Archive for UniSA

Rostrum Club #10 Meeting 165 on Wednesday 5th Nov 2008

Note change of room to 5th Floor H5-26

Agenda for Meeting 165 on Wednesday 5th Nov 2008

Rostrum Club 10 – Presentation Skills

http://sa.rostrum.com.au/clubs/club-10

6 pm (please be there by 5.45 pm.)

to be held at

UniSA, Room H5-26, Hawke Building, North Terrace (cnr Fenn Place), Adelaide

Walk 100m up North Terrace from Tram Terminus to Fenn Place,

enter through main entrance, take lift to 5th Floor.

If late and locked out, phone Peter Griffith  0408 832 891  to be let in.

5.45pm Light refreshments and networking.  Subway available at $4 ($7 for 2).

BUSINESS

6.05pm Open Meeting Chairman: Helen Bills

· Introduction of guests

· Welcome of guests MC Terry Franklin

· Apologies –

· Icebreaker – Kate Smith

· Minutes of meeting number 164

· Business Arising

· Reports  -  President

-  Secretary including correspondence

-  Treasurer

-  Dais Member

· General Business

o Election of officers for 2009

o UniSA students and Club #10 interface

PRESENTATION PROGRAMME

MC to introduce each speaker before each presentation – Terry Franklyn

Reserve speaker if a scheduled speaker unable to present Helen Bills

6.30pm 1st Presenter – Julie Cranswick (20 mins)

Criticism (5 mins)

6.55pm Set-up break

7.00pm                  2nd Presenter – Peter Griffith (20 mins) – “Cloud Computing”

Criticism (5 mins)

7.25pm Set-up break

7.30pm                  3rd Presenter – Mark Prodoehl (20 mins)

Criticism (5 mins)

7.55pm Review programme for next month (5 mins) – Peter Griffith

Any Other Business

8.00pm             MEETING CLOSE

MASTER OF CEREMONIES – Terry Franklym  –

PRESENTERS please email the following information well before the meeting to the MC

v Purpose v Competency (if applicable)

APOLOGIES TO Program Director- Peter Griffith on 0408 832 891

Parking:

http://www.unisa.edu.au/about/campuses/cwmap.asp

Metered parking till 6pm north side North Terrace

Or park in Hindley Street or Clarendon Street and walk through to Fenn Place

Peter Griffith MACS

http://pgriffith.wordpress.com

PH: 0408 832 891

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ADNUG UniSA CodeCampSA 2008 Programme

Updated 11.30pm 09/07/2008 with programme changes.:

Darren Neimke presenting 10.30 am Saturday and Daniel Brown presenting 12.15 Sunday.

To register for Codecamp, use the “Visitor without an ACS Id” option

(unless you are an ACS member) at

http://www.acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=event&area=9005&temID=eventdetails&eveID=10109365592870

Location is UniSA West Campus. Room HH4-08, Hans Heysen Building.

Enter from Register Street (off Hindley St. at Morphett St end)

If you bring your laptop, bring a power board. We should be able to cater for a limited number of laptops. Some hotswapping might be needed depending on demand.

Saturday

8:30:00 Register

9:00:00 Jeremy Huppatz VSTS 2008 Database Edition

http://www.xanga.com/ged1970

Jeremy has been on an EDS professional development program for the last 3 months (including 2 months in Seattle) working with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition.

Jeremy will walk through the SDLC phases that the various features of DB Edition addresses and some of the productivity benefits on offer with some interesting stories from Seattle.

10:00:00 Allan BairdWelcome UniSA

10:15:00 coffee break

10:30:00 Darren Neimke – Lap Around the Windows Live Platform

Most of us are probably already using the Live Platform for things such as Mail, Instant Messaging, and, dare I say it, Search! As the Windows Live platform continues to mature we’ll see an increasing number of new ‘Live branded’ applications coming through to consumers soon.

But the Windows Live platform is very broad and not always that well understood. It can be used for anything from building Virtual Earth based mash ups through to hosting the operations of an entire small business.

In this talk, we will do a lap around the bits and pieces that make up the Live Platform and take a look at what’s in it for developers.

11:10:00 Alan Boldock WPF: Styles, Control templates, Data templates & User Controls

Bio:

Alan Boldock is a Senior Analyst Programmer and manager of a small development team working within the Central Northern Adelaide Health Service (CNAHS) at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH). The team is primarily responsible for the development and maintenance of user databases. This includes many ASP .NET web applications as well as Microsoft Access and SQL Server databases.

