Category: .NET South East

Humanitarian Toolbox Codeathon .NET South East - Coding for the Greater Good

Steve Gordon Leave a comment

On Saturday (20th January) we held a special .NET South East event, spending the day ‘coding for the greater good’ on the Humanitarian Toolbox allReady project. We were very excited to be joined by Richard Campbell, one of the co-founders of Humanitarian Toolbox and co-host of the popular .NET Rocks Podcast. A team of 19 volunteers joined us to contribute towards the project during the day, all first time contributors to the project. For many, this was also their first time working on an open source project and GitHub.

Richard Campbell - Humanitarian Toolbox co-founder
Richard Campbell Introducing the Humanitarian Toolbox to our Team.

Planning

The possibility of running a codeathon came together quite recently and once I was able to arrange with Richard for him to join us, I kicked the planning into high gear. The first problem when trying to host an event like this is usually finding a suitable venue. In my case this was not a problem as Madgex, my employer, are very supportive of these events and were immediately open to the idea of hosting it. We have three neighbouring meeting rooms which can be opened up into one larger space. We do this for our monthly .NET South East meetups too and it creates a very reasonable working area.

We picked the date around Richard’s travel plans for NDC London. Richard and Carl were recording their shows at the event and Richard had a day spare following the conference which was ideal for hosting the codeathon. I created a meetup event to allow people to begin reserving their place at the codeathon. Initially I set a limit of 14 spaces until I’d had chance to fully assess the logistics of running the event. In the end we raised this to 18 spaces.

So we now had a date and a venue planned; the final  thing I started to put into place was food. I wanted to ensure that our contributors didn’t run out of steam too early in the day and as we all know, the best fuel for developers is pizza!! Madgex kindly agreed to pay for the pizzas and also for some post event catering to re-fuel before our regular meetup began.

Organising GitHub Issues

After the Christmas holidays I started to organise the issues in the project. allReady has evolved over the last few years into a quite large application. As a result, the complexity level for those starting out with the project has increased. When running a codeathon I am conscious that for some people, everything may be new and so I wanted to try to make the barrier of entry as low as possible. Part of this includes having a good range of smaller issues that can be easily tackled by first-timers.

Fortunately, one of the things we had recently been focusing on is the need to improve the user experience (UX) of the application. The application is very much functional, but not always intuitive for a new user. As a result of this I spoke to a friend of mine, Chris, a UX designer working in Brighton. We spent a couple of hours reviewing the application and during that session he found a number of small, but neccesary changes we could make to give us some quick win improvements to the UX.

After that meeting I came away with a lot of subtle changes that I was able to create issues for; perfect for the codeathon. These may not see very exciting on the surface but they will really help improve the usability of the application. They were also small enough that they can easily be tackled in one day as someone new to the project finds their feet. I hoped these could be good gateway issues before people started to tackle more complex feature requirements.

In the week leading up to the event I spent time organising the final logistics, such as ensuring we would have sufficient power connections for all of the laptops. I was also able to increase the RSVP limit as we wanted to make the most of the opportunity and allow as many members of our community to contribute. I also reached out to some local charities to see if they would be interested in attending the event to see how the application may be able to help with their own requirements.

I am very thankful to some of my colleagues at Madgex who were also helping to make sure we had everything in place ready for the weekend. This was particularly useful as I was at the NDC London conference the three days prior to the event so couldn’t be there in person to perform any last minute preparations.

Codeathon

On the day of the codeathon I set off by train to Brighton. Once there, my first stop was to pick up Richard from his hotel. Dan, the organiser of .NET Oxford was also staying at the same hotel and would be joining us for the event. It was great to finally meet Dan in person after many months of chatting via Twitter about running our user groups.

Together, the three of us set off for the Madgex office. One of my colleagues, Chris was already there and had been helping out by letting the early arrivals into the building.

The next 45 minutes to an hour were spent organising the meeting room space. Again, my colleagues had been very helpful, having set up a few things the day before. We just needed to ensure we had the suitable power points for the numerous devices we’d be running on the day. Ricky, our IT support technician at Madgex had kindly come in on his weekend to help with the setup and to be on hand for any technical challenges.

The setup went very smoothly and soon we had most of volunteers for the day settled in. Nearly everyone had been able to get the project cloned onto their laptops and tested prior to the event. This is extremely useful and meant that we were ready to start the event and begin coding with very little delay. At codeathons this really does help with the productivity as we can focus on code, rather than machine preparation.

At about 9:20am we were all ready to begin. We started with a short introduction from Richard who shared the history behind Humanitarian Toolbox and the goals of the allReady project we would be working on. Our volunteers listened with rapt attention and it was fantastic to have Richard with us to share his passion for the charity he has founded.

Humanitarian Toolbox Codeathon introduction

After Richard finished his introduction, I spent a few minutes speaking about the technical stack and the basic flow for working on issues and submitting pull requests. I find it useful to review this flow before starting, especially when we have some first time open source contributors in the room. In hindsight I probably needed to mention a few other things to make it easier for people to get going which I’ll include in my slide deck for future events.

With the introductions complete, we commenced coding. Everyone was heads down very quickly, choosing issues to work on and producing code to address them. As expected, there were quite a few questions along the way and I hope I was able to help everyone get started without too much of a delay. There’s a lot to take on and learn at an event like this and I thank everyone for being very patient as I worked through the various questions.

