Thanks to Sebastian, Darryl, Sarah, and Chris for making it out last night to the August meeting. Over the course of the evening we had some great discussions about HTML5, the new Google Maps API, Rails 3, Flex, tablets, and other fun topics. Congrats to Darryl for winning the channel developer contest with Litl and on his trip out to FITC 2010. He gave us a demo of his how the Litl development environment worked and the sign language channel he’s developed which very cool to see.

At the close of the meeting, we came to the consensus that we’d like to start building an application as a group. I shared my idea for a pub crawling application using HTML5, Google Maps and Geo-location, LawnChair, CouchDB, jQuery, and an assortment of other fun libraries that everyone seems to be into. Each meeting we’ll try to building a piece of the puzzle and see how it goes. If anyone has any suggestions or requests for features or technologies they’d like to use, come out to the next meeting and let’s dig in.

Our next meeting will be on September 21th, 2010 @ 6:00 PM at the Suntree/Viera Library, since the venue seemed to work out pretty well this month. See you then!

Rick Johnson from Kirkman Consulting is looking for candidates for a client who’s recently opened a development center in Melbourne.  The company is an outsourcing company who is looking to compete with off-shoring companies and is in desperate need for “.NET and Biztalk developers”.  I’ve posted the job description below:

Microsoft C# Mid and Sr. Level Developer

Job Description

• Work with the functional analysis team to understand the business requirements and help to translate these into technical specifications and work items.
• Work with the other Developers to build a highly scalable, and reusable architecture within the .NET Framework.
• Create simple technical documents for use in translating the edge-point requirements to other technical developers in adjacent teams.
• Develop user interface applications, backend services and data access layers within the .Net Framework.
• Understand the design and have a strong working knowledge of development within Microsoft SQL Server object development.
• Understand and have a strong working knowledge of MVC and JQuery.
• Understand the Visual Studio 2008 IDE including the ability to create service references and work with Team Foundation Server (TFS).
• Create unit tests within Visual Studio and demonstrate TDD development.
• Report and correct defects as well as confirming the defect corrections of others on the team
• Participate in Agile Methodology sessions and understand the basics of the Agile SDLC.
• Work well in a small team environment, be a self-starter and mentor other team members.
• Understand the basics of business object development including the ability to work with Design Patterns, WCF and Linq-to-Objects.

Job Experience

The ideal candidate will have:

• Minimum (3-5 years Mid) (5+ years Senior) experience in application design, development and testing in .NET Framework/C#.
• Minimum 3-5 years experience with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, C#, SQL Server 2005,
• Understanding of databases and database concepts such as SQL and relational database design.
• Understanding of software development concepts including programming languages (C# and XML), Object oriented analysis and design, and design specifications.
• Experience in development of backend Windows based applications. Knowledge of CSLA, XSLT, and serializers are helpful but not absolutely necessary.
• Experience with development tools such as Visio UML Diagrams and Visual Studio 2008.
• Should have specific knowledge of some the following areas:  Command, Abstract Factory, Singleton and Façade Design Patterns.
• WCF services, including the ability to define endpoints, create data contracts, message contracts and work with configuration files.
• Create and work with SQL Server 2005 tables, triggers, and stored procedures.
• Create and deploy reports with SQL Server Reporting Services.
• Must have good analytical skills and a solid understanding of cross-cutting concerns.
• Must enjoy programming and be excited about the opportunity to exercise the skills.
• Must pay attention to detail and have tenacity
• Must have a solid understanding of common software failures exceptions and how to deal with them in a programming environment.
• Should be able to get along with other team members.

I do have to apologize, Rick sent me this posting in June, and I’ve just gotten to posting it now. Anyone interested in the position should contact Rick directly at rjohnson@kirkwoodIT.com.

Since Spain has won the World Cup, SitePoint is giving away their JQuery: Novice to Ninja Book for free!  The deal is only effective today, 07/12/2010, so make your way over now and grab a copy before it’s too late.

I’ve updated the code base for tonight’s meeting so the application works just like what we built in the web version of the application. If you haven’t downloaded the code for the meeting as of yet, you can grab it @ http://svn.itsrandom.info/20081218/. I did some refactoring to pull out the jQuery plugin for Google Maps in favor of us using their APIs directly; over time I’ll try to add this back into our AJAX application as well. I have to thank Simeon Bateman for all his help with the code for tonight’s meeting. Without his help, we’d be learning a lot less about Adobe AIR tonight; thanks Sim!

