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.