Martin Kulov's Blog

This month UG meeting will be held on 7th of March, 19:00 at Elieff Center for Education and Culture, Studentski grad, Sofia, Hall 103. We have a special guest from INETA - Alex Thissen.

Alex is going to talk about WPF and LINQ in two different sessions.

Here are the abstracts:

Windows Presentation Foundation

In this talk the speaker will show some of the powerful features of WPF that clearly shows its potential as an application framework. The session will focus on styling, resources, templates and data-binding for WPF controls. Learn how styling for WPF brings CSS of the web to the world of Windows applications. You get to see that templates allow you to completely change the look of controls and how resources are used in WPF. And last, but not least, this session will cover the data-binding options, which offer much more control and possibilities to combine data and controls. The session shows all features in several demos and puts the pieces of this puzzle together by combining it all.

LINQ to SQL and LINQ to XML

The .NET Framework 3.5 has support for language integrated querying and ships with providers for various data sources. In this talk we will take a close look at two of these: LINQ to query SQL Server databases and XML data. After a quick introduction to the basics we are going to dive right in and get a deeper understanding of how and where LINQ queries are executed. Finally, you get to see how LINQ can be used for real-life scenarios such as a WPF application. This session is going to be full of demos and offers room for lots of questions from the audience.

About the Speaker

Alex Thissen is .NET technology evangelist from INETA Europe Speakers Bureau. He works for Class-A, a company specialized in training and coaching on Microsoft technologies and tools. He is a .NET trainer and teaches and coaches developers to build better software. He teaches the .NET Platform and Framework to both developers and architects. He has been a trainer for many years now and also spent quite some time with COM+ and Visual Basic. Alex performs audits of .NET implementations and the development teams responsible for it. He has written a number of articles for various magazines, such as .NET Magazine, the Visual Basic Group and SDC Magazine. You can probably find Alex at conferences, seminars and other community events where he likes to share his experiences from training and coaching.

Thanks to Telerik and INETA for all the support!

Labels: INETA, LINQ

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:41 AM |

This Saturday we organized the first pilot CodeCamp in Bulgaria. Personally I think the event was superb. First it was the variety of the nature of presentation that were given. They were not required to follow any specific technology track and no one get bored because of that. The small group that we kept allowed us to have discussions on any question at any given time. In one of the sessions the speaker was interrupted to fix a using clause, which eventually led to 15min discussion on why developers have to use tools like Resharper and their prons and cons. We also gained a lot of experience in car repair services under -20°C as an added value :)

Next meeting is scheduled for May so keep an eye on my blog and the CodeCamp web site. You can also see pictures from this pilot event at the CodeCampBG FaceBook space. A registration of codecamp.bg is pending. If you need support of setting up .bg domain, you can always contact me (for non BG readers - yes, it is f* hard to get a .bg domain).

Thanks to Deyan Varchev and Stefan Dobrev for organizing this event together.

Labels: CodeCamp, INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:45 AM |

The November meeting of SofiaDev .NET User Group will be held on 29^th November, 18:30h, at local Microsoft office.

Presenter is going to be Galin Iliev aka Galcho, very smart guy and a very good friend also.

Galcho is going to talk about building custom modules in II7, web farm administration, problem diagnostics and others.
Here is a brief schedule:

1. New tools in IIS7 as well as new administration options


2. New tracing and diagnostics options


3. New integration pipeline


4. Deep example that:
   
   
   
   1. use custom IIS module written in C#
   
   
   2. extend IIS configuration schema
   
   
   3. extend IIS Manager by adding UI component
   
   
   
   

If you want to attend, send an email to branimir a-t sofiadev.net to reserve your seat.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 5:08 AM |

INETA Europe is organizing Silverlight Challenge that starts in November and will have Bulgarian contest to elect two winners to compete on European level in February 2008 at the European Grand Final!

Details about competition are available here: http://europe.ineta.org/Events/EuropeanSilverlightChallenge/tabid/311/Default.aspx.
If you want to participate in this competition - ask Branimir Giurov - Country Leader of INETA for Bulgaria (branimir (ATsign) sofiadev.org) or email me.

Make sure to check my blog for additional details about the local part of the competition.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 7:35 AM |

I am going to speak to this year’s WebTech 2007. The event is hold at Varna, one of the Bulgarian major seaside cities. The conference is going to be great and it is free to attend. I will be talking about SliverLight and can it change the market that Flash already won.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 11:18 PM |

We had a great speaker at this month’s .NET user group meeting. George Kremenliev, previously working as Software Development Engineer in Test in the WCF team, presented how to write WCF services with workflow in .NET 3.5. I did not have a chance to blog about this meeting before due to short notice to the group at all. Ruslan took some pictures again (thanks for doing it every time man).

