.NET User Group members witnessed this last night @ the user group meeting … well! at the end of the user group meeting.

Last night what happened was order was suppose to be here @ 7.15 and when I called the hotline the delivery person had left the outlet @ 7.16. Where the hell is the commitment on delivery time. So the poor fella came here around 7.30. and several members left without waiting. I’m sure guys who stayed loved that some left early :) … When I called again the guy who answered the phone didn’t had any answer to give.

So next time if the order gets delayed i’m not going to pay … wait! … Will there be a next time? Oops! Actually we use to order pizza for almost every user group meeting several months back. Those days also it was the same drama … I was actually stupid enough to think that they have improved over time.

So … I’m thinking of NOT to order pizza from PizzuHut anymore, because they never deliver on time. There were times it got over 30 minutes delayed. Once they delivered after the meeting was over and after almost everybody left. Also there are several other issues. When the order is made for about 50 people with several mega bottles they send only 5 or 10 cups … how generous.

What do ya’ll say? Shall we try Dominos next time? or any other recommendations.

Session 1: Microsoft SharePoint Branding
Speaker: Chandana N. Athauda, Software Engineer

This is a very first SharePoint Branding session of serious of upcoming Branding sessions. With these all the sessions you'll learn all about customizing the look and feel of your SharePoint sites. Dive deep into web content management features and designer technologies like master pages, content types, and page layouts. Find out how to apply your graphical & programming mojo to SharePoint sites!

Session 2: "Windows Azura" Word-cloud
Speaker: Joy Pradeep (MVP, MCT)

The Azure™ Services Platform is designed to help developers quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute web services and applications on the Internet. Windows® Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.

This is a first local session about Microsoft upcoming "Windows Azura" platform. Say "Hello Word" with Windows Azura"

Date: 4th December 2008 (Thursday)
Time: 6.00 PM Onwards
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room. No42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 02
Entrance: FREE

The 20th consecutive monthly meeting of the SQL Server Sri Lanka User Group (SS SLUG) will be held on the 19th of November 2008 at Microsoft Sri Lanka. Sticking with the norm we have two sessions along with a special redgate segment ready for you.

Discussion 1: Transactions with SSIS by Supun Thrikawela

SQL Server Integration Services introduces a new method of handling multiple transactions from within a package. It also allows for distributed transactions and checkpoints. Join first time SS SLUG speaker Supun Thrikawela, as he shows you how transactions are implemented in SQL Server Integration Services.
(Duration: ~45 minutes)

Discussion 2: Peer-to-Peer Transactional Replication by Dinesh Asanka (MVP)

Peer-to-peer replication provides a scale-out and high availability solution by maintaining copies of data across multiple server instances. Because data is maintained across the nodes in near real time, peer-to-peer replication provides redundancy, which increases the availability of data. Follow SQL Server MVP Dinesh Asanka as he explores the intricacies of peer-to-peer replication.
(Duration: ~45 minutes)

Date & Time: 19-Nov-2008 1800hrs Onwards

Session: Optimizing .NET Data Access
Speaker: Joy Pradeep (MVP, MCT)

Have you got any performance bottlenecks in your Data Access Layer? How do you know, you are using best practices to transform data between Data Layer and the Presentation Layer? Are you using optimization features of ADO.NET in your application?

It’s time to talk about ADO.NET.

It’s going to be a Level 100 session and I will be covering asynchronous data processing, caching, paging, batching, and creating a provider independent data access layer (if time permits).

Guys, it’s time for Demos, not for theory.

Date: 6th November 2008 (Thursday)
Time: 6.00 PM Onwards
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room. No42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 02
Entrance: FREE

Not that infotel 2008 is over its time for me to write :) ... wanted to write during the event ... kind of a live blogging. But hell! who can spent time to blog when there is a xbox 360 plugged to a big screen right in front of you. It was a tiring 3 days but with a loads of fun because most of the active community fellows were there.

From our MVP team Jinath, Manzi, Dinesh Asanka, Fiqri, Shaminda, Padman and Dinesh Priyankara joined the party. Also representing the student champ team Uditha, Ransara, Senaka, Bhashitha, Charith and Akila joined. Also Chandana and Seminda volunteered. Special thanks to Shaminda and Seminda for the support given at the end of the event to pack things.

Thanks to Lilian for the goodies sent.

Overall quality of the exhibition is questionable at best. Hope to see something better next year as Infotel is the biggest IT showcase in the country.

Session: “Creating a RESTful Data Access Layer”
Speaker: Prasanna Amirthalingam (MVP)

Abstract: This session talks about creating a data access layer that can be exposed through HTTP based on REST principles. The session also details how exposing the data access layer as a service opens up a whole lot of possibilities, using technologies such as ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services

Date: 7th August 2008 (Thursday) (Please note that from this month onwards the meeting will be help on the first Thursday of the month)
Time: 6.00 PM - 8.00 PM
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room, No 42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 2
Entrance: FREE

Session 1: Game Developmentwith Microsoft XNA Game Studio
Intorduction to Microsoft XNA Game studiowith Visual Studio 2008. Basic features,exmples and games.

Speaker: Uditha Bandara

Session 2: Imagine Cup 2008 Sri Lanka Winning Teams Solution
Imagine Cup 2008 Sri Lanka winning team is in the process of preparing to face the world finals in Paris, France in July. They will be presenting their winning solution @ this months user group meeting.

by: team Sasrutha (Sapumal, Chethiya, Dasuni & Supunmali)

Date: 4th June 2008
Time: 6.00 PM - 8.00 PM
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka, No. 42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 02
Entrance: FREE

First of a series of Heroes Community Launch Events is scheduled to happen with the May 2008 User Group Meeting. Please drop an email to admin@dotnetforum.lk with the subject 'i'm attending - <Username>' to reserve a seat. Only 70 User Group Members will get the opportunity to attend this event.

