November Meeting: 3 Pack

For November, we have 3 interesting short talks:

John Bristowe (@JohnBristowe) - The Life and Times of a Developer Evangelist
The role of a Developer Evangelist is certainly an interesting one. From the vantage point of where John Bristowe has sat for the past number of years, he’s seen a lot – having worked as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft for the past six years and now with Telerik APAC. In this session, John will share with you some of his more memorable experiences over the past decade and provide insights into the state of the tech industry today as it pertains to software development.

Joshua Roth - How To Write Less Comments
Uncle Bob Martin's book Clean Code opened my eyes to the beauty and importance writing of clean code. The good news is that writing clean code is much easier than you might think. I'll be sharing a few a simple techniques that you can easily apply to your daily coding that will help turn your code into a thing of beauty. At the very least, future maintainers of your code will curse your name a few less times due to your contributions to the code base.

Aaron Powell (@slace) - Lightweight Editors
VS is our standard editor but when you're not using .NET what should you go for? Or how about the crazy idea of ditching VS for .NET dev too

This will be the last meeting for the year, so you don't want to miss it :-)

And as always, please RSVP via the poll on the site.

October: Windows 8 Install-fest and Hack Night

Following the "Practice, Don't Preach" motto this month, we're running a Windows 8 Install-fest and Hack night.  The idea is simple:

1. No Windows? No Problem! Want to install Windows 8 into a VM, bootable VHD or some other device and you just haven't had the time to download or install it yet?  Bring your gear along and we'll sort that out for you.  Just sign that insurance waiver first! :-D

2. Got Windows? Great! It's time to understand how Metro apps work in more detail. What better way than to set aside some specific time and do some exploring and learning with others! Come along and poke Windows hard in the gut! You can try and build something awesome in one night if you want (and we hope you do), but far more importantly we want you to learn something and share what you learned with others.

For the record, we don't care if you want to use HTML/JS/CSS, C# or C++, heck we'll even let you use VB.NET if you really, really want to.  Whatever the case, come for the fun, the learning and the pizza!

See you there!

And as always, RSVP via the poll on the site.

September Presentation Slides

Nick has kindly shared his slide deck on "Moving from SQL Server to MongoDB" from yesterday's presentation. You can find it here:

http://www.slideshare.net/nickhac/moving-from-sql-server-to-mongodb

September Talks

This month we have two talks as follows:

Nick Holmes a Court (@nickhac) - Moving From SQL Server to MongoDB

The problems faced at BuzzNumbers related to monitoring Social Media posts

Why choose NoSQL over SQL Server/MySQL 

Why we chose Mongo over other NoSQL solutions 

How to design a NoSQL schema if you are used to relational databases

How BuzzNumbers designed a solution that allows infinite scaleability using low cost commodity hardware and .NET

Why we still use .NET as a primary development/hosting environment and how we also leverage Open Source where optimal

Lessons Learned.

Brendan Forster (@shiftkey) - Attending BUILD and Developing for Window 8

Brendan is back from the Build conference and has a shiny new tablet, Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 on it.  This is a good time to play with Win8 and have an open discussion about what it all means for us moving forward and what we need to do to roll with the changes.

As per usual, let us know you are coming by RSVPing via the poll on the right of the site.

August Talks

For the month of August we have two talks, as follows:

Ducas Francis (@ducas) - JQuery Mobile

Building web apps targeted at mobile platforms is becoming increasingly popular, but it can be quite difficult to get your site working on all devices. See how you can use jQuery Mobile to make your MVC apps come to life and easily build mobile experiences that work across all modern phone and tablet operating systems. That’s right… one version of your site CAN work on iPhone, iPad, Android and WP7!

Philip Laureano (@philiplaureano) - Blind Refactoring

Have you ever wondered if there was a better way to learn refactoring? Martin Fowler's Refactoring book was a great introductory book on how to clean up legacy code bases, but over the years, what I have found missing in that book is one a set of guidelines that links all the different types of refactoring techniques together into one continuous process. In this talk, I will show you how to take almost any code base, and refactor everything from the simplest nested' 'if' blocks all the way to extracting an actual domain/object model to using an IOC container framework. Using a set of repeatable steps, I will show you how easy it is to refactor almost any code base, even if you don't understand every part of the application.



We may also have a different MC than usual since Richard will be at TechEd and James may away as well.  If that's the case you'll be in the hands of Brendan Forster - be kind!

As per usual, RSVP via the poll for catering and don't forget to bring a friend!  It should be a great night with plenty to see.

July Meeting Talks

We have a nice mix of talks this month:

Jason Stangroome (@jstangroome)
PowerShell is built on .NET and uses curly braces but that's where the relationship with C# ends. I'll demonstrate some of the intricacies of PowerShell that give the language its power and pitfalls.

Wiryadi Adidharma (@toocoolfortwitter)
High Performance Web Sites
14 Steps to Faster-Loading Web Sites, with examples for ASP.NET Web Sites.

Pawel Pabich (@PawelPabich)
Unreliable end to end integration tests can cause much more harm than good. So we will have have a look at what constitutes a valuable integration test and how to avoid common pitfalls when writing one (samples in C# Selenium Webdriver).

Please RSVP on the poll to the right.
See you on Tuesday!

July Meeting: Call for speakers!

As things seem to be pretty good with the 3 X 20min short talks format, let's do it again this month. Let me know if you're up for a talk (@jtcrisp) or comment below.

Also feel free to give us the highlights of an awesome DDD talk if you think it'd suit :-)