Chicago ALT.NET User Group

We'd like to thank you for all your support and your participation during the years we held meetings and organized other community events.

Our archive of meetings and videos is still avilable for browsing and commenting.

January 2014 Meeting

Building Cross-Platform Native Apps with MVVMCross and Xamarin

For a while it seemed that HTML5 and Hybrid apps were the only way to build cross-platform mobile apps. But, sometimes you need a native app. While web-based apps are one way to do cross-platform, these architectures often eschew the benefits of native apps such as performance, offline capabilities, and device hardware access.

We'll show you how to build a cross-platform native app that shares just about all your code (except for the UI) across iOS, Android, and Windows Phone using C#, Xamarin, and the open source MVVMCross library - all in a single Visual Studio solution.

John Sprunger is an Architect leading the Mobility practice at West Monroe Partners. John has over ten years of experience in custom application development, performance optimization, and systems integration, and has worked in a number of industries including energy and utilities, healthcare, insurance, and private equity. John has published several apps for Windows Phone including SightReader and Imgur Uploader.

Andy Attebery is a Senior Consultant at West Monroe Partners and has over six years of experience developing web services, dynamic web applications and mobile apps on a variety of platforms.

December 2013 Meeting

Year-end Meetup

We won't have a normal presentation meeting this month. As you may have noticed, it will also not be on the 2^nd Wednesday as usual.

Instead, we will meet on December 18^th to reminisce about the high and low points of the year and, why not, make great plans for the upcoming one. But, most of all, we'll just unwind and have a good time.

We will meet at Rock Bottom downtown around 6pm. Make sure you hit the RSVP link below to help us provide a better headcount.

Please note that this isn't a sponsored event. We are taking care of the tab ourselves.

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.