David Gardiner - ADNUG

ADNUG Streaming struggles

2024-02-05T08:00:00.000+10:30

Back in 2020, the Adelaide .NET User Group switched to a virtual-only format due to pandemic restrictions. When we returned to being able to meet in person in 2021, I was keen to maintain some of the connections we'd made while we were running online, particularly with folks who joined us from interstate and overseas, as well as Adelaide people who for any reason aren't able to be in the room.

I already had a Microsoft LifeCam Studio Webcam (available as business or the more pricey regular models) which we'd used when video-conferencing with a remote speaker, and an MXL AC-404 boundary microphone that I'd been using for a few years to record audio for the group podcast.

I had some funds put aside for the user group as well as a generous donation, so I decided to put that towards some hardware to help with streaming our meetings. I bought the following gear:

Elgato Game Capture HD60S+ screen capture (now superseded by the model X)
Rode Wireless GO II USB wireless microphones.

Both of these are well-regarded brands so I felt confident that I had selected reliable products to use. If only that was the case.

First attempt

I did some testing at home and everything seemed to work ok and headed off to our April meeting. Having the two wireless mics would be handy as we had a presentation planned with two speakers.

I had brought two laptops - one to manage the stream and the other to present the introductory slides. But the Rode mics just refused to work. They were turned on, and the status on the receiver showed levels from the two transmitters, but nothing was showing up on the computer. A lot of fiddling, and rebooting to no avail. In the end, I had to resort to using the MXL boundary microphone. Unfortunately it didn't work as well for picking up the presenters and people on the stream were having real trouble hearing.

Next month

The following month I'd done some further testing. I discovered that the Rode mics worked with my older laptop, but not the newer one. Not sure why, but I suspect there might be something a little odd with the USB audio on that device.

The next problem we hit was that the data projector didn't seem happy having the Elgato capture device plugged in. The display in the room we normally use is a multi-screen wall display (so not an actual projector).

We've had issues with this display in the past, even before we tried streaming. Some laptops just didn't like it (they'd display for a few seconds, then the screen would go blank). It was so bad we ended up having to do a screen share from the speaker's laptop to another laptop that was known to work with the display. I'm guessing there's some kind of signal strength issue, but it is hard to know for sure. We use a room at the University of South Australia, and the equipment probably gets a fair bit of wear and tear.

I ended up removing the capture device and not streaming that month.

And then

In the months that followed we tried various combinations and managed to get the stream to work, but there was always the uncertainty of not knowing until the last minute whether it was going to work correctly or not.

The audio was refined a bit by making use of the Rode Connect application to allow the mixing/muting of the two wireless mics. Much easier to mute the mics remotely, rather than having to ask the presenters to turn their mics on and off. The only downside is that the audio from Rode Connect comes into OBS Studio as a single channel, rather than two separate ones.

Working on the theory that the video signal strength might be the problem, I wondered if an HDMI signal amplifier might help. I bought a StarTech.com HDBOOST4K 4K 60Hz HDMI Signal Booster and tried it out. It did seem to provide a bit more stability, but that element of doubt remained. One issue that remained was that switching presenter laptops would still interrupt the signal. The Elgato seemed to need a power cycle to cope with the change.

So we had something that worked, but it could be better.

Next steps

Late last year I happened to be watching the live stream from Brisbane .NET User Group's meeting and was able to ask them how they manage their broadcast. From memory, they just had a large-screen TV in the room, so didn't have the challenges we experienced with room display. But also differently, rather than trying to capture video with a passthrough device like the Elgato, they use a video splitter to send the signal to both the TV and a separate capture device. The capture device they use is similar to this HDMI to USB-C Type-C Video Capture Card.

So now I've bought the following to try out at the next meeting:

Simplecom CM412 HDMI 2 Port HDMI Duplicator
4K HDMI USB-C Capture Card (similar to the model above).

I'm not sure how the HDMI splitter will go - I fear the multi-screen display might not like it either, but it's worth a shot, and they're not that expensive.

The fallback option is to drive the multi-screen display from the streaming laptop's external display. We use OBS Studio for streaming so the idea would be to map the output preview to the external display. In this way, the room display will have a constant signal, and in theory, we can switch input laptops without annoying the room display.

As an aside, one other positive is that my latest laptop does work correctly with the Rode mics.

