North East Bytes hold technical events covering Development and IT Pro topics every month throughout the year. We hold our events on the Third Wednesday of the month (except in December – it’s the second Wednesday) and all details of our events will be published here. Subscribe to our events feed to keep up to date with all of our events.
We also list other UK Community events on this page too, both local and national.
North East Bytes now steamrolls into autumn with our 10th event of the year. Why not register, come along and enjoy the show!
Managing an Enterprise Infrastructure Using SCOM 2007 R2 with Mark Robson
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is Microsoft’s enterprise monitoring and alerting tool. SCOM gathers server performance and status information using software agents; it then collates this information using pre-determined rules (Management packs) and produces a “health” report for the environment. SCOM can be a very complicated product to implement and needs to be handled carefully to ensure the information it is producing is accurate & relevant.
In this session Mark Robson will draw from his real world experiences implementing SCOM to show how it can be used as much more than just a server monitoring tool.
Mark, a NEBytes local, is an IS Systems Manager for a Newcastle based housing association. In 2009 Mark was key in the managing the first UK implementation of a companywide SCOM 2007 R2 deployment that has since been used as case study by Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000006463).
You can follow Mark on twitter at: http://twitter.com/mark_robson
Introducing Windows Phone 7 with Matt Lacey
In this session Matt will give us a view of overview of Windows Phone 7 and an introduction to developing applications for it.
We'll look at functionality and features of the phone highlighting what's new and what's different in the interface, architecture and development experience.
Matt has been paid to develop software for the last twelve years. In that time he has worked with multiple languages & platforms and for companies of all types and sizes. He currently works for a company specialising in mobile and digital content solutions. He is particularly interested in developer productivity, mobile computing and providing excellent user experiences.
He also organises DevEvening (http://devevening.co.uk/) and the Windows Phone User Group
(http://wpug.net/).
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
Wednesday 18th August 2010 – NEBytes August 2010 – The Debt Is Over To You!
Join North East Bytes for our ninth 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!
Credit Crunch Code - Time To Pay Back The Technical Debt with Gary Short
Technical debt is the cost of putting off good development practices. This debt, must be paid back to avoid the "interest payments" becoming crippling. This presentation will further define technical debt, before examing some anti-patterns and how to avoid them. We'll then look at how to put a financial cost on technical debt, and end by examing some measures to identify technical devt in a code base.
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
The Floor Is Over To You!
The second element of our meeting will include a number of 15 minute presentations by members of the NEBytes Audience.
So far we have presentations lined up on
Cloud Computing - Justin Souter
Windows Phone 7 - Peter Bull
Overview of Windows Phone 7 including platform features, developer experience, consumer experience and business experience plus Q&A.
Open Source .Net - primarily Umbraco
ASP.Net MVC (tbc)
If you are interested in taking part in this section of the evening there's still time so visit www.nebytes.net and send us your proposal.
Why not come along and support these attendees who are making the leap to deliver a Bytesized session for your benefit?
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
Wednesday 21st Thursday 15th July 2010 – NEBytes July 2010 - Virtualisation-o-rama!
Update:
Unfortunately Liam Westley, who is presenting - Hyper-V for Developers - can only travel up to the North East on Thursday 15th July 2010 as this is when flights were arranged for and unfortunately the cost of changing them is far too prohibitive. We have not been able to confirm Tom Howarth, our VMWare VExpert, for this event so he will NOT be speaking.
Therefore we would like to move the event to THURSDAY 15th JULY 2010 starting at 18:30 - SAME VENUE and Liam will also cover Virtualisation on the Desktop - covering VirtualBox, VMWare Player and Workstation, Hyper-V, Virtual PC, discussing all the issues related including 64-bit support and Networking.
---------
Join North East Bytes for our eighth event of the year. We’re awaiting full session abstracts but it promises to be a great event – Hyper-V and VMware both covered.
"Hyper-V for Developers" with Liam Westley
... more details coming soon ...
http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/Default.aspx
"VMware" with Tom Howarth
... more details coming soon ...
http://planetvm.net/blog/
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
Stay up to date with North East Bytes
Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
Wednesday 16th June 2010 - NEBytes June 2010 – WCF Data Services and Exchange 2010
Join North East Bytes for our seventh event of the year. Following on from the great events that started the year we've lined up another two great speakers who are delivering two very interesting sessions. Register now, you won't want to miss this opportunity!
