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The Wellington .NET User Group is all about developers, tools, tips and tricks. We've been meeting regularly for a while now, and each meeting you can come along and learn something new, or hear some ideas on how to improve what you're already doing.
We usually meet on Wednesdays, at the moment we meet twice a month on the first and third Wednesday of the month.
We usually hold the sessions at Xero from 6pm to 7pm with pizza and drinks following. Please check the event details to confirm the date and location.
We run an announcement mailing list to let you know of upcoming events -- please email Kirk to subscribe. |
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 | |  | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 11/08/2010 6:00 p.m. | 11/08/2010 7:00 p.m. | | | | | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 25/08/2010 6:00 p.m. | 25/08/2010 7:00 p.m. | |
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| Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 28/07/2010 6:00 p.m. | Bohdan Szymanik, CTO at Kiwibank, is keen to show how he’s been using F# for analysis tasks within the bank. He’ll provide an intro to the language then show its use for performing aggregations over large datasets, taking advantage of cpu and io parallelism, and data presentation through charting and image generation. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 14/07/2010 6:00 p.m. | Does the thought of SSL, HTTPS and S/MIME make you squeamish? Does PKI
make you want to scream? Does encrypting data at rest make you want to
bury yourself alive?
Cryptography is an important part of most web applications these days,
and developers and admins need to understand how, why and when to
employ the best and appropriate techniques to secure their servers,
applications, data and the livelihoods of their users.
Join Graeme Neilson (Aura Software Security) and Kirk Jackson (Xero)
for a series of scary stories in "Tales from the Crypt0".
Graeme Neilson is lead security researcher at Aura Software Security,
a security consultancy based in Wellington with clients across the
globe.
Kirk Jackson is a developer at Xero, makers of the world's easiest
accounting system. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 7/07/2010 6:00 p.m. | Think about the project(s) you’ve worked on in the last six months. What was involved in going from source code in development to working code in production? How many manual steps were involved? Do you have a copy of the mythical 47 step checklist for deployment into the test lab? We developers spend much of our time streamlining and automating other peoples workflow, yet often we’re like the Cobblers children as we do things the hard way: manually. Start working smarter, not harder, and start automating your builds. NAnt is one good tool for this automation – come and see how NAnt works and discover how you might be able to use it yourself. If you’ve been considering use of psake, rake, make, nmake, msbuild (or any of their cousins) but aren’t quite sure what they’d do for you, come along to see some of what can be achieved with a little investment of time.
Bevan Arps is a professional software developer and self confessed geek. With a career that spans analysis to testing, hardware installation to user training, and tech support to technical writing, he is currently a C#/.NET developer working for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Bevan’s blog can be read online at www.nichesoftware.co.nz. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 16/06/2010 6:00 p.m. |
Greg will demonstrate an architecture for WPF and Silverlight apps using POCO objects generated from Entity Framework 4 and MEF to glue the layers together.
WPF = Windows Presentation Foundation; POCO = Plain old C# objects; MEF = Managed Extensibility Framework | | Microsoft Office, Level 12, Level 12, 157 Lambton Quay, Wellington | 2/06/2010 8:00 a.m. |
Chris Auld and Ryan CrawCour have spent the last couple of months building the new set of Windows Azure training material for Microsoft.
Be among the first in the world to experience this training at the New Zealand Windows Azure Bootcamps.
These intensive 1 day training camps provide a soup to nuts run through of the Windows Azure Platform.
This is a deep dive session from globally recognized experts in the Windows Azure Platform and includes workshop content that has been delivered at both Microsoft PDC and Microsoft MIX.
This is a not to be missed community lead event.
* Need to convince your manager of the value of the cloud? Get them along to the "The Business of Cloud Computing" one hour Twilight event directly after the Bootcamp. This is the registration link just for this session: http://intergen.co.nz/Our-Events/Think-Seminars/the-business-of-cloud-computing/the-business-of-cloud-computing/
8am - 9am - Windows Azure Introduction
9am - 10am - Windows Azure Computing
10am - 10:30 - Morning Tea
10:30 - 11:30 - Windows Azure Storage
11:30 - 12:30 - Windows Azure Pricing and Business Model
12:30 - 13:30 - Lunch
13:30 - 14:30 - Non relational data modelling, Data partioning and scale out architecture
14:30 - 15:00 - Afternoon Tea
15:00 - 16:00 - Asyncronous Processing
16:30 – 17:30 - The Business of Cloud Computing
http://intergen.co.nz/Our-Events/Think-Seminars/the-business-of-cloud-computing/the-business-of-cloud-computing/
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 26/05/2010 6:00 p.m. | With Visual Studio 2010 come C# 4.0 and the .NET 4.0 framework, the first update to the C# language for more than two years and the first major revision of .NET since 2005. Learn what's new in C# 4 and how the new features make it easier to work with generic types and LINQ collections, with other .NET languages including Visual Basic, and with Microsoft Office and COM objects.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 12/05/2010 6:00 p.m. |
The Windows Azure platform offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. In this talk Slava will talk about running legacy or unmanaged code on the Windows Azure platform, and share some real-world experiences working with this environment.
