NEBytes

Join North East Bytes for the first event in an action packed month of November!!!

We are pleased to welcome newly-awarded SQL Server MVP, Jen Stirrup and veteran SharePoint MVP, John Timney.

Date: Wednesday 16th November 2011

Time: 18:30-21:00

Mobile Business Intelligence Using Microsoft and Tableau

Mobile Business Intelligence allows end users to access data to support their decisions, irrespective of time and place. The Apple iPad is the definitive tablet of the decade, and is game-changer as a credible business tool. PowerPivot is a game-changer because it places data, and data structures, back in the hands of business users. Apple’s cutting edge usability, along with PowerPivot’s accessibility, can be combined to enhance productivity for mobile business users. Together, these technologies can support Mobile Business Intelligence as an essential tool for end users who need data 'on the go'.

What you will learn from this session:

• Capabilities of Microsoft PowerPivot in terms of scalability and empowering access to data
• Using PowerPivot as source for data, viewing the visualisation via an Apple iPad
• Specific considerations for visualising data to serve Mobile Business Intelligence, supported by Tableau

Come and see Mobile Business Intelligence in action using the Apple iPad, with Microsoft PowerPivot as a data source.

Jen Stirrup

Jen Stirrup is a newly-awarded SQL Server Most Valuable Professional (MVP). She is the joint owner of Copper Blue Consulting Ltd, and specialises in Business Intelligence with a focus on Data Visualisation. Jen has conducted projects in the UK and mainland Europe. Jen has previously spoken at SQLBits, SQLPASS Northern Europe, the UK, mainland Europe and the United States as well as other Tableau community events on the topic of Business Intelligence and Data Visualisation. She blogs regularly on these topics at www.jenstirrup.com and can be found tweeting at twitter.com/jenstirrup

SharePoint Virtualisation (Level 100) IT Pro or Technical Beginner

Sharepoint 2010 Virtualisation remains a hot topic and for many firms it is still as yet unexplored territory and the concepts surrounding virtualisation are pushing the knowledge boundaries for Sharepoint Infrastructure Architects, Administrators and Solution Architects into areas they thought they wouldn’t need to understand, away from the physical and into the conceptual. This presentation offers an introductory view of some of the important aspects to consider when thinking about utilizing virtualization in the Sharepoint 2010 world and considers reasons for virtualizing Sharepoint 2010, supported physical and virtual platform architectures, guidelines for choosing which aspects of farm to virtualize, support and the issues it brings, considers layered designs as an easy means of visualising virtual architecture and introduces conceptual Geo-DR.

John Timney

He currently sits within the Senior Leadership Team as Enterprise Assurance and Strategy Lead Architect at the UK Department of Education’s flagship Government Information Workplace programme, specialising in Delivery Assurance and Strategy around Sharepoint (2007 & 2010 (TAP member)).
He is now involved in G-CLOUD, an IL3 compliant private cloud delivering Sharepoint 2010. The role involves advising Project Directors and Managers, Client Directors and Technology Leaders, End Users, Technical Architects, Developers and Designers to set a roadmap for technology evolution and transformation. John has experience of a diverse technology stack with excellent consulting experience around complimentary products like Meridio, Livelink and Documentum gained with substantial pre-sales ITT & PQQ response experience for major public sector clients.

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf (Identified by number 32 on the maps).

Join North East Bytes for the first event in what is the outstanding month of October!

We are pleased to welcome Andrew Fryer from Microsoft UK's Developer and Platform Group to give us the low down on SQL Server Denali

Date: Thursday 6th October 2011

Time: 18:30-21:00

Denali - What Can I Tell You?

Denali is the next release of SQL Server. It builds on the three themes of the previous version:

• Scalability and Availability
• Unstructured Data
• Business Intelligence

So I am going to dive into each of these as far as I can at the moment and give you and idea of what's coming up in the public beta

Andrew Fryer

I'm a technical evangelist at Microsoft UK. What this means is that I spend my time explaining the future to IT Professionals who do data management and data centre administration. There are just under a million IT Professionals in the UK, and to reach all of these I spend a lot of time online: On my blog, doing webcasts and the usual social media channels (Twitter, Facebook). However I love going to community events to swap stories and to try and help get the most out of Microsoft technologies.

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf (Identified by number 32 on the maps).

We are very pleased to announce that Session Submission has opened for DDD North, the first Developer! Developer! Developer! event to be held in the North East!

DDD North will be held at the University of Sunderland on Saturday 8th October 2011 – http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/north.  We are looking forward to hosting a fantastic free community led event where you the community define the agenda.  So what are you waiting for, get your session submissions in now!!

Stay up to date with DDD North through the twitter account – http://twitter.com/dddnorth and with the hashtag #DDDNorth.

Join North East Bytes as we partner with the SharePoint User Group for our eigth event of the year. Following on from the great events that we've had so far we've lined up another great event for your benefit. Register now, you won't want to miss this opportunity!

Date: Wednesday 20th July 2011

Time: 18:30-21:00

Event Sponsored by ffA

ffA creates astounding 3D images of the earth's subsurface from seismic data, our software gives geo-scientists and engineers the ability to see geological formations kilometres below the surface in incredible detail. We are looking for programmers who enjoy working in a team and have an ability to learn and adopt new technologies and techniques. Our codebase is a mix of (mostly) C++, Ruby and C# for Windows and Linux, and our development process is based on Scrum & TDD.

Our current work involves:

• Gui design and development
• 3D Visualisation, OpenGL
• GPGPU (CUDA) and multi-threading
• Signal & image processing
• Making scientific software interactive and easy to use
• Refactoring & working with legacy code

For more information check out http://www.ffa-geosciences.com/

SharePoint Best Practices with Simon Tyler

The session covers Infrastructure best practices for SharePoint deployments, revealing field learned best practices and planning for topics such as SQL Server, Networking, Virtualisation, Identity & Authentication hard won from “award winning” UK Government projects such as the “Information Workplace Programme” and it’s follow on project “G-CLOUD”, a 100,000 + seat, fully virtualised multi-farm MOSS 2007 platform evolving into a fully virtualised Multi-Tenant SharePoint 2010 platform scaled to 500,000 users. It is an enlightening view as to what you must consider if deploying virtualised Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server instances at scale, with lessons that apply equally to smaller projects and programmes.

Simon is an Infrastructure Architect with 13 + years in the IT industry. He currently plies his trade for Capgemini UK within their Microsoft practice focusing on collaboration platforms & integration. His current technology areas of focus are SharePoint, Virtualisation, Unified Communications (Lync Server 2010, Exchange Server). He is an industry specialist is build, deployment management and platform governance.

Delivering High Quality Live and On-Demand Video to Multiple Devices with Andrew Westgarth

IIS Media Services 4 provides a platform on which to build applications to deliver high quality live or on-demand video content to viewers regardless of the quality of their device and network connection.
In this session we'll look at the problems which streaming media faces and we'll look at how we can make use of IIS Adaptive and Smooth Streaming to provide a great streaming experience to your consumers, be it through a web based Silverlight Player, Windows Phone 7 application and even an iPhone.

Andrew Westgarth is an MVP (Internet Information Services) and Co-founder of North East Bytes, a free User Group covering the North East and Cumbrian regions of the United Kingdom having technical meetings covering Development and IT Pro topics every month.
He is a Senior Consultant for Waterstons Ltd, a consultancy based in Durham. Andrew is very active in the UK Developer Community, attending and speaking at multiple events, supporting users and other User Groups. In the past he has spoken at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference, VBUG's National Two Day Conference; Developer Developer Developer Day 5 and local User Group meetings. Andrew has experience in VB6/.NET; C#; ASP.NET; MCMS 2002 and Internet Information Services. Andrew's current technical interests include IIS 7.0/7.5 and IIS Extensions; Personal Performance Imrovement and Best Practices.

Blog: http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/apwestgarth

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf (Identified by number 32 on the maps).

Join North East Bytes for our seventh event of 2011. This event will be different to any event we have ran in the past as it will be held ONLINE as unfortunately a black hole of work commitments has prevented the entire team from being able to attend an actual live event. So in order to provide yet another stellar event we have lined up a fantastic speaker and friend of NEBytes to give what we hope will be a fantastic session.

Asymptotics and Algorithms – What You’ve Forgotten Since University

Modern development environments have made us lazy! Well maybe that's an exaggeration, but sure as eggs is eggs they have dulled our knowledge of what makes good algorithms good. We've ridden the wave of Moore's Law for so long that we thought the good times would last forever. Well the party's over folks! In the coming days of multi-core chips and "Big Data" algorithmic performance is back on the menu.
This session - revision for some, enlightening for others - will focus on how to calculate the efficiency of an algorithm, before going on to show you how to set about devising your own algorithms. I can promise you a fun session, despite a little bit of maths. :-)

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.

