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!

On Tuesday, December 9th, 2008, we will be hosting our annual Christmas Party.  This will be a joint meeting with our sister group, the Mid-Michigan ColdFusion Users Group. Our December meeting will NOT have a normal presentation, however we will have a casual dinner with pizza.  The meeting will be held at the Pizza House, located in Hanna Plaza, just north of Hannah Blvd and Haggadorn Ave., in East Lansing.  

Have a project that you are proud of?   Want to show off one of your new products?   Have some questions for the group?   As long as you don't mind talking about it with pizza in your mouth, it's all open!

If your business would like to help sponsor some of the pizza, please contact Nick Kwiatkowski at nick@theFlexGroup.org for more information.

On November 6th (which is the 1st Thursday of November), we will be doing a meeting on "Back to the Flex Basics".  We will be building a basic application from scratch, and showing all the steps that you need to build a simple application.  We will be building a CRUD form (data input form), and a simple Twitter client.  

This will be an interactive session, so please bring your Laptop if you have one.  

The meeting will begin promptly at 7pm, and we welcome everybody from the Newbie's all the way to experts.  The meeting will be held in room 161 ComArts, on the campus of Michigan State University.

We will also be doing our big software giveaway.  Like to be on the latest version of Adobe's Creative Suite?  Come on by and win a copy!! 

It's kinda a stretch, but 360|Flex is hosting their very first FlexCamp, on Sept 26-27th in New Jersey.   If you haven't already registered, you can use the promo code of AUGDiscount for 10% off!  More details can be found on the camp's website at http://360flexcamp.com.   2 Days of training (similar to our Camp), and $150 for the entire shabang. 

If you do end up going, tell 'em Nick sent ya :)