European VAN on Ruby for Static Language Developers on 22 February 2011

We’re very proud to announce that Matt Yoho agreed to do a talk on Ruby for the next European VAN meeting. Matt is a developer and agile enthusiast with a love for Ruby and the web, working for EdgeCase, LLC in Columbus, Ohio. He’s going to discuss Ruby’s unique object model, the power of implicit self, the effects of dynamic execution as well as metaprogramming. Matt is also going to contrast this great dynamic language with other static programming languages while diving into duck-typing and some of the unique functional features of Ruby.

Here are the details:

Start Time: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 08:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Tuesday, February 22, 2011 09:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 08:00 PM UK, 09:00 PM Brussels, 03:00 PM EST, 01:00 PM MST and 12:00 Noon PST. For time zone arithmetic, you can consult the world clock site, use this time zone converter or every time zone.

This is a great opportunity to learn more about Ruby. We hope to virtually see you there.

Recording of Ayende on RavenDB @ E-VAN 11 January 2011

Ayende did a great speak at the first European VAN meeting of the new year. He talked about RavenDB, mostly doing hands-on coding with a couple of introductory slides at the beginning of the session. As always, Oren is very passionate about the stuff he is working on and certainly when it comes to RavenDB. Needless to say that he was really on a role. There was also a good turn-out of attendees, which made that there were lots of great questions as well.

For those who missed it, the recording is now available on Vimeo:

Ayende on RavenDB @ E-VAN 11 January 2011

The original file that we used for uploading can be downloaded from Vimeo as well. So you just have to log on (or register if you don’t have an account) and download the original recording in the right down corner. The quality of the original recording is slightly better. It’s also possible to  download the original OLM recording here. Keep in mind that this one will only be available for one year.

Details of the next E-VAN presentation will be posted soon.

European VAN on RavenDB on 11 January 2011

For the first E-VAN session of 2011, we’re going to continue our series on NoSQL. So we’re more than happy to announce that Oren Eini, also known as Ayende Rahien, agreed to do a talk on RavenDB. RavenDB is an open-source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform. RavenDB offers a flexible data model design to fit the needs of real world systems. RavenDB stores schema-less JSON documents, allow you to define indexes using Linq queries and focus on low latency and high performance.

I guess Oren barely needs an introduction as he’s a well known active member of the .NET open-source community (NHibernate, Rhino Mocks, Castle, etc. …), the author of DSL’s in Boo and the developer/inspirer behind products like NHibernate Profiler, EF Profiler, Linq to SQL Profiler and RavenDB. 

Here are the details:

Start Time: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 08:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 09:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 08:00 PM UK, 09:00 PM Brussels, 03:00 PM EST, 01:00 PM MST and 12:00 Noon PST. For time zone arithmetic, you can consult the world clock site, use this time zone converter or every time zone.

Make sure that you don’t miss this excellent learning opportunity and we hope to see you there.

Discussion on the State of (ALT).NET on 23 November 2010

We’ve been hearing and reading quite a lot lately about folks that were part of the ALT.NET community leaving the .NET platform and moving on to other development platforms, not only for late night coding but also for their day jobs. This seems to go along with these people ventilating a lot of frustration regarding the .NET community in general. The ALT.NET community efforts seems to be rapidly declining as well, probably due to the fact that many of the most active members were amongst the first to jump ship. What has changed in the .NET space over the past couple of years, or perhaps, what didn’t change. Do we eventually get fed up with the single vendor driven community or do we get frustrated with the second-class role of open-source in the .NET world?

We would love to have a discussion about this topic and also we would like some feedback about the E-VAN sessions we’ve been doing for the past 1,5 years now. We have some ideas we would like to share and we would love to hear others as well.   

Here are the details:

Start Time: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 08:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Tuesday, November 23, 2010 09:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 08:00 PM UK, 09:00 PM Brussels, 03:00 PM EST, 01:00 PM MST and 12:00 Noon PST. For time zone arithmetic, you can consult the world clock site, use this time zone converter or every time zone.

We hope to virtually see you there.

Glenn Block on “WCF - Evolving for the Web“ @ E-VAN 18 October 2010

Glenn Block did an excellent talk on the stuff that he and the WCF team are working on regarding REST and HTTP on the .NET platform. He showed us some of the work that has already been done and also talked about some of the plans for the future. Very interesting to see where this new embrace of HTTP on the .NET platform is headed.

For those who missed it, the recording is now available on Vimeo:

Glenn Block on WCF Evolving for the Web @ E-VAN 18 October 2010

The original file that we used for uploading can be downloaded from Vimeo as well. So you just have to log on (or register if you don’t have an account) and download the original recording in the right down corner. The quality of the original recording is slightly better. It’s also possible to  download the original OLM recording here. Keep in mind that this one will only be available for one year.

Details of the next E-VAN presentation will be posted soon.

Glenn Block on “Embracing HTTP in the .NET platform” on 18 October 2010

We’re happy to announce that Glenn Block agreed to do a talk about REST and embracing HTTP in the .NET platform. REST is a topic that has gotten quite a lot of attention on this format and with good reason. With his talk, Glenn is going to show us some of the investments that are being made to provide richer and more natural support for HTTP in WCF “vNext”. Glenn is going to talk about the work that has already been done and he’s also bringing an inside perspective on what the future will bring. So we’re more than willing to learn more about this new embracement of HTTP in the .NET stack.

For most of us, Glenn barely needs an introduction. Currently he’s a program manager on the WCF team working on Microsoft's future HTTP and REST stack. Prior to WCF he was a program manager on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in .NET 4.0.

Here are the details:

Start Time: Monday, October 18, 2010 07:00 PM GMT*

End Time: Monday, October 18, 2010 08:30 PM GMT

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)

VAN Calendar: http://www.virtualaltnet.com/Home/Calendar

(*) 08:00 PM UK, 09:00 PM Brussels, 03:00 PM EST, 01:00 PM MST and 12:00 Noon PST. For time zone arithmetic, you can consult the world clock site, use this time zone converter or every time zone.

Make sure that you don’t miss this excellent learning opportunity and we hope to see you there.

Recording of Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus @ E-VAN 29 September 2010

Andreas Öhlund performed an excellent hands-on coding session showing how to quickly get up to speed with NServiceBus. We could easily tell that Andreas is really passionate about this excellent open-source message bus. He covered the basics of sending messages but didn’t quite get around to demonstrate pub-sub. We’ll probably schedule a second part later on if Andreas agrees to come back on and further enlighten us with another coding session.

For those who missed it, the recording is now available on Vimeo:

Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus @ E-VAN 29 September 2010

The original file that we used for uploading can be downloaded from Vimeo as well. So you just have to log on (or register if you don’t have an account) and download the original recording in the right down corner. The quality of the original recording is slightly better. It’s also possible to  download the original OLM recording here. Keep in mind that this one will only be available for one year.

Details of the next E-VAN presentation will be posted soon.