubyHam lunch meeting is at the Cocina Superior, Monday, June 2nd at 11:30am til 1:00pm or so.

Please RSVP to Rubyham, so we know how many people to expect. Cocina can accommodate tables of up to 10 people without prior notice.

Cocina Superior
587 Brookwood Village in Homewood
http://www.thecocinasuperior.com
205-259-1980

Map to Superior
http://www.thecocinasuperior.com/location.html

Brookwood Village is in Homewood, located between Highway 280 and Highway 31, it’s next door to Brookwood Hospital. Cocina Superior is located in the outdoor shopping area (not inside the mall). It’s near the restaurant Brio. You can park along the street that runs between the restaurant and the mall, or park in the parking garage entrance just past the restaurant.

Portals — Collaboration by People Who Put It All Together!

Portals are one of the key technologies in service-oriented architecture. They are used to provide a unified view of multiple, often disparate, applications. SharePoint Services (Microsoft) and WebSphere Portal (IBM) are realizations of the Portal pattern (a.k.a. mechanism).

There are significant differences between the products offered by these two major contributors to the state-of-the-art of MD SOA. But they do not extend to the Portal pattern itself.

This is technology that is increasingly in your customers’ faces. That makes it very important for all of us to be on the same page with respect to fundamental features and patterns.

Portals or “Dashboards” have been recognized as so useful that they are becoming pervasive. They are the surface for email, enterprise application integration, customer resource management, executive information systems, and a growing list of advanced applications.

There are also some interesting capabilities that make collaboration more productive. For instance, full-text search capabilities are advancing rapidly. An example is “Stemming”. It makes key word search more natural by analyzing the key words’ various meanings in spoken languages.

The folks from ACP Incorporated will illustrate the key features of portals with some of their notable collaboration projects. Those implementations were done on the Microsoft platform. However, the remarks about portals and their features pertain to both the SharePoint Services (Microsoft) and WebSphere Portal (IBM) realizations.

Please see the SOA Society site at http://soasociety.com for more info, including location and RSVP info.

To make tracking tech events easier, Alabama Tech Events has added an RSS feed via Feedburner. See the link over on the lower right side of the page.

Keith Elder will be presenting Windows Workflow for the May 27th meeting of the Lower Alabama .Net Users Group meeting.

Time: 6:00 PM
Sponsor: ITT Tech
Location:
ITT Tech
Office Mall South
3100 Cottage Hill Road
Building 3
Mobile, AL 36606

Information from: http://keithelder.net/Presentations/default.aspx
Current PowerPoint presentation (might be updated before meeting): http://keithelder.net/Presentations/IntroToWorkflow/IntroToWorkflowFoundation.ppt

Introduction to Windows Workflow
Foundation Scenario: Your boss gives you a task with fairly complicated business rules one day at work. You spend weeks coding it and as soon as you get done he/she informs you the business rules have changed. Your first thought is to lash out at your boss because this is a major change. Instead you politely smile and say thank you, “I’ll get right on it”. Little does your boss know you’ve used Workflow Foundation to map out all the business logic and rules. You quickly make the change declaratively within Workflow Foundation and all of a sudden you are a hero.

Workflow Foundation enables developers to quickly and easily map out complex business tasks that turn their code into declarative models. In this session we’ll explore the ins and outs of Workflow Foundation from the ground up so you’ll have a good sense of where to get started when you head back to the office.

Kevin Bowles, SQL Server MVP will be speaking at the next Steel City SQL User Group meeting. He will be at the New Horizons offices in Homewood on May 20th, 2008. The meeting will begin at 5:30 pm. Kevin will be presenting on SQL Server 2008 Development.

See the Steel City SQL website for more details.

On Wednesday, May 14th at 6:30 pm the Birmingham Software Developers Association and the Birmingham .Net User Group (Bug.Net) are pleased to co-present a special event. Regional speaker Michael Neel will be here to talk on DataSets:

DataSets are Evil. They will hog your CPU, steal your RAM, and rob your home. This is the story surrounding DataSets, but what is fact and what is myth? In this session we will look at DataSets and the tools that go with them to see how they can save you development time while not crashing the server. We’ll also dive into DataSets in 2008 with LINQ to DataSets and Unit Testing with DataSets.

Learn more about Michael at vinull.com/profile

For more information please visit the BSDA site.

Welcome to Alabama Tech Events. This site is a community effort designed to keep Alabama’s technical community apprised of upcoming events in the great state of Alabama, and occasionally it’s fine neighbors in adjoining states. We will also strive to educate everyone on the vast array of user groups available in the state.

While the primary focus of this site will be on the user group community, we are also open to event posts from businesses provided those events are of interest to our core group: Information Technology professionals, students, and hobbiests.

If you are a user group leader, and would like to join our effort and have the ability to post your own event notices, please e-mail us at altechevents at gmail dot com.