Dublin ALT.NET

May Meetup – Platform as a Service options for .Net

andrew — Sun, 12 May 2013 21:34:59 +0000

This month Slawomir Dorzak has kindly volunteered to give us a talk on Platform as a Service options for .Net:

Platform as a Service is a new hot thing and is revolutionizing the way we write and manage our applications. PaaS lets us focus on what’s important – that is creating and running the application by taking care of the infrastructure. By far the most popular PaaS platform for .NET is Microsoft Windows Azure, but is that it or maybe there are others? In this session we’ll look at some of the benefits and challenges that come with using PaaS. We will also explore some alternatives to Windows Azure that can be used for hosting .NET applications.

Bio: Slawomir Dorzak has almost 10 years of experience in software development. He is programming mainly in C# .NET, recently also in Ruby and Go. Last two years working for Dell Cloud teams he has been focused on open source cloud computing systems as well as cloud oriented application architecture.

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, May 30th in the regular spot: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

It’s a free event as always thanks to our sponsors Wonga but please sign up to the EventBrite event so I know the numbers for the room.

See you there

April Meetup – Developing OWIN compliant web applications with Katana

andrew — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 10:40:46 +0000

This month we have ALT.Net regular Damian Hickey giving us a talk on developing OWIN compliant web applications with Katana:

Open Web Interface for .NET, or OWIN for short, defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of the OWIN interface is to decouple server and application, encourage the development of simple modules for .NET web development, and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools.

The Katana Project is Microsoft’s effort, guided by the members of the OSS community, to create a suite of hosts, libraries and tools to compose, host and test OWIN compliant frameworks and applications.

This session will cover the reasons why the OWIN specification came to be, what problems it solves and how you can use it with Katana packages to create (and test!) OWIN compliant applications.

When & Where

Finally back to our usual date of the third Thursday of the month, the talk will be on Thursday, April 18th, in the regular spot: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

It’s a free event as always thanks to our sponsors Wonga but please sign up to the EventBrite event so I know the numbers for the room.

See you there

March meetup: Agile software architecture sketches – NoUML!

andrew — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:34:21 +0000

~~[Heads up: This talk is on Thursday, 14th March]~~

[Update: Due to the bad weather, we've had to reschedule to Thursday, 28th March]

Hot on the heels of our last talk, we’re ready for our next meetup. We’re lucky to have author and noted speaker Simon Brown in Dublin this March and he’s kindly offered to give us a talk on Agile software architecture sketches:

Agility is about moving fast and this requires good communication. A consistent, shared vision is essential in order for teams to push in the same direction, but it’s surprising that many agile teams struggle to effectively communicate the architecture of the software they are building. As an industry we do have the Unified Modeling Language (UML), yet many people favour informal “boxes and lines” sketches instead. The problem is that such diagrams rarely make any sense, usually need a narrative to accompany them and ultimately slow the team down. Although we can argue whether UML offers an effective way to communicate software architecture, that’s often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown out UML or simply don’t know it. Abandoning UML is one thing but, in the race for agility, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually.

This session is aimed at everybody involved in the software development process and is about improving architectural communication in an agile environment. You’ll see some patterns and anti-patterns related to NoUML diagrams and you’ll learn some simple techniques for communicating software architecture using informal sketches.

About Simon:

Simon lives in Jersey (Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, specialising in software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. Simon regularly speaks at international software development conferences and provides consulting/training to software teams at organisations across Europe, ranging from small startups through to global blue chip companies. He is the founder of Coding the Architecture (a website about pragmatic, hands-on software architecture) and the author of Software Architecture for Developers (an e-book that is being published incrementally through Leanpub). He still likes to write code too, primarily in .NET and Java. Simon can be found on Twitter at @simonbrown.

Simon was only available on the 14th, so hope you don’t mind I’m shifting the date a bit again to accommodate (last month’s was later than normal – which is why there’s such a short gap this time). Normal service resuming shortly. Update: Simon got snowed in with the bad weather, so new date is the 28th

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, March 28th, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

It’s a free event as always thanks to our sponsors Wonga but please sign up to the EventBrite event so I know the numbers for the room.

See you there!