11:50:00 Simon Holman – DotNetNuke

Simon will be presenting a rapid development model for creating DotNetNuke modules.

Simon Holman is the Managing Director of Expressnet Web Hosting and Developed Solutions and has been hosting and developing with DotNetNuke for 4 years.

12:30:00 BBQ Lunch

13:10:00 Peter Cornish Converting visitors into Sales

Web metrics – Converting visitors into Sales explores understanding and interpreting website statistics, particularly from a sales & marketing perspective.

We look briefly at website statistical sources; the website metrics that really ‘count’ and explore some examples of how apply these stats in business situations.

The information provided is relevant for your own website or you can also apply it to your client’s websites to add value to your services.

Bio

Peter Cornish’s life long fascination with computers started in the late 70’s when as an electronics technician he built his first computer and then taught himself how to write assembler software to get it going.

With the appearance of the internet and a new career in sales and marketing, Peter used his technical understanding of computing and software to exploring using the internet as a sales tool.

Three years ago Peter established Succinct Ideas an internet marketing consultancy to help business unleash their internet sales potential.

13:50:00 Paul Turner Branding a Publishing site in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

http://paulturner.is-a-geek.com/default.aspx

- Implementing look and feel in MOSS

- Masterpages, Page Layouts and Style sheets.

- Multi-lingual sites and resource files

Director of IASA in Australia.
Member of Australian Computer Society
Board member of ACS (South Australia)
Committee member of the Adelaide SharePoint Users Group
Leadership member of the Adelaide .NET Users Group
Member of the Adelaide IT Architecture Group

14:30:00 David Gardiner Microsoft Sync Framework

An introduction to using Sync Framework for smart client apps

David Gardiner has been a .NET developer since the version 1.0 betas. He is currently working at ABB Grain Ltd after 13 years as a Senior Developer at the University of South Australia. An active member of the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, he will also be presenting a talk on “New Developer Features of SQL 2008″ later this year.

15:10:00 coffee break

15:25:00 Jason Stangroome/ Jim Burger – Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and the open-source Subversion alternative.

The presentation is about source control and why you should be using it. More specifically it is about Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and the open-source Subversion alternative and how they differ from each other in features and workflow. I plan to present the case for TFS while Jim will argue for Subversion.

Bio

Jason Stangroome has been employed as a developer since 1998 and was a hobbyist developer many years before. I am currently working with Local Government System Inc building a new suite of .Net WinForms applications to replace the existing system used by 13 rural SA councils. I also contribute to a few open source projects (TFS Deployer mainly) and have been organising occasional dinner events with other .Net developers around Adelaide since last year.

16:05:00 Nigel Spencer/ Jason Schluter Videoing Demo Competition apps – Dave Glover

Dave Glover is videoing 2 10 minute Demo Apps for entry into the Hero’s Demo Competition

16:35:00 Quiz

Prize is prize an MSDN Team Suite 2008 Subscription (valued at $19,000)

17:00:00 Break

18:00:00 Marcellina’s Restaurant – Pasta and Pizza Smorgasboard

$20 entry. Pay at door.

20:00:00 Close

Sunday

8:30:00 Paul Stovell Reactive Programming with Bindable LINQ

http://www.paulstovell.com/blog/

As Windows Client developers, our platform is always improving: from Win16 to WPF, what was once considered the impossible has increasingly become the normal. Yet while the capabilities of our platform have evolved, have we? Is Object Oriented Programming enough, or is there a paradigm that can enable you to better leverage these platforms?

In this presentation, Paul Stovell demonstrates Reactive Programming. He will also introduce Bindable LINQ, a set of LINQ extensions that bring Reactive Programming to .NET.

If you work with Windows Forms, WPF or Silverlight, be prepared for a paradigm shift.

9:10:00 Tatham Oddie Extending the ASP.NET MVC Framework

With the release of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC Framework looming closer, now is the time to not only investigate how it will be useful for your project but also to start exploring the ways we can extend it. Tatham Oddie will take a quick lap around the framework before delving into AJAX, Inversion of Control and all kinds of extensibility goodness.

Based in Sydney, Australia, Tatham divides his time between .NET Consulting and his own businesses. A passionate member of the technical community, he is a regular presenter and a currently awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.

9:50:00 Dave Glover Welcome from Microsoft

Some words of welcome from our lunches sponsor.

10:00:00 Coffee Break

10:15:00 Ben Mackie “Reflection, Injection and Add-Ins”

Value configurability and extensibility in software? This presentation will look at the purposes for adding these qualities to software, survey patterns and tools for achieving these qualities (Service Provider, IoC, DI, System.AddIn) and thoughts on what tools suit what purposes.