Session: New features for ADO.NET in .NET 3.5
ADO.NET has certainly evolved very fast in the last few years. This session talks about some of the new technologies such as Linq to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework and helps developers understand the technologies under the ADO.NET stack.

Date: 7th May 2008 (Wednesday)
Time: 6.00 PM Onwards
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room (42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha)
Entrance: FREE (please reserve your seat)

As most of ya'll already know at the last MVP open day we decided to bring all the user groups under one umbrella as Microsoft Sri Lanka Technical Communities. Currently we have 4 arms under it. Those are the .NET Forum, IT Pro Forum, SQL Server Forum and the Student Champ Community. With over a total of 5000 registered members these technical communities stand stronger than ever. Hats off to EdQuek for showing us the ways and hats off to all the members for contributing and adding value.

Wanted to write about this not to talk about the existing four. This is about the FIFTH arm which is going to come out in the very near future ... and it's going to be bigger than the current four. Yup! very soon registration counts will be bigger than even the .NET Forum user base. Right now i'm sure you are totally clueless about what this is and where can I find a bigger user base. Wait and see :)

Session: SharePoint for Developers
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a powerful tool which combines Web Content Management (WCM), Business Intelligence (BI), Records Management, and whole lots of other features. SharePoint products & technologies are based on Microsoft's most innovation technology called Microsoft Application Platform (MAP).

What is MAP? What is the role of a .NET developer in the area of SharePoint products & technologies? What specially an ASP.NET developer can do to provide a better SharePoint solution using Microsoft Application Platform-MAP?

This session introduce SharePoint products & technologies and MAP and scope of a .NET Developer in SharePoint & MAP.

Speaker: Joy Pradeep (MVP, MCT)

Date: 5th March 2008
Time: 6.00 PM - 8.00 PM
Venue: Microsoft Sri Lanka, No. 42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha, Colombo 02
Entrance: FREE

As some of ya'll already know .NET Forum now has two new sections.

SMS Notifications
This was implemented as a response to a request came from few members to get a SMS notification about the Monthly User Group Meetings. So form members can register for this thorugh http://sms.dotnetforum.lk.

Link Partners
This is mainly focusing on driving more traffic to the website and also to the registered member's website. You can register thorugh http://linkpartners.dotnetforum.lk. If you still haven't ... hurry up, only a limited number of slots available.

What's Next?
Some more interesting tools and programs are in development and ya'll will see those in the near future.

I think the IT Pro Forum and the User Group is back to it's former glory. Right at this moment the November Meeting is going on in the training room and there are 50 participants. Thanks to Padman for all the hard work put in to this. I'm going to have to get another bigger place very soon. Woo! Hoo!

Two sessions are happening in this meeting ...

Session 1: Introductory Session on Windows Sever 2008 by Afraz Mohomed (1 hour)

• Editions Comparison
• New features
• Role based Deployment
• Active Directory Improvement
• Windows Hypervisor
• Live Demo –Feature Based

Session 2: Implementing Organizational portal using MOSS by Mohomed Shamin (1 hour)

• Creating portal sites
• Adding web parts to the main site
• Creating task list, document libraries, and configuring
• Workflow creation
• Excel publishing
• Forms publishing
• My site creation and overview
• Enterprise Search configuration

7th Wednesday we had the November User Group Meeting and Prasanna did a session on 'Working with Rules in .NET 3.0'. Rest of the time we spent to have a brainstorming session. I wanted to get some good idea from the crowd. So we can implement / execute in the time to come and see some good results. Almost all the idea came up were related to coding, coding and more coding. Nobody suggested any fun activities. So i'm going to have to think about some fun activities. I think these folks are too deeply engaged into coding :)

Will publish the ideas gathered in the .NET Forum. Thanks or everybody who contributed on this.

It's good to see that the IT Pro Forum (www.itproforum.lk) is up and running again. There is a quite a lot of work to be done and now there is a commited team behind it. We have fixed the monthly user group meeting date as the last Friday of the month, from 6.00 PM onwards. Current Venue is Microsoft Sri Lanka Training Room, but it seems like pretty soon we are going to need a bigger place for this as the attendance is growing super fast.

Special thanks to Paddy for the efforts made on this.

We had the long awaited WCF session by buddhike @ the July user group meeting on last Wednesday (4th). Feedback received at the session was really awesome. Looking forward for the Part II and Part III of the WCF in the coming months user group meetings.

Introduction to Windows Communication Foundation
Speaker: Buddhike de Silva (MVP)
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is the platform for building new generation connected applications in Windows. In this session, Buddhike will be talking about the WCF fundamentals and walk you through a demo to show how to get started with this powerful & exciting technology. Session prerequisites: Some WS-* required ;)

Hey folks,

we are having the IT Pro User Group ...

Session 1:
Live Communications Server
Speaker: Imran Vilcassim
With over 7 years of experience in the industry and a vast knowledge of Microsoft tools and technologies, currently Imran works as a Technology Specialist in Microsoft Sri Lanka.

Session 2:
Active Directory Right Management Services
Speaker: Mohamed A Afraz
Currently Afraz works as a Senior Consultant at Ceylinco Micro Technologies. His total work experience spans over 8 years and he hold the CCNP and MCSE certifications.

Venue:
Microsoft Sri Lanka Training room
No. 42, 11th Floor, DHPL Building, Nawam Mawatha

Date: 27th June 2007 (Wednesday)
Time: 6.00 PM - 8.00 PM