Slava started his professional IT career in 1999. Since then he has had a wide range of projects and technologies.
Projects: SCADA system, Heathcare, WF, CMS, Document Management, Telecom
Technologies: C/C++, scripting languages (TCL/TK, Python, JavaScript, VBScript), .NET (from version 1.0 beta to the most recent one), ASP.NET, WCF. And even Java projects. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 28/04/2010 6:00 p.m. |
It’s not just about building web services; Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is all about enabling you to build connected, service oriented systems. Originally included as part of .NET 3.0, WCF has been with us since 2006 but it still appears a bit dark and mysterious to many of us.
Come join Jeremy for an introduction to how to use Windows Communication Foundation to build connected systems, explore the flexibility in hosting services that you build and find out about why this is such a flexible and rich framework to work with.
Admission is free, and pizza and drinks will be provided. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 7/04/2010 6:00 p.m. |
A while back I was asked to build a kiosk application for a client. It should run 24/7 unattended, integrate both an EFTPOS terminal and a ticket printer and look good. On top of those requirements, it needed to be built in 2 weeks and preferably using Silverlight 3 due to code re-use. I’d like to show how to make this a reality and also show people that one sometimes has to be a bit pragmatic when approaching problems.
Bio: Chris Klug is a senior developer at Intergen. He has been working as a developer for almost 10 years. During this time, he has worked with a wide variety of companies in a lot of different areas, such as on-line sports betting, professional sail racing and charity organisations. Before moving from Sweden to New Zealand a year ago, he spent two years working as a technical trainer on the Microsoft platform. But if asked, he would say that his passion is kitesurfing and not computers.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 24/03/2010 6:00 p.m. |
With MIX10 around the corner, it’s no better time for Microsoft to get on the road and showcase some of the highlights from this year’s conference held in Las Vegas. Join us at your local Community User Group where we will focus on some of the key highlights including; the future of Mobile™, Silverlight™, Internet Explorer®, Expression®. Ryan Tarak, from Microsoft New Zealand will be travelling all over NZ spreading the good word and also be getting everyone ready for the launch of Visual Studio 2010 by giving the first 30 members at each event a retro Microsoft t-shirt. We will also be providing content from MIX on DVD’s and also the usual pizza, so make sure you block out the date below
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 17/03/2010 6:00 p.m. |
It doesn't seem to matter whether we're in an economic boom or a slump, there's always pressure on us to get more done in less time. For us developers, this usually translates into feature pressure - the challenge to get the next feature across the line on time and under budget. Simply writing code faster isn't going to get us very far towards this goal, particularly since most of us (myself included) tend to introduce more defects if we rush too much. I believe the answer isn't to work harder, but to work smarter - to write code that naturally works. In this presentation, I'm going to explore this idea of "Smart Code". You'll take away a toolbox of tips and tricks that I've found to be useful - but more importantly, you'll take away some new ideas on how you can build a toolbox of your own. Bevan Arps is a professional software developer and self confessed geek. With a career that spans analysis to testing, hardware installation to user training, and tech support to technical writing, he is currently a C#/.NET developer working for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Bevan’s blog can be read online at www.nichesoftware.co.nz. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 3/03/2010 6:00 p.m. |
Regular Expressions are a lesser-known feature of the .NET Framework that often strikes fear into the hearts of many, yet they can be quite powerful for validation, data extraction and string replacement. In this session Daniel will walk through the basics of regular expressions and progress to the more advanced (and powerful) features, with practical tips along the way.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 3/02/2010 6:00 p.m. |
The presentation addresses how to accelerate application development through the use of Managed and Unmanaged Code Interworking and the reuse of existing software components, without or with minor modifications, to provide SoA(Service oriented Architecture).
The following topics will be addressed:
- C++ COM / Dll’s used in C# world
- C++ code interfacing to Webservices for SOA
- How to make COM component in C#
Sunil Hargunani has Masters level qualification and 8 years of experience in software development. He is currently employed by Electrodata Recorders Pty Ltd, based in Sydney Australia, who specialises in the development and manufacture of Voice Recording Solutions. His major projects include, Machine Translation for the Parliament of India, Point of Sale System for the Convenience Stores industry, Smart Ticketing Systems for San Francisco Transport Authority and Call Recording Solutions for Emergency Services.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 20/01/2010 6:00 p.m. |
Language Integrated Query is one of the big features of C# and Visual Basic, but it remains unfamiliar to a lot of developers. Come and see what features LINQ provides, how LINQ can simplify working with collections and with XML, and how you can use LINQ to easily work with databases such as SQL Server. Learn how LINQ unifies the way you work with all these different kinds of data... and how you can use the same techniques with other kinds of data as well!
