About Jimmy

Jimmy has been writing .NET since the first version was available and he switched from Delphi. He is now working as a Principal Software Engineer in Symantec.cloud where he is responsible for web services and emerging identity management applications. Although his job requires more design, team leading, mentoring and endless meetings, he is still eager to make his hands dirty whenever he can. His favourite tools recently are MVC 3 and WIF. To relax after a hard day at the office he loves to fly a virtual space ship in EvE Online.

The Talk

Windows PowerShell is a great tool for system administrators and normal users alike. One of its design principles was extensibility. It provides powerful scripting mechanism but is also very easy for developers to create new tools and utilities to be integrated with PowerShell. It provides easy to use SDK that eliminates many tasks that typical command line tool would require.

The session introduces into PowerShell development from the ground up. You will learn how to start and the basics of argument processing, output and pipeline processing. We will also look at error handling and diagnostics to end up deeper in custom types and type conversion. After the session you will be able to sit down and write a tool your system administrator will love you for.

The Meeting

The date is 15th February 2012. It’s not the second but the third Wednesday of the month! The meeting will be in the Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, start at 6.30pm and end at about 9pm. There will be refreshments and hot pizza available. Please arrive in time. Details here.

About Matt

Matt is a freelance mobile software developer specialising in Windows Phone. He’s been developing software for a living since the 90’s and doing mobile since before it was cool and has developed a number of showcase apps for household names. When not building apps he’s helping other people do so on StackOverflow or getting people together to learn more about developing software as he runs DevEvening and the Windows Phone User Group.

Read his development ramblings on his blog (http://blog.mrlacey.co.uk/) and follow him on twitter (@mrlacey).

The Talk

You’ve probably heard that you can use lots of your .net development experience to build Windows Phone applications. But that still leaves lots of questions: What if you want to go beyond the basics? How do you make a great app? One that people will want to download and maybe even pay for?  How does the mango update help you create a great app? And how can knowing about developing for Windows Phone help with developing for other platforms, such as Windows 8?

These and other question will be answered to help you create awesome apps.

The Meeting

The date is 11th January 2012. The meeting will be in the Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, start at 6.30pm and end at about 9pm. There will be refreshments and hot pizza available. Please arrive in time. Details here.

The GL.net is looking for speakers for 2012. If you can and want to give us a talk you are the person we need. The list of the most desired topics is here but any topic is welcome.

Meetings are usually held on the second Wednesday of each month. It can be changed but Wednesday is by far the most popular day for most of our members.

Please contact me if you are interested either by commenting to this post or by any other way you can imagine, such as twitter @_jimmys.

Jimmy

About Marc

Marc is part of the development team for Stack Exchange (and a self-confessed Stack Overflow junkie), and has been a C# MVP for the last 4 years. He has a long history of open source projects, and tries to focus on high-performance, low-impact libraries (hiding all the "ugly" from app developers). Before his transition to Stack Exchange, his history is corporate / line-of-business (mainly on the Microsoft / .NET stack).

The Talk

We all know the common tricks for improving perceived performance, but often far too little emphasis is given on making the servers do their work more efficiently - otherwise all you achieve by scaling-out is distributed slowness. Here we take a hands-on look at some pragmatic ways to measure and improve the performance of your server-side code. The examples focus on ASP.NET MVC, but the themes should apply to most .NET web development, and beyond.

The Meeting

The date is 14th December 2011. The meeting will be in the Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, start at 6.30pm and end at about 9pm. There will be refreshments and hot pizza available. Please arrive in time. Details here.

We had our first, after the break, meeting and I tell you, it was simply amazing. I haven’t expected to see so many familiar faces again. When I arrived to the venue and started setting up the room I expected a few people. But then you started showing up one after another and that was amazing. You made me proud of the group and showed me that there is need and value in in my work here. Thank you all for that!

Your voice

Almost all of you voted to keep meetings at Wednesdays so we will stay as we are. Someone mentioned that the first Wednesday of each month is not convenient so I will try to avoid it if possible. My aim will be to keep meetings on the second Wednesday of each month.

There was a plenty of subjects you asked for. In no particular order

• ASP.NET MVC
• LINQ
• MVVM
• PRISM
• Entity Framework
• Async
• Both SQL Server and NoSQL databases
• Functional programming, F#
• Business, non-technical topics
• Java Script
• Metro applications
• Interface design
• Windows Phone
• XNA
• Windows 8
• .NET 4.5
• Silverlight
• HTML 5
• Reactive Extensions
• Azure
• Amazon web services
• WCF, REST
• Continuous integration
• Dependency Injection

You also asked for a handful of specific speakers

• Mark Rendle
• Paul Stack
• Jon Skeet
• Gary Short
• Steve Sanderson

That gives me nice base to work on.  Gary is on his way here and you will see him next month. I’m now starting building schedule for 2012 so watch out this space for further announcements.