Ben is a solutions manager and architect, regularly morphing between a solutions architect, project manager and software architect. He has created SOA, web based, client server and multi-tier systems, has processed mathematical, relational and real-time data, and once wrote a compression algorithm in javascript…

10:55:00 Greg Low Microsoft SQL Server Coding for Maximizing Concurrency in SQL Server Applications

In this session Greg will describe the concurrency-related issues that developers need to be aware of when developing against SQL Server. In particular, he will cover transaction isolation levels in detail, including those introduced in SQL Server 2005 such as snapshot isolation and the read committed snapshot database option. Greg will also cover techniques for overcoming common problems such as deadlocks.

Greg Low: Greg is an internationally recognised consultant, developer and trainer. He has been working in development since 1978, holds a PhD in Computer Science and a host of Microsoft certifications. Greg is the country lead for Solid Quality, a SQL Server MVP and one of only three Microsoft MSDN Regional Directors for Australia. Greg also hosts the SQL Down Under podcast (www.sqldownunder.com), organises the SQL Down Under Code Camp and co-organises CodeCampOz.

11:35:00 Shane Morris Pimp My App “User Experience” (UX)

Pimp My App

“User Experience” (UX) is so hot right now. Business magazines talk about it, stakeholders want it, people even have job titles containing it. Designers, usability engineers, information architects, psychologists and even anthropologists are all circling, fighting for a piece of the UX pie. But at the end of the day, coders own the user experience. All the drop-shadows in the world don’t mean a thing if they don’t make it into the code. Join Shane Morris – recovering developer, long-time user interface designer and Microsoft User Experience Evangelist – for a discussion of user experience from the developer’s viewpoint. What simple things can developers do to deliver better user experience? If you could only do one thing to improve your application’s user experience, what would it be? What about designers? What do they do? How can they help? How can you work effectively with them? This talk focuses on practical, realistic ways to ensure your next application delivers a great user experience.

Shane Morris is one of Australia’s most experienced user experience professionals, having worked in usability and user interface design since 1991. In that time he’s worked on traditional graphical user interfaces, web sites, kiosks, multimedia products, mobile applications and physical devices. Shane has taught user-centred design techniques around the world. His clients have included Sensis, Lonely Planet, Hewlett Packard U.S., Telstra, The Australian Football League, Telecom New Zealand and the Royal Australian Air Force.

Shane has degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science and is an active member of Australia’s Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group. Shane has also lectured in Information Architecture and Usability Evaluation at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

Previously General Manager – Victoria for the Hiser Group and Principal of Echo Interaction Design, Shane joined Microsoft Australia as a User Experience Evangelist in 2006

12:15:00 Daniel Brown Developing SharePoint Web Parts with Visual Studio 2008 & disposing of SharePoint Objects.

http://www.danielbrown.id.au/default.aspx

SharePoint provides a great platform for building custom solutions and taking advantage of such features as web parts combined with the SharePoint API. The presentation will cover ways to write your code when using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services objects so that you can avoid retaining the objects in memory.

Daniel is a Senior Application Developer and Senior SharePoint Architect at Hostworks in Adelaide, Australia. At Hostworks Daniel’s main duties include developing internal applications in C# and Microsoft Office SharePoint as well as client SharePoint implementations. He is a member of the Australian Computer Society and International Association of Software Architects.

Daniel has a solid knowledge of C# and the Microsoft .NET Framework and has been using C# for over 5 years.

Daniel was awarded the Microsoft MVP award in July 2008 for his contribution to the community and his technical knowledge of both WSS & MOSS, making him the first SharePoint MVP in South Australia.

TBA

12:55:00 BBQ lunch

13:35:00 Corneliu I. Tusnea CLR Production Debugging

The session is a pre-run of the TechEd talk I’ll have in October and has a

focus on some advanced VS debugging techniques and managed production

debugging using windbg and other tools.

14:15:00 Adrian Downes Monitoring and Analytics in PerformancePoint

Server 2007

In this session, Adrian will describe how the business discipline of Performance Management intersects with Business Intelligence in general and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 in particular.

Developers will be introduced to PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer as a key tool to design, develop and deploy dashboards to monitor and analyse business performance.

14:55:00 Close

PG

Peter Griffith MACS

PH: 0408 832 891

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CodeCampSA 2008 12-13th July Prelim Program

Register at

http://www.acs.org.au/index.cfm?action=event&area=9005&temID=eventdetails&eveID=10109365592870

Saturday

8:30:00Register

9:00:00 Jeremy Huppatz VSTS 2008 Database Edition

has been on an EDS professional development program for the last 3 months (including 2 months in Seattle) working with Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition.

Jeremy will walk through the SDLC phases that the various features of DB Edition addresses and some of the productivity benefits on offer

10:00:00 Allan Baird Welcome UniSA

10:15:00 coffee

10:30:00 Daniel Brown Sharepoint

11:10:00 Alan Boldock

11:50:00 Simon Holman DNN

12:30:00 Lunch

13:10:00 Peter Cornish

13:50:00 Paul Turner Branding a Publishing site in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

14:30:00 David Gardiner Microsoft Sync Framework.

15:10:00 coffee

15:25:00 Jason Stangroome/ Jim Burger Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and the open-source Subversion alternative.

16:05:00 Nigel Spencer/ Jason Schluter Videoing Demo apps

16:35:00 QUIZ – Prize MSDN Team Suite 2008 Subscription

17:00:00 Break

18:00:00 Marcellina’s Restaurant

20:00:00 Close

Sunday

8:30:00 Paul Stovell Reactive Programming with Bindable LINQ

9:10:00 Tatham Oddie Business Considerations for the ASP.NET MVC Framework

9:50:00 Mike Duhne Welcome from Microsoft

10:00:00 Coffee

10:15:00 James Chapman-Smith

10:55:00 Greg Low

11:35:00 Shane Morris

12:15:00 Ben Mackie

12:55:00 lunch

13:35:00 Corneliu I. Tusnea CLR Production Debugging

14:15:00 Adrian Downes? business intelligence – to be confirmed

14:55:00

15:35:00 Close

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CodeCampSA

Venue: Theatre HH4-08, UniSA, City West Campus, North Terrace, Adelaide

When: 8.30am-5pm Sat/Sun 12th-13th July

First Call for speakers, email Peter Griffith if you would like to present.

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Hire My Mum is Launched in Australia

Hire My Mum is Launched in Australia

Every now and then an idea comes along that’s so good you ask yourself, “Why didn’t somebody think of this before?” Well, one such idea is ‘Hire My Mum’ – the brainchild of a fed-up north western Sydney mum, Leigh Kostiainen.

For Leigh, frustration this time was the mother of invention. After closing a retail business due to the pressures of trying to balance work and raising a young family, Leigh scoured the local papers for a more practical source of income. She thought she couldn’t be the only mum wanting to stay with her kids but still assist financially for her family.

“I knew there had to be employers and business owners that would let me use my years of experience in marketing, database management and project management to complete jobs they couldn’t afford a full time employee to do,” Leigh said.

After a frustrating search, everything Leigh found seemed to be just a scam. Determined to do something about it, Leigh founded ‘Hire My Mum’ to assist her, and others like her, who wanted to stay at home with their kids but still contribute to the household income.

It’s a fact that everyday, working women leave work to have babies. People from all walks of life are affected, teachers, receptionists, sales people, secretaries – and in the process, dozens of businesses lose skilled workers. There’s obviously a need to fill that gap.

That’s where Hire My Mum comes in. It’s a subscription service allowing Mums who have reasonable skill levels and internet access to combine the best of both worlds by working from the comfort and security of their own homes, at hours that suit them. This provides business owners with valuable workers for one-off projects or employees on a more permanent part-time basis.

The office environment has been changed so much by technology and none more so than good old dictation. There was a time that you would pop into the boss’s office with a steno pad and pen ready to take short hand, and now you can voice record your letters or reports digitally and email them to anyone anywhere for typing.

Statistically, over 60 per cent of working mothers feel they take out their stress on their families and close to half of all working mothers would prefer to be full-time mothers, while around one fifth would like to work from home. Just four per cent of working mothers would elect to work full-time if they had the choice.

These-days, working from home is no longer a ‘fad’ or just for a select lucky few – it’s an important part of Australia’s future working culture. The new Australian government strongly supports the growth of home-based small business in our country, particularly the benefits it brings to mothers and their families.

The benefits of working from home are obvious. You create a work and lifestyle balance by beating the rising costs of childcare, parking, tolls and petrol while providing flexibility in the time of day you work. Now, that’s a nifty idea!

“At Hire My Mum we are putting these skills back into the market place and providing businesses with a strong talented pool of resources, but we want listings,” Leigh said.

Business owners finding it difficult to find reliable skilled employees, or tired of trying to fend off the high costs for specialised services are encouraged to apply. Hire My Mum can help you find willing and skilled workers ready to help providing you with many financial benefits, as well as the ability to increase productivity by up to 40%. True! There are no contracts and you can register online for free!

Hire My Mum is based in north western Sydney but is not limited geographically. Women living in any city in Australia or any rural/ remote communities can log in and get the job done. People with a disability are not excluded, in fact anyone can do it – and all jobs are listed free!

As a subscription based site, the company receives no commissions or income from the jobs listed, thereby ensuring their registered mums receive all the payment for the jobs worked.

Mums can start working from home today doing the jobs you choose at a time that suits you … and the family. Joining Australia’s newest growing online industry is simple and swift. Just log in at www.hiremymum.com.au, or ring 0417 230 682.

Hire My Mum is launching nationally in time for Mothers Day 2008 to coincide with National Families Week.

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Uni Students opportunities for work experience

UniSA run 2 programs, Industry Alliance Program http://www.cis.unisa.edu.au/iap/index.html and the Business Information Systems Program. http://www.unisa.edu.au/bis/

These programs involve interaction with Industry, the BIS program gives students 2 x 15 week placements for project work. The CS program invites industry to give problems or development for students to solve.

Last November I attended 2 events showing some of the results of these programs. There were presentations by BIS students on the their placement projects. I believe there were 10-15 students in this program. The second event, 90 groups of CS students (usually 2 or 3 in a group) demonstrated solutions to problems suggested by industry partners.

Our contribution was a CS student who developed a USB interface and software for one of our serial interfaced energy management controllers.

ACS recognized the need for students “work integrated learning” (work

experience) by creating the ACS Foundation in 2001.

http://www.acsfoundation.com.au

By giving a student an ACS Scholarship rather than putting the student on the payroll which adds all the HR things (super, hol and sick pay, employee count, insurance, etc) and the student pays tax on his pay. A scholarship through the ACS foundation avoids all this and in most cases the student gets the whole amount donated by the donor tax-free.

Universities can make it difficult for students to get work experience by limiting the time available for this. I am told some courses now have a unit of work experience as a part of the course.

University courses suffer as a new course takes 2 years to develop and implement. The designers have to predict what’s likely to happen over the next 5 or so years. Not knowing what vendors will still be around, they avoid the problem. When the first graduates emerge from a new course, the concepts can be over 4 years old. It makes it easy to question the current relevance of courses.

I have watched the Howard government tearing the universities apart in their 10 years in Government. For a good description of how bad it was, I am indebted to The Science Show where Robyn Williams interviewed Vicki Sara, Chancellor, University of Technology, Sydney http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2007/2089488.htm#transcript

Vicki Sara points to a looming crisis in Australian universities as they lose their competitive position due to underfunding and over regulation.

Other OECD countries have increased funding for higher education. Australia has seen a decline of 4%.

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OzCHI2007 – the Computer Human Interface Conference

It’s always a busy week when there is a conference on.

ACS was a sponsor for this week’s OzCHI2007 conference hosted by UniSA.

http://www.ozchi.org/mediawiki/index.php/OZCHI_2007 

I was looking after the ACS handouts to delegates, attending what sessions I could and  networking.

South Australia gets brownie points as the original CHISIG http://www.chisig.org  was started by Dr Michael Patkin, a Whyalla based general surgeon with a life-long interest in applying ergonomics to surgery. http://www.mpatkin.org/

There is a continuing role for ACS in this area to support the various state CHISIGs.

With over 200 delegates, a most successful conference.

PG

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UniSA Project Fair Day and BIS Co-operative Program

I attended 2 UniSA events this week. 

The first at Mawson Lakes Campus was the School of Computer and Information Science (CIS) Student Project Fair Day. A showcase of 90 final year projects, the Day celebrates their achievements. Projects covered software engineering, multimedia, information systems and web site development, for organisations such as the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, DSTO, Comunet, Northern Sound Systems, SAPOL, Cancer Council of SA, Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, Megaw and Hogg, and many more.

Because of the number of projects, some 25 students gave a 1 minute elevator pitch to the audience on their project. The projects were able to be seen at display booths after the formalities were completed.

 The 2nd at Chifley Hotel was Final Student Presentations  for six projects undertaken for leading Adelaide organisations by top final year and postgraduate students in the BIS Cooperative Program. Projects included business needs and potential solutions for a digital photo library; strategic investigation of connected customer interaction; building a business case for a mobility solution; SAP portal roll-out; building a contract and contract clauses database; and client management system review.

The importance of students being involved in real industry projects, both students and industry participants are winners in this program,

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