In under 1 hour we had had our first pull request to the project and after that the flood gates opened and more streamed in. I did my best to keep up with the requests, performing code reviews before merging them into the project. Our AppVeyor account was struggling under the load a little. Each pull request to the project triggers a build on the AppVeyor system. This is very useful to be able to verify that the code included in the PR builds and that the tests all pass. As we had many PR’s coming in concurrently, it did start to creak at the seams a little. Worth noting for future events to see if we can increase the capacity of the account.

We had a brief lunchtime break for pizza at around 12:45pm, which was a good chance for people to break from their screens and chat about the progress so far. The morning had flown past at a great rate and already the team had achieved a great deal. The team were eager to get going again and before long were back at their laptops, working on the next set of pull requests!

Codeathon contributors in action

During the afternoon we had organised a series of User Experience (UX) user testing sessions. We are conscious that the project has been developed mostly by backend developers and as a result, while functional, the User Interface (UI) and UX of the project leave something to be desired. This is now a focus on the project to see what we can change and improve to make it as easy to use as possible. A big thanks to my friend Chris for joining us to run the user testing sessions and to our willing test subjects, Jenny, Zen and my wife Rhiannon. It proved really useful and we now have a number of good suggestions from Chris for changes that we can make to resolve some difficulties identified during the testing.

The afternoon seemed to go even faster than the morning, with more PRs being made as people became more familiar with the project and the workflow. By 5pm we had made significant progress and it was time to wrap up the event. We concluded with some sandwiches provided from a local caterer which were very welcome after our busy afternoon.

Achievements

Including myself and Richard we had 17 people working on the project all day, and a further 4 contributors for the additional work being done in the afternoon to perform the UX testing. This was a really great turnout and it meant we could get through a lot of work in a relatively short space of time. I can’t thank everyone enough for coming along and helping to make the day such a success. On reflection, the number we had was just about right. Any more would have been harder for me to support without delaying people.

In total we had 30 pull requests opened during the event. That’s thirty issues within the project being addressed and fixed which is pretty incredible. That may be close to a record for a single day Humanitarian Toolbox event! I was able to review and merge 18 of those during the day as well, which means that code is already active in the project. I will endeavour to get through the reviews of the remaining 12 PRs as soon as possible.

How can you help?

If you like the sound of this project and this style of event, we’d love for people to join us in contributing to allReady. For those that took part in the codeathon, we hope many will continue contributing to the project too. During the next couple of months there is a global Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) event running which is a virtual codeathon to get Microsoft MVPs from around the world contributing to the project. I am helping to organise and run that event and hope to see lots of activity on the project leading up to the Global MVP summit event in March.

This is a great time for newcomers to join the project as we have lots of experts on hand to support you and help you get started. The best place to start is to visit the GitHub project repository. From there you can view the open issues and jump in wherever you feel comfortable. If you need support, just let us know and we can help out.

I have started a series of videos explaining how you can get started with open source contributions and showing the technical steps. You can view these on my YouTube channel.

Summary

I’d like to wrap up with another huge thank you to everyone who helped in some way with organising this event and especially to those contributors who took part during the day. It was a great showing from the community and I hope everyone enjoyed the day as much as I did. The aim of the event was to introduce people to the project and get them past the learning curve for contributing to an open source project. A big thanks to Madgex for supporting the event with the use of their meeting rooms, as well as for providing some food to keep the troops fuelled up. In my opinion it was a huge success and I hope that we can arrange future events to continue the good work from everyone who contributed.

.NET South East October 2017 Meetup With guest Rabeb Othmani

Steve Gordon Leave a comment

Last night we held our third .NET South East meetup at Madgex HQ with special guest Rabeb Othmani. Here’s a brief summary of the evening…

Preparation

Planning for this meeting felt a lot easier than past events as I have built a few lists of things to do and have a bit of experience with setting everything up. As usual I did a bit of marketing for the event via Twitter, hoping to spread the word.

On the evening I finished work around 4:30pm to begin setting up the room and preparing things like the snacks and drinks. We have a pretty well-oiled process now and with the help of Ricky our IT guru we had the room prepared in about 30 minutes. The plan for the evening was to stick to the process we’d developed at our prior meetup.

We had our attendees sign in down in the foyer with two volunteers, Chris and Jenny very kindly helping to do that this month. Again we placed our food and drinks networking area in our main reception space so that there was more space for people to chat and socialise. Toby and Sally; two more Madgexians kindly helped meet and greet people from the lifts. This month I was please as everything was ready well in advance and I was actually able to spend a bit of time greeting and speaking to people as they arrived. This was something I’d been unable to do at the prior events where I was running around getting the final things sorted.

In the end we had 20 attendees for the evening so a bit of a drop off from our first two. I had kind of expected this since the novelty has worn off for some. We did have some new faces though so it was nice to see more members finding their way to us.

Intro and news

At 7pm I opened the evening with my introduction, including thanking our fantastic sponsors and then went on to discuss some of the news items I had gathered for this month…

Quantum Computing

The first item I discussed was taken from the Ignite 2017 announcement that Microsoft are expecting to release a Quantum computing programming language by the end of this year. Microsoft are heavily invested in research around building a working quantum computing device and would like to start skilling up developers to work in the quantum world. The new language is yet unnamed (my guest is Q#!) and will include full Visual Studio integration, including a debugging experience. A local simulator will be available to simulate a 30 Qubit device or an Azure based 40 Qubit similar can be used. It’ll be interesting to watch how this develops as quantum computing could truly change the way we think about programming.

Microsoft Quantum Computing

Arstechnica Article on MS Quantum Computing

.NET 4.7.1 built in support for .NET Standard 2.0

A smaller news item but worth a quick mention, this story refers to the Microsoft announcement that 4.7.1 of the .NET Framework now includes all necessary files to consume .NET Standard 2.0 libraries. While 4.6.1 introduced compliance with the .NET Standard 2.0, it required some additional files to be deployed and in some cases binding redirects to be used.

.NET 4.7.1 built in support for .NET Standard 2.0 Announcement

UWP Supports .NET Standard 2.0

A related story was another Microsoft announcement that a major update for UWP means that it now supports .NET Standard 2.0. This introduces an additional ~20k APIs to the platform which developers can now take advantage of. It should also make sharing code between UWP and other platforms much easier. To use this update you need Visual Studio 15.4 and need to be targeting the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

UWP Supports .NET Standard 2.0 Announcement

Rabeb Othmani – Welcome to the age of conversational interfaces

Rabeb Othami speaking about conversational interfaces

Rabeb gave us a great talk that really set my mind off thinking about building bots! She talked about the coming of age of conversational interfaces via devices like Google Echo, Amazon Alexa and our smart phones.

She described the history of the changing development landscape as users move to consuming on smaller devices and via different interfaces. We moved from mouse on desktop devices, to touch on tablets and smart phones and we’re now entering the age of voice communication where we may never physically interact with the device at all.

Recent advances in technologies such as AI and machine learning are enabling us to develop more intelligent applications while improvements in voice recognition, language interpretation and text to speech have also driven the industry forward and moved us towards more and more voice based interfaces.

Digital assistants such as Google, Siri and Cortana understand more about the context in which we are operating and can tailor responses and information to our needs.

Voice as an interface is becoming popular in part due to its convenience and speed. With text we need to locate our device, unlock it, access an app, type data and wait for a response. With voice, we can very quickly interact without any need to physically hold the device. We can interact on the move or in situations such as in the car when our hands are not free to use a device. Voice can be very simple when done right as there are no UI issues in the traditional sense. However the application/device must be able to understand and interpret the intent of the user.

Rabeb listed some key point to consider when building voice based interfaces:

  • Make it smart
  • Use language users can understand
  • The capabilities of your tech
  • The structure of the info – For example dates; e.g. should you infer a year if the user doesn’t say one?

When building for devices like Alexa you build skills which are a unit of conversational intelligence. You must register the skill to be able to use it from your device. Skills invoke a bot in the cloud which does the processing for your application. Rabeb demoed the Microsoft bot SDK in Visual Studio and a simple bot which would call her phone using the Nexmo APIs.

Rabeb Othamni at .NET South East

It was a great introduction to the world of bots and voice interfaces. I have been inspired to add it to my list of things to try and I hope a few others will do the same. This is exactly why I believe user groups are so great. In a short evening you can quickly learn about a new technology with enough to get you excited and start you on a path of discovery. A big thank you to Rabeb for travelling down from Bristol to spend the evening with us.

As always, a big thanks too to the amazing volunteers from Madgex who helped me setup and run the evening and to all of the attendees for making time to join us. A final thanks goes to our sponsors for the evening who offered some great prizes and support of our user group.

Prize Draws

With the end of the evening closing in we drew the winners of the prizes from our fantastic sponsors for the event. The prizes we had to offer were:

JetBrains
One year individual subscription to any single JetBrains Toolbox product

Progress
DevCraft Complete License code

Manning
Free eBook

elmah.io
6 month Small Business license

PostSharp
License to PostSharp

Again we use the WPF app created by Dan Clarke, who organises the .NET Oxford meetup. The rules as with the last event were:

a) names are added from the RSVP list (as at about 1 hour before the event)
b) if the name drawn is not in attendance, we redraw.

Next events

We have some great speakers lined up for the next couple of months, and I’m working with a few people of plans for next year too.

.NET South East November 2017 – Michael Newton
Making Distributed Systems in .NET Easier

.NET South East November 2017 – David Arno
Roslyn Analysers

2018 events to be announced soon!

Call for speakers

I’d love to get a range of varied content and speakers to present at our user group. We have a nice pipeline for the coming months but those months will fly by very quickly. If you’d be interested in speaking at a future event we’d love to have you. Please get in touch via the contact form on this blog or ping me on Twitter and we can discuss availability and topics.

I’m really keen to draw as many speakers from our local community too so please let me know if you might be interested in speaking. Perhaps you have presented a talk internally and could open it up to a wider audience. I highly recommend speaking as a way to develop professionally. I’m happy to offer advice for new speakers and help where I can.

If you don’t like the idea of public speaking, you are not alone. Please check out my own story in my recent two part blog series – Part 1 of How to not hate public speaking.

Links

https://www.nexmo.com
https://rabebdiaries.wordpress.com/
https://dev.botframework.com
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana

.NET South East September 2017 Meetup With guest Jon Galloway

Steve Gordon Leave a comment

Last night was the second .NET South East meetup event and it was a special one. Through a bit of scheduling luck I was able to co-ordinate with Jon Galloway and make plans with him to join us for the evening; before returning with him to London today to attend the Progressive .NET conference.

Planning

After our first event we decided to slightly refine the entry and sign in process to make it easier for our Madgex volunteers to manage. We decided to sign in the attendees downstairs in the foyer with two volunteers – Chris and Martin – kindly helping to do that. We also moved our networking area (where we provided snacks, soft drinks and beer) into our office entrance area. There was a little more space for people to talk and it made it easier for Trev, another volunteer on the evening to watch for anyone trapped in the corridor when returning from the toilets!

