David Gardiner - User Groups

Import Azure applications into Terraform

2025-05-26T22:00:00.000+09:30

I'm looking forward to presenting at the Adelaide Azure User Group next month about the process of importing a 'brownfield' Azure application into Terraform.

Terraform is a popular infrastructure as code tool. Starting off from scratch with Terraform is pretty straightforward. But what if you've already got your cloud infrastructure deployed but you didn't use Terraform, Bicep or another Infrastructure as Code tool? Maybe you just created resources in the Portal directly, or used the Azure CLI or PowerShell.

This talk steps through this scenario, demonstrating how to use tools to generate Terraform, common issues to watch out for, and hwo to make it work across multiple environments.

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Elgato Game Capture HD60S+ screen capture (now superseded by the model X)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.)

Moving a user group online

2020-04-19T21:30:00.000+09:30

The Adelaide .NET User Group has been meeting in various incarnations since waaaaay back in 1993. The group has been through changes of name, venue and leadership, but 2020 and specifically COVID-19 has presented a new challenge to the continuity of the group.

Our last in-person meeting was in early March, and at that time COVID was in the news but there were no restrictions on public gatherings. I did however rush out to buy some hand sanitiser for people to use before eating their pizza. Concern was growing, and in fact that same day my friend and fellow MVP Rob decided to call off the Adelaide Data and Analytics User Group meeting that was scheduled for the following week. (By that weekend it had become clear that Rob was on the money).

April's meeting had already been planned, but it had quickly become apparent that an in-person meeting would not possible. The choice was to either shut down the group for the duration, or find a way to go virtual. I was keen to explore the latter!

Our group (like Rob's) had hosted remote presenters before (not everyone is lucky enough to visit Adelaide in person), but this would involve everyone being remote which was a big change.

I did a lot of research into viable platforms to run the meeting on - reading blog posts, comments on Twitter and listening and asking questions from my fellow Microsoft MVPs in the ANZ region. Zoom was popular in the community, but it was around that time that it was getting all the wrong kind of press. Microsoft Teams was a service that I was familiar with (having used it for work and also for the recent MVP Summit). The aspect of Teams that I decided to use for our first fully virtual meeting was Microsoft Teams Live Events.

What swayed me to choose Live Events was that it had a fully-anonymous option to run public events which I felt would lower the barrier to entry for participation. I have a complimentary Office 365 tenancy provided as part of being a Microsoft MVP, so I made use of this to host the event.

My presenter for April was Andrew Best (who also happens to be my co-organiser for DDD Adelaide). We scheduled a test run the week before to try out the technology and also involved Simon Cook to sit in the 'audience' seat. For the test we actually tried out Teams Live Events and Teams Meetings, and from that we felt comfortable choosing Live Events.

Our group has been using Meetup.com for a number of years now to promote our meetings. They recently introduced the ability to add a link to online meetings. The problem I discovered was that they'd limited the link field to 250 chars, and a Teams Live Event URL was around 270! Using a URL shortener didn't work either (I tried) as they were parsing the text to limit it to a fixed list of virtual event providers. I reported this to Meetup.com and pleasingly they increased the field size a few days before our event.

Show time

I was all set up (including bringing in some extra lighting) and 6pm was rapidly approaching. I then got a message from Andrew - he was having trouble connecting to the event! But we'd tested it the week before, what had changed? As it happens, Andrew had actually changed jobs in that week, and it seems Teams was trying to use his old credentials

Rebooting and restarting Teams wasn't helping. Some frantic Googling came across this post, and applying the suggested solution unblocked Andrew. It did mean we started a little later than planned, but we didn't have to cancel. To make sure attendees realised that we were running late, I'd hit the 'Start' button on the Live Event and then let everyone know to sit tight while we did some troubleshooting the problem (rather than think it wasn't on).

Once the introduction and updates were out the way, I handed over to Andrew to do his presentation. I was in the Producer seat, so I could choose whether to show Andrew's screen-share, his webcam, or both. For most of the talk I left it on his screen, but as we were taking questions during the talk, I tried to switch to a screen+webcam view for those.

