Next Meeting

Managing Privileged Account Passwords, Virtualization/Hyper-V, Windows Azure, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

INETA 10th Anniversary Special Event

Thursday, Feb. 16th, 2012 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:45 p.m. -- Information session on Windows Azure, Virtualization/Hyper-V with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012

7:45 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation: Managing Privileged Account Passwords Register Now

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Managing Privileged Account Passwords: How do you manage your privileged passwords? Come to the meeting, share horror stories and discuss best practices using the Secret Server solution by Thycotic: “The IT industry typically focuses on network security, endpoint security, firewalls, vulnerability testing, and intrusion detection. Unfortunately, passwords are often overlooked. Policies are created for end user passwords to ensure complexity and regular changes, but what about privileged passwords? Privileged (admin/root) accounts are privileged system level accounts that do not correspond to an end user. Privileged accounts can do practically anything on the network with often with little or no accountability. Examples of privileged accounts include Windows local administrator accounts, UNIX root accounts, firewall admin accounts, application/service accounts, and router local accounts – and they all have passwords. What is the best way to manage these privileged passwords?”

Windows Azure is an open cloud platform that enables developers to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Our guest speaker, Zhiming Xue, Microsoft architect evangelist, will provide an update on the new release of Microsoft Windows Azure, including its support for Node.js, java and PHP.

Benjamin Campbell is the Technology Evangelist at Thycotic Software, headquartered in Washington, DC. Thycotic produces enterprise password management tools including Secret Server, an encrypted web-based password vault for storing privileged passwords. Benjamin’s previous roles include Lead Systems Engineer, Deployment Team Leader and Windows Subject Matter Expert in varied fields including healthcare, government and high technology.

Zhiming Xue “Z"--Dr. Zhiming Xue “Z" is a senior Microsoft Architect Evangelist, based in the Washington DC area. He focuses on the Windows Azure platform while continuing to evangelize Microsoft technologies such as Windows Phone, SharePoint, Silverlight, ASP.NET and the web platform. Prior to his current role, he played lead developer and architect roles at Microsoft Services to support enterprise customers in both private sector and public sector. His blog is blogs.msdn.com/zxue.

Connecting the clouds with Google App Engine

Thursday, March 15th, 2012, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation Register Now

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Learn how to utilize Google App Engine to build enterprise class integrations using programming languages and techniques you already know. In this presentation, Joseph Ferraro from Mavens Consulting will deliver a technical deep-dive into a bug tracking application running on Salesforce.com, fully integrated with Beanstalk via Google App Engine.

Joseph Ferraro is the Director of Platform Development for Mavens Consulting (http://mavens.force.com), a cloud software firm focused on delivering innovative Force.com solutions to the pharmaceutical industry. Joseph has over 7 years of experience architecting cloud software from Salesforce.com to Amazon to Google App Engine.

Moving to the Cloud Using Platform as a Service

Thursday, April 19th, 2012, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation Register Now

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

This session offers a definition and discussion of Platform as a Service (PaaS) that focuses on developers and open standards. CloudBees' PaaS will be used to demonstrate creating, operationalizing, and continuously building and deploying a Java EE Web profile application.

Jim Leary is a Systems Engineer at CloudBees, Inc. He has over 30 years of experience in the information technology field, and for over half his career has been working with Web-based technologies across a broad swath of frameworks, platforms and languages. He has held positions as a software developer, manager and architect in a variety of industries including high technology, financial services, and energy.

VMware's vision, strategy and direction for Cloud Computing

Thursday, May 17th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

This session will present VMware's vision, strategy and direction for Cloud Computing as they move into 2012 and beyond. The session will include exposure to VMware's strategy for IaaS, PaaS, DaaS (Data as a Service) and end user consumption. VMware will discuss the technology that makes this vision and strategy come to life and how they see the market adoption from private, hybrid and service provider cloud computing.

Curtis Brazier is VMware’s Senior Program Manager for VMware’s Federal Cloud team. He has spent more than 20years in Information Technology, in strategic roles ranging from architectural design to management and operations. Since joining VMware 5 years ago, Mr. Brazier has played a key role in helping VMware’s Federal customers expand their leverage of virtualization and to adopt cloud computing. Mr. Brazier also works closely with the systems Integrator community collaborating on integrated solutions to satisfy a number of use case scenarios within the Federal Market. In his role as VMware’s Senior Program Manager for VMware’s Federal Cloud team, he helps to define and evangelize the integrated elements of VMware’s Federal cloud strategy including the unique Federal requirements around security, architecture and execution. Prior to joining VMware, Mr. Brazier held various engineering and architecture roles with companies such as Novell, RSA Security, Gemalto and CSC.

