Our first Guest Speaker will be Mark Rendle. Mark is a Microsoft Azure Development MVP and a well known speaker – his career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember.

C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line.

Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include .NET Core, Docker and all the new things on the Azure Cloud platforms.

Mark will be speaking on “From WCF to gRPC”.

gRPC is a high-performance messaging protocol that is ideal for communication between microservices and other clients on internal networks. It’s the ideal replacement for WCF or .NET Remoting, which are not supported on .NET Core.

In this talk, he will explain the different models that gRPC enables, from Request/Response to full bi-directional streaming, and how they map to various WCF models. He’ll show how to create gRPC services and clients using the dotnet CLI, and share best practices for using them in the real world.

Please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

About iO Associates Specialising in recruitment across the Tech and Digital market, iO Associates have extensive experience in recruiting the highest calibre of talent to create the products and infrastructure of the future.

Get in touch to find out more on what we do and how we can help you.

We are excited to bring you the next instalment in the iO Virtual Meetups, this time for those working in Testing and discussing ‘Modern Testing: Do we all need to be SDIT?’. ​

Our guest speaker Callum Akehurst-Ryan will be delves into ‘Modern Testing: Do we all need to be SDIT?’ and how Manual / Exploratory testing skills are still needed in a DevOps & Modern Agile environment.

He explains what SDIT really is and looking at how SDIT have the skills for scripting and coding. In addition he will be looking into how you cannot neglect test skills and things like: Critical Thinking / heuristics / risk analysis which is needed to know what to test. ​

Frequently we’re seeing that the testing job market is asking for pure SDIT (Software Developer in Test) roles. Callum will explore if this is a good thing? What benefits does it give us? And how do testing (and manual testing) skills fit in? ​

In this Lean Coffee style webinar, Tester Callum Akehurst-Ryan , who has over 14 years’ experience, leads discussions answering your questions about whether the rise of SDIT is a good thing. ​​

Please get in touch at meetups@ioassociates.co.uk with any questions or suggestions on future virtual meetups.

About: iO Associates Specialising in recruitment across the Tech and Digital market, iO Associates have extensive experience in recruiting the highest calibre of talent to create the products and infrastructure of the future.

Get in touch to find out more on what we do and how we can help you. www.ioassociates.co.uk

Here, our guest speaker Emily Jiang, Liberty Microservice Architect, Advocate and Java Champion, tackles the modern and open way to build cloud-native microservices and the programming models available.

You may have heard about Eclipse MicroProfile and are wanting to find out more.

In this session you’ll learn:

• Everything you need to know about MicroProfile (including a demo)
• How to package the MicroProfile in to a Docker container and deploy it to a Kubernetes cluster
• And finally, how to use Istio to manage your microservice interactions Listen to this session to develop your in-depth knowledge about MicroProfile and how you can use it to build well-performed microservices.

After this session, you will understand how to best develop Cloud Native Microservices by using MicroProfile and how to work well with Cloud infrastructure, such as Kubernetes and Istio. Emily Jiang, is a Java Champion.

Emily Jiang is a Liberty Microservices Architect and Advocate, Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) in IBM, based at Hursley Lab in the UK. Emily is a MicroProfile guru and has been working on MicroProfile since 2016, leading the specifications of MicroProfile Config, Fault Tolerance and Service Mesh.

She is a CDI Expert Group member and passionate about MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Emily regularly speaks at conferences, such as Code One, DevNexus, JAX London, Voxxed, Devoxx, EclipseCon, QCon, GeeCon, JFokus, etc.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Java Virtual Meetup – The Modern and Open Way to Build Cloud-Native Microservices: MicroProfile’ on-demand here:

This .Net Meetup is a series of lightning talks hosted by iO Associates’ Michael Collins and Stella Webster. Our first guest speaker is Robin Minto, the Head of Technical Architecture at ByBox, who kicks us off with ‘OWASP ZAP HUD WTF?’.

During this talk, we see how the features of ZAP can be used to find issues during development, so that we can deploy a better-tested app when we navigate through a web application.

Stuart Lang from Coditorium follows up with his lightning talk on ‘C# 8 -Async Streams & Channels’. He discusses what’s new in .Net for asynchronous processing with hands on examples. Our final speaker is Joe Woodward, a Senior Software Engineer at Just Eat.

He takes us through Microsoft’s new Feature Toggle library and shows us how we can utilise it to de-risk deployments of new features, and also use it to gradually role out new changes into production and promote continuous delivery.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘.NET – Lightning Talks’ on-demand here:

Bea Meyrick and Inness Law, Java Champion Matt Raible present ‘Microservices for the Masses’.

Microservices are being deployed by many Java Hipsters. If you’re working with a large team that needs different release cycles for product components, microservices can be a blessing.

