Friday, January 23, 2009

Nashville Web Developer January Meeting Review

We had a great turnout for our first meeting and came up with some great suggestions for presentations. Thanks to everyone who participated. Here's a list of the meeting topics we're considering:- Silverlight & XAML- Silverlight 3rd Party Components- ASP.NET Performance Considerations- ASP.NET Security Considerations- ASP.NET Page Lifecycle- Introduction to JQuery- Ajax/JavaScript Development- Designing with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)- DotNetNuke Installation & Configuration (1/2)- DotNetNuke Module Development (2/2)- Overview of Visual...

Friday, January 16, 2009

Nashville User Group Meetings

How enthusiastic do you think you would be if you had a 1/5 chance to win a really nice prize worth up to $1,300? We gave away a ton of great stuff at the Nashville .NET User Group meeting, but the enthusiasm level seemed abnormally low. Our first meeting at the Brentwood library went really well, despite the reserved mood and the (new) projector refusing to work for the first 10 minutes. The library conference rooms are quite nice, the speaker (Chris Hefley) was great, and we had a fair turnout considering the meeting location change.Now that...

Friday, January 9, 2009

Microsoft Tag - Cell phone bar code scanner

I remember thinking how cool it would be to write a program that would use my cell phone's camera to scan a book bar code then automatically add that book to a digital library or shopping list.While Microsoft Tag wont let you scan traditional UPC bar codes, it does let you create your own bar code that will send a user to a website, place a phone call, add a contact or just show regular text. The main thing I see this being useful for is posters...

New Site: SprintPre.net

Palm announced a new phone named the "Pre" yesterday for release on the Sprint PCS network. It's already created quite a bit of buzz, so last night I put together a community website for it. Now my task is putting useful information on the site and getting the word out so future Pre owners start using ...

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

XNA Game Development for the Xbox 360

If you have an Xbox 360 and a bit of time on your hands (ie. no children) you've probably visited the marketplace to browse the Live Arcade games for something new. You may have noticed that they recently added Community Games, which is where amateur game creators can publish their games for everyone to try and rate. If a game becomes popular enough, it is added to the Xbox Live Marketplace. I was flipping through the community games the other day and was not impressed. Like a typical software developer, I thought to myself, "I could make a better...

Nashville User Groups (.NET and DotNetNuke)

Since being appointed as Vice President for the Nashville .NET User Group, I've felt like a fireman without a fire. My task as VP is to handle sponsorship and the all important SWAG (Stuff We All Get). The previous VP had a child and needed to step down early, so I expected to be swamped with current and potential sponsors to contact and have a list of companies who had donated products/books for giveaways to hit up for more stuff. This was not the case. The user group has been blessed with a number of very faithful sponsors and, although we did...

Friday, January 2, 2009

Silverlight in DotNetNuke

Have you ever been fired up about doing something, but every time you try to start you get bogged down in the details and loose interest? If you're a developer and tinker with projects at home I'm sure this has happened a time or two. I had an idea for a website, similar to Craigslist, but instead of hosting classified ads it would host a calendar of events for motorcycle enthusiasts. If you want to plan a ride to a specific destination next weekend, just go to your city's site and post a ride. Other members can join in if they're interested. It...