TechGate 2012 Conference

Saturday, September 15, 2012, 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: Microsoft, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190

Great technical sessions in

-- Cloud Computing

-- Software Development

-- System Management and Deployment

-- Professional Development

-- Security

Previous Meetings

The Blackboard Advanced Platform Environment (A performance based private cloud solution)

Thursday, Jan. 19th, 2012 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Blackboard Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

A discussion on the private cloud hosting platform deployed to support Blackboard Managed Hosting. The Blackboard Advanced Platform Environment (APE) is a performance based cloud platform supporting more than 1000 clients and 10’s of millions of educational clients around the globe.

Alex Kissal--Senior Director, Blackboard Managed Hosting Services. Alex delivers a fully managed private cloud based solution to approximately 35% of the Blackboard client base. During his first two years at Bb Alex managed the global Support team for all Managed Hosting clients, and the last five years running the business development efforts for North America K-12 and Higher Education. Throughout his career he has focused on sales and development efforts around web-based, cloud services and software. Prior to Blackboard, Alex worked in sales and marketing for startup Careerbuilder.com (1997-2002,) a leading online jobs-search site as well as Automatic Data Processing (2002-2004), the leading provider of payroll products and services.

Craig Nottingham--Chief Technology Architect, Blackboard Managed Hosting. Craig has worked in the Managed Hosting group at Blackboard since 2004. Blackboard Managed Hosting delivers fully managed solutions to more than 1000 clients globally in their private cloud hosting platform. During his tenure at Blackboard he has help guide technology strategy supporting the growth of the Blackboard Managed Hosting from 10% of Blackboard clients in a single datacenter to more than 35% spread across a dozen datacenters globally. Prior to joining Blackboard he worked for companies such as UUNET Technologies, Internet Security Systems, IDT Corporation and High Speed Access. Throughout his career he has supported global scale solutions in networks, systems and security.

Introducing Windows Azure & SQL Azure

Thursday, Nov. 17th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- AIS Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

This presentation will cover the basic concepts of Windows Azure including: Compute, Storage, Azure AppFabric Service Bus and ACS, and SQL Azure. Attendees will be shown how to migrate a sample on-premise application to Windows Azure and then extend that application by leveraging the additional capabilities the cloud provides. Additional application architecture patterns will be discussed and attendees will be shown a number of additional Azure based demos.

Harin Sandhoo is a solutions architect at Applied Information Sciences (www.appliedis.com), a systems software engineering company specializing in .NET-based solutions. Harin is also part of the Microsoft VTSP Program, focusing on the Windows Azure, SharePoint, and Windows Phone 7 technology areas. Prior to joining AIS, Harin worked for L-3 Titan and ITT Industries. Harin received both his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and MBA from the University of Maryland, College Park.

The Powerful Database in the Cloud -- Database.com

Thursday, October 20, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 303 (Berico Technologies Conference Room), Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Database.com is the world’s first enterprise cloud database. It's proven technology that reliably powers billions of transactions per quarter and securely manages data for thousands of organizations’ business-critical apps and users. In this talk, you’ll gain a broad overview of the various and unique technologies within Database.com. You’ll learn how to use Database.com to power big data apps, mobile apps, and social apps that you can build with the development language of your choice.

Steve Bobrowski (@sbob909) is a Senior Developer Evangelist with salesforce.com. Previously, Steve worked as Director of SaaS Technology with BEA, SaaS CTO/architect with CSC, led a large database operations team at the EPA’s National Computer Center, and worked for Oracle in many roles within the core Server Technologies group. He is an award-winning author of six books about database technology, writes for many publications, and speaks regularly at conferences and meet ups.

TechGate 2011 Conference

Saturday, September 17, 2011, 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: Microsoft, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA 20190

Great technical sessions in

-- Cloud Computing

-- Software Development

-- System Management and Deployment

-- Professional Development

Pair Programming with TDD

Thursday, August 18, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

One of the rarest and most maligned and misunderstood tool in the Agile/XP developer toolbox is Pair Programming. It is fought against by developers who want to be left alone to get a job done, and by managers who want to squeeze the most out of every billable hour. Pair Programming is an effective tool to reduce defects, spread knowledge, and mentor new hires. In this session, Jimmy Bosse and Kevin Jones will walk through the pros and cons of pair programming, how to decide if pair programming might be a good fit for your team, and demonstrate the power of TDD with pair programming to solve problems, improve code quality, and increase maintainability.

Kevin Jones is a Senior Consultant and Team Lead at Thycotic Software Ltd and an ASP.NET MVP. He is also an advocate for Agile and Lean software development.

