Announcements and Events

Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server vNext Preview: Anthony Borton

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Thurs Feb 2nd 5:30pm, where you’ll see what’s coming up in the next version of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Anthony will demonstrate features from the Developer Preview versions of both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server and whet your appetite for the Beta releases expected in February. Some of the things you’ll see include the new team explorer, code review workflow, exploratory testing, local workspaces and much, much more.

TOPIC:   Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server vNext Preview: Anthony Borton

DATE:     Thurs Feb 2nd, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth

COST:     Free. All welcome

Anthony Borton is the lead ALM consultant for Enhance ALM Pty Ltd, an Australian consulting and training company specializing in Application Lifecycle Management and Microsoft Visual Studio. He has been working with Visual Studio Team System full-time since 2005 and has worked with a variety of companies ranging up to some of Australia’s largest companies and financial institutions. Anthony is a sought after trainer and has delivered technical training and consulting in the United States and all across the Asia Pacific region. He is a Microsoft MVP (Visual Studio ALM), a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer and a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Anthony also runs the QLD ALM Users Group and the Canberra ALM Users Group.

In addition to the usual JetBrains license raffle prize, Anthony has arranged to provide everyone that attends our February user group meeting to get an invitation code for the preview of Microsoft’s Hosted TFS offering.

DevJam 2011 – Talk Lineup

Subject to any last minute changes, here is the line-up of talks for Thursday’s  DevJam event (randomly shuffled using an implementation of Fisher-Yates algorithm!):

• Doug Paice - Using Reactive Extensions and Caliburn.Micro to simplify event chaining in WPF
• Jake Ginnivan - Real World MVVM
• Michael Minutillo – Crankpad
• Alistair Waddell - Compare and Synchronize your Database with VS2010
• Piers Williams - Kinect SDK
• Adrian McGrath - Testing Async
• Ben Leane - SP2010 Client Object Model

It’s happening at our usual venue:

·         DATE:     Thursday, Dec 1st, 5:30pm

·         VENUE:  Enex100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth

·         COST:     Free. All welcome

If you are attending, please sign up at EventBrite (http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2402588206) so I can get an idea of catering numbers.

If you have any questions, please send me an email.

http://perthdotnet.org/blogs/events/archive/2011/10/22/december-devjam-2011.aspx

December DevJam 2011

For December's meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thurs, 1st Dec), we are running another DevJam style community event, where local developers can give a short talk about anything .NET software development related.

DATE:    Thursday, Dec 1st, 5:30pm

VENUE:  Enex100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth

COST:     Free. All welcome

You can talk about any development topic but it must be between 5 – 10 minutes long:

·         Anything you’ve done, or any new technology you’ve investigated

·         Any tips and tricks, or tools that aid development

·         Basically, anything .NET software development related!

How do presenters register?

1. Speakers must sign up by sending an email to mitch.wheat at gmail.com
2. Email should arrive no later than 25th Nov (2011), with the word 'DevJam’ in the subject, stating your talk title in the body.
3. Please arrange a laptop on the night with the talk ready to go.
4. Talks should be 10 minutes in length.

[Presenter places are limited, so it's on a first come, first served basis. If you sign up after the quota is filled, I will hold your talk in reserve in case a presenter drops out].

There will prizes for the three highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break). The first prize is an Xbox 360 with Kinect. There will several other prizes (both presenter and audience) which will be announced shortly.

There will be pizza and refreshments provided. Please sign up at EventBrite (http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2402588206) so I can get an idea of catering numbers. 

If you have any questions, please send Mitch an email.

Hosting in Azure - without the blues: Joe Albahari

Had enough of your data centre or web hosting company?

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Thurs Nov 3rd 5:30pm, and find out how to move your MVC or Web Forms apps into the cloud and enjoy high availability, security and scalability - without the responsibility of OS installation, updates or security. This session will be full of practical advice and lessons learned from Joe’s own experience migrating two web sites and a licensing server into Azure, all of which now run inexpensively on a redundant pair of extra small instances.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Action with Andy Marks

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Weds Oct 19th 5:30pm, where Andy Marks will introduce the philosophy and principles behind AWS and briefly describe some of the key components around storage and compute capabilities.  The session will include a short hands-on activity for participants to build and deploy their own cloud-based application.

TOPIC:     Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Action with Andy Marks

DATE:    Wednesday, Oct 19th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Andy serves ThoughtWorks principally as the Perth and Melbourne Technical Lead in the design and implementation of enterprise applications. He also has considerable experience in coaching and mentoring development teams adopting Agile practices.

Optional Requirements: Laptop with internet connectivity (for the hands on section of the talk).

C#/Mono with Ben Last

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Oct 6th 5:30pm, where Ben Last will discuss a real world application using C# and Mono. nearmap.com make heavy use of C#, but in a very non-Windows environment.  Plenty of people have played with mono as a .NET platform, but there are not that many who have used it in a large-scale, high-traffic, n-tier environment.  Hear our story, and find out if mono delivers what it promises.

