Hi Coders,

The December meeting – 1st December 2010 – is imminent. I’m pleased to announce that it will mark the 5th anniversary of the Newcastle Coders Group. We are running a special competition from now until then.

Paul Stovell (a favorite at the Newcastle Coders Group) has given us a 12-Month MSDN subscription to give away. This is an amazing prize, worth a great deal of money and gives the winner development access to licenses to the full range of Microsoft applications, servers and developer tools.

Rather than just holding a raffle on the night, we decided it would be a good idea to give it away to the project that will most benefit the Hunter Region. In order to be considered you will need to do the following:

1. Send in your application with a 50 word (max) explanation of your project and how it will benefit the community.
2. Attend the December meeting.
3. Be prepared to answer questions from the judges on your intended project on the night.

The judges will be selected from the organising committee of the Newcastle Coders Group. The projects will be scored on the criteria of worthiness, value to the local community and likelihood of the project getting off the ground. The judges decision will be final.

The projects we’re looking for might be: startup business plans, open source projects or could even be related to a charity or educational institution. The project could even be underway already – you just need to explain how the license will support your project.

So, get cracking. We have many talented people in the Hunter and I can’t wait to see what they come up with!

I have been looking into cloud-based application engines for the purpose of hosting a social media web app which can be infinitely scalable (now here’s hoping I can attract the traffic!)

For those with a Microsoft Visual Studio .NET background, Azure is actually quite compelling.

For the most part, you largely construct an ASP.NET web app as normal but when you publish it, you’re actually publishing to Microsoft’s cloud.

This cloud can be configured to have multiple instances which can be housed in specific geographic locations if so desired.

The own downside when compared to Google’s App Engine is your instances come in specific configurations of CPU power and RAM and you need to resize to larger (and more) instances if and when needed, while AppEngine does all this sort of scaling magic behind the scenes for you.

Of course, it does mean you can control costs because you have specific fees for each size instance.

The other thing I really like about Azure is you can debug locally on your own PC via regular Visual Studio debugging tools before ultimately publishing online.

It’s on, and I’m here. Microsoft Tech-Ed Australia is running from today until Friday 11th September on the sunny Gold Coast of Australia. An incredible 2000+ attendees are roaming about with HP Mini netbooks. Demonstrations have already begun of Exchange 2010, Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.

Hi Coders,

The Newcastle Coders Group is back at the newly renovated Forsythes IT and Training rooms for the August meeting. Two great presenters, Eliminating no-repro bugs with MS VS Team Test 2010 and Flash/Flex and Silverlight from a management perspective. PLUS – a chance to win a full retail copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite with 12 month MSDN Subscription courtesy of Enhance ALM and Microsoft. The full details are available here.

When: 6.00pm Wednesday 5th August 2009 (tonight!)
Where: Forsythes IT and Training Rooms – 9 Denison Street, Newcastle West
Cost: FREE!

For those of you who haven’t been before, the Newcastle Coders Group is a great place to learn about the latest technologies in software development. It’s also a great place to meet your peers in the local area. Everyone is welcome, so bring your friends and colleagues.

We order pizza and soft drink on the night for those who want to chip in $5. Pizza is purely optional. If you plan to come along, please RSVP so that we can plan for numbers and indicate if you want to chip in for the pizza (by 4pm today).

I’ve been trying to get into Microsoft LINQ and came across this excellent Microsoft Press book, “Programming Microsoft LINQ.”

It covers just what LINQ is and how to use it, beginning with in-memory objects before moving onto relational databases and XML and then covering some advanced topics like parallelisation.

Here’s my full review.

iTWire: So, what’s this Azure, then? Let me tell you Microsoft’s vision for the next stage in the evolution of software right from the mouth of none other than Steve Ballmer, live from Sydney today. Here’s what Azure is, what cloud computing is, and how the two shall meet.

Microsoft Australia have a programming contest out right now – with (at the time of writing) 173 hours and three minutes remaining. There’s a nice bevy of prizes.

The challenge is to make something modern out of something retro – or even implement something retro using new tech.

My first thought was a modern .NET Commodore 64 emulator – but then I came across Sharp-64 – written two years ago by a fellow Australian. I pondered briefly whether a C64 emulator Vista sidebar gadget would be feasible but I’ve gone off this train of thought now …

Anyone got an idea for me?? Time is ticking down … and like with most great software, the coding likely isn’t the significant part of the challenge, it’s the big idea!