Jimmy Bosse is an Agile Coach and Team Lead with Thycotic Software Ltd. who has been working with .NET and C# since 2001. Jimmy became a TDD fanatic in 2005. He became fascinated with Agile with Pair Programming after reading a post on the blog of Thycotic founder Jonathan Cogley and jumped at the opportunity to join the Thycotic team in 2008. He as been an avid evangelist and coach for Agile practices ever since.

The Power of Hadoop in Cloud Computing

Thursday, July 14th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Introduction by Berico Technologies

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Apache Hadoop is an open-source project administered by the Apache Software Foundation engineered to provide scalable fault-tolerent distributed (rack-aware) data storage and processing comprised of the self-healing high-bandwidth clustered Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the fault-tolerant MapReduce framework. Cloudera is an active contributor to the Hadoop project and provides an enterprise-ready, commercial Distribution for Hadoop. By integrating the most popular projects related to Hadoop into a single package and subjecting it to rigorous tests to ensure reliability during production, Cloudera has created a commercially viable alternative to relational and data warehousing products with a dramatically reduced total cost of ownership. Joey will discuss the Evolution of the Apache Hadoop Stack, why we need it and how it works. Topics will include Hadoop’s key business values and use cases, performance, and component architecture and utilization. This is the presentation on open source cloud computing that you’ve been waiting for.

Joseph Echeverrialuti is a Solutions Architect at Cloudera where he works directly with customers to deploy production Hadoop clusters and solve a diverse range of business and technical problems. Joey joined Cloudera from the NSA where he worked on data mining, network security, and clustered data processing using Hadoop. Prior to working full time for NSA, Joey attended Carnegie Mellon University where he attained an M.S. and a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Data Modeling in Azure Table Storage and Amazon SimpleDB

Thursday, June 16th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:15 p.m. -- Modis Consulting Information session

7:15 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Both Amazon Simple DB and Windows Azure Table Storage allow the creation of massively scalable data sets. In both systems, entities don’t have a fixed schema but instead provide key/value dictionaries. These databases support massive loads beyond the capabilities of any relational database. However, this flexibility comes at a price. Traditional data modeling tools like foreign key relationships and table joins aren’t supported by these storage engines. For developers used to working with SQL databases, new skills must be learned.

In this session, you’ll learn:

Similarities and differences between Microsoft Azure Storage and Amazon SimpleDB.
How to structure data in table storage.
How to build web applications that run at massive scale by using table storage.

The code sample is written in ASP.NET MVC running on Azure with an Azure Table Storage database.

FREE 30 day trial of SQL Azure and the rest of the Azure platform free of charge, no credit card required

It only takes a couple of minutes to sign up at www.windowsazurepass.com and enter: capcloudug as the promo code.

Geoff Snowman is a web architect with Hedgehog Development in Holbrook, Long Island, NY. From 2001 – 2009 Geoff worked for Microsoft Corporation where he focused on .NET development and BizTalk Server. Geoff’s technical interests include web development, social media, cloud computing, and service-oriented architecture. Geoff is a frequent speaker at developer community events throughout the Mid Atlantic and New York metro areas as well as online.

Unleash the power of F#

Thursday, May 19th, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- CSC Information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

F# Functional Programming will allow you to write less code and be more productive at the same time.

Learn these basic concepts of Functional Programming:
1. Declarative Programming v.s Imperative Programming
2. What v.s How style
3. Immutability

Learn how you can write less code for some of your most used Design Pattern based class libraries.

Soe Tun is an accomplished software engineer and technical evangelist. He has been a speaker for user group meeting and conferences such as Richmond Code Camp. Soe is passionate about helping other developers and IT professionals to learn cutting-edge technologies. For more information about Soe, please visit his blog at : http://geekswithblogs.net/stun

Force.com & Salesforce New Features

Thursday, April 21, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 1501 Lee Highway, Suite 400, Arlington, VA 22209 (near Rosslyn metro station, parking available at garage)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- RightNow Technologies information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

There are so many exciting new features on Force.com cloud computing platform. During this session, Peter will cover some new features and show you how to effectively working with them. From his working experience with Saleforce, you will find this session very useful, productive, and informative.

Peter Churchill has 15 years of experience in the design and implementation of Contact Management systems for both the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. Peter started out in the corporate sector working for KPMG Consulting, and then at American Express, implementing large scale contact management solutions such as Siebel for Fortune 500 companies in Europe and the USA.