Future thoughts

One challenge that remains is having to switch between different scenes in OBS Studio and also muting and unmuting the mics. Something like an Elgato Stream deck might make that easier (instead of needing to alt-tab between OBS and Rode Connect applications).

It would also be nice to have a better solution for in-person audience questions. We do have the MXL boundary mic, but a handheld mic would give clearer audio. Something for the wishlist!

If Rode ever updated Rode Connect to provide separate audio channels, that would be nice too.

I'll write a follow-up post down the track to report on how everything went. Check out the meeting recordings on our YouTube channel too.

(Amazon links are affiliate links.)

ADNUG Survey 2022 Results

2022-05-08T18:30:00.000+09:30

We recently ran a survey of the Adelaide .NET User Group membership, and had 23 responses. While that's not a huge number compared to the 1538 people who have currently registered in our Meetup group, it's in the ballpark of how many people we'd get attending an actual meetup event. So in that respect it's useful.

The 10 questions ranged over what time(s) are most convenient for people to meet, what topics are of interest, to what kind of food would they prefer.

Style of meetup

9 people voted for hybrid
7 people voted for in-person
6 people voted for virtual

Requested topics

Accessibility
Amazon
Azure
Basic good practices or framework design
Blazor
Cloud
Code Builders
Coding best practices
C# new features
Development patterns
DevOps
Dependency Injection
Event driven design
MAUI
Microservices
Mobile app dev
New technologies
People’s experience and insight using technology
Real world experiences & “war stories”
Secure coding
Serverless
Software Architecture
Testing
Unity
Visual Studio tooling
Visual Studio updates
Web API
Web development
Why .NET6

Participation

Appreciate the networking time afterwards Hybrid/virtual - useful especially for those who don't work in the city

Start times

In-person - 12 like 5.30pm, 5 preferred 6pm
Virtual (evening) - 9 like 5.30pm, 6 for 6pm
Virtual (daytime) - 10 for 12 noon, 9 for 12.30pm

Most people seem to like the 5.30pm start. I did wonder if more would like a later start for a virtual event (which is why I split the questions).

For daytime events (these are often when we get a US speaker presenting remotely), then it's almost evenly split between 12 noon and 12.30 (possibly an indication of when folks stop for lunch!)

Catering

15 like pizza, 5 like subway

Pizza is definitely a favourite, but sounds like we should mix it up with the occasional subway.

Other comments

A bunch of nice compliments. That was much appreciated!

Now what

My general sense is people are happy with what we've been doing. As we look to return to in-person events then there's definitely interest in still being able to attend those virtually (eg. hybrid).

I'm always looking for presenters. If you see a topic above that you know something about, or that you'd like to learn more about by putting a talk together, I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU!!

Microsoft Build 2020 highlights

2020-05-20T08:30:00.000+09:30

Microsoft Build 2020 started early this morning. I've never had the opportunity to attend the US Build conference in person, so the fact that this year they're running it as a virtual conference for free is awesome! Here's a few of the highlights and announcements that have stood out to me so far:

Windows Terminal 1.0 released. I've been using Windows Terminal for a few months now and it's become my go-to command-line environment.
WSL2. WSL2 ships with Windows 10 20-04. I made the jump to the Slow Ring to check out WSL2 on my new workstation. There's a few rough edges around running mixed containers (Windows and Linux at the same time) so hoping those get sorted out when it goes GA. Interesting that they're adding GPU support to WSL2 as well.
Blazor WebAssembly is now officially released. I haven't played with this at all but it's on my radar.
Visual Studio 2019 v16.6 & v16.7 Preview 1 - Time to spin up the Visual Studio Installer and make sure you're running the latest GA and Preview bits. Watch the recording of me exploring some of the new features in 16.6 which was run as an event of the Adelaide .NET User Group.
.NET 5 Preview 4 - The next version of .NET Core, now just called '.NET' and skipping v4 to avoid confusion with the old .NET Framework. Some nice performance improvements as well as the next versions of C# and F#.
Teams support for NDI - this will be of interest to those wanting to use OBS or similar live video production applications with Microsoft Teams.

It's going to be a challenge getting my regular work done as well as keeping an eye on all the sessions that are running today and tomorrow. Fortunately, sessions that I miss will be up on Channel 9 to watch at a more convenient time.

