On Thursday July 8th, we will be having our annual Picnic and BBQ with the Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group.  We will be meeting at around 6:30pm at Patriarche Park in East Lansing, with food near 7pm.  Bring your family and friends and meet interesting people from the community.  Hotdogs, hamburgers and soda will be provided by the usergroup.

There will be no set topic for the evening.  If it is raining that evening, we will meet at Reno's East just down the road on Saginaw Highway.  Patriarche Park is located on the corner of Saginaw and Alton Roads in East Lansing.  Our reservation is on the east side of the baseball field (furthest away from Alton Road).

See you there!

For our December meeting, we are partnering up with a few other local user groups like the Greater Lansing .NET Users Group and the Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group to bring you Lansing's first DemoCamp!  This DemoCamp is sponsored by TechSmith and will feature YOUR projects that you want to show the rest of the community.  Have something cool that you want to show, or just want to bounce ideas off the rest of the community?  This is the place!

Info:  December 15th, 2009 @ Harpers Brew Pub in Downtown Lansing

Cost: FREE!  (Thanks to TechSmith!)

Registration is required (so we know how many people are coming), but it is free.  You can pick up your ticket here :http://democamplansing.eventbrite.com/.  More information about the event can be found here : http://barcamp.org/DemoCampLansing1.

Indiana University Bloomington will host the third annual BFusion and BFlex conferences, two days of hands-on training from experts in Adobe ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, and Flash Catalyst -- technologies used to rapidly build Rich Internet Applications.

   When: Saturday, October 24 (BFusion); Sunday, October 25 (BFlex)
   Where: Kelley School of Business

BFusion is a full day of hands-on ColdFusion training. It features a true beginners track, a beginners track for programmers new to ColdFusion, an intermediate track on framework-based development, and
other hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers.

BFlex is a full day of hands-on Flash Platform development with Flex, AIR, Catalyst, and Flash Builder. It also features beginner and true beginner tracks, as well as hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers. New this year is a track for designers looking to use Adobe Flash Catalyst for developing Rich Internet Applications.

This is a tremendous training opportunity, especially with the cuts in training and travel budgets. Some of the sessions being given at this event are the same sessions by the same speakers as were at Adobe MAX in LA last week for as much as $595 for the day of training. This event at IUB is $10/day and is open to students, faculty, staff and the general public.

I encourage you to point your developers to this opportunity. Send your designers too! There is a full day Flash Catalyst course on Sunday. This prerelease technology allows designers to take Illustrator and Photoshop comps and turn them into Rich Internet Applications (including cross-platform, network aware desktop AIR applications) without any programming.

So send your staff and come yourself. It is a great skill-building experience and wonderful candy for the brain!

For details and to register, visit the event web site:

   http://bflex.info/

On August 20th, 2009, the Michigan Flex Users Group will be hosting our 2nd annual BBQ in the Park.  We will be meeting at, or around 6:30pm at John M. Patriarche Park located on the SE corner of Saginaw Highway and Alton Dr. in East Lansing (about 5 minutes north of campus).

The Michigan Flex Users Group will be supplying Hot Dogs, Burgers, Soda and Water.  If you wish anything else (including veggie-burgers, etc), please bring it with.

There will be no presentation this month in East Lansing.  Rather, we pass on the invitation from one of our sister groups, the Detroit Java User Group, that will be hosting James Ward from Adobe on August 19th, 2009.  See the below :

The Detroit Java User Group is pleased to announce ....

What: Java and Flex
Who: James Ward
When: August 19, 2009, 6:30PM - 8:30PM
Where: ePrize

Please RSVP: mckinnon.david@ymail.com

Java and Flex
Building highly interactive software that users love to use is usually a challenging endeavor. However, the open source Flex SDK and Java are a perfect combination of technologies for building very rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop. The communication between the Java back-end and Flex front-end can utilize a number of different communication protocols, but the easiest and best performing is the open source BlazeDS library. This session covers the fundamentals of using Flex, Java, Spring, and BlazeDS to build rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP
representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Food and Beverages sponsored by The Epitec Group
Prizes Provided by O'Reilly Media and Manning Publishing

On April 9th, 2009 Ryan Stewart an Evanglist from Adobe, and a columnist from ZDNet will be visiting us at the Michigan Flex Users Group on the campus of Michigan State University.  Ryan will be talking to us about Flash Catalyst, a new, unreleased product from Adobe that will be used to prototype Flex and RIAs.  We may also get a preview of what is coming up with the next version of Flex (codename Gumbo).

The Flex Group will be providing a light meal, and we will be going out for drinks after the meeting.

We will be meeting on the campus of Michigan State University, in 1281 Anthony Hall, promptly at 7pm.  This is NOT our normal location. 

See you there!