TOPIC:   C#/Mono with Ben Last

DATE:     Thursday, Oct 6th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Ben is a Software Engineer and Architect with more than twenty years' experience in the design and implementation of large-scale software systems.  He joined NearMap in April 2009 and is the Development Manager for HyperWeb, which delivers very high volumes of image data via thenearmap.com website and over the Internet.  Before joining NearMap, Ben was R&D Manager at EMCC Software in the UK, leading product development teams for mobile enterprise and consumer applications and consulting on mobile and networked software development.

YOW! Night Perth with Dave Thomas

In recognition of the importance of active software professionals who always seek improvement - YOW! Australia in cooperation with ThoughtWorks, Microsoft, Sensis, Readify and your local user groups is pleased to invite you to join us Weds 28^th Sept for a YOW! Night in Perth. Hear great YOW! speakers and network with other software professionals.

TOPIC:   YOW! Night Perth with Dave Thomas

DATE:     Weds, Sept 28th, 5:00pm - 7:30pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

If last time was anything to go by, seats will be limited. Everyone attending this event should RSVP at EventBrite: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2123807365

We will start the night early at 5:00pm for pizza and refreshments (courtesy of Thoughtworks).

Dave Thomas is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave Thomas is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and is a Managing Director for Object Mentor a leader in XP, Craftmanship and Lean and Agile in the Large. Dave is doing the opening keynote for the Agile 2010 Conference.

Perth .NET User Group Social Event

For those of us not attending TechEd this year, I thought we might have a purely social event with pizza and refreshments, in lieu of our usual meeting. To get an idea of the number of people attending please RSVP via EventBrite: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1665737265

TOPIC:    Perth .NET User Group Social Event

DATE:     Thursday, Sept 1st, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Introduction to NServiceBus with Colin Scott

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, August 4th 5:30pm, where Colin Scott will give an introduction to NServiceBus covering key features and concepts such as asynchronous messaging, Publish/Subscribe, message handling and versioning and just what the heck is a service anyway. NServiceBus is an open source service bus built on .NET. It supports the construction of systems that are robust, loosely coupled and aligned to your business.

TOPIC:    Introduction to NServiceBus with Colin Scott

DATE:     Thursday, August 4th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Colin Scott is a developer who's been working with .NET long enough to start telling the kids of today that they don't know how good they have it! Having worked for consulting companies since 1999 he's recently decided to see how the other half live by joining the development team at Quickflix as a Senior .NET Developer/Architect. When not making the world a better place for developers everywhere he can be found on Twitter at @AbstractCode.

Source Code from Previous Sessions

Source code from Lee and James' session on RX is available here: http://leecampbell.blogspot.com/2011/05/rx-code-from-perth-presentation.html

Source Code from Joe's async session is here: www.albahari.com/AsyncSourceCode.zip

Good Things Come to Those Who 'await' with Joe Albahari

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, June 2nd 5:30pm, where Joe Albahari will showcase the magic of C# 5's await and async keywords. You'll see how easy asynchronous programming has become with Microsoft's latest CTP, and how much you can achieve without being a guru in multithreading or monadic calculus.

We'll start with very simple examples to introduce asynchronous programming in general: what exactly is it, how does it differ from multithreading, and why do we need it? Then we'll examine the historical support for asynchronous programming in the .NET Framework and what people are doing right now. You'll see why BackgroundWorker and the event-based pattern are clumsy and often inadequate - and how the APM strikes fear, pain (and ultimately asynchrophobia) into the hearts of the even most hard-core programmers. We'll then demonstrate how the async CTP eliminates the problem almost entirely - allowing you to program as you always have.

TOPIC:    Introduction to C# 5 async with Joe Albahari

DATE:     Thursday, June 2nd, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

There will be plenty of practical examples - from making a rich client app responsive to writing high-concurrency apps and games. We'll also cover limitations and discuss when you would use this versus Reactive Extensions. The presentation will assume minimum background knowledge and yet will go fairly deep. We'll also look at what the compiler actually does in translating asynchronous calls, and potential extensibility points. This is a great chance to get to grips with an otherwise difficult-to-research topic.

Joe Albahari is a C# MVP and author of C# 4.0 in a Nutshell and LINQPad. He has presented at TechEd and JAOO, and is a regular speaker in the Perth .NET UG. He has an extensive free online resource on .NET multithreading and parallel programming at www.albahari.com/threading/

Introduction to the .NET Reactive Extensions (Rx) with Lee Campbell and James Miles

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Thurs May 12^th (6pm) where Lee Campbell and James Miles join up to present an Introduction to Rx, aka the .NET Reactive Extensions. Rx is a product from Erik Meijer's team at Microsoft that allows you to compose asynchronous and event based programs using observable collections and a Linq style syntax.