As expected, we had major interest in this evening, with the RSVP limit of 60 reached in about 24 hours of announcing the event. With a few days to go our RSVP list had grown to around 14 people and it was clear we had a good chance of full attendance. From the last event we knew that 60 would be pushing the available space to its maximum. This presented a slight concern as we were conscious that whilst we wanted to accommodate everyone who arrived on the night, we might have people showing up who were not on the list. We had announced beforehand that to be as fair as possible we would have to limit entrance to those on the RSVP list. In the end we had a few last minute cancellations and no-shows so our numbers were about perfect.

The Event!

On the day of the event, Madgex had held a company meeting in the space we would be using for .NET South East. This was quite handy since it meant most of the chairs were already out and setup. After the company meeting I spent the next hour making sure everything was neat and in order. As with the last event, time seemed to disappear very quickly. This time the Madgex staff decided to order pizza which was rapidly consumed before the event began. 

At 6pm I headed out to meet Jon at his hotel, just around the corner from our office. It was great to finally meet Jon in person after chatting back and forth for a little while. We walked back to the office together and ran through the rough plan for the timings of the evening. Once in the office we did a quick technical check to make sure Jon’s laptop would output on the large TV we use for the event.

This month, I had decided to bring in my dSLR camera (5D Mark II) and a couple of lenses for the evening. Outside of developer work, my wife and I are (occasional) semi-pro photographers and so have a lot of equipment from photographing weddings etc. The photographic results from the first meetup were a little poor due to the low lighting. Despite our best efforts, most were either noisy, blurry or both. I hoped that by bringing in the pro gear I could hopefully get a few more shots to use to promote future events. I’ve yet to have time to check and process the photographs from the event. The ones included here are from my phone. I’ll add more at a later date.

In the end we had 53 attendees (including myself) and filled every seat in the room. A massive thanks again to everyone who attended the event. It was great to see some new faces among those returning after the first meetup in August. I’m terrible with names and faces so apologies to anyone I had forgotten from the first event!

Intro and News

Just after 7pm we gathered everyone in the conference room, ready for the event. I opened the evening with my introduction, including thanking our fantastic sponsors and then went on to discuss some of the news items I had gathered for this month.

SignalR Core Alpha

The first topic I touched on was the upcoming release of the first alpha of SignalR Core. I was a little premature in this news item as technically the announcement is not due until later this week. I was basing this news item from a pre-announcement-announcement by Damian Edwards during the ASP.NET Core community standup. This is SignalR re-imagined and re-written on top of ASP.NET Core 2.0. SignalR is a real-time framework to support cases where you need to send messages from the server to connected clients in real-time. Application can include classic chat scenarios, gaming, real-time dashboards and notifications.

To learn more about what the team have been working on you can view this video from Microsoft Build 2017.

Source Linking

The second news item I focused on was the ASP.NET Core support for Source Link, a feature which now enables us to debug into the ASP.NET Core source from our application. This is a useful feature, particularly for learning more about how ASP.NET Core works under the hood. I shared details of my early use if this feature, along with a few items I could not get working. I mostly referred to the information I’d collected for my Debugging ASP.NET Core 2.0 Source blog post.

.NET Standard 2.0 and .NET Framework 4.6.1 Issue

The final item I decided to include was some information about an issue with .NET Standard 2.0 with .NET Framework & NuGet as documented in this GitHub Issue. The short summary of the issue is that in some cases, when consuming a .NET Standard 2.0 library from a .NET 4.6.1 project there can be runtime crashes or compile time warnings due to the handling of dependent assemblies. This stems from two possible causes, the possibility of missing binding redirects and/or entire missing binaries. The team are aware of the causes and are working to address this in Visual Studio 15.4. In the issue Immo Landwerth provided some workarounds that might help in the interim.

.NET Conf

I also mentioned the .NET Conf event again, which is running in September. It’s a free, streamed conference organised by Microsoft which include a lot of great .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 content from experts in their field.

I hope the news content is adding some value to the monthly events. I didn’t feel that my presentation was quite as polished as my first time. Partly due to having to try and consume and remember the key points of the items, with only a little time to absorb it. The tough thing with news is that it’s, well, new! So pulling together a few cohesive points and then talking about them without rehearsing is not that easy for me. Maybe I can convince a sponsor to provide a teleprompter for the next one!

Talks

With such a rare opportunity to have someone directly linked to the ASP.NET team join us we took full advantage, with Jon kindly presenting two talks during the evening.

Jon Galloway – What’s new in ASP.NET Core 2.0

Jon Galloway - Introducing ASP.NET Core 2.0

In this talk, Jon managed to pack in a summary of the many new ASP.NET Core 2.0 features. It was a demo packed hour as Jon discussed and showed examples of the improvements since the 1.x release.

Jon started with a quick overview of .NET Standard 2.0 and why this is an important feature for developers, providing better compatibility of libraries between the different platforms. Jon likened the .NET Standard to HTML specs which is a good analogy to understand why we need a standard. Jon gave an example of Keen.io who develop an event data platform. They were able to take their existing PCL libraries and convert them to .NET Standard 2.0, simplifying code sharing between their platforms.

Jon went on to talk about the new AspNetCore.All metapackage which takes advantage of the runtime store which now ships with the .NET SDK. This store provides pre-jitted, optimised versions of the packages which any application using the .All meta-package will take advantage of. Jon also demonstrated the simplification and changes in the Program.cs and Startup.cs files.

Next was a big new feature in ASP.NET Core 2.0, Razor Pages. This is a new pattern built on the existing MVC system which aims to simplify and remove some of the ceremony of the traditional MVC pattern for less backend-heavy pages. It’s a feature I really need to spend some time taking out for a spin.

Jon then showed some of the additional templates we have available for ASP.NET projects, such as Angular and React. These stem from Steve Sanderson’s work on Javascript Services.

Jon concluded with a big slide of smaller features and improvements that all made it into ASP.NET Core 2.0. It was an information packed session and really great to have all of the key changes made easily accessible to the audience. We had a good mix of developers, some who had used ASP.NET Core and some who had not yet had chance to work with it. This talk had something for everyone.

Jon Galloway – The .NET Foundation

Jon Galloway - .NET Foundation

In Jon’s second talk the theme was the .NET Foundation, of which Jon is the Executive Director. In this 45 minute session, Jon took us through some of the goals of the .NET Foundation and explained the work they do with open source projects.

First Jon talked through some of the phases of open source contribution for developers. This was a scale from the fear and uncertainty that developers and business can feel about even using and consuming open source, up to fully embracing it, sharing and maintaining open source projects with public roadmaps. More details about these stages can be found at A Wider NET.

Jon then detailed at a high level some of the phases of Microsoft’s own adoption of open source, from the earlier toe in the water with some source open code (read, don’t use or change) through to where they are today, developing out in the open with .NET Core, ASP.NET Core and even things like the documentation and the C# language specifications.

A small part of the .NET Foundation is to act as an ombudsman between open source projects and consumers to try and ensure that the project is acting in the interests of its users and responding appropriately to legitimate issues. A much larger part is the support the .NET Foundation can offer to projects in the form of sponsorship as part of the community project membership. This is not about monetary funding, but about providing advice and services to the projects. This can include things such as helping set up wildcard certificates or providing some Azure credits for example. The goals here are to help make sure the projects continue to thrive and do not die out. This is a very important thing for consumers of the libraries, particularly in enterprise situations, that may rely on these projects in their code. The foundation does not run the projects but works to support them as much as possible. Jon likened this to Open Source as a Service!

Jon also talked about the recent .NET Summer Hackfest, a 6 week event aimed at getting new contributors into open source with support from some great projects such as Brighter and Humanitarian Toolbox. Jon hopes to makes this an even bigger event next year. Contributing to Open Source for the first time can be a daunting prospect and the idea of bringing forward some friendly projects who can put together some smaller, bite-sized issues that new contributors can pick up is a great one.

It was really great to hear about what the .NET Foundation is doing to support the .NET ecosystem and to help the community open source projects to thrive and be sustainable for the long term.

A bit thanks to Jon for fighting through the jet lag to present these two great talks and for making the arrangements to come straight down to Brighton from the airport.

Prize Draws

With the end of the evening closing in, before heading off to the pub we drew the winners of the prizes from our fantastic sponsors for the event. The prizes we had to offer were:

JetBrains

One year individual subscription to any single JetBrains Toolbox product

Progress

  1. UI for Xamarin license code
  2. T-Shirts x 5

Manning

  1. ebook of choice

elmah.io

6 months Small Business license

Last time I draw names from a bowl. A bit low tech and also time consuming to print and cut up all of the names. Dan Clarke, fellow .NET user group leader has created a desktop app which randomises winners from the Meetup.com RSVP list. He has kindly provided the application code on GitHub. For this event I decided to give that a go. It worked quite well and simplified things nicely, although I was still conscious that at the end of the evening, it takes a little time to draw all of the prizes. One big advantage is that it stores the winning member ID so we don’t have to worry about duplicate names causing us to require some kind of tie-break. I am pondering whether for the next event I pre-draw the names using the app to save some time.

The rules as with the last event were:

a) names are added from the RSVP list (as at about 1 to 1.5 hours before the event)
b) if the name drawn is not in attendance, we redraw.

Next events

We have some great speakers lined up for the next couple of months, and I’m working with a few people of plans for the next couple of months after that.

.NET South East October 2017 – Rabeb Othmani
Rabeb joins us with her talk “Welcome to the age of conversational interfaces” – looking at how we can build interfaces using SMS, voice and bots.

.NET South East November 2017 – Michael Newton
Michael joins us with his talk “Making Distributed Systems in .NET Easier” – discussing distributed architecture with .NET.

Call for speakers

I’d love to get a range of varied content and speakers to present at our user group. We have a nice pipeline for the coming months but those months will fly by very quickly. If you’d be interested in speaking at a future event we’d love to have you. Please get in touch via the contact form on this blog or ping me on Twitter and we can discuss availability and topics.

I’m really keen to draw as many speakers from our local community too so please let me know if you might be interested in speaking. Perhaps you have presented a talk internally and could open it up to a wider audience. I highly recommend speaking as a way to develop professionally. I’m happy to offer advice for new speakers and help where I can.

Links

Some links from this months event:

.NET South East August 2017 Meetup With speakers Dylan Beattie and Steve Gordon

Steve Gordon Leave a comment

Last night we held the first ever .NET South East meetup event! I’ve been really looking forward to this meetup since first announcing the idea at the end of June. I talked about some of my motivations behind starting the group in an earlier blog post.

I’d spent a lot of time leading up to this event trying to think about all of the bits I needed to plan and have ready. I had great support from some of the other community leaders to help with ideas, advice and suggestions. I was also able to attend an event at Microsoft in London for community leaders, speaking with some of their team about how they can support user groups, so I’m looking forward to working with them too.

Over the days and weeks before the event I had been staggered by the number of RSVPs we were getting via meetup.com. One of my two big concerns when moving forward to launch the group had been whether there would be interest from the local community and people would show up. I had set a rather arbitrary 60 person limit for the group, never really expecting to hit that. However, with a day or two left before the event, we were full! In fact I was starting to worry that if everyone turned up, we would run out of space and seating.

The big day!

Thoughts of the meetup were always in the back of my mind during the day and as the start time approached I was equal parts excited and nervous. I start and finish early at work so by 4pm I was able to shoot out and grab an early dinner from Pompoko in Brighton. It was nice to have 20-30 minutes to relax out of the office and prepare myself for the evening ahead.

Returning to the office at 4:30pm it was time to begin setting up. We have 3 meeting rooms at Madgex which can all be opened up into one large space. It’s the perfect location for an event like this as we have a large TV screen for presenting on and an audio system with an array of microphones. I’m hugely thankful to two Madgex staff in particular at this stage who helped me to get this room ready and setup the equipment. Leah our amazing office administrator was on hand helping to set up the seating, whilst Ricky our IT tech was there to ensure the audio/visual side was all functioning as expected.

Our one and only technical hitch for the evening was actually with one of the folding doors which allow us to open up the last room as part of the space. The last folding section was jammed shut and we couldn’t open the door fully. However, it wasn’t a major issue and we were still able to get the seating setup. It was not one of the things I’d worried about going wrong! I’d been mostly concerned with the TV output and microphones working correctly.

Madgex venue for .NET South East

I was amazed at how quickly the time evaporated as we got the room and snacks prepared. Once the meeting rooms were ready I set about putting up some signs to guide people into the Madgex offices. By 6:15pm we had our first early bird arrivals. Some more of my colleagues at Madgex jumped in to add their support here, helping get people through the security doors and into the office. Madgex are on the 1st floor of a shared building and access is tightly controlled. To access the building you need to be buzzed in, then to use the lifts you will need an access fob.

It was actually the logistics of this which was the hardest part of the evening. Fortunately I had two volunteers on hand to help. Rachel, our development team lead kindly based herself in the foyer of the building to let people in. She would then put them in the lift and swipe her access fob so they could be delivered to the 1st floor. Ready and waiting in the entrance of the Madgex office, Chris, one of our senior developers was ready to greet the guests and get them signed in. With RSVP lists on hand Chris was able to tick off the attendees for the evening.

The other logistics challenge we have is access to the toilets, or more specifically, how people get back into the Madgex office. Once you leave for the toilets a security locked door stands in your way if you want to return. We had organised visitor access fobs for the evening and Chris was superb as passing those out and gathering them back from our guests. During our 10 minute break Chris manned the door to enable people to use the facilities.

Without Chris and Rachel helping on the night I’m really not sure how we could have gotten everyone in so successfully, so I know for next time that I need to line up at least two volunteers again. We also realised that once we start it’s near impossible to hear the intercom buzzer so I have made sure to update our details on meetup to stress that entry after 7pm can’t be guaranteed. Unless we are able to get someone stationed near the door (who was not worried about missing the talks) I’m not sure how we can improve this. We’ll try to think about possible solutions to that problem, but hopefully everyone arrives on time. By having the arrivals from 6:30pm and talks at 7pm, we hopefully give enough of a window to get people into the event.

In the end we had 49 attendees (including myself) and I think nearly filled every seat in the room. I was really amazed by the turnout as people started to fill up the area where we were serving drinks and snacks. Before long it was getting quite congested. We’ll think about the possibility of picking a different networking space for the next event. I’d honestly not dreamed that the first event would be so popular. A big thanks to everyone who made time to attend and show their support. It’s great to see that we have such a large community who are willing and able to attend. I really hope we can keep the attendance level up for the upcoming events.

Audience at .NET South East

Intro and news

As we hit 7pm it was time to get everyone seated and begin the event. I expected to be more nervous than I was as I prepared to give my introduction. However, I felt pretty good and after a minute or so I was into my stride. After covering the obligatory health and safety notices I went on to share some of the reasons behind starting the group and welcoming everyone to the event. I then took a chance to thank our sponsors, especially Madgex for the support they’ve given and for providing a venue for the evening. The meeting rooms are a great space and I hope everyone was reasonably comfortable in there.

I also covered a little news and events section which originally I was unsure about including. However, with the release of .NET Core 2.0 last week I felt that was worth spending a few minutes to talk about it. The big changes are the wider API surface now available in .NET Core 2.0 which align it to .NET Standard 2.0. This hopefully eases the barrier to entry for companies with existing code that they may want to migrate over to core.

I also highlighted the .NET Conf event which is running in September as well. It’s a free, streamed conference organised by Microsoft which will likely include a lot of .NET Core 2.0 and ASP.NET Core 2.0 content.

Talks

Dylan Beattie: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness : The Secret to Happy Code

With my introduction complete it was time for our first talk. Dylan Beattie was kind enough to join us from London (on his birthday) to give his fantastic talk entitled: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of APIness : The Secret to Happy Code. In this very entertaining talk Dylan presented examples of both good and bad interfaces and how these can affect the happiness and frustration of end users.

During the talk he highlighted the power of giving helpful error messages and prompts for the user/developer to solve the issue wherever possible. Blank wall error messages should be avoided where they offer no useful information to enable the user to proceed. The way those messages are phrased is also important.

Dylan spoke about a personal obsession of mine – including proper XML comments to supply tools like Visual Studio’s intellisence a way to provide developers with useful instruction about how to use your library / code. This is something I’m very keen on as I’ve used a few poorly commented libraries that provide no intellisense support to guide you through their API.

The discussion continued onto proper and relevant logging / monitoring and how logging levels and messages should be used wisely to provide insight into the health of systems. A good recommendation is leaving relevant debug logging in place that can be enabled in production if you need to diagnose hard to replicate errors.

It was a great talk and really well received by the audience.

Dylan Beattie speaking at .NET South East

Dylan ended with a short promotion for a .NET conference that he helps to organise in London called Progressive .NET. There’s a fantastic speaker line-up for the event so I recommend you check it out and convince your boss to send you along! We also have a 20% discount code you can use against the current list price: SE_PROGNET_20

My Talk: Docker for .NET Developers

After our 10 minute break I was pleased to see that nearly everyone had stayed for the second talk of the evening. This time I was in the spotlight and presenting my talk about how .NET developers can get started with Docker. In this talk I share our experience at Madgex as we got started with Docker for a new product. Along the way I explain the architecture we developed and how we used Docker to ease the workflow for our front end developers. Along the way I show some code demos about how we can get started using Docker, building images and running containers. We look at using docker-compose for co-ordinating multiple containers.

I conclude the talk with an explanation of how we’d developed a build and deployment process and how we run in production on AWS using Docker. This included a final demo showing the deployment process in action.

Steve Gordon speaking at .NET South East

Prize Draws

With the end of the evening closing in, before heading off to the pub we drew the winners of the prizes from our fantastic sponsors for the event. The prizes we had to offer were:

JetBrains

One year individual subscription to any single JetBrains Toolbox product

Progress

  1. DevCraft Complete license code
  2. T-Shirts x 5

Manning

  1. ebook – 1Docker in Action by Jeff Nickoloff
  2. ebook – Docker in Practice, 2nd edition by Ian Miell and Aidan Hobson Sayers

elmah.io

6 months Business license

I went for the low tech, names out of a bowl approach for the first event! The rules I’ve devised which I hope are fair are:

a) names are added from the RSVP list (as at 1 to 1.5 hours before the event)
b) if the name drawn is not in attendance, we redraw.

Congratulations to the winners. I hope everyone who won was happy with their prize. One issue we did encounter were that meetup.com doesn’t enforce full names for RSVP’s so we could run into issues with drawing a winner signed up with just their first name when more than one person in the room shares the name! I’m not sure what we can do there but we’ll try to manage it fairly or do some kind of tie break in those cases. I’ll also urge our attendees to add their full names when registering on Meetup.

Next events

One of the main concerns I had when starting the user group was finding speakers. So far those concerns have not been warranted and I’m pleased to have been able to line up some great speakers for the coming three months of events.

.NET South East September 2017 – Jon Galloway
We’re excited to announce that Jon Galloway from Microsoft will join us for the evening to share two exciting talks. What’s new in ASP.NET Core 2.0 and a talk about The .NET Foundation. This is filling up fast and we expect it to be quite popular. Please make sure you visit the link and RSVP to attend as we will have to limit numbers.

.NET South East October 2017 – Rabeb Othmani
Rabeb joins us with her talk “Welcome to the age of conversational interfaces” – looking at how we can build interfaces using SMS, voice and bots.

.NET South East November 2017 – Michael Newton
Michael joins us with his talk “Making Distributed Systems in .NET Easier” – discussing distributed architecture with .NET.

Call for speakers

I’d love to get a range of varied content and speakers to present at our user group. We have a nice pipeline for the coming months but those months will fly by very quickly. If you’d be interested in speaking at a future event we’d love to have you. Please get in touch via the contact form on this blog or ping me on Twitter and we can discuss availability and topics.

I’m really keen to draw as many speakers from our local community too so please let me know if you might be interested in speaking. Perhaps you have presented a talk internally and could open it up to a wider audience. I highly recommend speaking as a way to develop professionally. I’m happy to offer advice for new speakers and help where I can.

Links

A collection of links shared during the evening.

Dylan Beattie’s blog
Steve Gordon’s blog
.NET Conf – Sept. 19th – 21st
Progressive .NET Tutorials – Sept. 13th to 15th
Humanitarian Toolbox Summer Hackfest
.NET Core 2.0 / ASP.NET Core 2.0 Introduction – Scott Hunter
Ian Cooper – Creating a .NET Renaissance (NDC Oslo 2017)

Docker for .NET Developers slides
Docker for .NET Developers – Demo 1
Docker for .NET Developers – Demo 2
Docker for .NET Developers – Demo 3
August 2017 Meetup intro / summary slides

Announcing .NET South East A new Brighton based .NET User Group

Steve Gordon 4 Comments

It’s been an exciting few weeks for me recently. First I was accepted to talk at two conferences in September, then our latest product at work went live, then I got a promotion at work and now I’ve decided to start a new .NET user group in Brighton which is call .NET South East.

Brighton based .NET South East user group logo

The idea of starting a meetup has been at the back of my mind for a little while now and after much consideration I decided that I should just go ahead and get on with it. I’ve setup a new group on meetup.com called .NET South East. I expect it will mostly be attended by developers living and working in Brighton but I’m hoping that we can encourage people to join from anywhere around Sussex.

Announcing the First Meetup

I’m very excited to be able to announce that the first meetup will be held on August 22nd. At that event I’ll be talking about Docker for .NET Developers. In this talk I will take you on a tour of Docker, a modern application packaging and containerisation technology that .NET developers can now leverage. I will share with you the Docker journey that our team at Madgex are on, exploring our motivations for using Docker. You will learn the core terminology .NET developers need to know to begin working with Docker and explore demos that show how you can start using Docker with your own ASP.NET Core projects. Finally, I will demonstrate how we have built a deployment pipeline using Jenkins and explore the AWS EC2 Container Services (ECS) configuration we have created to enable rapid, continuous delivery of our microservices.

Elmah.io have kindly provided sponsorship for this event in the form of a 6 month business license for their software. We will be holding a raffle at the end of the event for one lucky attendee to win this fantastic prize.

Why a User Group?

User groups are a place where like-minded people can come together to enjoy a common interest, sharing and learning about that interest together. I’ve attended a few general developer user group sessions and watched many more online and I always leave having learned something or with a take-away I could follow up on later. Even if it’s just the seed of an idea or something I’d like to try, it has been well worth my time. Along with the content from the speakers, it’s also a good chance to mix in with other developers and make contacts, share thoughts and ideas. Perhaps you’ll meet someone who can help with a problem you’ve been fighting recently!

I started working in Brighton nearly two years ago and since then I’ve kept an eye out for groups and talks to attend. The only .NET specific group I’ve found locally is Brighton ALT.NET which meets once a month to have open discussion about any topics that the attendees vote to talk about. It’s a great format and there’s a nice variation of topics and opinions from the community there. I’ve attended on a couple of occasions and plan to get along to more of their monthly events.

Some may wonder, why start a group if one already exists and it’s a fair question. What I’m proposing to introduce takes a different format to that of ALT.NET. I’m looking to bring in speakers from around the area, as well as hopefully further afield, giving them the chance to share a topic in depth with the audience. In many cases I expect the talks to be conference length, 45-60 minutes long although I’m sure we can accommodate shorter talks as well.

Recently I met up with Mike who organises the ALT.NET evenings to run the idea past him. I was conscious that he already has a good community of regular attendees and I didn’t want to upset the balance by trying to introduce this second group. Mike was very encouraging of the idea and agreed that he felt there was room for both groups to exist and thrive together, helping to strengthen the local .NET community.

I recently watched a very inspiring talk from Ian Cooper at NDC Oslo entitled, The .NET Renaissance. In that talk Ian highlights the historical decline of C# and .NET. Ian ended that talk with a call to action to everyone in our community to help create a renaissance of .NET. Together, we can do it and bring the change. It’s an pivotal time for .NET developers with the new .NET Core framework and the approach from Microsoft to embrace open source and community. Later this year, version 2.0 of .NET core will be released and at that point porting over older .NET framework projects should be even easier. I’m very much enjoying working with the new framework and sharing my experience in this blog and now at soon at some meetups and conferences. I’m excited to play my small part in helping move the #dotnetrenaissance forward. Please join us!

What’s Next?

I’m still finding my feet as I establish this new group and start planning the events. I’m working on the logistics of the arrangements that need to be in place. My employer Madgex have very kindly agreed to allow me to use their meeting room space for the meetups. We have three meeting rooms that can be opened up into one large area, with A/V equipment and seating available. Perfect for our needs! Located close to the centre of Brighton, the Madgex office should be in easy reach of developers wanting to participate.

Madgex have also kindly provided me funding to setup the meetup.com group so that I could start to gauge interest in starting a new group. Already I’ve had over 40 signups from people interested in the idea and I hope that many of those will be able to attend the meetups going forward.

Finding speakers was my main worry, but already I’ve been approached by a few people who have talks they can offer to present. I expect there are other potential speakers out there with content to share, but perhaps no outlet for it. If you’d like to come along and speak please do get in touch.

I’m still trying to decide what the best schedule for the meetups. Ideally I’d like to run them every month and about two weeks after the local ALT.NET meetup. To begin with I’m planning on every two months as we build up the interest and I make arrangements with enough speakers who can present at the meetups. We’ll judge this on interest and the logistics or organising everything.

Call for Attendees

I’d love to get as many developers from our community involved in the meetups and attending regularly. I really believe that they will be a great chance to learn about topics that are necessary for .NET developers to thrive. Let’s get together and share our passion for what we do. I do urge you to save the date and RSVP on meetup.com. Please do spread the word with friends and colleagues who may want to attend.

Call for Speakers

I’d love to hear from you if you have a talk you want to present. It would be great to hear from the many local developers we have in Brighton, sharing what they do and teaching others about technologies they are using. If you’re further afield, but able to travel, we’d love to have you. I’d love to welcome first time speakers to join us as well. I’ve only just begun speaking myself and I’m finding it to be a great experience that is teaching me a lot along the way. I’ve never been a confident public speaker, but have found that by diving in, I’m able to deal with that fear and share my passion. Please do get in touch and I’ll help in any way I can.

Call for Sponsors

We already have two fantastic sponsors on-board, Madgex are providing their meeting space for free and assisting with some of the costs to get the event up and running. Elmah.io are providing a license as a prize for one attendee to win. If you’re a company in a position to offer prizes or sponsorship to our new group to help us get off the ground, please do get in touch.

Conclusion

I’m excited to get started to try to do my part to help build on the .NET community here in Brighton. I’m learning as I go and developing my own skills to organise the meetup and network with peers. I’d like to offer a huge thanks to those who have helped me so far. I’ve had great support from other event organisers (Dan Clarke, Joe Woodward, Dylan Beattie, Derek Comartin), community members via Twitter, Madgex and the staff there and elmah.io. Thanks to Mike from ALT.NET for his support and input and a special thanks to Ben Wood, a talented designer at Madgex who is kindly helping to develop a brand identity and digital assets for the new group.