Chicago ALT.NET User Group

December 2013 Meeting

Year-end Meetup

Annual Chciago ALT.NET Holiday Party. Details to follow.

November 2013 Meeting

Going Parallel for Performance

Know your hardware and software

Asynchronous programming is about responsiveness, while parallel programming is about performance — creating programs that run faster or process more data.

As .NET programmers, we are generally isolated from the hardware, and focus more of our attention on the software. But in the world of high performance computing (HPC), ignoring the hardware, and overly abstracting the software, are luxuries you cannot afford.

This talk will present the most important hardware and software concepts you need to know for effective parallelism.

Joe Hummel is an author, consultant and professor of Computer Science, with a PhD in the field of High Performance Computing from the U. of California, Irvine. Joe started hacking on the Microsoft platform in 1992 with VB3, and was overjoyed when .NET arrived in 2001.

He’s been teaching academically and professionally for over 20 years, specializing in computer architecture, compilers, programming languages, and all things parallel. Joe has co-authored two books on Windows programming, developed curricular materials for Microsoft around their parallel and HPC technologies, and is well-versed in parallel hardware and software.

Joe currently develops online courses for Pluralsight, teaches Computer Science at the U. of Illinois, Chicago, delivers workshops for the IEEE, and is a visiting researcher at the U. of California, Irvine. He’s also a Microsoft MVP in Visual C++, and when he’s not working, he’s sailing. Joe resides in the Chicago area with his wife and daughter. You can follow @joehummel or http://www.joehummel.net/, though he doesn’t blog or tweet as much as he should.

October 2013 Meeting

Open Projector Night

This month we will open our projector to our group members. We want to get a sampling of what cool stuff you have been working with or learning.

Are you learning a new programming language? A new web framework? Maybe a new practice that is helping you? Come and show us. Each talk/demo is expected to last no more than 20 minutes accounting for one or two questions.

We will update this page as we get more confirmed topics, but feel free to give a short impromptu demo as well (time permitting.) So far the confirmed talks and presenters are:

• Karl Grzeszczak: Salt Stack
• Kevin McMahon: Intro to GIS
• Sergio Pereira: Go programming language
• Fawad Halim: VMWare SQLFire
• (your name here)

August 2013 Meeting

Single Page Apps With Proven Tools

Single Page Applications (SPAs) contnue to gain momentum. As it's common with many new technologies, the pendulum swings way too far before coming back and eventually reaching its balanced position.

We've seen it taken to extremes without consideration to sane web application development and deployment, causing regression of issues we have traditionally invested a lot to overcome, like page loading speed and search engine indexing.

In this talk we will look at some of the more stable options for creating, maintaining and deploying an SPA without losing our sanity.

We walk through a sample web application built with ASP.NET MVC and Web API but that's the least important part of the code. The main focus will be given to the front-end technologies, like:

• RequireJS
• Backbone.js
• LESS
• Bower (time permitting)

Sergio Pereira is a Principal Engineer with Trading Technologies developing software for for electronic derivatives trading.

For the longest time Sergio has had his eyes in the development of richer and more usable web sites. He believes in using the most basic tools to create web applications, while at the same time not giving up productivity.