Mitch Wheat - Treat the cause, not the symptoms!

Applications that can be reconfigured and extended after deployment often last longer and enjoy greater success. Enabling this powerful technique requires forethought and planning and can be difficult to implement. .NET 4.0's Managed Extensibility Framework provides you with the tools you need to make highly customizable applications with very little additional effort. You will walk away from this session ready to extend existing MEF-based products and add MEF extensibility to your own applications.

• TOPIC:   Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)- with Mike Minutillo
• DATE:    Thursday, July 1st, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
• VENUE:  Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
• COST:    Free. All welcome

Mike Minutillo is .NET software engineer with a BSc in computer science. He is a regular attendee at the Perth .NET Community of Practice where he has given presentations on new features of C#, ASP.NET MVC and Test-Driven Philosophy. Mike is half of the winning team in the 2008 Microsoft DevSta programming competition winning best overall application and best mobile application. Mike is co-author of the upcoming Professional Visual Studio 2010. He maintains a technical blog at http://wolfbyte-net.blogspot.com/ and can be contacted at http://twitter.com/wolfbyte/

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA), and several 30-day coupons to Tekpub's high-quality, online screencasts for programmers.

The TFS Branching Guide for the 2010 release, which is also 2008 compatible, is available for download from Codeplex here: Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010

An interesting paper on the performance of four new .NET 4.0 concurrent collection types: ConcurrentQueue<T>, ConcurrentStack<T>, ConcurrentBag<T>, and ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue>: Thread-safe Collections in .NET Framework 4 and Their Performance Characteristics (from the MSDN Parallel Computing Developer Center)

PDF poster can be downloaded here.

LearnDevNow.com is offering approximately 15 hours of free Visual Studio 2010 training (requires free Sign up):

Exploring Visual Studio 2010 Using Visual Basic or Visual C#  (full course)

• Investigate new language features and see the benefits of the new WPF-based IDE.
• Learn about many of the new ASP.NET Web Forms features.
• See how the all-new Workflow 4.0 works and get started learning its features.
• Create services using the new features in WCF.
• Drill into new WPF features, focusing on new controls, data binding and more.
• Create Silverlight applications using the new designer built into Visual Studio 2010.
• Incorporate Office 2010 features into .NET applications, focusing on SharePoint 2010.

Exploring Visual Studio 2010 ALM Tools  (4 out of 8 modules)

• See the new features of Visual Studio 2010 for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
• Understand about Team System and Excel Reports as well as Ad-hoc reporting.
• Then move on to Version Control with Team Foundation Server version control concepts
• Learn about Microsoft Test and Lab Manager for test plans for both manual and automated testing.

Just an on post from a conversation I saw on a C# list: .NET Framework 4 Migration Issues:

This topic describes migration issues between the .NET Framework version 3.5 Service Pack 1 and the .NET Framework version 4, including fixes, changes for standards compliance and security, and changes based on customer feedback. Most of these changes do not require any programming modifications in your applications.

• Features Supported by the Editions of SQL Server 2008 R2
• What's New (SQL Server 2008 R2)