As well as C#, Gary also has an interest in dynamic languages such as Smalltalk, Ruby and Python as well as iPhone development using Objective-C.

Read Gary's Blog - http://www.garyshort.org and follow Gary on Twitter - http://twitter.com/garyshort

Location

The event will be held online making use of Live Meeting. The joining instructions will be sent out on the day of the event so please make sure your registration details have the correct email address specified.

You can join LiveMeetings via a WebClient and Browser or by downloading the LiveMeeting client, check your machine's configuration ahead of the meeting.

Orchid Software, valued supporters of NEBytes, are looking to fill three fantastic roles!

Who are we?

We are Orchid Software, the North East-based development house behind Orchidnet - the UK's number 1 intranet product. Our software is used every day by over 150,000 people across a wide range of sectors, and organisations as diverse as ITV, Nissan, Pinewood Studios, Northern Rock and the Royal Academy of Music rely on Orchidnet intranet software to bring their business operations online.

What do we do?

We develop and build Orchidnet, our own proprietarily-developed intranet software. Orchidnet is a feature-rich intranet product, with 90 applications that let organisations bring their business operations online using nothing more than a web browser. Our applications include everything from traditional business tools to social media functionality, .

How do we do it?

Working closely with our customers is what sets us apart from the competition. Our success comes from creating software based on real-life requirements, and we take a long-term approach to each of our installations. As well as customer development, our commitment to wider R&D helps us adapt our software to new technologies and changing business practices as they arrive.

Who are we looking for?

We have three positions available:

· Senior Web Development Manager

· Head of Technical Support

· Web Developer

The Web Developer role is suited to candidates with good technical knowledge and software development experience; the other two roles also require technical ability and knowledge of development, in addition to experience of managing a team and coordinating projects to meet specific deadlines.

Our people tend have a few things in common: an incredible initiative, real intelligence and a passion for what they do; if you're clever, ambitious, and want a career with a company that is going places, then we would like to hear from you.

For more information check out http://www.orchidsoft.com/jobs/

Join us for our fifth event of 2011, where we are very happy to welcome Kendall Miller, Principal at eSymmetrix as he tours the UK.

Date: Tuesday 10th May 2011

Time: 18:30 – 21:00

The Natural Laws of Software Performance

Just like you can't defeat the laws of physics there are natural laws that ultimately decide software performance. Even the latest technology beta is still bound by Newton's laws, and you can't change the speed of light, even in the cloud!

Kendall will dive into examples of how technology has changed the tactics of high performance but is still at the mercy of these natural laws. Understanding them will help you create applications that scale without arcane tricks or endless hardware. No actual Physics will be abused in the talk, just bad software.

Kendall Miller is one of the founding partners of Gibraltar Software, an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) that develops & markets commercial applications for .NET developers including: Gibraltar – an application logging & monitoring platform; and VistaDB – a small-footprint, SQL Server-compatible embedded database engine. Both products are used by customers around the world ranging from individual consultants through Fortune 100 companies and governments.

Before starting Gibraltar Software, Kendall worked for multiple startups leading their technology development from concept through profitability. In each case, he's focused on translating Enterprise-level performance and capabilities down to smaller companies. Using multiple generations of Microsoft technologies over the past 15 years, Kendall is experienced with the details of modern .NET development as well as the challenges that have stayed the same for generations. You can follow his blog at rocksolid.gibraltarsoftware.com or follow him on twitter @KendallMiller.

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf

The Windows Server User Group emailed us this morning to let us know about a great event which is running for IT Pros and we’re delighted to pass on the information:

Connecting On-Premise Applications with the Windows Azure Platform

With the all the interest in Microsoft Windows Azure, it’s natural to ask “what does that mean for IT Pros?”. There’s loads of information to help developers write applications for the cloud, but what about those of us who do infrastructure: servers, networks, and other such things?

One important element is integrating on and off-premise systems and, to do this, Microsoft has created Windows Azure Connect – a new Windows Azure service that enables customers to setup secure, IP-level network connectivity between their Windows Azure compute services and existing, on-premise resources. This allows Windows Azure applications to leverage and integrate with existing infrastructure investments in order to ease adoption of Azure in the enterprise..

