Most of our meetings are held at the St Luke's Community Health Center (3333 Squalicum Parkway) but we have met else ware depending on availability. Please check the particulars of the event. Unless otherwise indicated, evening events occur on the second Wednesday of each month. Smooze and pizza start at 6:00 PM followed by a presentation and discussion.

• Wednesday 04/14/2010. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Windows on Amazon's EC2
  Presented by Wayne Berry

  Learn the ins and outs of running Windows on Amazon's EC2 platform, including a demonstration of the EC2 dashboard.

  Pizza sponsored by Umbraco

• Wednesday 03/10/2010. 6:15 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Asynchronous I/O in .NET
  Presented by Bradley Grainger

  Bradley Grainger is the Director of Software Development at Logos Bible Software in Bellingham, WA. He has been programming in C++ and C#, with a focus on Windows client applications, for 15 years. Asynchronous I/O is a crucial technology for building scalable applications and services.

  “Asynchronous I/O in .NET” will cover the basics of async I/O using both the .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 frameworks on Windows. The talk will be primarily code-focused, with demos of how to consume and implement asynchronous operations.

  This is a non-pizza event. Meet for dinner beforehand at 5:00 pm at Bob's Burger and Brew. (The downtown location.)

• Wednesday 02/10/2010. 6:15 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Web-based project management and related tools: Basecamp, Highrise and Beanstalk
  Presented by Syd Cole

  Syd’s previous presentation to our group resulted in a big draw and a lively discussion. This talk promises to be even better. Don’t miss it!

  This is a non-pizza event. Meet for dinner beforehand at 5:00 pm at Taco Lobo.

• Wednesday 01/13/2010. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Discussion Panel on Open Source Software
  Lead by Paul Sterling and Rusty Swayne

  Pizza sponsored by Umbraco!

  Paul Sterling and Rusty Swayne will hold a panel discussion on how to successfully run an open source software project. Paul contributes to the Umbraco Project while Rusty has authored Mindfly Web Design Studio’s Boogaloo.

  Come and learn about the ups and downs of running an OSS project from a practical perspective along with the tools that make this all possible.

  Thinking about starting your own open source software project or just want to know what it is all about? Come and join this informal talk. Ask questions. Discuss the possibilities!

• Wednesday 12/09/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Implementing Parallel Patterns in .NET
  Presented by Reed Copsey, Jr

  This is a "pass the hat pizza event". If you would like some pizza, please bring a few extra dollars and contribute to the cause.

  Although the expectation of users are continually increasing, we can no longer rely on computers to get faster in order to make our programs faster or allow us to do more work. In order to do more work in less time, we have to break up our programs to in parallel.

  In this presentation, we will explore some design patterns related to parallel programming, and explain how they are used in .NET today, as well as how the new Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ coming in .NET 4 simplify the programming of parallel algorithms. We'll discuss Data Paralellism, Task Parallelism, and the Asynchronous Programming patterns, and how to apply them effectively.

  Reed Copsey, Jr. is the Chief Technical Officer of C Tech Development Corporation. He has spent the last 8 years leading a development team for a small independant software vendor which creates software for scientific analysis and 3D visualization of geology and groundwater contamination data. He is also very active in multiple online communities such as StackOverflow, and has also been involved in multiple open source projects.

• Wednesday 11/11/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Windows Azure
  Presented by Paul Mehner

  Azure is a "cloud services" platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure platform provides highly-available and dynamically scalable on-demand computing and storage. The Azure platform includes several modular services such as Live Services, SQL Services, SharePoint Services, Dynamics CRM Services, and .NET Services. Developers can utilize these services individually or together to create applications. This session will teach you how to begin using the Azure .NET Service development tools with Visual Studio to build services hosted in the cloud.