"WCF Data Services" with Iain Angus
WCF Data Services is a framework for exposing data layers in a REST-ful manner. This session will look at how WCF, REST and LINQ come together to form Microsoft's latest data access technology. Topics covered include implementing and consuming data services, why IQueryable and IUpdatable are important, service operations / interceptors and concurrency.
Iain Angus is a Technical Consultant for Black Marble, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England, specialising in Microsoft BizTalk and SharePoint based business automation and collaboration solutions, as well as Application Lifecycle Management.
Iain has more than 14 years working in IT, as both a System Administrator and Developer across a wide ranging set of industries including Health, Finance and Professional Services. In addition, Iain has presented at events on a diverse range of web and data technologies including SharePoint, Reporting Services and SQL 2008.
http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/iangus
"Exchange 2010, Product Overview And Example Architectures" with Ben Lee
Exchange 2010 is the latest generation of Microsoft’s enterprise messaging suite. This session will provide an overview of the platform, focusing on the architecture changes including the simplified storage topology, resiliency options as well as the improvements to the end users. If you didn’t know what a DAG was before the session, you certainly will by the end!
Ben is a Senior Consultant for an IT services and consulting company called Waterstons based in Durham. He specialises in Microsoft enterprise products such as System Center and ISA server. Ben also has an interest in automation technologies and network security; some of his recent projects have involved Configuration Manager and PKI implementations. Before joining Waterstons at the start of 2009, Ben worked as Systems Administrator for the North East Chambers of Commerce. Ben has not been officially involved in the IT Pro community before but is excited to be involved with NEBytes and is looking forward to helping from the community in the North East.
Blog: http://www.bibble-it.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/bibbleq
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
Stay up to date with North East Bytes
Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
Wednesday 19th May 2010 - NEBytes May 2010 - The Need for Speed: A Developer's Guide to Velocity aka AppFabric And Making Powerful Use of PowerShell 2.0 Easily
Join North East Bytes for our fifth event of the year. Following on from the great events that started the year we've lined up another two great speakers who are delivering two very interesting sessions. Register now, you won't want to miss this opportunity!
"The Need For Speed: A Developers Guide to Velocity (aka AppFabric)" with Phil Pursglove
AppFabric (formerly codenamed Velocity) is Microsoft’s distributed caching technology. In this session we’ll look at how to use it (and why you’d want to) and dig into some of the details like how to handle concurrency, and how we can integrate AppFabric into ASP.NET to share Session state across servers, prevent Viewstate from being transmitted to the client, and share output caching across servers.
Phil Pursglove is a Senior Developer with WSP Group based in Cambridge. Phil has been involved with the UK developer community for over ten years and was previously the East Anglia co-ordinator for the VB User Group. He has spoken at VBUG conferences and user group meetings as well as the DDD and WebDD conferences at Microsoft. His blog is http://philpursglove.blogspot.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/philpursglove
"Making Powerful use of PowerShell 2.0 Easily" with Jonathan Noble
With the launch of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, PowerShell became part of the core OS and added a bunch of 2.0 features. In this session, aimed at existing users of PowerShell as well as beginners, we'll cover some of the new aspects of PowerShell which IT Professionals can use easily to manage their Windows systems. This will include remoting, background jobs, advanced functions, script debugging and more. There are some deep concepts at play here, but this session will make them accessible enough for you to start working straight away. For those with no experience of working with PowerShell, there will be a quick on-ramp to get you going.
Jonathan Noble is one of the co-founders of NEBytes and a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell with over a decade of experience in administrative scripting on Windows. When the first version of PowerShell was released, he was happy to drop VBScript like a stone and hasn't looked back. He suffers from tech addiction; particularly mobile devices. Jonathan blogs at http://jonoble.com and tweets at http://twitter.com/jonoble.
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
Stay up to date with North East Bytes
Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
Friday 16th April 2010 – NEBytes – Jesse Liberty – Silverlight Geek – Newcastle-upon-Tyne
On Friday 16th April 2010, NEBytes are pleased to welcome Jesse Liberty, the self styled Silverlight Geek and a Senior Program Manager in the Silverlight Development Team at Microsoft, to Newcastle as he makes his way round the UK as part of his UK Tour . Jesse will be delivering the following session:
Building A Highly Extensible, Decoupled Silverlight Open Source Application with MEF and RIA Services using Lean, Test Driven Development, An International Team of Volunteer Programmers, and lots of Advil.
This talk will use the Silverlight HyperVideo Platform open-source project on CodePlex as a case study in building highly extensible Silverlight applications. Among the topics we will focus on are:
- New features in Silverlight 4 and how they made life easier
- The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) added to Silverlight 4
- WCF RIA Services for connection to a back-end db
- Handling inter-module communication when the requirements are that modules cannot assume which other modules will be created, there can be no dependencies on order-of creation and unanticipated modules must be able to communicate with existing modules.
- Using Markers, Injected Markers and polling to trigger events while viewing a video.
- A Quick introduction to Lean, TDD and Kanban.
NEBytes are also looking at putting on a Geek Dinner afterwards, so if you’d be interested in attending let us know when you register.
Wednesday 21st April 2010 – NEBytes - “Office 2010” and “Preventing SQL Injection Attacks” – Newcastle-upon-Tyne
On Wednesday 21st April 2010 NEBytes will be holding their fourth monthly event of 2010 and will be covering the topics of Office 2010 and Preventing SQL Injection Attacks. We are pleased to welcome Colin Mackay to cover Preventing SQL Injection attacks and we are very pleased to have NEByte’s very own Jonathan Noble and Ben Lee covering Office 2010 at the event:
Office 2010 - Ben Lee and Jonathan Noble
This summer Microsoft will release Office 2010. While this is more of an evolution from Office 2007 rather than the revolutionary jump from Office 2003 into the world of the Ribbon UI, there are still a number of new features in the desktop applications that make this release interesting. In addition, 2010 sees Office head into the cloud with the all-new Office Web Apps. In this session, NEBytes' own Ben Lee (@Bibbleq) and Jonathan Noble (@jonoble) will highlight their favourite new features across the whole suite and also demonstrate how to manage, secure and deploy Office 2010 to the desktop, including delivery using App-V.
SQL Injection Attacks and Tips on How To Prevent Them - Colin Angus Mackay
In light of some recent events, such as the man who was convicted of stealing 130 million credit card details through a SQL Injection attack, it is imperative that developers understand what a SQL Injection Attack is, how they are carried out, and most importantly, how to defend your code against attack.
In this talk Colin Mackay will demonstrate a SQL Injection Attack on an application in a controlled environment*. He’ll show you where the vulnerable code lies and what you can do to harden it.
Although this talk uses C# as the application language and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as the database engine many of the concepts and prevention mechanisms will apply to any application that accesses a database through SQL.
* Demonstrating an attack on a system without the owner’s consent is a breach of the 1990 Misuse of Computers Act, hence the controlled environment.
Colin Angus Mackay is a Software Developer living in Glasgow. He has been programming since the age of 9 starting with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He became a professional software developer in 1994, using a Smalltalk based language called Magik. In 1996 he started using C++ commercially and in 2002 migrated to the emerging language of C#.
Colin has received a number of awards including Code Project MVP (for 5 years) and Microsoft MVP (for 3 years). He is a member of the British Computer Society and a Member of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers. He is currently the chairman of Scottish Developers and has organised the last two Developer Day Scotland conferences (with a third in the works).
You can find out more on his blog at: http://blog.colinmackay.net.
NEBytes – March 2010 – “Visual Studio 2010” and “System Center in the R2 Wave”
Join North East Bytes for our third event of the year. Following on from two great events to start the year we've lined up another two great speakers who are delivering two very interesting sessions. Register now, you won't want to miss this opportunity!
When
Wednesday 17th March 2010, from 6:30pm.