You can see in the photo above how you can queue up the next layout on the left. When you're ready to change the live stream you click on the Send Live button. The layout options are very basic compared to something like OBS, but they did the job nicely.

While the event was on we seemed to peak at around 47 concurrent viewers. Afterwards I downloaded the event usage report which said we had 114 unique people connect in that day. I think the difference could be some people might have connected in via different devices (or app vs web browser), but still 114 sounds impressive!

Post-event

The recording of the live event can be downloaded as an MPEG4 video file. My eldest daughter has access to Adobe's Creative Cloud so I asked her if she could edit the video for me in Premiere (removing the big delay at the start). I uploaded two resulting videos to YouTube. The first was my 'welcome, news and updates spiel' that I normally do at the start of our events, the second was Andrew's presentation.

The recordings are now published in the ADNUG YouTube channel

What worked

We have an Adelaide developer community Slack (called HeapsGoodDev - 'Heaps Good' being a particularly South Australian expression) that our group participates in. I'd promoted our Slack channel as a great place to have side and post event conversations, and also as a means to support anyone who was having trouble connecting.
Live Events worked just like it should have

What to watch out out for

A Teams Live Events event can only be started once, and once they're started, if you stop then that's it, there's no option to restart.
There's a decent lag between the presentation and what viewers see - around 20-30 seconds, so take that into account if you're asking for responses from attendees during the talk.
Live Events have a Q&A facility which allows attendees to ask a question. A moderator can then answer privately or choose to publish the question to everyone. It's a good way to manage questions, particularly from a larger group, but it isn't the same as an online chat - attendees can't chat with each other.
As we found out, Teams Live Events doesn't currently support sharing system sounds (unlike Teams Meetings).
Live Events starts the recording automatically as soon as you hit Start to begin the stream.

What's next

We've already got our next meeting planned, and will use Live Events for that.

I'm also thinking of running some shorter lunchtime meetings, and might try using Teams Meetings for these to make them a bit more informal.

One of the recommendations from the ANZ MVPs was to get your group its own Office 365 tenancy (rather than rely on an employer's or MVP's). I'd like to get the group our own Office 365 Business Essentials subscription.

EDITED TO ADD (21st April 2020): Office 365 Business Essentials includes Teams Meetings, but does not include Live Events. It looks like you'll need at least an Enterprise E1 license for that.

*[ADNUG]: Adelaide .NET User Group *[ANZ]: Australia and New Zealand *[MVP]: Most Valuable Professional

2018 draws to a close..

2018-12-26T17:24:00.000+10:30

2018 is almost done. It's the day after Christmas, about 38°C outside (just over 100°F in the old money - not uncommon for this time of year in Adelaide). As I sit here under the cooling, gentle breeze from the air conditioner, I've compiled some of my 2018 highlights. (Let me know in the comments if I've missed something obvious)

Work

RL Solutions are/have merged with Datix. No changes yet, other than getting to meet a couple of people from the Datix side (including from their Melbourne office).

Our Adelaide team also grew this year with some new hires. We do miss Tom (having lost him to Toronto), but we've managed to survive, and it was great to have him back for a week last month. A part from my coding and team lead responsibilities, Tom's move has meant I've picked up additional roles of office grocery/supplies organiser and local IT support.

One particular recent highlight was upgrading the office to a 1G fibre Internet connection, taking advantage of the 10G Adelaide initiative. That's been a huge win - bandwidth is essentially no longer a constraint on getting things done.

Toronto sent a lovely Christmas present to the Adelaide office. Yum!

User Group

The Adelaide .NET User Group has finished on a positive note. We've had increased attendances the last few months which is really encouraging. We've also had a sponsor come on board, which means we can run meetings for free now that our pizza costs are covered.

It would be great to have others join me in organising the group - it does concern me that I'm the 'single point of failure' at the moment.

In addition to monthly meetings, I'm looking forward to some announcements in the new year about a bigger developer event for Adelaide.

Presentations

Managed to do some user group talks locally as well as while I was in Toronto, but the highlight for the year was being picked to present as part of .NET Conf.

