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A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Jan 4, 2015

    2014 in review

    As I write this, a major bushfire is threatening towns and some suburbs in the north eastern areas of the Adelaide Hills.

    Smoke rising from bushfire

    Here’s a photo I took on my bus ride home from work on Friday, looking north. You can just see the edge of the CBD on the left of the horizon. The smoke is towering up into the sky. Friday was very hot – it got to 44°C (~111°F). This morning (Saturday) when we woke up, the smoke had drifted south and was obvious in the air around our house.

    Fortunately I live a fair way away from the fire front, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about our preparations should we be put in a similar situation. Given where we live, it’s a real possibility every fire season.

    So, that’s an interesting start to 2015, but what about last year?

    User Groups

    I’ve been involved with the SQL User Group since it started many years ago. The Adelaide .NET User Group (ADNUG) has been running even longer, but for most of that time the evening meeting time wasn’t that convenient. That changed earlier this year when I decided I wanted to take my user group involvement up a notch, by not only becoming a regular attendee at the ADNUG meetings but also stepping up to help organise them too.

    I’m now charged with organising speakers for each month. Speaking of which, this month we’ve lined up Sayed Hashimi to speak to us live from Redmond (Washington, USA) on changes coming to the ASP.NET 5 project system – register now! If the live hook-up works well then we might plan these regularly – possibly alternating each month between in-person and virtual. It could be a way to book some more well-known US (or other overseas) speakers.

    Work

    A big change in 2014, with me leaving Eka at the end of September. I was feeling quite unsettled and was really not sure what the future held for me there, so I thought if I could take the initiative then I would, and applied for a position as a software developer at RL Solutions. It was a great start, and to be honest I’m really, really enjoying working with my new colleagues. In particular, I love the ‘team’ and ‘fun’ focus. I commented to the local guys when I began that unlike the Toronto office, we didn’t have a table tennis table in Adelaide. I’m pleased to report that oversight was remedied just before Christmas – just in time for us to be thoroughly ‘wiped off the court’ by our visiting CEO 😀

    PowerShell

    I was doing a lot of PowerShell earlier in the year, particularly in managing build servers and automating deployments. I’m still a PowerShell enthusiast, though those particular areas are no longer ones I need to worry about so much at the moment.

    Windows Phone and Windows

    I managed to get one new app out this year, but felt like I just didn’t have any spare time to devote to pushing out some upgrades to some of my other apps. I hope that gets rectified in 2015.

    I’ve been running Windows 10 preview on my laptop with not too many dramas. I’m looking forward to seeing it progress through this year. I’m curious as to what changes will come to Windows Phone from this.

    .NET

    Wow, what big changes are happening for Microsoft and .NET. Who would have thought open source would be having such a big impact and become part of their culture like it has? It feels like the ‘new guard’ at Microsoft, particularly in the developer division have really started to have an impact in this area.

    Cycling

    One constant frustration with working at MatrixGroup/Eka was the lack of change facilities for those of us who like to ride our bike to work. I was very pleased to confirm that my new place of employment does provide both bike storage and shower facilities.

    I’ve signed up to do the Bupa Challenge Tour ride (part of the Tour Down Under) on January 23rd.. Hmm, that’s only 20 days away! So it’s been great to be able to put in some rides to work as well as a few Saturday morning rides with the Mud, Sweat & Gears guys and girls.

    Personal and family

    Changing jobs feels like a big stress has gone. That is good. I’m still not sleeping well though, and am booked in to have a ‘sleep study’ later this month. I’m hopeful that might provide some clues and a way forward to not feeling tired most days.

    Close friends and colleagues know that my family seem to have a few health issues that we have to struggle with. I don’t expect 2015 will be dramatically different. Put it this way – I realised that I now am reasonably confident navigating my way around the local Emergency Department (which otherwise resembles a rabbit warren) now that I’ve had to visit there quite a few times.

    Looking ahead, other things to get done include getting an aquarium up and going (still deciding if we go for fish, or maybe a turtle). There’s also a chook shed that needs to be finished. The kids have already given names to our future chooks (you might sense a theme):

    • Princess Layer
    • Chook-backa
    • Hen solo
    • Bantam menace

    Our oldest will start his last year of Primary School, so selecting a High School will also be on the agenda (we’ve already been doing some research towards this).

    So there’s some of the things that stood out for 2014 and a few things coming up for 2015. I’m sure I’ve missed something!

    What were your significant events for 2014 and what are you looking forward to in 2015?

  • Jan 3, 2015

    Visual Studio Extensions

    As of January 2015, these are the Visual Studio extensions I currently have installed:

    Any other suggestions?

  • Dec 9, 2014

    Old new things for ADNUG

    For the longest time, updates for the Adelaide .NET User Group (ADNUG) were sent out by email. Then around 3 years ago the transition was made to use LinkedIn Groups. There’s currently over 200 members there.

    Earlier this year, I created a Twitter account for the group. Follow @AdlDNUG

    Tweets by @AdlDNUG

    A lot of user groups are also moving to Meetup to help coordinate their events. A few weeks ago ADNUG signed up, so you can now join https://www.meetup.com/Adelaide-dotNET/ and register to attend our events there.

    More recently I was wondering what happened to the old email list. Hopefully most made the switch to LinkedIn – but maybe some didn’t bother, so I figured it might be worth firing up the list again just to see if it would help get the word out a bit further. Using MailChimp, I now have the email list running again. I plan to send out an email about once a month with meeting news and other relevant info. If you’d like to subscribe, click here.

    Finally, after catching up with the ADNUG organising team today, I decided we should also be on Facebook. So if you like ADNUG, you can now share that fact with your friends!

    By the way, our next meeting is this Wednesday 10th December, 6pm at Marcellina Adelaide. David Rogers will be presenting on the MembershipReboot library and claims authentication. Register now!

    Looking ahead, as I mentioned in the email that went out a couple of days ago, I’m hoping to get some US-based Microsoft speakers to do virtual presentations next year. Just because we’re in Adelaide shouldn’t mean we can’t get access to great speakers where ever they might be – home grown, interstate, or even overseas.

    So now there’s lots of ways and lots of reasons to keep up with what’s happing with .NET in Adelaide!