If you think you can make out, please RSVP so we can get a head count for the restaurant and sponsor. See you tonight!

Adobe AIR is a technology platform aimed at bringing the ease of conventional web development to the desktop development experience.  AIR is a cross platform technology, just like the Flash Player, capable of running on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  An AIR application can be created using traditional HTML and JavaScript, the Flex framework, or a combination of the two.  When developing with HTML and JavaScript, Adobe provides a tailored version of Webkit.  This being available, it’s possible to utilize JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, Prototype, and Dojo as well as most of their plugins.  AIR also exposes a set of JavaScript libraries which allow you to take advantage of  desktop integration features such as file system access, SQLite access, network monitoring, and more.  Additionally, with AIR running on the desktop, some of the cross-site security concerns imposed by the browser are removed, conversly though, a new set of concepts regarding security sandboxes are introduced which can get a little tricky at times.  Overall however, the experience is very similar to what we as a group are accustom.

In this month’s meeting, I’m going to show you the what’s involved in migrating our restaurant application to the AIR platform.  My goal is to give a brief introduction to AIR, show you the tools I used to migrate the application, and last, but most importantly, show you lots of code to relay some of the previously mentioned concepts.  If you’d like to follow along on your own laptop, having the following available will make it easier:

• Adobe AIR 1.5 SDK and runtime
• Aptana Studio with AIR support installed
• Code from SVN

I’ll show most of my code examples in Apatana, since it’s stupid easy to use with AIR, but I’ll go over the command line tools for adl and adt as well.

Hope you can join us on December 18th @ 7:00 PM at Charlie and Jake’s for the end of year meeting.  If you think you may be able to attend, please RSVP here so we can give our sponsor a head count.  If you can’t make it out, Happy Holidays from the RAnDOM crew!

NOTE: Sorry for the delay on this primer.  I realize the meeting is this Thursday, so I hope you can join us for our meeting.

We’ve published the EventBrite page for November, so if you think you’ll be able to join us for a beer and some code at Charlie and Jake’s this Thursday, 11/20, @ 7:00 PM, please RSVP.

In preparation for this Thursday’s meeting, we’ve also updated the site a bit.  We’ve added the subdomain http://apps.itsrandom.info which contains the restaurant review application from our August meeting.  We’ve also updated the restaurant service to work via JSONP and updated the code base for the client and service in our SVN repository.  In this Thursday’s meeting we’ll be working with Selenium and this application to show examples of integration testing in web applications.

Hope you can join us!

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the October meeting last night.  We had a great turn-out of 8 people at our new venue, Java Surf.  Although, there were only a few laptops, I think we were able to have a good dialog about RESTful web services and, for those who toughed it out, a working client finally came to be.  I’ve committed my client code to get the client working on an instance of the Rails application running locally, but I was unable to get the JSONP code working with jQuery and Rails.  I hope to get something working over the next few weeks for anyone who is interested.  

We are interested in getting feedback about our new venue.  If you have time, please leave a comment on this post with what you did and didn’t like.  I know there were a few complaints about parking and internet access being limited to 60 minutes, so if these are points of concern, please let us know so we can look for another place to meet.

In any case, we will have the November meeting date and topic posted soon, so thank you to Zach for offering to present next month.  See you all next month!

For our first meeting, we’re not really sure what to expect in terms of attendance or location or even how well cooperative programming will work out, so this time around we’re going to keep it simple. I’ve thrown together a sample app using nothing but HTML, CSS, and Javascript so we can all work together to create your typical AJAX mash-up application; no server scripting need. We’ll be using everyone’s favorite Javascript library, jQuery, as well as the jMaps and jgCharts plug-ins for jQuery to make creating the mash-up that much easier.

To participate in the meeting, we suggest bringing along the following:

• Laptop with your favorite OS
• An editor/IDE for working with HTML/CSS/JS (I like Eclipse)
• A Subversion client to get a hold of the code (I like Subversive or TortoiseSVN)
• Firefox with Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar installed

That being said, if you don’t have these few things and just want to swing by, get a bite to eat, and see what we’re all about, everyone’s welcome. My shoulder is definitely available for looking over.

I’ve created the event on Eventbrite, our calendaring and event tool, so if you are able to make it, please leave us an RSVP so we can let the restaurant know how many to expect. Code should be made available withing a few days, if anyone wants to start messing around with it. Also, if you feel the urge, help us spread the word about our organization and meetings. Every little bit helps, especially since right now it’s just 3 guys who like to code trying to put this together.

Hope to see you all at our first meeting!