If you’re working at your VW Restoration Shop and running its online store with your own software, having five services to manage and deploy can be a real pain.

This presentation shows you how to use JHipster to create Angular + Spring Boot apps with a unified front-end. You will leave with the know-how to create your own excellent apps!

Matt Raible Matt is a well-known figure in the Java community and has been building web applications for most of his adult life. For over 20 years, he has helped developers learn and adopt open source frameworks and use them effectively. He’s a web developer, Java Champion, and Developer Advocate at Okta. Matt is a frequent contributor to open source and a big fan of Java, IntelliJ, TypeScript, Angular, Spring Boot.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Microservices for the Masses’ here:

Microsoft MVP and Managing Consultant at Excella Alexander Slotte presents ‘Machine Learning; an introduction to ML.NET’.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Machine Learning (ML) is quickly changing the way we live. Things we are accustomed to today are things we could only dream of 10 years ago. As ML is becoming more and more mainstream, you may be asking yourself how to get started.

Historically, many of the tools and libraries used to train a model have been found in the Python and R communities (e.g. Scikit Learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow), but what if you’re a .NET Developer? This session introduces ML.NET!

ML.NET is an open-source, cross-platform machine learning library, specifically built to enable .NET developers to train their own custom machine learning models in C# or F#. In this session we introduce some fundamental ML concepts and terms before transitioning into the world of ML.NET and building our first model from scratch.

Beware, there is live coding! ​ About Alexander Slotte Alexander is a Microsoft MVP, and a Managing Consultant and .NET Xpert at Excella, based out of Washington DC. He is an international speaker, and have spoken at conferences such as NDC London, ProgNET, Big Data Europe, .NET Jetbrains Global Online Day, Beer City Code, Music City Tech, Code PaLOUsa, Code On The Beach and Philly.

.NET He’s the organizer of the .NET DC User Group and a member of the .NET Foundation. He is passionate about .NET and cloud architecture, and constantly attempts to push his knowledge on data science and machine learning.

When not coding, you’ll find him out running or enjoying a good IPA! Say hi on Twitter @alexslotte! ​

​iO are pleased to bring you the full recording of our Virtual Meetup with Scott Hanselman.

Our guest speaker Scott is a Partner Program Manager at Microsoft. During his talk, Scott picked up on ‘Developing for Windows and Linux using Windows 10 and WSL’. Scott uses a variety of live demonstrations in this highly advanced session to take you through the state of the art of Linux on Windows, showing us if you can really use Windows to develop Linux apps. This session also exposes how real WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is, and how close it is to reality.

We were delighted to see so many familiar faces but also lots of new ones as well!

This platform allows our meetups to reach more of our community and communicate with you directly.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘.NET Meetup with Scott Hanselman’ here:

This .Net Meetup is hosted by iO Consultants, Charlotte Herapath and Danny Watts, and features special guest speaker Ian Cooper, a passionate exponent of OO, SOA, EDA, CQRS and Agile.

In this highly interactive session, Ian guides us through Kent’s original proposition from his book on Test Driven Deployment. We then discovered where key misunderstandings occurred and looked at a better approach to TDD that not only supports software development, but also stops hindering it.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘TDD Where did it go wrong?’ here:

iO Associates consultants, Bea Meyrick and Inness Law, host this Javascript based meetup.

They are joined by Dave Farley, Founder and Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd, who presents an amazing talk on the growing pains in Continuous Delivery, and explains some strategies to cope with them.

The deployment pipeline is a central idea in Continuous Delivery. It represents the channel through which ideas inside your business flow to the outside world so that they can be delivered to your users in the form of working software.

Creating a working deployment pipeline at first can be rewarding as they help to improve the quality of the software and lead to happier users. As teams mature in their adoption of Continuous Delivery though, the pipeline often begins to slow. We have more tests, we are testing more complex things, our software becomes more complex and more difficult to deploy.

Dave takes us through how we address these growing pains, what the next steps are beyond the CD beginner’s basic automation, and how we can optimise to meet and exceed our needs.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘Optimising Continuous Delivery – JavaScript ‘ here:

iO Associates consultants Ryan Pearch and Charlotte Herapath hosted this .Net Virtual Meetup. We are joined by Jon Skeet, a Staff Software Engineer at Google, who presented a fantastic talk on C#8.

Released in 2019, C#8 has a huge set of features, pattern matching enhancements, switch expressions, index and range literals, greater async integration and, most notably, nullable reference types. Jon splits this talk into two halves; in the first talk he covers nullable reference types in depth, the second half he discusses the remaining features.

Discover more .NET talks here.

Watch ‘C#8 with Jon Skeet’ here: