BizTron

I'd really like to see some more BlogEngine.NET themes take advantage of the new WidgetZone and cool features of version 1.4.  To that end, I wanted to see how difficult it would be to do this myself.  As a .NET architect and developer I haven't found myself doing a lot of css and UI interface work recently, but figured if I can do BizTalk, SharePoint, EntLib, SQL, WinForms and even ASP.NET development, HTML and css might be possible.  Besides, I'm only adding on to what other artists and geniuses have already done.

Here is my first attempt at modifying an existing BLogEngine.NET 1.3 theme to handle 1.4 functionality.  I went after one of my favorites: MWRT-002.

This is my update for BlogEngine.NET 1.4: MWRT-002-14.zip (23.24 kb)

Please critique, and let me know if you made any improvements that I had missed.  I'll be working on a few really nice themes from various locations over the next several weeks including one I'll be using on this site.  I'll try to show an example site soon.

TVUG Presentation - July 22nd, 2008 

TVUG President wrote in an e-mail to the Tech Valley .NET Users Group membership.  Please join us...

TVUG is proud to announce our first summer meeting with the return of John Pappa to Upstate New York. John's been working on a book tying data services with Silverlight 2, and he's been kind enough to give us a run through of a number of new technologies, and how they integrate together. This meeting will be held July 22nd in our standard location: our regular meeting schedule will resume in September, with a topic TBA.

Data Services with Silverlight 2

Speaker: John Pappa, MVP, MSDN Columnist, INETA Speaker
When: Tuesday July 22nd, 2008 - 6:30-9PM
Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY

Silverlight enables developers to use their .NET and XAML skills to develop Rich Internet Applications and to build data driven Silverlight applications that communicate with multi-tier architectures. This session will show how to build Silverlight 2 applications that communicate with and consume REST services and use LINQ to XML to manage XML content, show the various data binding techniques, and show how to use WCF to talk to various middle tier services including custom entity models and the Entity Framework.

Bio

John Papa is a Microsoft C# MVP, INETA speaker, consultant with ASPSOFT, speaker, author, and trainer who specializes in professional application development with Microsoft technologies including VB, C#, .NET and SQL Server. John has written over 60 articles and authored several books on data access technologies including ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, ADO.NET, XML, and SQL Server. He can often be found speaking at industry conferences such as VSLive and DevConnections, and viewed on MSDN Web Casts. John is currently working on his upcoming book titled Data Services with Silverlight 2 by O’Reilly due out in December 2008.

TVUG Presentation - June 10th, 2008 (Now June 17th)  

This event was postponed due to serious weather advisories.

Be sure to check the TVUG Website for any updates.

TVUG President wrote in an e-mail to the Tech Valley .NET Users Group membership.  Please join us...

Join us for our last meeting before our summer break as Andrew Badera introduces us to Windows Communication Foundation. The current plan is that we won't have another meeting until September '08, but we might have a special meeting if we can get an INETA speaker in the area. Let's put it to a vote next week!

WCF Essentials

Speaker: Andrew Badera, CTO, Change Round-Up
When: Tuesday June 10th, 2008 - 6:30-9PM
Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY

The global acceptance of Web services, which includes standard protocols for application-to-application communication, has changed software development. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is designed to offer a manageable approach to distributed computing, broad interoperability, and direct support for service orientation.

In order to simplify development of connected applications through a service-oriented programming model, Windows Communication Foundation bundles a lot of powerful features in one easily configured package. A couple notable features, as service architectures grow more complex and support greater workload, are duplex communication and connection throttling. This presentation will review the essentials of WCF, utilizing a Silverlight GUI to demonstrate latency and scaling characteristics of a simplex polling application vs. a duplex push application.

Speaker Bio
A lifelong geek, Andrew Badera has been immersed in the software world since the age of seven, when his parents bought him a Tandy BASICA programming book instead of Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator he had been asking for, months on end. Not to be dissuaded, he read the book three times over the following week, and immediately set about, without any great degree of success, trying to write his own flight simulator. Currently he serves as CTO of Change Round-Up in Coxsackie, NY as well as senior software engineer on the Open Systems team at Davis Vision, Inc. in Latham.