Better Background Tasks using Serverless Functions and SignalR with Chris Dix

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, June 25th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Web applications commonly need to run background tasks. The problem is that we want to run them outside of the web application while still providing feedback about their execution. Using a combination of serverless functions for processing and SignalR for communication, we can build web applications that can reliably run complex tasks while still providing real-time feedback to the user. This session will introduce both serverless functions and SignalR, and we will show how you can create a simple framework for your background tasks to use in all cloud providers.

The meeting presenter is Chris Dix.

Chris Dix is the CEO and Chief Developer at Thoughtpost. Chris has over 20 years of software development experience and has partnered with several MSPs to develop custom Connectwise integrations. A former Microsoft MVP, Chris has contributed to books and articles and spoken at many national industry conferences. At Thoughtpost, Chris leads the development of their messaging platform for MSPs, which provides deep integration support for Connectwise, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

The meeting sponsor is Signature Consultants.

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Strategies for Handling Big Data with Cosmos DB with Aaron Rowan

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, May 28th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. How do you best ingest large amounts of data? In this presentation, Aaron will review some of the steps Collins Aerospace undertook to build a large scale, mostly serverless data ingestion system using a globally distributed, multi-model database service. The general model is expandable to all cloud providers.

More specifically, we will dig into these elements of the journey:

• NoSQL vs. SQL Thinking
• CAP Theorem and Working with Consistency
• Managing RUs and Cost
• Scaling and Global Replication
• Indexing and Partition Key Selection
• Querying using SQL-API

The meeting presenter is Aaron Rowan.

Aaron has been writing code and involved in tech since he was working on his Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Early in his career, he worked with energy usage monitoring and data collection for manufacturing. Today, he is collecting and analyzing data from commercial aircraft for preventive maintenance. (https://utcaerospacesystems.com/aftermarket-services/flightsense/)

He lives in Huntersville with his Wife and 4-year-old daughter. For an interesting conversation, you should ask him about mentoring the FIRST Robotics State Title Winning team.

The meeting sponsor is Pinnacle Solutions Group.

Progressive Web Apps with Adam Vaden

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, April 23rd, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Progressive Web Applications (PWA) challenges us to reimagine what a web app is, and it’s capabilities. In this talk we will cover the what, why, and how of PWAs. We will take a look at some popular PWAs and see how innovators are using PWAs to address complex business needs. We will also dissect a PWA to learn how to build these new apps and how you may be able to leverage them for your existing applications.

The meeting presenter is Adam Vaden.

Adam is the Co-Owner and Chief Technologist of V2 Tools, an emerging software consulting firm. He has a passion for software and is always experimenting with the latest technology. His current focus is on Kubernetes and bringing the platform to the arm ecosystem. Adam has experience architecting and building applications that range from integrating custom control plane software to distributed real-time data processing systems.

The meeting sponsor is Gravity IT Resources.

xUnit Design Patterns for the Enterprise with Payne Miller

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, March 26th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Everyone has seen “unit testing.” Create an object, set some properties, then assert correctness. But that style of unit testing is just the tip of the iceberg! Come find out how xUnit Test Patterns create meaningful, maintainable, and useful unit tests for enterprise solutions.

The meeting presenter is Payne Miller.

Payne is a mobile developer who is currently branching into cloud development. Born in the small town of Mocksville, NC, Payne came to UNCC in 2010 where he majored in Computer Science. Shortly after graduation, Payne found his way to Cardinal Solutions, which is now a division of Insight Enterprises. Payne has a passion for unit testing, clean code, Scrum, and fitness.

The meeting sponsor is Insight.

High-performance Stream-Oriented Processing Systems for IoT with Riccardo Terrell

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, February 26th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Real-time event-based systems process millions of messages per second by defining and combining small flows to create processing graphs. This talk covers the concepts behind streamed-oriented processing systems using high-performance messaging queue systems like Kafka and Akka Streams.

Real-time applications are dominating the industry! Data is the main ingredient in Internet-based, social media and Internet of things (IoT) systems, which generate continuous streams of events used for real-time analytics. This poses a tremendous challenge due to the massive volume of data collected and processed. These event-based real-time analysis systems can efficiently handle millions of messages per second through new generation solutions by simply defining small flows and then combining them to create processing graphs. In this talk, will cover the concepts behind high-performance streamed-oriented big data processing systems. We will explore messaging queue systems like Kafka and Akka Streams which let developers define their process workflows at a higher level to describe a graph system enabling high throughput. You will learn how to integrate high-performance stream message queues and how to define process workflows in C# and F#.

The meeting presenter is Riccardo Terrell.

Riccardo Terrell is a seasoned software engineer and Microsoft MVP who is passionate about functional programming. He is active in the .NET community and the author of “Functional Concurrency in .NET,” which features how to develop highly-scalable systems in F# & C#. Riccardo believes in polyglot programming as a mechanism for finding the right tool for the job. You can read his blog at www.rickyterrell.com and follow him on Twitter at @TRikace.

The meeting sponsor is TEKsystems.

Design for Enterprise Developers with Niel Sutton

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, January 22nd, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Any successful product begins with great design, and the field of design and user experience (UX) continue to get more attention. But how does this apply to enterprise development? If you have a designer or team of designers, how can you ensure you are working with them in the best way? What if your organization doesn’t have any designers? In this talk, we will discuss an overview of the design/UX landscape, tips for working design into your current build process, and finally some advice on how to build your design expertise.

The meeting presenter is Niel Sutton.

Niel Sutton is a User Experience (UX) Architect Manager in Microsoft Services. While in college, he was an intern at a startup where his naïve loyalty to Linux and penguins nearly got in the way of an exciting opportunity to work at Microsoft. Niel began his career answering support calls for MFC and C++. He never imagined that years later he would have a role leading UX Architects around the world and helping customers navigate digital transformation.

The meeting sponsor is Signature Consultants.

Rethinking Business Rules – From Creation to Code with Jamie Dixon

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, November 27th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room (formerly named MPR or the Multi-Purpose Room) of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. If you work with business applications, you certainly have business rules. As obvious as it might sound, how you collect, write, and organize your rules go a long way in determining the success of your application. In this talk, we will take a look at business rules: where they come from, different ways we write them in code, and how we glue them together to make up an application. We will then look at how the move to serverless computing forces us to rethink how we write and compose our rules.

This talk is in C# and F# using Visual Studio and Azure.

The meeting presenter is Jamie Dixon.

Jamie Dixon has been writing code for as long as he can remember and has been getting paid to do it since 1995. He was using C# and javascript almost exclusively until discovering F# and, more recently, Python. Jamie now combines all four languages for the problem at hand. He has a passion for discovering overlooked gems in data sets and merging software engineering techniques to scientific computing. Jamie has a BSCS in Computer Science and a Masters in Public Health. He is the former Chair of his town’s Information Services Advisory Board and is an outspoken advocate for Open Data. He is a 4-time Microsoft MVP and the author of Mastering .NET Machine Learning. You can find him on Twitter at @jamie_dixon

The meeting sponsor is Pratt & Miller Engineering.

Performance and Scalability in Azure using CQRS Patterns with Jon Banta

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, October 23rd, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room (formerly named MPR or the Multi-Purpose Room) of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Take a deep dive into the CQRS pattern to help design enterprise systems in Azure. Learn Azure features that re-enforce the CQRS pattern that drives performance, scalability, and maintainability in a cloud environment. Discover how the pattern relates to microservices, RESTful APIs, security/trust boundaries and use practical examples to compare/contrast the pros/cons of the pattern.

The meeting presenter is Jon Banta.

Jon is a software architect of 20 yrs currently in Charlotte working in the FinTech space. He specializes in large system architectures and comprehensive security platforms. He has a background in many different industries including Banking, Motorsports, Logistics, and Gaming. Originally from Las Vegas, NV, if he is not coding, he is spending time with his wife and three kids.

The meeting sponsor is Pinnacle Solutions Group.

Refactoring to Testable Code with Richard Taylor

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on Tuesday, September 25th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room (formerly named MPR or the Multi-Purpose Room) of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Most developers have the responsibility of working with an existing codebase. In many circumstances, the existing code was not designed with testing in mind. This does not allow leveraging of automated testing to reduce risk and improve quality. To realize the value of automated testing, this existing code must be refactored which is not always easy to accomplish. By attending this session, you will learn several techniques to refactoring code that was not designed to be testable. In addition, a unit test will be added to the newly refactored code and executed as a part of an automated test suite.

The meeting presenter is Richard Taylor.

Richard Taylor is a 25-year software development and technology professional living in Huntersville, NC. His experience includes the design and development of small to enterprise-class applications. For the last ten years, he has focused on web-based applications, and that is where his passion lives.

When not developing software, Richard focus is on spending time with his lovely wife Shondrecca and their five children (Richard III, Ayanna, David, Jonathan, and Stephen).

The meeting sponsor is SentryOne.

Ethereum and the Azure Blockchain Workshop with Jason Petrin

Join the Enterprise Developers Guild and me on August 28th, at 6:00 PM in the Redwood Conference Room (formerly named MPR or the Multi-Purpose Room) of the Microsoft Charlotte Office. Blockchain, Ethereum, Smart Contracts, what are they? How do they work? How can I leverage them for my business? In this session, we will begin to answer these questions. We will discuss what a blockchain is. We will dive a little deeper into one of the popular blockchain frameworks, Ethereum. We will talk about what a Smart Contract is and how it fits into this ecosystem. Finally, we have a demonstration of the Azure Blockchain Workshop and some sample smart contracts.

The meeting presenter is Jason Petrin.

Jason Petrin is a Consultant at Cardinal Solutions Group, where he works with different clients to build their products in the cloud. Jason has been working as a consultant for over a decade in the Charlotte area and has focused on creating cloud solutions for the past eight years.

The meeting sponsor is Signature Consultants.