In 2005, Peter moved to Washington D.C. to get his Masters degree in Political Management at GW University. Since then, he has focused on working with political and not-for-profit groups to help them implement a more CRM-based approach in their organizations, mainly focusing on the Salesforce.com platform. After two years at the Center for American Progress, where he was instrumental in designing and implementing their Salesforce.com platform across the organization, Peter started his own consulting firm in 2008. Since then, he has continued to work with the Center, as well as other leading not-for-profit organizations in helping help them plan and implement their CRM strategies and technologies.

Goodbye Entity Framework 1, Hello Entity Framework 4!

Thursday, March 17th, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Aquilent information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

The 1.0 release of the Entity Framework was not a resounding success – developers found themselves fighting the framework. Thankfully, Entity Framework 4 enables you to work how YOU want to work. Database-first, Model-first, or Code-First – you decide. Self-tracking entities, POCO entities, custom entities – you decide. Auto-generated SQL or stored procedures – you decide. With a slew of new features EF4 will allow you to quickly achieve a high level of productivity. This demo-heavy presentation will cover the new features of Entity Framework 4 with a focus on features that will enhance the quality of your code!

Steve Michelotti is a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP and an Architect/Developer for Applied Information Sciences (AIS). He has consulted at Advertising.com/AOL where he was the Tech Lead for one of the highest volume .NET applications in the world. He previously was the Chief Technologist at e.magination. Steve is a frequent presenter at developer user groups and Code Camps along the East Coast and holds the MCSD, MCPD, and MCT certifications. Steve has been on Microsoft Channel9 and his published articles include Visual Studio Magazine and his blog: www.geekswithblogs.net/michelotti.

Cloud Computing Implementation and Security

Thursday, Feburary 17th, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- World Wide Technology information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Cloud computing applications and platforms such as Salesforce.com CRM, the Force.com platform, Amazon S3 and Google Apps provide enterprises with a path to quantifiable cost savings while increasing agility and scalability, in addition to providing a superior user experience. Implementing SaaS applications on an enterprise scale multiplies the benefits, presenting new opportunities to streamline and integrate processes and systems. However, SaaS is a new model for consuming and delivering software and therefore raises some new questions.

Jon Irwin is a Technical Architect for Data Center Solutions for World Wide Technology, Inc. (www.WWT.com). He is the lead engineer for WWT’s mobile containerized cloud computing solution. In his 28 years in the IT community, he has held both senior technical and director-level positions working for the US Government, several system integration firms, OEMs including EMC, and now one of the leading value added reseller/system integration firms supporting the Federal Government and commercial enterprises worldwide.

IIS Express, Razor, and WebMatrix, oh my!

Thursday, January 20th, 2011, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Acumen Solutions information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Does the announcement of so many new technologies make you wonder where the yellow brick road is that will lead you to the Oz of understanding? Well, there’s no denying that there’s a lot to keep up with these days if you’re a web developer. So let Microsoft Developer Evangelist G. Andrew Duthie give you an overview of Microsoft WebMatrix, ASP.NET Web Pages, the new Razor syntax, and IIS Express, and how they fit in with the existing offerings in Microsoft’s web stack.

Learn how and when you’d want to leverage these new technologies, and when existing technologies may be a better choice. Expect discussion and demo, and bring your questions, so we can make this an interactive and dynamic session!

G. Andrew Duthie, aka devhammer, is the Developer Evangelist for Microsoft’s Mid-Atlantic States district, where he provides support and education for developers working with the .net development platform. In addition to his work with Microsoft, Andrew is the author of several books on ASP.NET and web development, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences from VSLive! and ASP.NET Connections, to Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) and Tech-Ed. Andrew has been participating in the user group community since way back in 1997, when one of his co-workers dragged him out to the Internet Developers User Group in Tyson's Corner, VA, and he's been hooked ever since.

Andrew is also the creator and developer of Community Megaphone, a site designed for promoting and finding developer community events.
Andrew can be reached through his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/. You can also follow Andrew on twitter.

Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2

Thursday, December 9th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Are you considering Amazon's EC2 as the platform for your next business intelligence project? How will you interact with the cloud from within your corporate network? How will you create the applications that normalize and continuously analyze your data? How will you deliver this data to your end users? In this talk, the speaker will provide an introduction of the EC2 platform and introduce some tools that make working with it easier.

Tom Grant is the Product Manager for Twister Data Framework (http://twisterdataframework.com), a high performance data integration platform offered by SMSi. He has 11 years of experience developing solutions for both the commercial and government markets where his customers have shared the common challenge to gain insight from big data. The big data challenge has lead him to specialize in grid and cloud technologies, applying them to provide business intelligence systems.