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 1/12/2009 6:00 p.m. | Microsoft recently held their Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. Come along and hear a recap of the announcements around Windows Azure (including AppFabric, Dallas, Pinpoint and Project "Sydney”), Silverlight 4, and SharePoint 2010. Mike Zeff is a Development Advisor with Microsoft New Zealand and attended this year’s PDC. He will share some thoughts around the announcements and answer your questions around Microsoft’s developer roadmap for the next 12 months.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 4/11/2009 6:00 p.m. |
We’ve all heard the hype – that unit testing is a good way, “the one true way” to improve the reliability and flexibility of our systems, to drive out good design, reduce coupling, increase cohesion, write less code, write better code, write faster code, decrease dependencies, write code faster, reduce our carbon footprint, plant native trees, save the whales, reduce orangutan unemployment, counter global warming and colonize the stars.
Some of this hype is thoroughly justifiable. Some ... less so.
Come along to “Unit Testing 101” to see how to make Unit Testing work, not just from a mechanical perspective (how do we write a unit test) but from a philosophical one (how do we write a GOOD unit test).
Bevan Arps is a professional software developer and self confessed geek. With a career that spans analysis to testing, hardware installation to user training, and tech support to technical writing, he is currently a C#/.NET developer working for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Bevan’s blog can be read online at www.nichesoftware.co.nz | | Provoke, Level 22, State Insurance Tower, 1 Willis St. | 21/10/2009 6:00 p.m. | BDD or behaviour driven development: you may have heard of it. But what does it mean? Learn the foundations of caring about behaviour. Learn how the process helps guide developers to the software that helps rather than hinders. Learn about "given, when, zen" and how bdd came about. Get an overview of some of the tooling that can help you become a bd-developer.
| | Provoke, Level 22, State Insurance Tower, 1 Willis St. | 7/10/2009 6:00 p.m. | Apple does not allow third-party runtimes on the iPhone OS, thereby excluding Flash, Java, .NET and Silverlight.
Learn how .NET developers can nevertheless code for the iPhone OS using C# and a subset of the BCL, using Novell’s MonoTouch and the magic of static compilation.
The meeting will be followed by pizza and drinks.
Note the different location for this meeting. Provoke are very kindly hosting us this month.
Please RSVP to kirkj@paradise.net.nz | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay (Above Workshop), Wellington | 23/09/2009 6:00 p.m. | Domain Driven Design (DDD) is a topic that's been gaining a lot of popularity in both the Java and .NET camps recently. Entities, value types, repositories, bounded contexts and anti-corruption layers -- find out what all the buzz is about, and how establishing a domain model can help you combat complexity in your code. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay (Above Workshop), Wellington | 19/08/2009 6:00 p.m. |
Windows Mobile 6.5 features a number of much-needed UI improvements, and adds support for widgets that run on the device but are built with HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
I'll be talking about what widgets are, how you create them and how they are deployed to emulators and devices.
Pizza and drinks will be provided free of charge at the end of the session. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay (Above Workshop), Wellington | 5/08/2009 6:00 p.m. |
For our systems to work as intended, for them to deliver value to our end users, they must be working as designed. Clearly, proper care and feeding is vital to our systems operation - yet how much time and effort do we expend on ensuring this happens? The Systems Administrators who look after our production systems are an important group of users who are often poorly served. How can we better meet their needs? Come along and get some ideas.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 15/07/2009 6:00 p.m. |
Coding for Quality can sometimes seem to be an amorphous and ambiguous exercise. In this presentation, James will dispel the myth that writing Quality Code consistently and measurably is too hard. Learn techniques for defining a Quality design before coding.
James Hippolite started programming on an Apple IIe, at the age of 14. After graduating with a bachelor degree in Information Systems from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, he started working with small systems relational databases, like dBase, Paradox, FoxPro and Microsoft Access.
In 1991 he founded Mana Information Systems, a company for SME who couldn't afford their own IT departments. As the lead developer, he developed small to medium WinForms applications using SQL Server, Visual Basic and latterly ASP. In 2003 James developed in C# his first .NET web application, an internal metrics reporting tool for his new employer, Telecom New Zealand, utilising SQL Server stored procedures and .NET classes.
He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer. He has contributed lectures to the INETA and PASS communities.