  For more than three decades, Paul has been a software developer, architect, project manager, consultant, speaker, mentor, instructor, and entrepreneur. He is co-founder of the South Sound .NET User Group, one of the oldest recorded .NET user groups in the world, and was one of the earliest committee members of the International .NET Association (INETA). Paul currently specializes in .NET technologies for state government business systems. He has also provided community college instruction on .NET software development, and is an active trainer at software community events such as Code Camp.

  Prior to being reborn as a .NET protagonist in 2000, Paul's experience included over 20 years supporting many flavors of the UNIX operating system. Paul began his early computing career in 1977 on a homebuilt breadboard computer with 256 bytes of RAM, 12 toggle switches, 9 light emitting diodes, and an RCA CDP1802 microprocessor.

• Wednesday 10/14/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Build an Order Processing System
  Presented by Robert Green

  Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is part of the .NET Framework 3.5. It is a programming model, an engine and tools for building workflow into your applications. In this talk, you'll explore how to use WF in a real world application. How do you model an order processing system using a sequential or state machine workflow model? How do the host Windows or Web application and the workflow communicate? How does the workflow know to take the next step once a user has performed an action? Where does your business logic and data access code go? How do you integrate Web and WCF services? How do multiple users work with the same workflow? How do you manage long running workflows?

  Robert Green is a senior consultant with MCW Technologies, a Microsoft Certified Partner. Before joining MCW, Robert worked at Microsoft for 8 years, most recently as a Program Manager on the Visual Basic product team and previously as a Product Manager for several products including Visual Studio, Visual Basic, Visual Studio Tools for Office and Visual FoxPro. Prior to joining Microsoft, Robert was a Vice President and co-founder of The Information Management Group, a consulting and education services firm in Chicago. Robert has been a frequent speaker at technology conferences, including TechEd, VSLive, VSConnections and Advisor Live. His articles have appeared on MSDN and Advisor Publication’s VB.NET Advisor and will appear in other venues as well throughout the year. Along with co-author Ken Getz, Robert co-authored AppDev’s Developing Applications with Visual Studio 2005 courseware, and appears in the video training for these courses, as well.

• Wednesday 9/9/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  From One Web Server to Two: Making the Leap to Web Farms
  Presented by Richard Campbell

  Every web application starts out on a single web server. And while we've been told over and over again that you can always move to multiple web servers, it's not as simple as that!

  This session digs into the details of what it takes to make that leap - all the changes needed to let your application function properly with more than one server. You'll learn about replicating your web application between two servers and how to keep the content in sync. The techniques and challenges of load balancing are explored. And you'll explore the critical challenge of moving to multiple servers - getting rid of affinity. There's more affinity than just the session object, but that is a key starting point. Moving to multiple servers isn't easy, but this session will give you the check list of what to do to be successful.

  Richard Campbell is a Microsoft Regional Director for British Columbia and is recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in the area of ASP.NET development. His PWOP Productions creates a variety of multimedia programs including ".NET Rocks!, the Internet Audio Talk Show for .NET Developers," a podcast produced twice a week for about 150,000 listeners. Richard has contributed nearly 300 Advisor columns to Microsoft Access Advisor, and is the author of courseware for AppDev's national SQL Server 7.0 training seminars and video series. Since 1995, Richard has been a regular speaker on the technical-conference circuit and, in 2006, was ranked the top speaker at Tech Ed Asia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The son of an electrical engineer, Richard was tinkering with microcomputers at age 10 and, by 16, had started his own business developing custom software.

• Wednesday 6/10/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Umbraco: The Friendly, Free CMS Without Limits
  Real-code, Nabaztag Rabbits, SMS, and free stuff - oh my!
  Presented by Paul Sterling

  This session will give a quick overview of Umbraco and lots of live-code examples showing how Umbraco can be extended and integrated using the .NET code you already know. Umbraco is a developer friendly CMS that makes it quick and easy to create websites - or a breeze to build complex web applications. Umbraco has award-winning integration capabilities and supports your ASP.NET User and Custom Controls natively. It's a developers dream and your users will love it too.

