DocumentDB screencast from our August meeting

This was meant to be posted this earlier than now. Honest!

Richard's talk from last month's meeting on the new Azure DocumentDB offering is now available for your viewing pleasure.

Azure DocumentDB Preview at Sydney Alt.Net, Aug 2014 from Richard Banks on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

P.S. If you want to see it in a bigger window, you can view it on Readify TV, or click the title in the video player... or just hit the full screen button. Duh!

August 26th - Powershell on *nix and Dialling Lambdas up to 11!

For your delectation and delight this month, we are gifting you with the following two topics. Time to get excited! :-)

Dialling C#'s Lambdas Up to 11 with Functify - Philip Laureano (@philiplaureano)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you could, say, overload the semicolon operator in C#? What if I told you that there was a way to extend C#'s lambdas so that they behave as if you overloaded the semicolon operator, and made it behave more like F#? Functify allows you to do some very useful things in C# with reflection and lambdas that would be impossible to with just C#'s lambdas alone.

If you're a hardcore C# dev, or just want to get your feet wet with using C# as a functional language, then this might just be the session for you!

Moving to *nix but not without my PowerShell - Jason Stangroome (@jstangroome)

Powershell kicks bash/csh/ksh and all the other *nix shells floating around out there, but when you move from Windows to *nix, Powershell can't make that journey with you. This will be a look at the challenges of trying to get PowerShell running on Ubuntu, what I learnt about how the Microsoft platform does development better in some ways, and what ideas and tools Microsoft development could adopt from the other side.

Last minute addition - Azure's DocumentDB

Assuming we have time, Richard Banks will be doing a semi-blind run through of the new Azure DocumentDB offering to see how it works. This will likely be a shared learning session where we try some things together. It should be fun :-)


As usual, get your act together, grab yourself a ticket, and then tell your friends, colleagues and even random strangers on public transport that you're going and they should too! We'll see you there on the night.

July 29 - A Month of Magic

This month, we have two magical talks for you.

Collaborative Filtering - the magic of recommendations (Weiming Chen, @mingstar)
Ever wonder how Amazon generate its book recommendations? Do you want to do the same for your site? Introduce Collaborative Filtering (CF), one of the commonly used technique deployed by recommender systems. CF helps you to dig out the values of server logs, transaction history, and increase user engagement and loyalty. In this talk, sample C# code will be presented to illustrate the guts of CF.

Weiming works on data-driven products in Fairfax Media that serve millions of users, his expertise is on data analytics, recommender systems, Hadoop, and MapReduce

Aaron presents something magical* (Aaron Powell, @slace)

Have you ever implemented elementary arithmetic in code? What happens at a code level when you add two numbers? Come for a journey on some of the most pointless software there is and learn the magic of numbers!

* HINT: think surreal numbers and JS... And yes, he asked for that title :-) 

Links from June meeting

A quick follow up post with some links from the presentations..

Add a Billion Row Data Warehouse to your App.. with Redshift, sql and duct tape!
Presentation Slides

For more info on the code demos, tweet / email James.

The Power of the Elephant in the Microsoft Cloud
Presentation Slides

June 24 - BIG data

Big data is all the rage.. there's a lot of competing options which cover off different areas of the space; from AWS Redshift at the SQL end, to Mongo to Hadoop and Lucene at the other. So.. you guessed it! This month is BIG DATA theme night. We'll have talks on the technology and real world implementation & code.

Add a Billion Row Data Warehouse to your App.. with Redshift, sql and duct tape!

Started to hit the point where your transactional database is not the right place for running reporting queries and experimental data science? Keen to chuck in more data from web logs, CRMs, facebook, etc so you can start learning more about your users? James Crisp (@jtcrisp) will show you an easy way to do it with AWS Redshift, mapping SQL and some simple scripting duct tape.


The Power of the Elephant in the Microsoft Cloud

Jibin Johnson and Simon Waight from the Azure User Group and Kloud Solutions will walk us through the cloud-based Big Data pipeline from Microsoft looking at how Azure’s HDInsights and Office 365 Power BI can deliver insights out of raw data.

Jibin Johnson is a cloud development consultant who has worked on some the largest on-premise and cloud-based solutions in Australia. Simon Waight (@simonwaight) is a cloud architect with almost 20 years’ experience in delivering online services for a range market verticals.

Remember to RSVP too please to help us get the right amount of food and beer!

Links from the May 27th Meeting

Just as a follow up from last night's fun, here's a few links for you.

Sydney Xamarin Hack Day: http://bit.ly/XamarinSydney

.NET vNext
Video: http://youtu.be/8Tk6FVD2cjQ
Code: https://github.com/aaronpowell/aspnet-vnext-samples
Slides: http://presentboldly.com/aaronpowell/k
Official site: http://www.asp.net/vnext

Edge.js
Code: https://github.com/rbanks54/alt.net.edge.js
Official site: http://tjanczuk.github.io/edge

And finally, a quick snap from last night for fun,

Aaron Powell (@slace) waxing lyrical about .NET vNext

May 27th, 2014 - .NET vNext and Edge.Js

There were some significant announcements made at this month's TechEd North America, especially those related to .NET vNext, Roslyn and the way we build applications. The changes will impact each and every .NET developer in the future and the sooner you understand what's happening, the sooner you can prepare yourself for the future and adjust the direction of the projects you're currently working on.


.NET vNext - Aaron Powell (@slace)

14 years ago the .NET framework was released at version 1.0 and since then a lot has changed.

Single monolithic frameworks are no longer the name of the game. The rise of NuGet has seen our .NET projects get more modular, being comprised of small specialised dependencies that do one job and do it very well.

Other platforms have also risen up, with Ruby and Node.js we have small, light-weight application being built, and being built in a way that we can load multiple versions of the runtime at the same time.

And lastly there's a new compiler in town, Roslyn, a C# & VB.NET compiler-as-a-service that now underpins everything .NET at Microsoft.

With all these changes it's time for the .NET framework to evolve with it.


Edge.JS - Richard Banks (@rbanks54)

Node and .NET living together? Sacrilege! Horror! Awesomeness! Sweeeet! Your reaction may vary, but it's possible, it's here and it's really kinda interesting and potentially useful.

So let's take a short trip into the trippy land of round tripping between Node and .NET and see where and how this rabbit hold might lead and if there truly is a pot of gold at the end of these mixed metaphors I've been abusing.


RSVP if you're coming and we'll see you soon!