I am not going to spoil the surprise and I am only going to say that the next meeting of Sofia.NET user group will be on distributed applications with .NET 3.5.
If you want to receive email notification about the next INETA meeting, please register here.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 3:00 AM |

I know that I haven’t written anything for a while but there were a lot of changes happening around and they just suck all of my free time.
As I will blog about anything that happened in May later, I first want to bring you the big news.

Dino Esposito will be our special guest on 04-05 July in Sofia. He will present inner workings of ASP.NET and AJAX frameworks in highly specialized, level 400, seminar called Wicked ASP.NET Programming.

I remember few years ago, when I was just learning ASP.NET framework, how much value brought Dino’s articles to my work. He is probably the most trustworthy guy when talking about ASP.NET and AJAX. I have read a lot of his articles in Cutting Edge column for MSDN Magazine, ASP.NET Development Center in MSDN and many others.
I had a chance to meet Dino in March at the spring edition of BASTA conference. Not only that he an expert on ASP.NET but I found him to be very open minded and eager to help the Bulgarian community. I virtually squeezed every possible free dates from his already occupied calendar to find these two days and visit us in Sofia.

I am very excited about the seminar agenda. It covers everything from IIS process model and page lifecycle in ASP.NET to server endpoints and client eventing model in AJAX.

If you plan to visit the seminar, you will have the chance to get a big discount on the latest book from Dino Esposito “Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions”.

This week is the chance to catch 20% early bird discount.
Hurry up! Space is limited.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 1:28 PM |

The next meeting of Sofia.NET User Group will be help tomorrow (25^th of April) at 18:30 at local Microsoft office presented by Rosen Zhivkov.
I am sorry for the late notification but I really forgot to blog about it.
The agenda is:

- Integration of data with SharePoint, MS SQL Server, web services
- Extensibility and scripting of InfoPath with .NET and VSTO
- Forms Server - using of InfoPath forms with browser only - no ActiveXs
- Integration of InfoPath forms in WinForms applications
- InfoPath and Forms Server as front-end to Biztalk (real-life proof of concept project)
- Using Forms Server for rendering InfoPath forms in SharePoint 2007 Workflow

Demos of bug tracking, time tracking applications and others will be shown in the presentation also.

See you there!

UPDATE: The meeting was held on 25^th of April, not on 26^th as I originally posted. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 9:46 PM |

Ruslan Trifonov posted pictures from the last meeting of Sofia.NET User Group. Galin Iliev [Galcho] presented very nice session on Microsoft Office 2007 addins.
Kudos to Microsoft Bulgaria for the provided food, beer and very cool mug.
If you want to receive notifications about Sofia.NET future meetings, you can register here.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 10:06 PM |

The March meeting of Sofia.NET User Group is going to be held at 29th March, Thursday, at 18:30h at the local Microsoft office. You can find the official invitation here.
This time the topic is "Developing Add-Ins for Microsoft Office 2007" presented by Galin Iliev [Galcho].

The group has fully functional registration page. If you have friends that would like to come with you or just receive information about the group, please ask them to register. They should also send email that they want to participate in the meeting.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:10 AM |

Microsoft Bulgaria is organizing Innovations Day on 13 February 2007. The event will be broadcasted live so everyone has a chance to watch the tracks. I am going to speak about .NET 3.0 and WCF. The whole event has business and developer tracks. The developer tracks are co-organized with the support of INETA and Sofia.NET User Group.

Here is the program in brief:

• Introduction to .NET 3.0 – level 200, Martin Kulov, Director .NET Development, National Academy for Software Development


• Developing User Interface using WPF and Microsoft Expression Blend – level 200, Vladimir Tchalkov, MVP, Manager, Crossroad


• Developing service oriented applications using WCF – level 300, Martin Kulov, Director .NET Development, National Academy for Software Development


• Integrating business processes in client and server applications using WWF – level 300, level 200, Vladimir Tchalkov, MVP, Manager, Crossroad

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 1:28 PM |

Ruslan Trifonov has posted pictures from the SofiaDev .NET User Group meeting last week. You can’t see the session but you can actually see how hungry developers can be after my Data Dude talk :)

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 12:47 AM |

Today I will talk at Sofia.NET User Group about Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. I hope that we will have a good discussion on what common scenarios people are experiencing when they need to refactor and deploy a database.
The meeting will be held at the local Microsoft office at 18:30h. As usual - feel free to come and join us.
Here is the official announcement.

Labels: INETA

# posted by Martin Kulov @ 2:18 AM |