We'll be meeting at the Magenic office every 2nd Thursday of the month (except in June and December) unless otherwise noted in the session details. We'll start at 5:30 PM with food and drinks, and the presentation will go from 5:45 to around 7 (go to the Location page for directions).
At each event, we'll have dinner (either pizza or sandwiches) and some free giveaways. If you want to attend the next meeting, please register by sending an e-mail to jasonb@magenic.com. This will ensure we get an accurate head count (the room can hold up to 30 people comfortably).
There's also a Facebook group that you can join - go here for the details.
Boo is a new object oriented statically typed programming language for the Common Language Infrastructure with a Python-inspired syntax and a special focus on language and compiler extensibility. In this discussion I will be showing some practical examples of BOO and talk about some of the benefits it may offer.
Justin Chase is a .NET developer and is the lead on the open source project NBusiness. He has a special interest in DSLs and programming languages. In the rest of his spare time he likes to travel, play paintball, brew beer and play games.
...description is coming...
Jason Olsen...bio is coming...
Just a few short years ago, when you talked about Java, you were referencing a language and a platform; today, that's no longer the case. Long a friendly home to hundreds of languages, the JVM proudly hosts a slew of first class citizens, from JRuby to Groovy to Scala.
In this talk we'll discuss the transition from Java the language to Java the platform, the drivers of that metamorphosis, and what it means to today's busy developers. We'll touch on the ployglot programmer meme and why it's such an exciting time to be a hacker.
Most of the time we program in modern languages like Ruby or C#. However, there are a plethora of languages out there that are strange, odd, and/or just plain funny. In this talk, I'll go over a number of esoteric programming languages such as Whenever, Befunge, and LOLCODE. Come with a sense of humor!
Jason Bock is a Principal Consultant for Magenic, and is also a Microsoft MVP. He has worked on a number of business applications using a diverse set of substrates and languages such as C#, .NET, and Java. He is the author of "Applied .NET Attributes", "CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET", ".NET Security", and "Visual Basic 6 Win32 API Tutorial". He has written numerous articles on software development issues and has presented at a number of conferences and user groups. He also run the Twin Cities Code Camp and the Twin Cities Languages User Group. Jason holds a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Marquette University. Visit his web site at http://www.jasonbock.net.
The first step in any source compilation is to analyze the source code's syntax so that it can be understood and translated into a target instruction set. But just how does this step work? In this talk, I'll discuss lexical analysis: the process by which a file full of code is systematically dissected into the identifiers, keywords and symbols that make up the source. Included will be a discussion on regular expressions, state machines, the tools used for lexical analysis today, and how all of this might be implemented in today's .NET world.
Jeff Ferguson is a Consulting Manager with Magenic. He has been with Magenic since 1996 and has worked in the software development community since 1989. Jeff has developed code for the Microsoft space during all of that time and has been involved in a variety of both desktop and Web-based projects using C, C++, C# and Visual Basic .NET. Visit his blog at http://www.geekswithblogs.net/JeffFerguson/.
Arc is a new dialect of Lisp focused on minimizing the size of source code while maximizing productivity, particularly for relatively simple web-based applications. This session will introduce participants to the Arc programming model, as well as the Arc development ecosystem as it exists today.
Kurt Christensen is a complete idiot, and always has been, although Kurt's idiocy wasn't unleashed onto the software community until 1995. Kurt has been weaseling his way into interesting coding gigs ever since, always underqualified for the task at hand. For the past four years, Kurt has also subtracted value from organizations as an "agile" snake oil salesman. Kurt still tries to code as often as possible, but the agile stuff pays more per hour, so of course you can see the difficulty.
Microsoft’s High-Level Shader Language (HLSL) is a shading language developed to give graphics programmers complete control over the graphics in their applications. This talk starts at the very basics explaining what a shader is, how it works, how to write one, and why they’re so important in the future of next-gen graphics.
Matt Christian is a student at the University of Wisconsin – Stout studying Applied Mathematics and Computer Science with a concentration in Software Development. In 2006 he was the outstanding graduate in the IT – Programmer/ Analyst degree at Northcentral Technical College. He has been programming game demos since high school and has been actively learning DirectX, OpenGL, XNA, and other game related topics. You can find out more about his current projects at http://www.insidegamer.org/projects.aspx or http://www.geekswithblogs.net/CodeBlog.
PowerShell is Microsoft's latest command line shell, formerly codenamed Monad. But PowerShell isn't just for administrators. Though they might not admit it, PowerShell is .NET's first scripting language. Learn how PowerShell's constructs combine a shell and programming language and leverage its powerful capabilities into your own environment.
Neil Iversen thrives on digging into business issues and (ab)using technology to solve a problem. As Lead Developer for Inetium, Neil gets to create solutions that span multiple technologies including SharePoint, CRM, Office and a variety of platforms. He is also a frequent speaker at the Minnesota SharePoint User Group (MNSPUG) and creator of the Minneapolis Office Developer Interest Group (MODIG).
JRuby is the only other production-ready Ruby implementation, and it's starting to see wide deployment. Whether you're building web applications, GUI applications, Java testing frameworks, or just playing around with Java APIs, JRuby has a lot to offer. And there's more to come.
This talk will focus on practical details of Ruby and JRuby, showing why Ruby is such a flexible language and how Ruby combined with the JVM is better than either alone. We'll show off GUI frameworks, graphics demonstrations, web app development and deployment, and maybe more. We'll talk about the status of JRuby in relation to Ruby versions and what's left to implement. Then we'll take a look into JRuby's future, discussing the challenges of keeping up with a development version of Ruby along with other JVM languages that keep moving forward.
Charles Nutter has been working full-time on JRuby at Sun Microsystems for almost two years. He has now expanded his job to include outreach to the JVM language community and hopes to pull more JRuby subsystems out as reusable libraries to help other language implementers. Charles blogs at headius.blogspot.com.