COVID-19

2020-03-18T14:00:00.000+10:30

Wow, that escalated fast. In the space of just a few weeks:

The MVP Summit trip to Seattle and Redmond was cancelled (and replaced with a virtual conference).
My daughter's school long anticipated school trip to Spain has been cancelled/deferred.
Massive government interventions.
People are dying.
Many people (particularly those in service industries) are (or soon will be) doing it really tough.
Our family is increasing our social distance as much as possible.
I'm planning to run the next few months of ADNUG as online virtual meetings.
I'm now working from home for the forseeable future. I appreciate that my job allows me to do that - not everyone has that option.

To avoid being cooped up in the house the entire day, the last couple of mornings before starting work I've gone for a short walk around the neighbourhood with my other daughter. It emulates my walk to the bus stop. Hopefully we can make it a regular thing.

Apparently my legs are a bit longer than hers, so a short break on a seat in the park along the way is required :-)

This is going to be a very disruptive time. Things aren't too bad (yet) where I live, but the stories from overseas are quite scary. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones.

March update

2020-03-06T15:00:00.000+10:30

January and February have come and gone, and March is now well underway. Autumn seems to have definitely hit Adelaide, though I wonder if there might still be some warmer weather around before Winter arrives? Time will tell.

Out of the ordinary

This year was the first in a long time that we didn't take part in the Tour Down Under community ride. The route wasn't particularly inspiring this year, so we gave it a miss. Hopefully 2021 will be better and the Gardiner boys will be back in lycra, raring to go!
I was all booked to fly over to Seattle/Redmond to attend Microsoft's annual MVP Summit, but it was announced this week that it has been cancelled, and an online/virtual event will be run in its place. Thank Coronavirus for making this one of many large events that have been impacted. So, I'm staying in Adelaide instead of cramming myself into an international economy seat for 24 hours (plus the return flight home). As I said on Twitter, it is disappointing but I think Microsoft made the right call considering the circumstances.

Also interesting to read about Microsoft asking their Redmond-based employees to work from home (if possible) for the rest of March.

ADNUG

The Adelaide .NET User Group is back for 2020. There's been huge interest in next week's meeting, which is great to see. I'm hoping to fill out the speaker schedule for the next few months. Do get in touch if you'd like to present to the group (and that can be in-person, or remote via Skype/Teams).

If I have one wish for the group, it's that I could find someone(s) to share the organising with. It would be good to have some load balancing (or at least a fail-over cluster!) Related to that, we've actually launched the ADNUG 2020 Member Survey. Please share your thoughts (and be in the running for a $100 book voucher).

I must say it's been really great to have Simon and Kristine from Encode Management on-board as both sponsors and supporters - and I know they're also working with other meetups in Adelaide too. It would be easy (and I think it has happened in the past) that sponsors just give some money, or might just pop their head in, but the folks from Encode are regular attendees and are often one of the last to leave after helping pack up. That sincerity and encouragement count for a lot in my book. And speaking of books, it's Encode that are putting up the aforementioned book voucher. Awesome!

DDD Adelaide 2020

I caught up with Andrew this week to kick of planning for DDD Adelaide 2020, with our traditional 'DDDumplings' lunch meeting. We should really get Dumpling King on board as a major sponsor :-)

Jon Galloway on new things in ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6

2015-04-01T16:58:00.001+10:30

We’ve got another “big name international speaker” for ADNUG this month!

Next week, we’re joined by Jon Galloway, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist based in San Diego, California. Jon will be speaking about the new features coming in both ASP.NET 5 and ASP.NET MVC 6. I assume we’ll see the final versions of these around the same time that Visual Studio 2015 ships.

I first came across Jon through his being one of the presenters of the Herding Code podcast (I’ve been listening since 2009). More recently, I’ve watched some of his courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy, seen him appear weekly in the ASP.NET 5 Community Stand-ups and been following him on Twitter. He’s an engaging, knowledgeable, down-to-earth presenter and I’m anticipating it will be a great meeting.

If you’re in Adelaide, then please register and come along on Thursday 9th April at 12 noon, Microsoft Adelaide, Level 12, 147 Pirie St, Adelaide. Register via http://www.meetup.com/Adelaide-dotNET/events/221073867/

If you’re out of town or just can’t make it in person, then we’ll be running the session via a Google Hangout – so you can still participate in the live session or watch the recording after the event on YouTube.

Look forward to seeing you there in person or online 😀.