On Tuesday it was our fourth .NET Oxford, and this time we had a slightly different format ... In order to give more people the opportunity to get up and talk, we decided to go with a lightning / grok talk event. There was actually quite a lot of interest, and the speaker slots filled up very quickly with a really good line-up ...

I was recently investigating issues in some scheduling and dispatching code, which was actually quite difficult to visualize what was happening over time. So I decided to reach for the ELK Stack to help me see what was going on using time based charts. I've only used this briefly in the past, but given the very simple setup thanks to Docker, and also the power and flexibility of ELK, it made a huge difference in my investigations!

This is my second LINQPad Tips and Tricks post. If you haven't read my first post, I'd definitely recommended reading that one first, and then coming back to this one ...

On Tuesday evening we had our third .NET Oxford, and even despite the heat it was yet another great event! Whilst not quite our usual turnout due to the very hot weather, it was still pretty good! Luckily for those who did attend, our sponsors Corriculo Recruitment were on hand doing an amazing job as usual with plenty of refreshments - both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety! Personally, I think I drank enough of their water for everyone! It was so hot!!

At our most recent .NET Oxford event, we had Frans Lytzen, founder and CTO of New Orbit talking about Async/Await in .NET.

Rather than just your typical "How to use Async/Await" talk - Frans' talk instead focused more on what happens under the hood - eg. timings and threads, and the reasons you get the deadlock situation.

Once again, the .NET community in Oxford has amazed us with how awesome they are, with another almost full-house at our second meetup last week! Again bringing an approximate headcount of around 70 attendees, which is pretty incredible for such a new user group!

It was our very first .NET Oxford event on Tuesday night - and wow, what an incredible turnout! Before the event, we were amazed by how many people RSVP'd on Meetup.com - with the final figure being 93 people! We knew that not everyone who RSVP'd would come along, but we still hit a pretty impressive 65-70 people! Not bad for a first meetup!

(Also see LINQPad Tips and Tricks - Part 2, and Part 3)

Well, what a great time to be a .NET developer! With all the changes that have been happening over the last year or so - with the new cross platform .NET Core, Azure, Microsoft's embracing of open source, and so much more!

Whilst I've used Docker in the past, it has only really been for development and prototyping - mainly to host 3rd party software - eg. MongoDB, Neo4j, etc. I've tended to have my webapp itself outside of Docker - partly due to not using the Core version of ASP.NET, which isn't cross platform. So I decided it was about time I had a go at setting up ASP.NET Core in Docker! It turns out that this is actually extremely easy!