James lives in Wellington and is currently employed full time in a large corporate and loving the regular hours that non-consultants enjoy. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 17/06/2009 6:00 p.m. | The aim of this talk/presentation is to follow on from John-Daniel
Trask's talk last year on MVC.
A brief overview of MVC and how the framework came to be, and touching on the different parts of the framework followed by:
What MVC means to developers, why it's especially applicable in the web 2.0 world.
Routing in more depth, how to write your own routes, and what common patterns appear (REST routes and resources)
Models or some small pointers as to how chose an ORM for use with MVC Views and a brief dip into different view engines.
Tips and patterns for controllers.
By the end of the talk, hopefully attendies will have enough
information to know where to look when getting more active with the MVC framework and will have a good idea of what to avoid when writing MVC applications.
| | Whitireia Community Polytechnic, Porirua | 13/06/2009 12:00 a.m. | | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 3/06/2009 6:00 p.m. | Scott has waited long enough for someone to tell him all about dependency injection and IoCs, so it's up to him now. Scott will be presenting an introduction to the NInject dependency injection framework. He's keen on hearing any experiences people have had with dependency injection from the user group; the good and the bad, NInject and other frameworks. If you have anything we can learn from you'll be encouraged to volunteer this information.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 27/05/2009 6:00 p.m. |
AJAX for SharePoint can seem quite a daunting task, especially when stumbling across endless blog posts which are completely out of date and are giving wrong or misleading advice. With SP1 for SharePoint Microsoft fixed a few internal glitches in regards to using AJAX and with .NET 3.5 and VS 2008, creating AJAX Controls has never been easier. In this session Alex Dean, SharePoint Consultant and MCT will show you step by step how to configure SharePoint for AJAX, create a simple SharePoint WebPart using the Visual Studio Extensions, add the ability to customise the WebPart using the browser and finally populate an Accordion AJAX Control with the information gathered from a list on your SharePoint Site. Great example for creating dynamic FAQ pages in SharePoint
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 20/05/2009 6:00 p.m. |
What is it that, as developers, we do? Fundamentally, our value comes from code that works. That code needs to work today, and tomorrow, and next month, next year. How do we ensure that the damn fool who comes along in a years time to fix a bug or make a change isn’t going to break things? Especially since that damn fool is probably us.
| | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 6/05/2009 6:00 p.m. | At some point in your application development, you'll need to start caching data or the output of your program.
Scalability, performance, bytes transferred, speed, reliability and robustness can all be improved through judicious use of caching.
The first half of the talk will cover the types of caching and motivations for using them -- through all layers of your app: SQL, C#, ASP.NET and through to the browser cache.
The second half of the talk will briefly cover memcached, which is used by all the cool kids (YouTube, Facebook, Trade Me), and then introduce the Microsoft project code named Velocity (currently CTP), which brings all that coolness and more to the .NET platform.
Kirk Jackson is a Senior Developer at Xero, the creators of "The world's easiest accounting system". He is also a Microsoft MVP and involved in the local .NET community. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 29/04/2009 6:00 p.m. | Aura performs security reviews and penetration tests against many companies here in NZ, over the ditch in Aussie and as far away as the UK. Companies pen-tested include the NZ Police, MFAT, ACC, Parliament, SCC, several banks and insurance companies, the TAB and Xero (to name a few). In all our testing we find one of the best forms of defence is teaching your own IT staff and devs "how to hack" - come along and find out why...
However - use caution - Andy will also tell of what can happen "when the good guys go bad" with a real-life case study from here in NZ of a company under attack by their own disgruntled dev team!
Andy Prow is the managing director of Aura Software Security Ltd, a specialist IT Security Consulting and Penetration Testing company based here in Wellington. Andy has 18 years software development experience gained from companies such as IBM, Vodafone, Telecom and Ericssons. He also runs Aura Software Architects (a Microsoft Certified Partner) which has developed software for customers around the globe, including a product used by Microsoft globally. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 22/04/2009 6:00 p.m. | Tim Heuer, Program Manager for Silverlight at Microsoft is visiting Wellington, and will be presenting at our user group! His presentation will be a tour of the upcoming Silverlight 3, and .NET RIA Services. | | Xero, Level 1, 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 15/04/2009 6:00 p.m. | James Hippolite will be speaking about the newly relational-ised SQL offering for the cloud. | | Xero, Level 1 98 Customhouse Quay, Wellington | 21/01/2009 6:00 p.m. |
Learn what's coming up in the next version of the C# language, due out later this year. We'll also be looking at .NET 4.0, the first major revision of the .NET 2.0 back in 2005, and the capabilities it brings to all .NET languages including both C# and Visual Basic. |
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The Wellington .NET User Group has a small library of donated books available for borrowing by regular members (maximum 1 month loan). Please contact Kirk or ask at a meeting if you're interested.
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