Where
The event will be hosted in Room 120 of the Claremont Tower at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf
"Visual Studio 2010" by Richard Fennell (Black Marble)
Visual Studio 2010 has many new feature, too many to cover in a single hour. For this reason I propose that I divide my hour into 4 mini sessions and cover items that are of most interest to the group, you get to vote. You can choose if the session is architect, developer, tester or project manager focus, or a bit of each. It's all down to you - choose the four sessions that you'd like to see from the list it is the NEBytes members choice.
Richard Fennell is a Director of Black Marble, a Microsoft Gold Partner based in Yorkshire. He is a Chartered Engineer, Member of the British Computer Society, MCAD and MCSD.NET, with over 20 years experience in the IT industry. Richard is a regular speaker at DDD and other community events, speaking on a variety of subjects.
"System Center in the R2 Wave" by Matt McSpirit (Microsoft)
With more and more organisations thinking about virtualisation, there has never been a better time to investigate what the complimentary System Center management tools can bring to the table. From deep monitoring, patching, backup, and virtual machine management, the System Center Management Suite is the most comprehensive, unified management solution in the marketplace today, for organisations big and small. In this session, you'll learn about a number of the key technologies making up the suite, how they are licensed, and how they can help you achieve a new level of efficiency and control.
Matt McSpirit, a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist, and a VMware Certified Professional, has worked at Microsoft since January 2006. Matt's role, as a Partner Technology Advisor, aims to ensure Microsoft Partners understand the 'Art of the Possible' when it comes to Microsoft technologies, and how to build solutions around the platform. Matt's role has taken him across products, from Client to Server, through to Virtualisation & Management. Matt has delivered a number of high-profile events, including IT Forum in Barcelona, the Partner and Customer UK Launches of Windows Server 2008, and the UK Virtualisation Launch.
Stay up to date with North East Bytes
Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
NEBytes February 2010 - Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 and DirectAccess
Join North East Bytes for our second event of the year. Following on from what we felt was a great event in January, we have lined up Three great speakers who are delivering two very interesting sessions. Register now, you won't want to miss this opportunity!
When
Wednesday 17th February 2010, from 6:30pm.
Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 - Oliver Sturm
C# 4.0 supports the new "dynamic" keyword, which promises easy interaction with those parts of the programming world that are, well, dynamic in nature. In this session, Oliver walks you through several scenarios, interfacing with dynamic programming languages, Automation and Web Services, and explaining some of the basics of how dynamic calls work in C#.
Oliver Sturm is an experienced software architect, developer, trainer and author with 20 years' experience in the software industry. He works as Director of Quality for DevExpress and is well known as a speaker at
events of all sizes, all around the world. He's currently working on a book for Wrox, titled "Functional Programming in C#". Programming languages and methodologies are one of his favorite topics and for several years now, he has been a Microsoft C# MVP.
DirectAccess with Dr. Dan Oliver and Conrad Sidey
Microsoft has recently introduced a range of new remote working and access technologies. One such technology, DirectAccess, was introduced in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. DirectAccess provides a secure "always on" connection back to the corporate network which provides truly seamless remote working. As well as providing remote access DirectAccess allow allows full visibility of remote machines so that IT can manage those machines to provide updates, software patches, anti-virus definitions or Group Policy changes just as if the machine was still connected to the LAN. Come along to this session to
learn more about this new technology and how it can help safely and securely extend your LAN.
Dan Oliver is the Managing Director of Sa-V Ltd a Newcastle based Infrastructure Optimization Microsoft Partner that specializes in helping their client’s simplify technology services and reduce the cost of the desktop, and delivering services to users. He is currently overseeing the merger and rebranding of two IT services companies and finalizing development the new service catalogue that includes Flexible Consultancy, Management as a Service and Advanced Technology Mastery training offerings catalogue.
Dan’s technical expertise is in design and integration of Managed Services, Shared Services, System Center, App-V, MDOP, Terminal Services, Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2 and ITiL to reduce cost. Before taking over as MD of Sa-V in early 2010, he worked for 10 years with Microsoft in Consulting Services, Premier Support and the Enterprise Product Group. Prior to working in IT Dan severed in the Armed Forces and holds a Doctorate in Computing along with a Masters in Business Administration.
