May 28 - Neil Bourgeois: Anthropomorphising Design Patterns

Anthropomorphise (verb): to ascribe human form or attributes to (an
animal, plant, material object, etc.).

Ya, it's a long word but you won't have to spell it,
Anthropomorphising can be a great technique to explain patterns to
your teammates and clients.  In this session we'll take a different
look at some classic OO design patterns by enacting the relationships
and responsibilities of each collaborator.  If you're new to OO design
patterns, this will be a great way to gain insight into the workings
of patterns.  If you're already a design pattern champion then come
out to experience a fun and engaging exercise that you can pull out to
educate teammates, involve clients and impress at parties.  Come for
the food, stay to star as the lead role in a visitor pattern.

  Neil Bourgeois is a software engineer with Tyco Thermal Controls.

April 7 - Rod Paddock on JQuery

Web 2.0 is here to stay. Jquery is a javascript library that abstracts away all of the gory details of working with Javascript for web applicatons. This session will demonstrate how to added Jquery to your ASP.NET applications today. This session will focus on proper uses of Jquery including how to organize your javascript code, how to use selectors in Jquery. How to manipulate your web content dynamically. Along with uses of the standard Jquery library time will also be spent exploring some of the most useful Jquery plugs ins.

Rod is president and founder of Dash Point Software, Inc. DPSI is an award winning software company based in Seattle, WA, specializing in application development and software training. Dash Point specializes in Visual Studio .NET, VB 6, Visual FoxPro, and SQL Server development. Dash Point Software was the winner of the 1999 Visual FoxPro Excellence Award and a finalist in 1998. Dash Point was also a finalist in 1996 at Windows World Open. Rod has been a very popular speaker at a wide variety of developer conferences in North America and Europe since 1995. His most recent speaking appearance was at the XML Connections conference in October 2002. Rod is the editor for CoDe Magazine and his writing credits include articles for database publications such as Data Based Advisor, FoxTalk and Dbase Advisor. He has also authored a number of books including Visual Basic 5 for Web Development, Visual Basic 6 for Web Development, and Visual FoxPro 6.0 Enterprise Development. Rod is also the V.P. of Technology for Red Matrix Technologies and the architectural visionary behind the DataClas middle-tier component and SQLAudit product lines