  Paul is an Umbraco core team developer, Umbraco Commerce lead, and frequent presenter focusing on Umbraco. He was a featured presenter at the Umbraco CodeGardens 2008 and 2009. He is a certified Umbraco Professional, an Umbraco MVP, and a certified PayPal Developer. For a living Paul creates e-commerce sites based on Umbraco and runs the technology company Motus Connect.

• Tuesday 5/5/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  Application Architecture 2.0 with Keith Pleas

  Please note that this presentation is one week earlier than normal and on a Tuesday night.

  Keith Pleas is one of the founders of Guided Design and has worked with the patterns & practices team for several years. Prior to that he worked for more than two years on the team developing the .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET. Keith is an internationally known writer and speaker and past Editorial Chair for the VSLive conferences. He is also a Contributing Editor to "Visual Studio Magazine", and has developed Microsoft Professional Certification Exams. Keith was a founding board member of INETA where he also created the INETA Speakers Bureau.

  Keith will be talking about this current project, which had a CTP release a couple of months back and is getting near being in printed final form: http://apparchguide.codeplex.com/

  This is an INETA.

• Wednesday 4/8/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  ASP.NET MVC Jonathan Carter

  Jonathan is the technical evangelist for Visual Studio and the .NET Framework at Microsoft Corporation. He specializes in web development and data programmability. His background is in software architecture and design for government organizations and ISVs.

  In this presentation we will take a look at what ASP.NET MVC is and discuss why it was created. You'll see how to develop a custom MVC application as well as how to write unite tests against it. Most importantly, you'll learn whether or not ASP.NET MVC is right for you or your company.

  Pizza is sponsored by Logos Bible Software.

• Wednesday 3/4/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Please note that this talk is one week earlier than typically scheduled.

  RESTful .NET Jon Flanders

  Jon is a member of the technical staff at Pluralsight, where he focuses on connected systems technologies. Jon is most at home spelunking, trying to figure out how things work from the inside out. Jon is the author of RESTful.NET from O'Reilly,as well as Essential ASP for Addison-Wesley, and was a co-author of Mastering Visual Studio.NET for O'Reilly. Jon's current major interest is helping people to understand the advantages of REST, but he sees a bright future for modeling as a way to build complex systems. You can read Jon's blog at http://www.rest-ful.net/

• Wednesday 2/11/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  

  C# 4.0 Ying Peng

  A talk about C# 4.0 and the following new features:
  • Dynamic Types
  • Named and Optional parameters
  • NOPIA (Type Embedding)

  Ying joined the C# compiler team about 2 years ago. Before that, she worked on a number of different teams both inside and outside of Microsoft. She move to US about 12 years ago after having taught Compiler classes at a college in China.

• Wednesday 1/14/2009. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  What the F# is that? with Ted Neward

  "If you're like most C# developers, you've probably heard (or maybe not) about this new language Microsoft is shipping in VS 2010, called Visual F#. And if you're like most C# developers, you probably thought, 'What the F# is that?' and thought you were funny. (It's OK; everybody does it.) But now your boss is asking the question, and he finds your geek humor somehow not quite satisfactory as an answer.

  "In this presentation, Ted Neward, author of the forthcoming 'F# in a Nutshell', takes an all-code, no-slides look at the language, its concepts and ideas, and a little bit of its libraries and syntax, and show you how to start answering that crucial question, this time for real. By the end of the talk, you will have a grasp of some of F#'s core syntax, some good background on how it works and what it's good for, and a little bit of how it interoperates with C#, Visual Basic and other .NET languages, in either web and desktop applications."

  Pizza is provided by Logos Bible Software.

• Wednesday 12/10/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Create Great .NET User Interfaces Phil Weber. Even the most beautifully coded application will flop if people hate to use it. And they will, if its user interface is not designed with their goals in mind. What makes a great UI? How can you apply the principles that work so well for the guts of an application to its front end? We'll examine specific techniques (with code!) that you can use immediately to reduce complexity for your users and improve your .NET presentation layer's efficiency and maintainability.
  