It’s taken a long while to set up but the Windows Server User Group (WSUG) is running a Live Meeting on this topic (thanks to a lot of help from Phil Winstanley, ex-MVP and now native at Microsoft).

Our speaker will be Allan Naim, an Azure Architect Evangelist at Microsoft. Allan has more than 15 years of experience designing and building distributed middleware applications including both custom and off the shelf Enterprise Application Integration architectures and, on the evening of 22 March 2011 (starting at 19:00 GMT), he’ll spend an hour taking us through Windows Azure Connect.

Combined with the event that Mark Parris has organised for 6 April 2011 where one of the topics is Active Directory Federation Services (AD-FS), these two WSUG sessions should give Windows Server administrators a great opportunity to learn about integrating Windows Server and Windows Azure.

Register for the Azure Connect Live Meeting now. Why not register for the AD RMS and AD FS in-person event too?

Don't Make Me Wait, Faster Websites 101

Gone are the days when we were willing to sit and wait five, ten, fifteen seconds for a webpage to load. We're all paying good money for lightning fast broadband connections but still often find ourselves frustrated with a site that takes an age to appear. Good news is there are plenty of techniques, tweaks and configurations we can apply to get the experience of browsing are site much like flicking through the pages of a magazine. Page speed doesn't just impact user experience. There are plenty of analytics metrics that could benefit from a boost while we're at it.

In this session I aim to:

● convince you speed matter to a number of stakeholders

● cover some best practises we can apply to our code and servers

● show you some tools to help you test the speed of your site and how to identify where to focus your efforts when your short on time.

Duncan McDougall is web application developer at Equator, a Glasgow based digital agency. He specialises in website performance optimisation and frequently blogs on the subject. Though mostly working in .Net he has helped improve the performance of websites on a number of setups.

To contact Duncan please visit his blog’s contactform or get in touch via Twitter @duncanmcdougall.

Windows Performance and Problem Troubleshooting Made Easy with Richard Diver

In this session Richard will share with you some of the most common Performance issues faced with
Windows servers, both Physical and Virtual. Richard will show you the key performance counters to
monitor along with their acceptable thresholds along with some other tools that can help with the
diagnosis of problems with applications running on Windows.

Richard has developed his career as an IT Pro over the last 11 years, 4 of them have been working directly for Microsoft in Belgium, UK and Australia. Richard has developed and reviewed several books and training courses on the topics of Windows Performance and Troubleshooting, the main highlights of his career have been presenting at Microsoft events and working with Mark Russinovich.

As promised Richard has very kindly provided his handout and slides for download:

• Windows Performance and Problem Troubleshooting slides.pdf (520.35 kb)
• Windows Performance and Problem Troubleshooting Flow.pdf (438.15 kb)

Date: Wednesday 20th April 2011

Time: 18:30 – 21:00

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf

Pizza sponsored by Orchid Software

Good Things Come in Small Packages – Package Management on .Net - Sebastien Lambla

Sebastien will be giving us an introduction to Package Management on the .Net platform with OpenWrap.  He will demonstrate it's capabilities, uses and how it measures up against other solutions on other platforms

Sebastien, is the director of Caffeine IT, a consultancy he created to help companies adopt the right technologies for the right reasons, has been obsessed with .net since 2000, and has secret love affairs with anything geeky.

Avviso: A Content Management Framework for SharePoint 2010 with Rik Hepworth

As a follow-up to his session last year on using SharePoint 2010 for content publishing, Rik will demonstrate and discuss Avviso – a content publishing framework for Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Avviso allows content authors  to create highly visual, impactful pages without technical skills. At the same time it enables quicker creation of site-specific designs and templates by web professionals. Suitable for internal and external web sites, Avviso takes the basic publishing functionality in SharePoint 2010 and enhances it, delivering a more user-friendly, flexible toolset. Rik will demonstrate Avviso and talk about some of the thought processes behind its inception and development.

For more info on Avviso check out Rik's Blog Post - http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rhepworth/archive/2010/12/21/avviso-a-content-publishing-framework-for-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Rik is the IT Director of Black Marble, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England. Black Marble specialises in Biztalk and SharePoint-based business automation.
In addition to making sure Black Marble's own systems deliver, Rik leads the IT side of Black Marble's SharePoint practice. Rik has been delivering SharePoint solutions since Black Marble’s involvement in the beta of SharePoint 2007 and presents regularly for Black Marble and their partners on this and other topics.

Location

The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Building at Newcastle University.  For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf