17th March - A good day for tech events

North East Bytes: Visual Studio 2010 and System Center

The March meeting of NEBytes is looking like a really good one with two excellent speakers making the trip up to Newcastle. For developers, we have Richard Fennell of Black Marble taking about Visual Studio 2010 and for the IT Pros, Matt McSpirit of Microsoft is coming to talk about System Center in the R2 Wave.

Richard is offering to let the audience vote on the content of his session; with so much to cover in Visual Studio 2010, he wants to make sure that his session hits the top four topics that people are interested in.

Matt's session also has a lot of ground to cover, but as a Microsoft Partner Technology Advisor, he has plenty experience to know which are the bits that are most important to the people using the technology: With more and more organisations thinking about virtualisation, there has never been a better time to investigate what the complimentary System Center management tools can bring to the table.  From deep monitoring, patching, backup, and virtual machine management, the System Center Management Suite is the most comprehensive, unified management solution in the marketplace today, for organisations big and small.  In this session, you'll learn about a number of the key technologies making up the suite, how they are licensed, and how they can help you achieve a new level of efficiency and control.

If you fancy joining us:

NB. There's a football match in Newcastle that evening, and from past experience, we know that means parking is a bit of a nightmare. You may want to check out Newcastle City Council's information on car parking before setting off.

NITKon 2010 PowerShell Day

For those closer to Norway than North East England, there's a real PowerShell treat in store for you:

The Norsk IT Konferanse 2010 (NITKon 2010) is running from 15th to 17th March in Oslo, and the 17th is going to be PowerShell Day, with Bruce Payette, Principal Developer on the PowerShell Team at Microsoft, along with PowerShell MVPs Dmitry Sotnikov, Thomas Lee and Ragnar Harper. That's a great line-up and if I wasn't already busy I'd be really temped to see if I could get there!

NEBytes February Event: Direct Access and Dynamic Consumption in C#

After over 80 attendees enjoyed the North East Bytes launch event in January, we've got another great event lined up for this month.

Direct Access has been the most requested session topic recently, so I'm very pleased to have two presenters to cover it at this meeting. We're glad to welcome Dr Dan Oliver (Managing Director of Sa-V Ltd a Newcastle based Infrastructure Optimization Microsoft Partner) back to speak, and coincidentally the day after I'd confirmed Dr Dan, Conrad Sidey from Microsoft also offered to do the session. I'm happy to say that they're going to collaborate to present Direct Access together.

From speaking to people in the IT pro community, I don't think that people are as excited about Direct Access as they will be when they realise what it gives them...

While an IT pro may sell Direct Access to the management as a "better VPN", where drives can be automatically mapped at logon and all the good stuff that the user gets from logon scripts that connect to resources on the LAN, users are pretty much used to "getting by" with the VPN they're already using. Where the story is really improved by Direct Access is that laptops hooking up to various connections around the world now stay under the scope of management, the same as any other domain computer that's wired to the LAN. I'm sure I don't need to go into detail about all the benefits of that!

There are a lot of people who appear to be scared of the requirement for IPv6, and in fairness if you don't currently have any IPv6, that isn't an insignificant barrier to entry, however you don't need your whole network to be IPv6 enabled in order to use Direct Access.

And for developers, Oliver Sturm is an experienced presenter who really knows his stuff, so his session on Dynamic Consumption in C# 4.0 should be a good one.

It should be a really good event, so grab your ticket:

Windows Server User Group

If I lived in the South East of England, I would've been going along to meetings of both the Active Directory User Group and the Windows Server Team. For those of you who do live an easily commutable distance from London, you might be interested to hear that these two groups have merged and now exist as the Windows Server User Group (WSUG).

The site is a little bit basic at the moment, but there are online forums there covering a range of Active Directory and other Windows Server topics, and knowing Mark Parris and Mark Wilson who are running the group, there'll be lots of good things to come. Even if you wouldn't find it easy to get to the group's meetings, if you work with these technologies, it may be a site you'll want to check out.

Introducing North East Bytes (NEBytes) a new Microsoft Usergroup for the North East of England

We are pleased to announce a new User Group in the North East of England, based around Microsoft technologies: North East Bytes (NEBytes).  We have decided to start this group in order to help Developers and IT Pros in the community with the constant battle to learn, stay current and broaden their knowledge.

We run monthly meetings every third Wednesday of the month (except on the second Wednesday in December – to allow time for Christmas parties and shopping!) at Newcastle University.  Each meeting consists of two one hour presentations (one Developer topic and one IT Pro topic) and we have refreshments, food, giveaways and prizes.

Attendance at our meetings is completely FREE!! The venue is provided kindly by the University, our Speakers kindly provide their time for free, and we as organisers provide our time for free to organise the events.  We will provide refreshments and we also provide hot food, all we ask is if you would like to partake in the the hot food, please make a small donation towards the cost via the open contribution box at each meeting.

Our Launch Event is to be on Wednesday 20th January 2010 (from 6pm), we are delighted to have Mike Taulty visiting to cover Silverlight and James O’Neill to cover Hyper-V, and we're teaming up with the SharePoint User Group UK to bring an overview of SharePoint 2010 too! We are really looking forward to this great event and hope to see lots there to help us celebrate our launch!

Head over to NEBytes.net for more details.

9th December, Newcastle: Windows Azure - What's In The Cloud

Microsoft's Simon Davies will look at what Windows Azure provides, how to use it and some of the common usage scenarios. This session will cover some of the new details of which were announced at the Professional Developers Conference in November.

 

Venue: Room 118, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 7RU, GB

Time: 18:45

Price: FREE

 

To register: - http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/December-2009/VBUG-NEWCASTE-Windows-AZURE--Whats-In-The-Cloud.aspx