NEBytes Event this Wednesday - Exchange 2010 and WCF Data Services

This Wednesday, 16th June, the 7th North East Bytes meeting of the year has NEBytes co-founder Ben Lee talking about Exchange 2010 and Iain Angus of Black Marble covering WCF Data Services. Here are the full details...

"WCF Data Services" with Iain Angus
WCF Data Services is a framework for exposing data layers in a REST-ful manner. This session will look at how WCF, REST and LINQ come together to form Microsoft's latest data access technology. Topics covered include implementing and consuming data services, why IQueryable and IUpdatable are important, service operations / interceptors and concurrency.

"Exchange 2010, Product Overview And Example Architectures" with Ben Lee
Exchange 2010 is the latest generation of Microsoft’s enterprise messaging suite. This session will provide an overview of the platform, focusing on the architecture changes including the simplified storage topology, resiliency options as well as the improvements to the end users. If you didn’t know what a DAG was before the session, you certainly will by the end!

This free event is hosted at Newcastle University from 18:30 to 21:30 and if you'd like to come along, please register at Eventbrite.

NEBytes May Event - Making Powerful use of PowerShell 2.0 Easily

I'm a bit slow posting this one, especially since I was the one who planned it from the start, but better late than never. Next Wednesday evening, 19th May, I will be presenting at NEBytes in Newcastle on PowerShell 2.0. Here's the overview...

With the launch of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2, PowerShell became part of the core OS and added a bunch of 2.0 features. In this session, aimed at existing users of PowerShell as well as beginners, we'll cover some of the new aspects of PowerShell which IT Professionals can use easily to manage their Windows systems. This will include remoting, background jobs, advanced functions, script debugging and more. There are some deep concepts at play here, but this session will make them accessible enough for you to start working straight away. For those with no experience of working with PowerShell, there will be a quick on-ramp to get you going.

Also on the bill is a developer session from Phil Pursglove entitled The Need For Speed: A Developers Guide to Velocity (aka AppFabric). That doesn't mean anything to me right now, so I'll be interested to hear that presentation myself.

The event is free (as usual), and if you want to come along, sign up at Eventbrite.

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!

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.