February Meetup – Multi Platform development in C#

andrew — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 11:06:54 +0000

This month we have Michele Scandura giving us a talk on Multi Platform development in C#

- Is C# truly an universal Language?
- Multi Platform? What Platform?
- A sample application runnig (let’s see some code!)

Bio: Michele Scandura has 7 years of experience in software development using .NET and C#. In the last 2 years he focused on mobile development on Android and iOS using MonoTouch and Mono for Android.

There was a great response from the group for talks for this month. Thanks again for the volunteers.

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, February 28th, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

It’s a free event as always thanks to our sponsors Wonga but please sign up to the EventBrite event so I know the numbers for the room.

See you there!

January Meetup – Sean Farmar on SOA with NServiceBus

andrew — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:32:10 +0000

Happy new year to all

We kick off 2013 with Sean Farmar giving us a presentation covering:

Why would you use a Service Oriented Architecture?

Why would you chose NServiceBus?

Bio: Sean Farmar has a 19 years of experience in software development, in the last 5 years had been focusing on enterprise architecture using SOA and NServiceBus.

Sean has a lot of real world experience to draw on so it should definitely be an interesting and informative meetup. Hope to see you all there.

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, January 24th, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our (new!) sponsors Wonga, but don’t forget to register if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

November Meetup – Jimmy Bogard on Real World Polyglot Persistence

andrew — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:10:33 +0000

Update: Jimmy has posted links to slide deck on his blog.

Update: For those who can’t make it in person, a company called OneStream has kindly offered to do a live stream of the event. We’re at the mercy of the hotel wi-fi, but hopefully you’ll be able to catch it here: http://video.onestream.tv/production/view/124

Hi,

Been a little while since we had our last meetup, but it’ll be worth the wait! This month we are fortunate to have Jimmy Bogard in town and he’s kindly offered to give us a talk on Real World Polyglot Persistence:

It always sounds easy – “use the best tool for the job”. With very isolated systems, it’s easy to decide RDBMS for one application, Redis for another and Cassandra for somethings else. When it comes time to building systems with multiple persistent stores, we’re met with challenges in integration, existing applications, and push back from IT administrators. In this session, we’ll look at the multitude of challenges of achieving polyglot persistence nirvana, and strategies for addressing associated risks.

Jimmy is a member of the ASPInsiders group, the C# Insiders group, and received the “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional” (MVP) award for ASP.NET in 2009-2012. Jimmy is also the creator and lead developer of the popular OSS library AutoMapper.

The talk will be on Thursday, November 29th, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30. Sorry about the short-ish notice this time.

The event is free as always thanks to our sponsors Beam, but don’t forget to register if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

This is one not to be missed. Hope to see you all there.

Andrew

September Meetup – Restful Objects

andrew — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:39:46 +0000

For the September meetup we’re delighted to have Dan Haywood over with us to give a talk about Restful Objects:

REST architectures are becoming increasingly more common, both on the internet and within the enterprise. Behind most of these REST APIs is a domain model (some anaemic, some less so); the wiring up of that REST API to the model involves lots of boilerplate and lots of testing.

Evolving out of the Naked Objects movement (and by the way, a major Naked Objects app has been very successfully deployed at the Department of Social Protection here in Ireland), Restful Objects is a specification that describes how to expose any domain model over REST. The spec fully documents a set of HTTP URL resources and the corresponding JSON representations that they support; and it fully supports the stuff that REST-heads care about: HATEOAS, media types, link rels, conneg, HTTP headers and arcane response codes; that sort of thing. Restful Objects isn’t just a specification though: there are also two separate open source implementations, a completed one for .NET (running on top of ASP.NET MVC4), and another on the JVM.

In this talk, Dan will explain some of the ideas behind the spec, and will show how you can use it to REST-enable an app in a matter of minutes.

The talk will be on Tuesday, September 18th and not our usual Wednesday, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our sponsors Beam, but don’t forget to register if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

Hope to see you all there

August Meetup – WCF Async Queryable Services

jacob — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:02:35 +0000

For data centric 3 tiers application, it is often useful to be able to query from the client tier directly. Microsoft provides two technologies to do this: WCF RIA Services and WCF Data Services. However, these technologies only support basic queries and the persistence is not optimal. This could be enough for basic scenarios but it is not in many (most?) real life cases.
As consultant, Matthieu MEZIL worked with many customers who finds these technologies not good enough for what they want to do. Based on his experience he made a technology that would cover every query and that would really improve developers experience. It’s called WCF Async Queryable Services (WAQS). WAQS is not a framework, it’s a meta-framework.
In this session, Matthieu will talk about how to use WAQS, what are advantages of using a meta-framework instead of using a framework and, at the end, will talk about the future of WAQS.

