NEBytes

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.

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.

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!

Join North East Bytes for our fourth event of 2015.  In this event we'll be running a retrospective session covering all the news from BUILD 2015 and the inaugural Microsoft Ignite Event, so if you can't make it out to San Francisco or Chicago why not come along and catch up on all the news with us.

Date: Wednesday 20th May 2015

Time: 18:30-21:00

If you're following the Build and Ignite conferences and see something you think might be of interest to the wider group, please feel free to either point it out to us so we can include it or why not even stand up and discuss it with members in our session - they don't bite! :), either way let us know via Twitter/Facebook/Website of anything that is of interest.

We look forward to seeing you on the 20th!

Event Location The event will be hosted in Room 1.02 on the first floor of Claremont Tower at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf

Happy post-Easter everyone...

Better late than never we're pleased to be making live our April event for 2015...

Date: Wednesday 15th April 2015

Time: 18:30-21:00

Session 1: Microsoft Preview

It's that time in Microsoft's development cycle where lots of new things are just round the corner and prehaps unprecedented in Microsoft's history they are sharing more and more information than ever before. As a Joe Public you are able to sign up and get preview access to:

• Windows 10
• Windows 10 preview for phones
• Office 2016
• Skype for Business

In this first session, Jon Noble, Ben Lee and Andrew Westgarth will cover the key points from the above upcoming product releases. They break their devices so you don't have to! :)

Session 2: Universal app per day to help prepare way for Windows 10

Peter Bull is a local developer living in Gateshead and has worked on a variety of development projects from an online second-hand book store to his own Windows Phone apps, one of which got over a quarter of a million downloads. This month he’s releasing a Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 Universal Application Tutorial each day, in this presentation he’ll cover how writing universal apps now (for Windows 8.1 / Phone 8.1) will bring you a step closer to being ready for Windows 10. Now that the promise of truly universal apps is about to be delivered Peter learned a lot from the process with Windows 8 and will share his knowledge with the group.