Thank you again and see you soon. There will be more pizza next time.

About Gary

In case you were hiding on Mars for the last decade, Gary Short works for Developer Express as the Technical Evangelist on the frameworks team. He has a deep interest in technical architecture, especially in the areas of technical debt and refactoring. Gary is a C# MVP and gives presentations at user groups and conferences throughout the UK, Europe and the US.

The Talk

Node.js is an event-driven I/O server-side JavaScript (built on V8 JavaScript engine) environment for Unix-like platforms. It is intended for writing scalable network programs such as web servers. It was created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, and its growth is sponsored by Joyent, which employs Dahl. Node.js is similar in purpose to Twisted for Python, Perl Object Environment for Perl, libevent for C and EventMachine for Ruby. Unlike most JavaScript, it is not executed in a web browser, but is instead a form of server-side JavaScript. Node.js includes a REPL environment for interactive testing.
In this presentation we’ll cover a quick introduction to Node.js before going on to de-construct a network appliance application written in Node.js. By the end of the session you will have a better appreciation for this language which is sure to become more important in the coming years.

The Meeting

The date is 16th November 2011. The meeting will be in the Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, start at 6.30pm and end at about 9pm. There will be refreshments and hot pizza available. Please arrive in time. Details here.

About Richard

Richard Wilde AKA Rippo is the owner ofwildesoft.net, a software developer and a coordinator for NxtGenUG a developers group in Hereford.  He has been developing .Net applications since 2003. You can catch him on twitter @rippo 

The Talk

NHibernate is an Object-relational mapping (ORM) solution for the Microsoft .NET platform: it provides a framework for mapping an object-oriented domain model to a traditional relational database. My NHibernate presentation will be broken up into 4 parts:-
                                                         
PART 1: Models and mappings - Shows how to model components, inheritance and collections using hbm XMLmappings
 
PART 2 : Mapping by code - Shows how to model the same model in part 1 using the new sexy mapping by code syntax new to NHibernate 3.2. A simple console application showed how to retrieve some data.
 
PART 3: Sessions and transactions - Shows how NHibernate can be configured into a MVC 3 application, how a unit of work can implemented and how we can use NHProf.
 
PART 4: Queries - Shows how we break up a MVC 3 application into layers comprising of a Domain.Model, a service layer, a repository layer and the MVC 3 layer. The application uses Unity to achieve a loosely coupled design. NHProf is used extensively to show how we can optimise the queries. This part also covers eager loading versus lazy loading and how you should be aware of unwanted side effects.

Meeting

The date is 5th October 2011. The meeting will be in the Maxima Forum in Cheltenham and will start at 6.30pm and end at about 9pm. There will be refreshments and hot pizza. Please arrive in time. Details here.

I'm delighted to announce that GL.net is back. It's been a very long time but I finally managed to pull all pieces together and restart it again. I hope all our members will be back and we will have great time again. Over last year we lost a lot of interesting topics so we will have a plenty to catch up. I'm really excited.

New Location

I've managed to find us a new location to try out. The next three meetings will be in Maxima Forum in Cheltenham, Lansdown Road, GL50 2JA. The building, for those who don't know Cheltenham, looks like on the picture below

And  here is the map:

Meetings

Meeting dates till end of the year are

• 5th October
• 16nd November
• 14th December

Put those in your calendar. Topics and speakers will be announced in the next couple of days.

The meeting format will be as usual. Dorr will be open from 6pm and talk will start at 6.30pm. Somewhere about 7.30pm we will have pizza so don't worry, you will not leave us hungry. Refreshments in form of tea and coffee will be provided to keep you awake. The meeting will end about 9pm, and we can retreat to the nearby bar afterwards to do more geeky stuff.

New Site

As you can see, we have a brand new website. It's based on excellent BlogEngine.NET that has been modified to use LiveID. Once you log in, using LiveID, you will be asked to fill short registration form and that's it. Registration is so simple and quick that you should not feel any discomfort.

The site will be slowly changing over next few months until I will be happy with it.

Sponsors

I wouldn't be able to run the group without amazing sponsorship from organisations such as Symantec.cloud, Telerik and DevExpress. It saddens me however that only one local business see value in the group. If you are member, please ask around in your company if they could sponsor us. The more help the better group. With more sponsors we could do really great stuff that would not only benefit all members but also your organisation. It's all in your hands.