Cheering a killing and getting Pi in your face

Based on your User Voice suggestions we've selected two talks for this month:

How to kill an open source project and have everyone cheer

Aaron Powell (@slace)

Umbraco did an interesting thing in June, they killed the new version they'd been developing for close to 2 years and it was met by excitement and celebration.

So how do you do that, how do you kill your product at the start of a conference and have virtually all attendees cheer at the decision?

C# on the Raspberry Pi – Dot Net on a $35 ARM system

Andrew Stone (@drivenlogic)

Embedded systems aren't new... but a $35 price point is.

The Raspberry Pi from the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory is an affordable credit card sized computer, capable of basic computing tasks such as browsing and email but it is also capable of HD video playback and physical computing applications such as robotics.

This session will take you through the basics of the system followed by some hardware IO code written in C#, closing with a quick demo of the super popular Xbox media center (XBMC) running on the RPi

You can read more here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

Don't forget to RSVP

Given the great turnout last month, let us know you're coming via the poll on the web site so we can organise the logistics for the evening and make sure we don't have to sit on each others laps! :-)

Update: Technical issues mean there's no RSVP poll on the site yet - you can use the Facebook event as an alternative for now.

July is Cloud Month

Due to popular demand, this month we're making it all about the cloud.  More specifically how to use AWS from .NET land and the low down on all the new stuff that's been announced with Azure.

Russell Sayers - AWS
Amazon Web Services for .NET peeps
A very quick spin thru 26 services on offer from AWS.  A more detailed look at the three services I've used in anger: EC2, S3, and Mechanical Turk.  Some live samples with the REST APIs and the .net wrappers.

Justin King - Azure
Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!

In this session we will cover not only all the new Microsoft Azure features released last month but how to take advantage of the entire Azure stack. With new functionality such as running Linux virtual machines, publishing directly from source control via git (appharbor model) or TFS with a checkin automatically triggering a build and deploy. We will take a look at the new Azure Websites, Azure Virtual Network to build hybrid on premise and cloud offering as well as the extensive updates to the new Management Portal and Web Apis for managing your deployments. If time permits we will take a look at a real world website and how I took advantage of Azure to build a scalable and multi layered site to ensure redundancy and speed.

Invite anyone who might be interested and then let us know you're coming by responding to the poll on the right hand site of the site or via the Facebook event page.

June - DDD Sydney Sneak Peek

What better way to prepare for DDD Sydney than by getting a sneak peek at some of the presentations coming on Saturday. You can maximise your time on Saturday and deal with some of those inevitable timetabling clashes when ALL of the sessions you want to see are on at the same time!

Andrew Stone is doing his Nefarious Web Robots talk, and we'll update this post once we have final confirmation from the others we "vounteered" for a talk.

We've also got Joshua Roth doing the lightning talk on Uppercut he wanted to deliver last month, so there'll be plenty on to keep you interested.

RSVP via the poll, as per usual and we'll see you on the night!

Lightning talks follow up

Pawel has posted the slides and code from his Less/Sass lightning talk this month..  You can find them on his blog.

Lightning Talks make it Yay for May!

Uggh! Terrible rhyming attempt.  Sorry.

Anyway, this moth is great for those of us with short attention spa... Squirrel!!!

Where was I? Oh, yes. Lightning talks.  Speakers and topics for this month are:

Wiryadi - Go Builds

Sean - Ruby Motion for native iPhone development

James - Lean Startup (and book give away!)

Sergey - Mixins in C# 

Pawel - Using Less/Sass in a project, the right way

It should be a fun night, and with beer and pizza on offer why wouldn't you come?! Just RSVP so we know how much food to get and don't forget to tell your friends!  We'll see you there.

May 29 - Lightning Talks: Call for speakers!

Some of the most interesting and fun ALT.NETs are the lightning talks. Each presenter speaks for 5-10 minutes. We have 6 or more interesting, and usually very different topics on the night, all presented at snappy pace!

Without further ado, we'd like to put out the call for speakers for the 29th! Want to talk about something but don't have the time to prepare a full length presentation? Got some useful tips or new tech to share? Want to do your first presentation to the group?

Let us know your topic by either tweeting @rbanks54 and @jtcrisp or adding a comment to this post.

So, what do you want to talk about?  We want to hear what you have to say!

April Date Change

Our April meeting, scheduled for the 24th, is now going to be on May 1 due to a late venue scheduling clash.  If you RVSP'ed for the original date, could we ask you to re-RSVP for the May 1 date so we know if you can still make it.

Apologies for the late change and we'll see you on May 1.