Tuesday, March 18, 2014

March Madness with some Crazy Cecil and Immutable Databases

After a little speaker wrangling we have the following talks lined up for this month...

The Dark Art of IL Rewriting for Fun and Profit - Philip Laureano (@philiplaureano)

In this session, we'll talk about how to use Mono.Cecil to modify .NET assemblies to do some useful (and unusual) things, such as:

  • Intercepting third-party method calls, including calls to libraries that you don't own (like the System.* namespace in the BCL) for mocking purposes
  • Swapping/replacing method bodies at runtime
  • Intercepting property getters and setters for caching purposes
  • Making all public methods virtual for use with your favourite ORM
  • Unsigning "signed" assemblies

We'll also talk about why you would want to do something like this, as well as introduce a IL-rewriting library named Fody, which you can use to do all of this stuff for you.


Killing the U in CRUD with Immutable Databases - Richard Banks (@rbanks54)

In an act of practicing what he preaches, Richard follows that thinking that the best way to learn about something being to do a talk on it. Time to see if this actually works.

The subject? Immutable Databases. What they're all about, the problems they try and solve and why you might actually want to use an approach to data storage that most people would think is completely and utterly bonkers. Probably the same people that said NoSQL would never take off.


So step out of your comfort zone and spend a Tuesday night hanging out with other like minded nerds and geeks, and see what you all the fuss is about.

Grab a ticket so we know you're coming, tell your friends (if you have any) and we'll see you on the night!


Monday, February 17, 2014

Feb 25th - February Fun

Remember those holidays back at Christmas? Yeah, neither do I. Well, since we're all back in the swing of things, then there's no excuse not to get over to your friendly, neighbourhood user group, right?

To entice you along, not only will we have food and drink, but also a few topics that might just pique your interest.

Event Sourcing: What, Why and How! - Mohammed Abed  (@moh_abed)


Just as the title says. What it is, why you'd use it, how it helps and how to actually put it into action in a way that doesn't just add overhead and feel like architecture for the sake of it :-)

Building a Web Site with Visual Studio Online - Richard Banks (@rbanks54)

We're going to do a run through of how you can use Visual Studio Online (VSO) to build a website without needing anything more than a browser (I hope!) as well as talking about why you'd use this and what this might mean for how Microsoft is engaging developers.


Book yourself a ticket so we know you're coming and we'll see you on the night!

Friday, January 17, 2014

Jan 28 - ElasticSearch and Real Neo!

To kick off in 2014, we have found you two tasty talks on interesting new tech. Both talks will be on how these tools work in real life - no shiny demoware here!

Elasticsearch for .NET - Adam Korczynski

The success of online businesses often hinges on the ability to find what a user is looking for (or didn’t know they were looking for) but search services are often an afterthought.

Elasticsearch uses the popular search engine Lucene and drops an enticing dollop of distributed goodness on top, but all things come at a cost. Adam will share his experience implementing Elasticsearch in a .NET world.


Moving to the graph - Nat Young

At GetUp, we are exploring Neo4j as an alternative model to replace complex SQL queries and sharding. We will take a look at the resulting difference in performance and usability under the polyglot persistence model.

We'll cover designing a graph model, tuning the model, importing options for gigabytes of relational data and real queries with cypher rather than SQL.

As usual, please RSVP for catering.

Friday, November 15, 2013

November 26th - Google Glass and Neo4j Graph Database

To wrap the year up, we've got two talks for you. Both should be really interesting.

Developing for Wearables (Google Glass) - Lewis Benge

The emergence of wearable devices is accelerating rapidly in the majority of first world economies. Born out of our passion for mobile devices, we are now placing more technology on our person than ever before. So how do we as developers tackle this technological evolutions? This session will look at how things have progressed from fitness and health, to smart watches, through to Google Glass – and as a .NET developer how we can take advantage of this emerging trend… And yes you get to try out Google Glass.

A talk on Neo4j - NeoTechnology

One of the NeoTechnology team members will be in town to give us a run through of Neo4j and answer all your questions, so if you've ever wanted to get to grips with graph databases and the problems they can help you solve you should come along.


Personally I love graph databases and I'm itching to see how Glass works in real life so I'm excited by both talks.

RSVP using https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/sydney-altnet-nivember-2013-tickets-9352247825, and yes, that's a typo in the EventBrite link. #sigh

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

October 29th - MVVM Cross and Advanced Async with Boiling Eggs

This month's talks come to you from topics suggested by people at last month's meeting. I love it! And just like these topics, we'd love you you to suggest your own too, either in person or using the UserVoice site. What's stopping you? :-)

On to this month's potential awesomeness:

MVVM Cross - Michael Ridland (@rid00z)

It's clear that the future of applications is multi device and multi platform. Not only are users demanding high quality applications,  they also want them to look and behave like their other native applications. Visual Studio and Xamarin allow developers to easily create native apps for Windows Phone/8/Store, iOS and Android in c#. Now thanks MvvmCross developers can easily have the code nicely separated and shared between all platforms using the Mvvm design pattern. 


Michael will be giving a introduction to MvvmCross and talk about some things he's learnt in 2 years of building mobile apps.


Advanced Async and Egg Boiling - Filip Ekberg (@fekberg)

This is an in depth async talk by Filip, covering some of the problems and fun you can have with it. As for the title? Well, that comes from this short explanation of the difference between parallel and async: "If you boil eggs, you have multiple eggs boiling at the same time, they're boiling in parallel to each other. While the eggs are boiling you stroll around the kitchen and clean up, you're doing this asynchronously to the egg boiling because as soon as the egg timer goes off you're going back to the boiling process to get the eggs off the stove." Let's get cooking!

UPDATE: Filip posted a recording of his talk on his blog - http://blog.filipekberg.se/2013/10/29/advanced-async-talk-alt-net/

This will be a fun meet up so don't forget to RSVP by getting a free ticket, tell your friends about it and then turn up on the night :-) We're looking forward to seeing you there!

Monday, September 23, 2013

Wed 2nd Oct - Co-Hosting a YOW! Night with Joe Albahari

In addition to our normal meeting (it's on tomorrow night - go RSVP if you haven't done so already!) we're having an extra get together on Wed 2nd October in conjunction with YOW! Australia.

We've got Joe Albahari (creator of LinqPad, author of C# in a Nutshell, and all round good guy) in town talking about functional programming. Get yourself a ticket from https://ynsydoct2013.eventbrite.com.au/ and we'll see you there!

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Sep 24, Meet OWIN and Nancy

We've got two web talks for you this month, both talking about alternatives to the standard way of  building and running ASP.NET MVC and WebForms web apps.

Meet Nancy - Richard Banks (@rbanks54)

Richard will be showing off the Nancy framework and proving that you don't need ASP.NET WebForms or MVC in order to build a great web application in .NET.

Video: http://t.co/f6igu3W4bG
Code: https://github.com/ColinScott/HappyPath

Meet OWIN - Aaron Powell (@slace)

Aaron will be doing much the same, and introducing OWIN; explaining what it's all about and how it works. He may even explain why Microsoft is getting on board and supporting a project that lets people run ASP.NET web apps without using IIS.

Video: http://t.co/qT7elKiQBB
Screencast: http://youtu.be/50Nqom-Zpuo
Slides: https://presentboldly.com/aaronpowell/owin/

Don't forget to RSVP at Eventbrite so we know how much food to order and we'll see you there :-)


UPDATE: Links to videos from the night have been added.