  With over 15 years of software development experience, Phil Weber's client list includes Intel, Kaiser Permanente and Wells Fargo Bank. He has worked with VB since 1993 and .NET since 2001. Phil is a Contributing Editor to Visual Studio Magazine and has spoken at numerous technical conferences in the U.S. and abroad. He currently works as a senior support engineer for Corillian Corporation, an eFinance enabler.
  
  You can read more about Phil on his web site.
• Wednesday 11/12/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Wayne's Perspective on the PDC, Azure and Windows 7: On wednesday Wayne fresh from the PDC will be talking about some of the latest Microsoft Technology, including a demonstration of Windows Azure running on his laptop, and the Microsoft focus around the new Mesh technologies. So if you haven’t been watching the conference online, or just want Wayne's unique perspective come join us Wednesday. As an added bonus before the talk Wayne will have Windows 7 running under a virtual PC on his laptop during "pizza time" which you can play with.
• Wednesday 10/15/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  SQL Server Performance Tuning and Advanced Query Tuning: This presentation will include SQL Server performance tuning tips and recommendations for both the developer and the database administrator. Topics covered will include index usage details, query tuning, understanding the procedure cache, and best practices to improve the performance of your SQL Server, and the programs using your SQL Server.

  About Steve Stedman: Steve has 18 years of software development and database administration experience. He has worked at Microsoft, Amazon.com, Wall Data and Innuity where he gained extensive knowledge in building scalable database applications. Steve is currently a freelance contractor in the Bellingham area focusing on programming scalable systems and database performance tuning. He possesses significant experience in troubleshooting and optimizing the performance of database systems including queries, indexes and database design.

• Wednesday 9/10/2008. 6:00 PM. St Joseph's Hospital Conference Rooms 5 & 6 (off of the cafeteria on the ground floor).
  Visual Studio Reporting: William Vaughn. The inside scoop on how to get the most out of the new ReportViewer control and how it's evolved in Visual Studio 2008. This discusses how to leverage your Reporting Services skills and RDL reports to create application-based reports and how to manage the myriad of issues that come up when trying to emulate Reporting Services functionality like parameters, connections, pick-list population and much more. This session previews the SQL Server Reporting Services technology coming with SQL Server 2008.
• Wednesday 6/11/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.

  ASP.NET: What is new in Windows 2008 and IIS 7: Aaron Dutton will give an overview of the new features found in Windows 2008 and IIS 7 specifically with regards to ASP.NET.

• Wednesday 5/21/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Joseph’s Conference Room 5 (off of the cafeteria on the ground floor).
  Successful Computer Consulting: Making Your Customer Happy.
  1. The beginning of the relationship: How to listen to a customer’s needs (without your programmer’s hat on).
  2. The middle of the relationship: How to be responsive and give frequent feedback (so you both know where you’re at, even if you’re behind).
  3. The end of the relationship: How to have a customer that will tell their friends about you – and keep coming back for more!
  
  Syd Cole runs Paige Data Management, a local web development company that uses .NET technologies. This presentation should help us all deal more effectively with our "customers" whether those customers are companies that we deal with as consultants or coworkers within the company that we work for. Many of you ask how does Sydney do it? Well, this is your chance to find out!
• Wednesday 4/9/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Handling, storing and processing XML with C# and SQL Server: Ken Lassesen will be present a talk on a variety of ways of handling, storing and processing XML with C# and SQL Server 2005/8. Ken has been involved in building systems for Lumension Security, Phoenix Arizona based on the the Security Content Automation Protocol developed through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (scap.nist.gov) and the Mitre Corporation (oval.mitre.org). There are 6 protocols involved with many having their schemas being updated 4-5 times a year. All content is issued and updated as Xml, often on a daily basis, for example there are 30000+ documents in the Common Vulernability Enumeration Database with about 20 new documents added daily (besides updates to existing documents). Ken will take you through a variety of ways of handling XML, their strengths and weakness as well as describing what he believes to be the future for robust database design, hybrid-XML-relational databases.