Travel

A bit less this year - two weeks in North America in March (Toronto for work and then Seattle/Redmond for the Microsoft MVP Summit). Coming down with a nauseous gastro-type bug for the last couple of days and the flight home was not a highlight. Definitely an incentive to remember good hand hygiene!

We also had a family holiday interstate and flew (instead of driving all the way). More costly, but quicker and less stressful.

Christmas

A significant time of year, and one I really enjoy. I have many happy memories of Christmases as a child, and I hope we're creating them for our kids now.

Our family traditions include taking part in our Church's Road to Christmas 'Bethlehem re-enactment', joining with friends to sing carols at a local hospital, attending a Christmas Eve church service, and then gathering with family for a meal on Christmas Day.

Bonus tip: My aunty told me that she buys a platter/plate from a 2nd hand shop for the food that she brings. That way she doesn't need to worry about having to remember to bring it home.

Turtles

We bought my son a turtle for his birthday the previous year. 'Nibbles' is now fast outgrowing his tank, so the current project is to build a pond out in the garden where he can live (the turtle, not my son!)

The pond shell/liner, redgum wood sleepers, a pump and filter, shade-cloth all add up to be a surprising amount. Not to mention the manual labour of digging the hole in the ground!

I think Nibbles will appreciate it when it's all done.

Nibbles the turtle, about to give the pond a test drive/swim

Sevenfold

That's the band I play in. We've had a few gigs this year, and might be doing some recording in 2019. I was sad when Jane (our violin/mandolin player) retired as that left me as the sole string player on 'Cello. I've had to pick up some of Jane's parts in some of our songs. Our last gig for the year was something a bit different (and special) - playing for Liz (who also sings in our band) as part of her service of ordination to become a Deacon.

Sound check, with Pete and Keith photo-bombing

When you're young, you sometimes dream about being a rock-star. Well that hasn't happened! But I do get to play instruments and sing on stage with good friends, and people seem to like our music, so while I'm not giving up my day job, it is a lot of fun.

Cycling

I try and get out for a ride when I can. Seemed to be less commute riding this year, but got out for a few Saturdays with the Mud, Sweat and Gears mob. Looking forward to the Tour Down Under in January and riding in the Challenge Tour with my Dad and my Son (3 generations of Gardiners) as well as brother-in-law James.

Family

I tend not to post much about my family here. If you know me personally then I might have shared a bit more about how we're all going. Needless to say, the kids are growing up fast!

Thanks for reading, see you in 2019 :-)

David

A Jon Skeet Meetup retrospective

2018-10-13T10:16:00.000+10:30

This week we hosted Jon Skeet at the Adelaide .NET User Group. Jon demonstrated some of the new language features coming in C# 8, and it was probably the biggest attendance we've had in a really, really long time.

Because we had so many registrations, I lined up some extra help with my two oldest kids (conveniently on school holidays). They helped set up the room, liaised with the pizza delivery guy, and helped pack up everything. I think they even found a few things familiar with Jon's use of Fibonacci sequences in one example and similarity of programming language features (my eldest daughter has been doing some Python coding at school).

Jon lives in the UK, and we're in Australia, so whilst we would have loved to have Jon in person, the next best thing was to have him present remotely. We've had remote presentations before using Google Hangouts, but this time I opted to use Skype (and made use of the new recording feature). I don't use Skype a lot, but we got the call up and running without too much difficulty.

I set up a webcam in the meeting room, along with a boundary microphone (an MXL AC404 USB Conference Microphone). The intention is that the presenter can see the audience, and the boundary microphone allows people to comment and ask questions from a fair way away (eg. right at the back of the room) and still be heard. This seemed to work pretty well - people up the back were able to ask questions and Jon seemed to hear them ok. Jon's video feed was pretty good. I think our feed back might have been a bit jumpy, but for the most part I think it was ok.

I left it to the last minute to arrange for access to the WiFi network at our venue. I ended up using my phone's 4G data for the call, which worked well. It was only after we'd finished that I discovered that an email had come through just before the start of the meeting with the WiFi details. At least I've got them for next time.

We also picked up a meeting sponsor this month in Simon Cook from Encode Talent Management. Being able to not charge attendees (to cover the cost of pizza) was great, and hopefully this relationship might continue in the future.

Skype notes:

The recording doesn't include the extra buttons/overlays/controls (which is good)
The recording will record a split-screen of web cams if they're both active. If you just want to have one webcam in the recording then you'll need to disable the other one. When screen sharing, then just that is recorded.
Taking a 'snapshot' follows similar rules as for recording. eg. a snapshot would include both webcams if they're active, or just the shared screen if one is being shared.
If the presenting person isn't using a headset, then to avoid echo it's probably best to mute the microphone (and just un-mute it for questions)
Making the overlay controls slide out of the way was inconsistent. Sometimes moving the mouse off the screen worked, but one time it didn't. Would be good to figure this out.
F11 makes Skype go full screen
Skype now supports NDI. This means it should be able to talk to software like OBS Studio if you wanted more control over broadcasting or recording. I don't know if the feed it sends is just the video/shared screen or if that also includes the control overlays etc.

Other notes:

Our regular room can hold a decent crowd if necessary.
People will eat as much pizza as there is available to eat
People don't drink much water (but this might change if it was warmer weather)
Organise wifi access earlier!
Windows 10 has simple video editing via the Photos app

The recording of Jon's talk is up on YouTube. I won't be giving up my day job to become a YouTube broadcaster anytime soon, but it's nice to have a record of a great presentation.

Skeet, Cogan and VS 2017 launch date announced

2017-02-10T21:23:00.001+10:30

It’s been a busy week!

On Wednesday evening we hosted the regular monthly meeting of the Adelaide .NET User Group in the Adelaide offices of RL Solutions. Our speaker was to be Jon Skeet talking about C# 7, joining us remotely from the UK. This involved a bit of logistical planning, including getting in enough seats for the expected crowd, getting a good PA (thanks Tom!), borrowing a nice data projector (thanks Keith!) and making sure everyone could get into the building after hours (thanks Vic!).

There were a few gotchas along the way – I’d remembered the front door to our building closes at 6pm, but forgot that the lifts required a security card from 5.30pm. Then my laptop decided to freeze its screen when I reconnected the data projector and tried to launch PowerPoint as we were about to start. We got everyone upstairs and I rebooted my laptop and Jon was able to present his talk. I then realised that the pizzas were going to be delivered too early. So a quick change of schedule to introduce a 5 minute interval in the middle of the talk so everyone could grab some food before continuing on with part 2. Not to mention Tom running out to get some disposable plates as I’d overlooked those too.

But in the scheme of things, they were all pretty minor. All in all, I think it was a pretty successful night and I think lots of positive comments about Jon’s talk and also our office (the bar was especially popular!)

We recorded the Hangout so you can watch Jon’s presentation:

Friday afternoon is not when we’d normally have a user group meeting, but Adam Cogan was keen to visit and give us a preview of his Ignite Conference talk on What’s New in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code. The timing of Adam’s talk turned out to be quite good, as Microsoft have just announced the release date for Visual Studio 2017. Set your alarms for 2.30am on March 8th (Adelaide time) for a live streaming launch event.

I’ve already got two speakers (Ben Laan on Load Testing and Bronwen Zande on HoloLens) lined up for March, so I think we’ll make April’s meeting our local Adelaide launch event for VS 2017 (combined with Jack Ni on IoT).

It’s going to be a busy year!

User group audio and video

2015-09-11T16:57:00.001+09:30

I’ve been pondering how to improve the ability of ADNUG (Adelaide .NET User Group) to do a decent job at:

Skype/Google Hangout video conferences – so that the remote presenter can see and hear attendees
Record audio of our group for a member with a vision impairment which means that they can’t physically attend meetings.

I’m not sure if there’s necessarily a huge overlap between those two requirements, but they both involve audio so they’re kind of related.

