NxtGenUG - Article


NexGenUG Fest 08 - 12th June 2008 - Microsoft Reading

June 12th was the big day, and the NxtGenUGeration User Group (NxtGenUG) packed out Chicago 1 in Thames Valley Park (TVP) Building 3, Microsoft Campus, Reading. There was a great turnout turnout of about 100 people, and a marvellous upbeat atmosphere. The day started with the keynote stressing to everyone that we've had another great year. NxtGenUG is now in Cambridge and Southampton, as well as Birmingham, Coventry and Oxford. Dave and Rich showed a really flash video made using Virtual Earth, where we flew across the world, dropping in on user group locations as well as places internationaly where we've had a presence.Eric Nelson introduced himself as the new Daniel Moth, not from Greece, and his commitment to Visual Basic (semi-colon free coding). He then went on to present the numerous prizes for Best Speaker, Best Nugget and Best Overall Event from all the different NxtGenUG regions.

		The first presentation was by Mike Taulty of Microsoft UK on ADO.NET Data Services. Mike's well known for slick and highly informative talks with a great dash of humour. This was very fast, with a huge amount of content explained very clearly. He focused on providing CRUD access to data via the Entity Framework and RESTful web services. The talk went from high level understanding down to low level implementation, and was very well received. The Entity Framework is one of the most important new tools from Microsoft, and is going to radically change the way we access data. It's very powerful and immensely customisable.

Next up was Dave Sussman, who took us through a quick and easy model for accessing data. This involved components that allowed CRUD access to any database very quickly and easily. The Dynamic Data Components owe their heritage to Ruby and other dynamic languages and its nice to see them recognised as a pattern in the .NET Framework. Dave's a confident and consumate speaker, who plainly enjoys what he does. He's spoken at many past NxtGenUG meetings and like Daniel Moth, he's written a book (or two).

		Lunchtime saw the Grok talks. With sessions from NxtGenUG coordinator Chris Hay talking on .NET Reflector, that titan of .NET utilities. Mohammed Muzammil a NxtGenUG member and student talking on MVC framework. Mohammed is really making an effort to put himself in front of people to hone his speaking skills, great to see the next generation of speakers starting to come through! First up however, we had the swan song of Daniel Moth ('the Moth'). Here he is, presenting on parallel programming. Never to be seen again in the UK perhaps, so savour the moment for a TOP guy and TOP presenter ... sniff.

Straight after lunch, Josh Twist from Microsoft a relatively unknown speaker in the UK Community gave a staggeringly good demonstration of WPF and Data Binding. This was a superb talk, demonstrating binding between controls, and also what incredible graphics can be constructed and animated when using Blend 2. Of particular interest was his explanation of the 'Model-View-ViewModel' pattern, first conceived by Professor Thomas Cooper! The photo shows the point when Josh got the needle on his graphic to rotate. As one of the attendees said in their feedback "Where have Microsoft been hiding this guy? Awesome!".

	Dave Morrow from Ridgian (a work colleague of Dave McMahon's and old college mucker of mine) was up next, taking us through the set of Business Intelligence tools from Microsoft. This was an excellent introduction, showing us all how to create cubes using Analysis Services, and also how to slice them and dice them using Proclarity and how to distribute them using SharePoint and Performance Point Server. It was the first time that Dave had presented to such a large audience, so well done to him on a good job done. This area of working with databases is a highly specialized area and Dave is obviously an expert in this field.

Final presentation of the day was Oliver Sturm who spoke at last year's FEST07, and spent this year telling about what F# is, and how to handle data with it. Oliver's session was brand new as were all of the day's sessions, and as ever he was always witty and informative. He gave a great introduction to F# using the command line tools, so that we understood what functional programming is all about (just). It's great to have slightly off the wall sessions like this, rather than having all 'core' sessions on C# or VB.NET and SQL Server. It's fascinating to see what else is being worked upon and simply being exposed to other ideas, even if we don't work with them, can prompt us to have ideas in our own line of work which may not have otherwise occurred to us.

What would a NxtGenUG event be without a game show? This year it was 'Whose Session is it Anyway?'. A presentation and slide deck was put on screen, and each of the day's speakers, plus special guests Craig Murphy and Alan Elston had to go ahead and give a 3 min talk, without any prior knowledge of subject or slides! Here's Dave Sussman, trying to convey the essentials of 'Trout Tickling' and Dave McMahon showing us several rather scary looking Yoga positions.

Last thing to do was to 'swag out' - loads of goodies for all the attendees. A great day, where we all learned a good deal and had a lot of fun. Thanks to Microsoft for looking after us so well, and to all the speakers for presenting such great content and for taking part in "Whose Session Is It Anyway?" at great personally risk to their proffessional speaking careers and to their dignity ...!

Downloads Click here to view the FEST08 Welcome Video. Click here to download the slides from Josh Twists Session. Other slide decks will be added as we get them.