  Ken is know to many as part of the infamous "Dr.GUI" of MSDN (you can still find some of his articles on search.microsoft.com by searching on his last name). An abbreviated list of his articles is at: lassesen.com/publications.aspx. Ken has been running Lassesen Consulting, LLC since 2003 and recently located to Lake Samish area.

• Wednesday 3/12/2008. 6:00 PM. St. Luke Health Education Center.
  Life in a Post Web 2.0 World: What’s possible in a post Web 2.0 world? Innovation continues at a mind-bending pace, and this presentation will showcase some thought-provoking new directions that Web Services are headed in (imagine computers programmatically calling people to perform tasks), as well as introduce a concept known as “Web Scale Computing”. The presentation will also provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how to extend a base ASP.NET photo-sharing site so that uploaded content is securely stored in (and delivered from) the cloud, while appearing to be part of your domain.

  Amazon spent ten years developing a world-class technology and content platform that powers Amazon web sites for millions of customers every day. Most people think “Amazon.com” when they hear the word; however developers are excited to learn that there is a separate technology arm of the company, known as Amazon Web Services or AWS. Using AWS, developers can build software applications leveraging the same robust, scalable, and reliable technology that powers Amazon’s retail business. AWS has now launched ten services with open API’s for developers to build applications, with the result that over 265,000 developers have registered on Amazon’s developer site to create applications based on these services.

  Bio: Mike Culver joined Amazon Web Services after almost eight years in evangelism at Microsoft, where he saw .NET move from a provocative idea to the preeminent development platform for serious development. As an Amazon Evangelist, Mike works in the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services. In that capacity he once again helps developers take advantage of cutting-edge technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications.

• Wednesday 2/13/2008. 5:30 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. LINQ Overview
  Modern applications operate on data in several different forms: Relational tables, XML documents, and in-memory objects. Each of these domains can have profound differences in semantics, data types, and capabilities, and much of the complexity in today's applications is the result of these mismatches. Charlie Calvert, C# Community Program Manager at Microsoft, explains how Visual Studio 2008 aims to unify the programming models through LINQ capabilities in Microsoft Visual C# and Visual Basic, a strongly typed data access framework, and an innovative Application Programming Interface (API) for manipulating and querying XML.

  Charlie Calvert is the Community Program Manager for the Microsoft C# team. Working on outreach and bridge building to both external and internal teams through the web and live events, Charlie focuses his technical energies on LINQ. He has a degree in Journalism and Computer Science from the Evergreen State College. The author of ten technical books which have sold well over 100,000 copies, Charlie currently lives in the Seattle area where he enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking and skiing in the mountains.

  Charlie maintains a blog that deals with all things C#: http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/

• Friday 2/22/2008. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch.
• Friday 1/25/2008. 12:00 Noon. The Shrimp Shack.
• Wednesday 1/9/2008. 6:00 PM. Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting.
  WebParts for SharePoint 2007: WebParts provide the fundamental building blocks for creating custom applications for SharePoint. This session will show you how to efficiently and quickly use your ASP.NET 2.0 and C# skills to develop WebParts for deployment into SharePoint 2007. Most of the development, testing and debugging will be done in Visual Studio .NET 2007. We shall then deploy the WebPart as a feature into Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0). We will also look at WebPart communication and modifying WebPart verb menus.

  Bio: Medhat Elmasry is an instructor at British Columbia Institute of Technology. He specializes in web development and is involved in most of the ASP.NET courses. He moved from Java to C# since the latter's inception. Medhat is also a senior software engineer consultant at Sierra Wireless Inc. He is the founder and president of the .NET users group in Vancouver (AKA. .netBC) and co-owner of bcjobs.com. Medhat holds a Masters of Computer Science degree from Bradford University in England.

