There will be no March meeting of RV.NUG.

We look forward to seeing you in April!

The Free Lunch is Over: What You Need to Know about Parallelism

Presented by Stuart Leitch

Single thread CPU performance improvements have largely stalled out. The sequential performance “free lunch” most developers enjoyed from hardware advances is over. With the industry shift to multiple core systems, performance has to be realized through concurrency and many developers will find themselves building applications designed to scale as the number of cores increases.  This session will provide a broad review of the trends in parallelism and an overview of major patterns for parallelizing your applications.

Stuart Leitch is a Charlottesville based developer working for Growing Technologies. He spent most of the last 7 years running Grove Creations, a small Melbourne based consultancy focused on developing WinForm applications for a variety of Australian clients. Since winding down Grove Creations and migrating to America 2 years ago, Stuart has relinquished the role of small business owner to pursue fulltime the art and science of software craftsmanship.

Unleashing your code-fu with code katas

Presented by Perry Neal

We've all heard that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to "master" a skill.  What they neglect to mention is that it takes 10,000 quality, effective hours of practice to master that skill. In software development, we "practice" on the job.  And, usually, it's doing the same things, over and over, day in and day out.  In this presentation you'll be provided with resources and techniques that will help you "practice" software development more effectively - in only 30 minutes a day!

Perry Neal has been developing software for twelve years.  He's worked on everything from single-user Visual Basic 6 desktop applications to enterprise ASP.NET applications for the U.S. Army (but somehow managed to avoid classic ASP).  He currently works for a medium-sized company moving all their applications from Microsoft Access to .NET.

This is a combined User Group meeting sponsored by Red-Gate (and Santa)
 
Red-Gate Software, a cloud-ready tools provider for .NET and SQL,  is sponsoring this month by providing a visit from Santa and red holiday food (red velvet cake and more!).  www.red-gate.com

An Introduction to Office 365

Presented by Butch Adams

Could Office 365 be the “Killer App” for the cloud? This high level view of the Office 365 package will make it obvious how the complexion of your IT department will change forever. Microsoft have put three of their most powerful collaboration tools into the hands of even the smallest offices, so let’s check out the new possibilities!

Before hanging his shingle as an IT consultant in January 2011, Butch amassed over twenty-five years of Systems Engineering experience in the defense and private sectors. He implemented some of the first PC-based networks for the Navy in the eighties, wrote software for automated electronic test equipment, and has expertise in IT department resuscitations, security remediation and platform migrations.  Butch is Microsoft-certified on Exchange, SQL Server, Windows XP, Vista, 2003 Server, SharePoint and Dynamics SL and GP.  His primary focus is providing start-ups and small businesses with excellent IT solutions that help protect and manage their intellectual property. Butch also provides IT consultative, training and design/installation services.

Take Your Database to the Cloud

Presented by Mike Lawton

This session will provide a whirlwind overview of SQL Azure.  We'll look at the architecture, available sizes and pricing, tooling, feature support, limitations, management, and security.  We'll also discuss what it takes to move your existing SQL Server database(s) to SQL Azure.  Finally, we'll take a look ahead at the SQL Azure roadmap.

Mike Lawton is Manager of Software Engineering for DaProSystems, a Public Safety Software company headquartered in Roanoke, Virginia.  He’s a self-taught, polyglot, “why not” developer with 10 years experience building solutions on the .NET Framework.  His current projects cover the spectrum of desktop (WPF), server (Windows Services, WCF), mobile (Android – Java & Mono), web (ASP.NET MVC), and cloud (Azure).  You can find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/malawto