Speaker Bureau Profile: Dane Morgridge

About the ComponentOne Speaker Bureau

The purpose of the ComponentOne Speaker Bureau program is to provide Code Camps and user group meetings with qualified speakers. ComponentOne also wants to provide opportunities for public presentations by knowledgeable speakers to aid them in furthering their career interests.

In this series of blog posts, we'll profile the members of the ComponentOne Speaker bureau, and their talks. To schedule a speaker bureau member, contact Rich Dudley at richd@componentone.com. Please supply your event location, dates the speaker is needed, and which talk(s) you are interested in.

About Dane

Dane Morgridge has been a developer for 10 years and has worked with numerous technologies in this time. His current passions are Entity Framework, Ruby on Rails & C and he is currently a Microsoft MVP for Data Platform Development and an ASPInsider. He works mostly with C# and Ruby on Rails, but is also a big fan of whatever new technology he happens to come across. In addition to software development, he is the host of the Community Megaphone Podcast and also enjoys dabbling in graphic design, video special effects and hockey. When not with his family he is usually learning some new technology or working on some side projects. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at RDA Corporation.

Follow Dane's blog at http://www.danemorgridge.com/, or on Twitter at @danemorgridge.

Current Talks

Adding Search to your application with Lucene.Net

Lucene.Net is a C# port of the popular open source Lucene Java project. Lucene.Net will allows you to add search to your website or application quickly and painlessly. It is a fully customizable search engine that you can even embed directly into your application. In this session, we will take a quick lap around what Lucene.Net is and how you can leverage it in your application. We will take a solid look at the search and indexing APIs so that you can get started building your search app right away.

ASP.NET, jQuery & JSON: The Magic Unveiled

Both ASP.NET & jQuery can make building web applications easier and more fun. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a very cool Javascript serialization format that has become very popular due to its lightweight nature and how easy it can be used with jQuery. What you may not know is how easy it is also to use from ASP.NET MVC. In this session, we will do a quick intro to both ASP.NET MVC, jQuery & JSON then take a look at how awesome they are all combined.

ASP.NET MVC: A Gateway to Rails?

There seem to be a lot of .NET developers taking a solid look at Ruby on Rails recently (and some are jumping ship on .NET) and I have to wonder if the reason is ASP.NET MVC. There are a lot of similarities between the two and in this session I will give an intro to Ruby on Rails from a ASP.NET MVC developers prospective and how they are similar. I took my first look at Rails several years ago, but it was after working with ASP.NET MVC, that I really "discovered" what Rails had to offer. I will share my learning process from ASP.NET MVC to Rails and how working with Rails has helped me be a better overall developer.

Getting Started with Entity Framework 4

With .Net 3.5 Microsoft release LINQ to SQL and with .NET 3.5 SP1 came the Entity Framework, both powerful ORM tools leveraging Linq technology. Entity Framework v1, while usable, was definitely lacking some important features and the Entity Framework team delivered with version 4 coming with Visual Studio 2010. In this session we will look at Entity Framework 4 from the ground level and you will get a solid understanding of it basic principles. We will also go through all of the new features in Entity Framework 4 and see how far it's come since the initial release. If you've never taken a look at Entity Framework, now is the time as version 4 is the real deal.

NoSQL with RavenDB

RavenDB is a cool, fast document database solution that makes heavy use of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and is very easy to work with. RavenDB documents consist of JSON objects that are easily serializable to C# classes and queries are done through LINQ. In this session, we will look at how to get started with RavenDB, how it compares to other NoSQL solutions and some cases where you may want to use it.

Real World Entity Framework

Most applications connect to a database at some point and ORM tools, like Entity Framework, can make that process a lot simpler. Whether you have worked with the Entity Framework before, sometimes it takes real world examples to make it all click. In this session we will look at a few real world examples using Entity Framework with technologies like ASP.Net MVC, Silverlight and WCF. We will look at some of the common issues when building applications with any ORM solution and how the new features in Entity Framework 4 help reduce development time and frustration. Most importantly, you will get to see how Entity Framework can be utilized in real applications along with some tips, tricks and gotchas.

Testable Entity Framework

As test driven development and unit testing are becoming more common practices in building good software, it is important that the tools you use support those development options. While still technically possible, Entity Framework v1 made it more difficult to achieve, the new support for persistence ignorance through POCO with Entity Framework 4, testing and mocking is much easier. In this session we will look at options for testing using Entity Framework and how you can implement common patterns such as the repository pattern. Whether you are have experience writing tests or not, you will walk away with the information you need to start implementing testing in your application and still have the option of using Entity Framework for your data access.

Intro to Rails 3 with MongoDB

Rails 3 made it easier to decouple Active Record and work with different persistence models and MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database that can be used from a myriad of platforms. In this session, we will look at an intro to using MongoDB inside the Rails platform and how easy it can be to build a scalable web application quickly without using a relational database.