Dan lives in Tynemouth with his wife Mary and their three sons. Away from work he is into Walking at the coast, Rugby (at Percy Park, naturally), PT, swimming, jogging (very badly, naturally), weight training, canoeing and has recently rediscovered diving (as every man needs a midlife crisis).
Conrad Sidey is a Solution Architect within Microsoft Consilting Services with some 17 years' experience of Microsoft-based solutions primarily in the infrastructure field. Conrad has a background that covers a broad spectrum of industry sectors ranging from Financial and Insurance, Manufacturing, Aero-Engineering, Defence, UK and European Government Agencies, Power Generators, Retail and Brewing. Conrad has also had the opportunity to work with large scale outsourcing services providers.
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
Stay up to date with North East Bytes
Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
NEBytes & SUGUK North East Launch Event - Silverlight, Hyper-V and Sharepoint 2010!
Join North East Bytes for our Launch Event, where we are pleased to announce that we are partnering with SUGUK North East for their first event of the year too!. This is the first of many great events scheduled for 2010. We are very pleased to welcome Mike Taulty and James O'Neill from Microsoft UK's Developer and Platform Evangelism Team to cover two great topics to kickstart the year! We are pleased to also welcome Steve Smith who will be covering the Highlights and Features of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2010.
SUGUK: Highlights and Features of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2010 - Steve Smith
Steve will add his own insight to a well balanced presentation on the replacement for the product we have all come to know, specifically highlighting the new metadata management model and the new records management and records routing features of 2010, the Ribbon, Office integration, migration options, architecture and new facets of the product likely to keep you employed well into the next few years. The session will be an open forum to allow participants to ask questions as the session progresses.
Steve Smith
Steve Smith is the Director of Combined Knowledge, a specialist Sharepoint training consultancy. Steve is a Sharepoint MVP and a prominent and very well known circuit speaker for the Sharepoint User Group in the UK. He has recently returned from speaking appearance Sweden, and was a speaker at both the Sharepoint 2010 conference in Las Vegas and the European Sharepoint Conference, held in London in April 2009. He is an authority on Sharepoint 2010 and we are very pleased to have him agree to come along to present on the next iteration of Sharepoint.
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=6F1C3FD4-330A-4916-BB5B-53B0D52BAA4F
Silverlight - 2 Years, 4 Versions, Where are We? - Mike Taulty
Silverlight is Microsoft's UX Technology for rich internet applications and its development is moving at internet-speed with 4 versions coming out in different forms over just 2 years. In this session, we'll talk about Silverlight from version 1 to version 4 with a focus on the currently released Silverlight 3 and also a look at Silverlight 4 which is in beta. We'll look at various aspects from the core capabilities of the framework through to where the tooling has got to as it progresses towards Visual Studio 2010.
Mike Taulty
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.
Mike holds a BSc Hons (1st Class) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.
Mike's blog - http://mtaulty.com and follow Mike on Twitter - http://twitter.com/mtaulty
Hyper-V with James O'Neill
James O'Neill from Microsoft's UK IT Pro Evangelism Team will cover the Hyper-V virtualisation technology, including the improvements in the new version of Hyper-V that launched with Windows Server 2008 R2, and management of your virtual infrastructure with System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Windows PowerShell.
James O'Neill
It is hard to believe but I used my first Microsoft product in 1979 and then joined Microsoft 21 years later, specialising in messaging technologies. In the 5 years before joining Microsoft, I ran my own consultancy company and in 1993, I became a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) with a focus on messaging and systems management. Prior to joining the Evangelist team, I worked for Microsoft Consulting Services.
James' blog - http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone and follow James on Twitter - http://twitter.com/jamesoneill
Location
The event will be hosted in Room G11 of the Percy Building at Newcastle University. For a detailed campus map - http://www.ncl.ac.uk/documents/Campus-Map-Print.pdf
When
Wednesday 20th January 2010, from 6pm.
Launch Event
This is North East Bytes launch event and as such expect plenty of food, drink, prizes and giveaways. We look forward to welcoming you all to help ring in the New Year and Era! Check out our site at http://www.nebytes.net; follow us on Twitter - http://twitter.com/nebytes and become a fan on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/NEBytes/154009434309
