This month we happen to line up the day before the Microsoft Web Platform roadshow hits town (more info here - mswebday.net). As such we have our own webby topic ready for you and are delighted to have John Staveley coming up from Leeds who will be taking over both sessions with his master class on:
.NET MVC Website Security - John Staveley
The
number and frequency of attacks on websites in the news is increasing
steadily and effects can be devastating. However for each company that
you hear about there are many more who cover up or are unaware of
breaches on their sites. Thus what you hear about in the news represents
just the tip of the iceburg. This primer session on security focusses
on the major risks and the practical steps you can take now in your
software development to protect an ASP.Net Mvc website from the major
threats in the web today and will include code you can take away and
implement in your own sites. Each type of attack will be introduced in a
technology agnostic way, then highlighted with some case studies using
major breaches as examples, then finally countermeasures which you can
use will be proposed for each risk. The attacks I will be looking at
are:
- SQL Injection
- Session hijacking
- Password hacking
- Weak account management
- XSS
- Insecure direct object references
- Misconfiguration
- Sensitive data exposure
- Missing Function Level Access Control
- CSRF
- Unvalidated redirects and forwards
- Form overposting
- DDOS
- Social Engineering
A sample code project is included as part of the talk which helps mitigate against all of these threats and more.
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For our second meeting of 2016, NEBytes welcomes back Peter Bull, and new speaker Jon Bulmer.
In the Groove - Developing with Groove Music - Peter Bull
Groove
Music is the music platform from Microsoft available on desktop,
tablet, phone, console and web but also features a powerful and free to
use API for developers.
Windows 10 and .NET Developer, Peter
Bull, will go through how to use the Groove Music API and .NET SDK and
share his experiences of developing using Groove Music in his own
application for Windows 10, TuneCardr.
Fogbugz integration with Kiln - Jon Bulmer
I
am active participant of NEBytes and DDD North. I am a senior developer
at a national company based in Teesside, I work with Code Club helping
with the development of young talent coming out of our schools. This
will be my first demonstration of a product aimed at helping the
software developer. I have worked with Fogbugz and Kiln for a few years
now and find it helpful with the management of projects.In the team
environment and working on my personal projects.
I will be
demonstrating how I set up milestones for an objective in a project,
that can be sliced up into tasks divided up in a team. Set time scales
and review the outcomes of development that can bring the teams work
together, ready for a deadline agreed in the milestone. This can and
does work with multiple developers working with the same file or files
independently.
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See you all there!
To start 2016, NEBytes welcomes back Microsoft MVP John Timney to
hear about the clever stuff he's been doing with Azure Machine Learning:
Improving SharePoint Project Cost Estimation with Azure Machine Learning
Costing
SharePoint projects, or any projects for that matter can be really
difficult, but what if you could simplify that dramatically by looking
at data science and Azure.
Bring on machine learning and you
suddenly have an opportunity to amalgamate your legacy cost information
to better predict future outlay for pretty much anything. What makes it
even better is that it’s not really very hard to start using Azure
Machine Learning and then to move on to looking at alternative
strategies for other types of predictive outcomes, and you don’t have to
be an experienced data scientist to dip your toe in the water and get
real fiscal potential from drag and drop solutions in Azure.
"Machine
Learning" made its first appearance on the Gartner Hype cycle chart
this year, but has already past the peak of inflated expectations and
now takes the place of Big Data as a critical skill for business to
acquire.
Join SharePoint MVP John Timney as he takes you through
this exciting and must learn thing that is AML, provides some light
touch insight into its operational domain and demonstrates how to start
taking early advantage of it.
In addition, NEBytes own
Jonathan Noble will be talking about adopting some DevOps practices with
Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Visual Studio Online):
Making your Operations workload more visible with Visual Studio Team Services
Developers
may have been using similar tools for a while, but in the DevOps era
it's time for the sys admins to catch up. Visual Studio Team Services
offers a number of features that operations folk can take advantage of,
whether you're closely collaborating with devs or not.
Microsoft
MVP for Cloud and Datacenter Management, Jonathan Noble, will share his
experience with VSTS's Kanban board and work item queries for better
visualising Work In Progress, and tying that in to hosted version
control for PowerShell scripts, DSC configurations, etc.
We are very pleased this month to welcome back the speaking powerhouse of Mike Taulty... Mike will be joining us to talk about the changes in the updated Universal App Platform for Windows 10... Mike will be taking over the whole session and we expect high demand so make sure you register early!
Windows 10 and the Universal Windows App Platform
Windows 10 is a big release for Microsoft. Commodious. Huge. Massive. Colossal. Humongous. ;-)
It’s
the end of a journey to unify Windows. It’s the beginning of a journey
for developers who want to take advantage of a universal app platform
available across all Windows devices.
In this session, we’ll dig
into what’s changed in Windows 10 for the Windows app developer. We’ll
talk about the Universal App Platform that makes it possible to build
code that runs on all Windows devices and about the Extension platforms
for code that targets specific device families.
We’ll stay in Visual Studio as much as is possible and we’ll lean towards C# and XAML.
Mike's Bio:
Mike
Taulty works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK
where he has spent the past few years helping developers understand and
get the best from the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, Mike spent 3
years with Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant on developer
technologies.