The event is on in the usual spot – the Central Hotel on Exchequer St – on Wednesday 15th August at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our sponsors Beam, but don’t forget to register on EventBrite if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

Matthieu MEZIL is consultant and trainer at Infinite Square in Paris, France.
He is an INETA Speaker
He was C# MVP from 2008 to 2010 and from 2010 and he now is Data Plaform Development MVP from 2010. he was nominated MVP of the year in this category in 2011.
As a passionate developer, he worked for Roslyn team one year ago during his vacations.
He blogs at http://msmvps.com/blogs/matthieu, mainly (but not only) on Entity Framework.

Bart de Smet in Dublin – 4th July 6.30pm

roundcrisis — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 08:59:48 +0000

We are very excited to announce that Bart De Smet will be visiting us once again to give us an updated talk on RX. Bart is a fantastic speaker, and it’s a real pleasure to be able to have him back again.

We’d like to send a thanks to Microsoft for their help in getting Bart to Dublin, and to BEAM Financial Solutions for sponsoring the venue.

The venue will be our usual spot – the Central Hotel on Exchequer St – on Wednesday, July 4th at 6.30pm. So book it in your calendars now, and please register in EventBrite. As usual, it’s free, but we really need to know the numbers for this one.

Anyone who missed him last time, don’t miss this one! And for those who were there, there’s plenty of updates (see below)

We really hope we can get a great turnout for this, so please help spread the word. And don’t forget to register

See you there!

Event details:

Abstract: Over the last years, we’ve seen a tremendous shift in the velocity of data. Ever increasing volumes of data are coming into our applications in an event-driven, asynchronous manner. Just imagine the bulk load of sensors in mobile devices, the social media fire hose, real-time trading and auction services, etc. This shift towards a push-based model for data acquisition prompts us to rethink the way we program our applications and services. No longer is the application in the driver seat of retrieving data. Instead, our code needs to react to a stream of incoming data. In this session, you’ll learn how Reactive Extensions (Rx) provides a nice programming abstraction for reactive event-driven programming, based on the notion of observable sequences and LINQ-style query support. Besides focusing on the essential abstractions, you’ll see a bunch of samples on how to use Rx to solve real-world problems, ranging from mobile application development on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8, over sensor programming using state-of-the-art technologies such as Kinect, to large-scale cloud data processing and data center monitoring. We’ll also focus on the better together story of using the upcoming Rx v2.0 release with the new C# 5.0 and Visual Basic 11 language features for asynchronous programming. Come and learn how to tame your event processing problems using Rx!

Bio: Bart J.F. De Smet is a senior software development engineer in the Cloud Programmability Team at Microsoft. For the last 2,5 years he’s been focused on democratizing data processing problems of all scales, using LINQ as the universal glue. In this role, he’s in charge of the design and development of Reactive Extensions, as well as various yet unannounced projects. Prior to joining the team, Bart worked on a the WPF team for a couple of years, after having joined Microsoft fresh out of university in 2007. During his Master of Computer Science and Civil Engineering studies in Ghent University (Belgium), Bart was active in the Microsoft community and became an MVP for C# in 2003. He’s also the author of the SAMS C# 4.0 Unleashed book, has been blogging for many years, and is a popular speaker at various conferences including TechEd, PDC, MIX, //build/, and several local Microsoft events.

May Meetup – Mobile Mono

andrew — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:16:58 +0000

Hi,

Our next meetup is on next Wednesday 23rd May where Jeremie Laval will be talking to us about Mono for Mobile devices.

He’s going to discuss their platform for iOS and Android devices – MonoTouch and Mono for Android

The event is on in the usual spot – the Central Hotel on Exchequer St – on Wednesday 23rd May at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our sponsors Beam, but don’t forget to register on EventBrite if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers

See you there
Andrew