• Friday 12/28/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch.
• Wednesday 12/12/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. Wayne Berry of XCache Technologies will present on the topic of his choice.
• Friday 11/30/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. One week later than normally scheduled.
• Tuesday 11/27/2007 - Thursday 11/29/2007. DevTeach Vancouver. Anyone want to attend?
• Wednesday 11/14/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. David Mitchell of Logos will present on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).
• Friday 10/26/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch.
• Wednesday 10/10/2007. 6:00 PM. Phil Hustead of eboware will present on the Microsoft Membership Provider.
• Friday 9/28/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Cicchitti's Pizza.
• Wednesday 9/12/2007. 6:00 PM. Andrew will be presenting: Overriding base ASP.NET controls: Making controls work for you! A lot of the functionality that we all code into our applications is better placed in the controls. A little bit of effort goes a long way to improving reusability.
• Friday 8/25/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Web Locker.
• Friday 7/27/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. On Rice Thai.
• Friday 6/22/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. Grand Avenue Ale House.
• Friday 5/25/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social lunch. ??
• Wednesday 5/9/2007. 6:00 PM. Chris Sandvig will present: Exploring ASP.NET 2.0's New UI Features: .NET 2.0 includes several new tools that make it easier to build usable and maintainable web sites. These include master pages, site maps and three new navigation controls: menu, treeView and SiteMapPath. The talk will overview the new features, look at examples and discusses implementation issues. It will be aimed primarily at people who are new to these features but the discussion will likely be of interest to those who have already used them.
• Friday 4/27/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Andrea's choice: El Gitano in Sunset Square.
• Wednesday 4/11/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "Building Data-Driven Web Applications with LINQ to SQL". Presented by Julie Lerman. Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is a set of features coming in the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio that enable compilers to understand and implement query logic over in-memory collections of objects. LINQ to SQL is an implementation of LINQ that allows you to map .NET objects to your database and then query against the object using the common LINQ syntax, which gets translated to T-SQL automatically. This session provides a developer’s overview of leveraging LINQ to SQL to build data-driven Web applications including a look at the design tools that are being created. This session takes an in-depth look at LINQ to SQL support with ASP.NET Web Forms, building an Object/Relational Mapping layer, and using the ASP.NET Data Controls to leverage LINQ to SQL functionality.
• Friday 3/23/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Boss Tweed. Bob's choice.
• Wednesday 3/14/2007. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "An Introcution to AJAX." Presented by Will Asrari. Pieces and components that fall under the umbrella of AJAX technologies. (This is not a talk about the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Library.)
• Friday 2/23/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. India Grill.
• Wednesday 2/7/2007. 6:00 PM. St Joseph Hospital. Evening Meeting. "Code Generation" An informal talk about data access layers. Inheritance and Code Smith. Given by Andrew Robinson.
• Friday 1/12/2007. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Cafe Akroteri. Andrew's choice.
• Wednesday 12/13/2006. 6:00 PM. St Luke Health Education Center. Evening Meeting. "5 New things in .NET 2.0". An informal talk about some of the new things in .NET Version 2.0. Given by Andrew Robinson.
• Wednesday 11/16/2006. 12:00 Noon. Social Lunch. Dos Padres. Andrew's choice.
• Monday 11/21/2005. 6:00 PM. Talbot Meeting Room in the Haggen Building. Evening Meeting. "Replication in SQL Server 2005". An overview of replication technologies in SQL Server, followed by a discussion of feature improvements and new replication features in SQL Server 2005, including Oracle publishing, peer-to-peer transactional replication, and Web synchronization for merge replication. Given by Michael Blythe. Michael works for Microsoft and has been the lead writer for SQL Server replication documentation for the last 4-1/2 years. He lives in Bellingham with his wife and two children.