For the recent Google Hangout we had with Scott Hanselman, I purchased a Microsoft LifeCam Studio webcam. I mounted this on a tripod and used a couple of USB extension cables. Scott reported that the video quality was a bit poor with some flickering. I suspect the use of the extension cables might have reduced the quality of the signal too much – combined with the fact that I was only on Wifi instead of using the network cable (that I only noticed when the meeting was almost over!). The tripod mount is definitely a plus though.

Scott recommended the Logitech Webcam 930e, which has the advantage of being wider-angle (90° vs the LifeCam’s 75°). I’ll see how I go with the Microsoft camera, otherwise trading up might be an option.

Sound-wise was also not ideal. I didn’t have any complaints with previous hangouts earlier in the year with Jon Galloway and Sayed Hashimi, but maybe Scott was possibly more interactive and wanted to hear questions raised from and converse with the crowd. As it was, I had to repeat the questions for him (as I was standing near my laptop). So a microphone that can pick up the whole room would be great.

It seems the kind of microphone I’d need to pick up is a a conference or ‘boundary’ type. Most of these are ‘omni-directional’, meaning they pick up sound in all directions and from a wide area – contract that with a normal vocal mic, which works best right in front of your mouth.

For a USB solution, these models from MXL seem to be well regarded:

For an XLR connector (XLR is the 3-pin connector commonly used with professional audio equipment), then maybe something like this:

The meeting we had this week at Marcellina had over 40 people in attendance. It turns out Marcellina function room has their own PA system, so I was glad to make use of that so that everyone could hear better. Having said that, they just have a hand-held microphone with no mic-stand – so that can get tricky if you’re speaking and trying to type at the same time.

Having a mic and loud speaker was a big help to the people in the room, but I didn’t have time beforehand to see if I could hook into their amplifier to record the audio. Instead to make the audio recording of the meeting, I just used the Windows 10 Voice Recorder app on my laptop (using my laptop’s inbuilt microphone), and just left that running for the duration of the talks.

A lapel microphone would be ideal, and wireless even better (so you’re free to walk around).

Audio2000 AWM-6032UL UHF Dual Channel Wireless Microphone System with One Handheld & One Lapel (Lavalier) Mic. This kit with a wireless hand-held and lapel would be pretty nice – wire up the main presenter with the lapel, which leaves the hand-held for the MC.

I get the impression that if you got the XLR-type microphones, you really need some kind of mixer/pre-amp that you’d then feed into the laptop (or other recording device).

Something like one of these:

So who knows if we ever get any of this. Given the costs, most of it’s probably just a pipe-dream. Having said that I’d appreciate any thoughts/suggestions/feedback on the options above or other ways that we might take some ‘baby-steps’ to improve things just a little bit.

2014 in review

2015-01-04T09:00:00.000+10:30

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

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?

Old new things for ADNUG

2014-12-09T22:58:00.001+10:30

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!

Structured JavaScript within ASP.NET MVC

2014-09-05T06:19:00.001+09:30

First off, run (don't walk) and go and register for next week's ADNUG talk.

Done that?

Great, I'll see next Wednesday evening!

What? You need more convincing? Ok..

I've worked with Ben Laan for a number of years now and I'd have to say he's probably one of THE best developers I know around the place. He seriously knows his stuff, and is just as comfortable optimising a SQL query on the back-end as he is tweaking CSS layout in the frond-end UI. So I was really pleased when he agreed to come and speak at next week's Adelaide .NET User Group (ADNUG).

To quote from the presentation summary:

Modern web development calls for more JavaScript than ever before. Loose, unorganised script files are no longer acceptable – or sometimes manageable. It is important to ensure those scripts are logically organised, structured, and testable, to ensure code quality.

This presentation will review techniques for organising code to meet these goals within an ASP.NET MVC context using RequireJs – a system for dependency management and Qunit – a unit test framework build by the JQuery team.

Ben's been living and breathing this stuff recently, so I know it's going to be a really good evening. Even if you don't do .NET I think you'll pick up a lot of tips on the writing better JavaScript.

So now I've convinced you, go and register and I'll see you at there 😀

ADNUG meets monthly on the second Wednesday of the month, at Marcellina Adelaide (273 Hindley St, Adelaide). Pizza from 6pm followed by presentation(s), finishing around 7.30pm