Before joining Microsoft, Mike spent the previous 9
years working as a software developer for a number of enterprises,
consultancies and software vendors working with a variety of operating
system, client, communication and server technologies. You can find more
of a complete career history over on LinkedIn.
Mike holds a BSc Hons (1st Class) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.
Date: Wednesday 21st October 2015
Time: 18:30-20.30
Make your SQL Queries Dapper with Mark Thompson
Mark says: "I’ll talk about the different object relational mappers out there – Why
the concept of ORM’s is a good idea but the real world performance
problems that seem all to common as applications scale in production.
We’ll then do a comparison of the entity framework and NHibernate to
some of the other options out there, including Dapper.
Dapper is a Micro ORM created by Stack Exchange (Stack Overflow) to
address exactly these problems.
I’ll then show how easy it is to get started with Dapper (How can the
creators of Stack Overflow be wrong?)
By the end of the talk you should have an understanding of Dapper, how
to use it and a common repository style pattern I’ve seen adopted when
using dapper.
We will be using C#, Mysql and possibly Sqlite as well as the Entity
Framework, NHibernate, Dapper and Peta Poco."
Mark is a Software Development Manager who has worked on software
projects from Military Communications to printing best before dates on
ready meals. He favours the Microsoft Technology Stack, C#, MVC and Team
Foundation Server, and is a Certified Scrum Master and Professional.
When he isn't ranting about code or Scrum he is trying to convince his
two young daughters software development is cool.
Using .Net + Unity3D to Make Cross-Platform Games with Steve Higgs
“When
I grow up I want to make line of business applications” - said no one
ever. Lets unleash our inner children and use .net and unity to easily
create games.
Topics covered:
What’s unity?
C# and unity
Using the asset store to work around the fact that I can’t draw
Physics
Steve
does node, c# and other things for Opentable. In previous lives he has
developed content management systems, factory control software and
gambling apps. Can be a bit sweary.
Date: Wednesday 16th September 2015
Time: 18:30-20:30
Attendence is free. Drinks will be provided. All we ask is a small donation towards the pizza order if you want some pizza. :-)

The magic hour has been and gone… Microsoft pushed the big green "go"
button in the cloud and have unleashed the Ninja-cat riding a
Bacon-Narwhale on a Unicorn surfing on the back of a T-rex software (incase you were wondering) known to the rest of the world as Windows 10!
Come along to the second NEBytes in our new home at Campus North where Jon Noble and Ben Lee
will cover their thoughts and experiences to-date with Windows 10. Also
they will talk and attempt to demo more of the upcoming Windows 10
mobile release – hopefully with more success than last time!
We’d
love to hear your tales and experiences so come along ready to
contribute. If you have any particularly interesting or exciting tales
you want to share drop us a line – events@nebytes.net and we can give
you a proper slot in the agenda.
As it is summer holiday
season we will only be running the one slot this month which leaves more
beer & pizza time after the event :)
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Ben & Jon.
Date: Wednesday 19th August 2015
Time: 18:30-20:30

Join North East Bytes for the first event in our brand new home! We're very happy to be running our events at Campus North in the heart of Newcastle from this month. The format of our events won't be changing (but there will be added beer!).
We're welcoming a brand new speaker for our brand new venue. This sounds like a great session from Mark Thompson:
Session 1: Communications enable your software quickly and easily with Twillio (Mark Thompson)
For the uninitiated Twillio is an on-line service that makes it easy add support for SMS and phone calls to your web/ mobile apps.
Using a few lines of code you can have your application up and running, sending/recieving SMS messages or even making telephone calls for you.
Yes really! No hardware needed, no SIM cards and certainly no need to run any new cables to your premises!
During this talk I'll demonstrate how easy it is to get up and running with Twillio:
- Get a UK landline number with the area code of your choice for $1 a month
- Enable SMS based two factor authentication for your apps - Because we all know how secure email is...!
- Respond to an SMS message
- Respond to a telephone call
- Build your own PBX (i.e. Telephone menu and multi user voicemail) in under half an hour.
We'll be writing code, mainly C#, with a dash of PHP in places and probably some good old ASP MVC too.
Everything I demonstrate will be easily ported to the language of your choice.
Mark is a Software Development Team Lead who has worked on software projects from Military Communications to printing best before dates on ready meals. He favours the Microsoft Technology Stack, C#, MVC and Team Foundation Server, and is a Certified Scrum Master and Professional.
When he isn't ranting about code or Scrum he is trying to convince his two young daughters software development is cool.
Session 2: Azure Service Bus (Michael Stephenson)
In this session we will look at an introduction to the Azure Service Bus and its capabilities to deliver low cost massive scale messaging. We will also look at some demo's of how to use the service bus and some real world use cases.
Michael Stephenson is a UK based integration and cloud specialise who has worked with many consultancies and customers building hybrid integration solutions using Microsoft technologies such as BizTalk & Azure. Michael is also a Pluralsight trainer and blogger on integration and architecture related topics. Michael has been a Microsoft MVP for 6 years.
Date: Wednesday 15th July 2015
Time: 18:30-21:00
We look forward to seeing you at Campus North on the 15th!