The presenters will guide you through the background and basics of Rx, and introduce you to the terminology that is peculiar to Rx. James and Lee will compare code written with and without Rx and show case code to demonstrate the power of Rx in the areas of resource management, fluent and familiar Linq syntax, composable nature,  testability of asynchronous and concurrent queries, and the and the ability to tame side effects.

TOPIC:    Introduction to the .NET Reactive Extensions (Rx) with Lee Campbell and James Miles

DATE:     Thursday, May 12th, 6:00pm - 7:30pm

VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth

COST:     Free. All welcome

I’m under strict instructions to ask everyone to come armed with questions about Rx!

Lee Campbell is a seasoned .NET developer who has worked in Auckland, Perth and is currently based in London. He has covered a broad spectrum of the .NET technology stack from WPF/Silverlight client side projects, messaging/integration projects, ASP/ASP.NET web projects and if pressed will admit to a former life as a SQL gun! He maintains a technical blog at http://LeeCampbell.blogspot.com which is currently focused on Rx.

James Miles is a freelance C# Consultant who specializes in Concurrent Programming and Software Architecture. For the last 18 months James has been in London working on Asynchronous Messaging Platforms and Reactive Programming Models. James maintains a blog, http://enumeratethis.com/ and an open source project Rxx. He recently received a MCCA for his work in the Rx community.

Please Note: this talk will start at 6pm (not our usual time of 5:30pm due to the venue’s availability)

ASP.NET MVC Framework Talk Content

Mike has posted slides and instructions from his talk here: http://wolfbyte-net.blogspot.com/2011/05/web-stack-of-love.html

ASP.NET MVC framework (aka The Microsoft "Web Stack of Love"**) with Michael Minutillo

(** It's what Scott Hanselman calls it!)

Scott Hanselman is fond of saying that programming components are like Lego pieces and right now "the lego pieces coming out of Microsoft are the right size".  One important piece of the web stack is the ASP.NET MVC framework. Since its initial release in March 2009 there has been a new version of the framework released every year and it has quickly become the platform of choice for .NET developers creating web sites.  January 2011 saw the version 3.0 release which introduces a number of changes and new features. Additionally, at the MIX11 conference earlier this month Microsoft released the "MVC3 tools refresh" which make developing MVC3 applications in Visual Studio 2010 a highly productive experience.

Join us at the Perth .NET user group, Thurs May 5^th, where we will look at the new Razor View Engine, Unobtrusive Javascript, Integrated Scaffolding, better support for IoC integration. We will also touch on SQL CE 4, NuGet and Entity Framework 4.1 (Magic Unicorns Editions).  Come and see the Lego pieces and be inspired by what you can build.

TOPIC:    ASP.NET MVC framework with Michael Minutillo

DATE:     Thursday, May 5th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm

VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth

COST:     Free. All welcome

Mike Minutillo is .NET software engineer with a B.Sc. in computer science. In 2000, Mike started writing .NET software to fund his university studies and has been an active member of the .NET community ever since. Mike is a regular attendee at the Perth .NET Community of Practice where he has given presentations on new features of C#, ASP.NET MVC and Test-Driven Philosophy. In 2009 he started the Perth ALT.NET user group which meets monthly to discuss software engineering tools and practices in the .NET development space. Mike is co-author of Professional Visual Studio 2010.  He maintains a technical blog at http://wolfbyte-net.blogspot.com/ and can be contacted at http://twitter.com/wolfbyte/.

There will be a door prize of a choice of license from JetBrains (one of ReSharper , TeamCity Build Agent, dotTrace Profiler, dotCover , RubyMine, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm).

LightSwitch with Andrew Coates

Join us at the Perth .NET User Group Thurs, April 7th where Andrew Coates will demonstrate

LightSwitch, a new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers who want to easily create business applications for the desktop or the cloud. LightSwitch simplifies the development process by letting you concentrate on the business logic, while LightSwitch handles the common tasks for you. In this demo-heavy session, you will see, end-to-end, how to build and deploy a data-centric business application using LightSwitch. We’ll also go beyond the basics of creating simple screens over data and demonstrate how to create screens with more advanced capabilities

TOPIC:    LightSwitch with Andrew Coates

DATE:     Thursday, April 7th, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
VENUE:  Enex 100 Seminar Room, Level 3, 100 St Georges Terrace, Perth
COST:     Free. All welcome

Andrew Coates is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft in Australia. Before joining Microsoft, Andrew was an independent consultant specialising in database applications using Microsoft technologies including SQL Server, Visual FoxPro and Microsoft Office. Andrew's wide range of experience includes telecommunications, SMB inventory, dispatch and accounting systems, using both web and rich client front ends. He has developed and delivered class room training and has mentored a number of developers in Visual FoxPro and SQL Server technologies. Andrew has spoken at international conferences on Geographical Information Systems, health statistics and database maintenance and is a regular presenter at TechEd both locally and internationally. An MCPD, MCTS and MCSD, Andrew also holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering. Andrew blogs at http://blogs.msdn.com/acoat