Salesforce (force.com) New Features

Thursday, November 18th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- TechUSA information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Our guest speaker, Peter Churchill, is a Salesforce expert. During his presentation, he will cover some new features of Salesforce and provide some useful demos that can help you to understand the power of force.com platform. This is a meeting you should not miss.

The Service Bus in the Sky - How to Connect Identity and Applications across Firewall Boundaries (Intermediate Level)

Thursday, October 21st, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Ettain Group information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Have you ever needed to build a web site that lets users log on using their Facebook passwords? Have you ever needed to connect applications that are running inside different firewalls? Perhaps the applications are in different data centers within the same organization, or perhaps one end is in your customers' or suppliers' data centers. Perhaps you need a flexible identity management solution that lets you switch from Active Directory to Google IDs, Facebook Connect, or Live ID with no code changes. Maybe you even want to write a massively multiplayer game like World of Warcraft, but you don't want to create your own server infrastructure to support it. You can solve these problems using Windows Azure AppFabric. The solutions work even if your application is hosted in your own data center, and you never plan to run code in the cloud.

In this session, we'll build a web site that allows you to long on with your Facebook credentials. We'll also build a chat application that works through firewalls, and demo it running across multiple networks.

Geoff Snowman is a mentor with SolidQ USA, part of Solid Quality Mentors, where he specializes in cloud computing, .NET development, and service-oriented architecture. Before joining SolidQ, Geoff worked for Microsoft Corporation in a variety of roles, including presenting MSDN events as a Developer Community Champion, and working extensively with BizTalk Server as both a Process Platform Technology Specialist and a Senior Consultant. Geoff has been part of the local user group scene for many years as both a frequent speaker and former user group organizer.

Introduction to Windows Azure

Thursday, September 16th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

Meeting Location: 4713 A Eisenhower Avenue, Alexandria, VA 22304 (plenty of FREE Parking spaces)

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Employ-R information session

7:20 to 8:20 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Azure is Microsoft's cloud-computing platform. In this introduction, we'll review the overall platform and its core components, such as service roles, storage, and the service bus. We'll build a sample app that takes advantage of these components, as well as SQL Azure, Microsoft's cloud-based relational database.

David Makogon is a Principal Architect at RDA (www.rdacorp.com), and the technical lead on RDA's Architectural Guidance Practice Group (http://architecture-blog.rdacorp.com). He's also a Microsoft Solutions Advocate and an Microsoft Azure Virtual Technical Specialist. You can follow him on twitter (@dmakogon) and visit his blog (www.DavidMakogon.com).

Windows Azure Platform

Thursday, August 19th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- Applied Information Sciences session

7:20 to 8:15 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

Windows Azure is Microsoft's operating system in the cloud and is a bold step towards commercializing Microsoft's heavy investment in data centers globally.

Windows Azure offers great benefit to enterprises, ISVs and developers in building cloud services that offer dynamic provisioning, scale-up, and scale-down at the click of a button. The Windows Azure platform abstracts the data center hardware by providing you with auto-provisioning APIs and a series of clicks on the developer portal.

Vishwas Lele is an AIS Chief Technology Officer and is responsible for the company vision and execution of creating business solutions using .NET technologies. Vishwas brings close to 20 years of experience and thought leadership to his position, and has been at AIS for 13 years. A noted industry speaker and author, Vishwas is the Microsoft Regional Director for the Washington, D.C. area and a member of the Connected Systems Division Advisors group. Additionally, Vishwas has received an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Solution Architecture award for both 2006 and 2007. Prior to joining AIS, Vishwas worked for Tata Unisys and Microstrategy. Vishwas received his Bachelors degree in Electronics Engineering from Nagpur University in India and his Masters degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.

Develop Cloud Computing Apps on force.com

Thursday, July 29th, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern

6:30 to 7:00 p.m. -- Member Networking (refreshments & pizza will be provided)

7:00 to 7:20 p.m. -- GRYPHON solutions demo for cloud computing

7:20 to 8:15 p.m. -- Featured presentation

8:20 to 8:30 p.m. -- Raffles and giveaways

The Force.com development platform makes building applications faster and easier than ever. It includes a database, security, workflow, user interface, and other tools that step you through the process of building powerful business apps, mobile apps, and Web sites. During this meeting Tony Kim will show us how to build and deploy applications on Force.com.

Tony Kim is a senior software engineer and cloud computing pioneer. He has developed enterprise-level cloud computing application that supports world-wide staff members. He has over ten years of programming experience and has substantial knowledge in C#, .NET, APEX, Visual Force, PHP, Visual Basic, and many other programming languages. He is currently working for AAAS.