The Cambridge .NET User Group is born

The Cambridge .NET User Group, a new .NET technical community is born in Cambridge, UK.

On 10th February, 2015 we held the inaugural event Envisioning the Cambridge .NET User Group and this post want to be a summary for the people who were not able to attend so that everyone is on the same page.

I started the event with my long experience with communities in Italy and in UK, sharing what I think were successes and failures with the aim of clearly define what for me is a real community. The most important lesson I learnt is that it's not about the number of members, or the number of events, or the number of expert speakers you can bring in but it's all about members engagement.

What is a community?

A community is a set of people with the same passion and interests willing to share knowledge and experience every day both online and face-to-face with the goal of develop themselves through collaborative learning.

I like to see a community as a knowledge sharing platform.

What is the Cambridge .NET User Group?

The Knowledge Sharing Platform for .NET developers in Cambridge

Base on my experience with communities in Italy I learnt that it is extremely important to set in stone the principles of a community otherwise future members can easily ruin the initial spirit of the community.

For this reason, I defined our community manifesto taking inspiration from the Agile manifesto.

The Cambridge .NET Community Manifesto

• Members Engagement over number of members
• Members Contribution over external experts contribution
• Constant Knowledge Sharing over sporadic events
• Collaborative learning over self-promotion
• .NET technologies over other technologies
• Free Events over paid event
• Respect and humility over technical competence

As I said before, members engagement is by far the most important thing. I don't care about the numbers of members, what I want to see is high engagement among members. That's where the value of the community comes in. 

Because members are the key part of a community, the content should come from them and not only from external contributions made by experts in the field. We will surely bring some experts in the future but that's not the goal of the community and events made by members will be always prioritized.

An another key element for engagement is that conversations should not only happens during physical events. Events happens sporadically, every months of two, so it would not be possible to create real engagement only from them. The only way to have real engagement is to have a social network where members can discuss every day online, learn together and share ideas. This is powerful and mandatory for the community to be a real community.

The community brings a lot of value for speakers that can self-promote themselves and improve their brand. This is certainly a positive thing but should not be the main reason why people share. If you only present at events without actively participating in online discussions or collaborating with members you are not a real member of the community. Collaborative learning is the goal. You learn by sharing, people learn from you and everyone grows.

We are indeed a .NET community so .NET related talks are prioritized. Other technologies can be presented in the context of .NET developers.

For the community to really fly, events must be free and will be always free! Presenting to our events will be always a volunteering activity made by speakers who love teaching and being part of a community.

Least but not last, respect and humility are the foundation for every interaction between members. We love people who are passionate, enthusiast, willing to learn and we don't judge them based on their technical competence. Everyone is welcome and nobody should feel worried about it. 

From these principles, the ideal member emerge.

Who is the ideal member?

• Passion for learning and self-development
• Passion for .NET and Microsoft technologies
• Actively contribute in sharing knowledge and experience
• Open minded and curious about other technologies
• Believe in the power of “learning by teaching”
• Love to discuss and share opinions
• Respect others regardless of their skills
• Promote the community on social network

It's clear that a community is a win-win situations for all the members.

Now, the difficult part.... how to get content from members?

In my experience, it is really difficult to get people sharing and presenting.

The reason is that everyone of us (included myself) suffer from a disease.

The Impostor Syndrome

We believe other people knows way more than us and we are not feeling "good enough" to share and present at events. Reality is different! We should focus our mind to the picture on the right, our knowledge intersect with the knowledge of others and we have something to share with the world, our unique experiences and opinions. To stimulate yourself in sharing more, you should see this exercise from an egoistic point of view that is for growing yourself. At the end of the day, this is the reason why communities work.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.  

William Faulkner

The Knowledge Sharing Process

If you overcome the impostor syndrome, the knowledge sharing process is quite simple.

Do you want to be part of the community?

Start joining us on The Cambridge .NET User Group on Meetup.

Participate to the online discussion on the Public Message Board (we collaboratively decided to use this board as our online social platform for now to see how it goes)

Follow us on Twitter @DotNetCambridge. (yeah DotNetCambridge is the short name of the community).

Volunteer to share your knowledge and be a speaker to one of our future events.

Thanks to Red Gate

Red Gate Software is our first and main sponsor. We are lucky enough to have a good equipped room to use for our events and food and drinks offered so that we can focus on delivering great content and be an awesome community. This helps is really appreciated and I'd like to thanks Red Gate for his amazing involvement in making this community a success.

Future activities

Register for our first technical event scheduled for April 13, 2015.

We decided to have regular Community Dinners where members get together for dinner to socialize and learn in a more informal way. The first community dinner is yet to be announced but likely to be in May.

We aim to become an official Microsoft Technical Community and get Microsoft as a sponsor. 

I am incredibly excited about the potential of this community and I am looking forward to see what's our members are going to share. Happy learning!

What our members say?

Secrets of Success from the Story of Bill Gates - Part 2

Persistence

Never give up there is always a way out. Do what you are supposed to do; it will lead to bigger opportunities along the way.

If you can make up your mind that you will not settle for less, you will not settle for less. You will keep right on going and you will achieve your goals and dreams. If you convince yourself nothing is impossible, nothing will be impossible for you.

Don't concentrate on how hard it is but focus on the reward and satisfaction you get by achieving your goals.

Always focus on the final outcome from the start, never lose that ability to focus. As the road gets harder, you get harder; as the road gets tougher, you get tougher; as the journey becomes difficult and seems like it’s impossible, just continue to focus and keep going and watch what will happen. The only true failure is when you give up and you stop moving on.

Reward your progress when you reach a milestone.

Bring your best to every situation; you may never know when your breakthrough opportunity presents it to you. Persistence always pays off. Don't take rejections to heart or personally, it’s only a normal process of taking out what is not good for you. Persistence takes action.

The most successful people in life are always persistent. Persistent people are often accused of being cold and heartless, but a careful re-evaluation shows this is not the case at all, they are simply singled minded in their pursuit of their own personal destiny.

Secrets of Success from the Story of Bill Gates - Part 1

This is an very inspiring and motivational book: Secrets of Success from the Story of Bill Gates.

Bill Gates is a person that always inspired me and continue to inspired me. 

Bill Gates built Microsoft from scratch – he created the single most influential technology company of our modern age, and it made him so wealthy that he is now able to focus on the eradication of poverty and disease through the work of his charity foundation.

In 1994, Gates and his wife Melinda founded a charitable organisation called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which supports initiatives in global health and education. The aim of the foundation is to eradicate poverty, disease and illiteracy from the world.

Bill Gates has received numerous international and national accolades, and honorary doctorates from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, Harvard University in June 2007, and other universities. He was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2005.

The book describes the key elements of  the history of the Bill Gates but he also introduce a lot of examples from other great people who are equally inspiring.

My TechEd 2013 in Slides

Microsoft TechEd Europe 2013 conference was held the last week of June in Madrid, Spain. As usual, Microsoft published online the entire content of the sessions. This is a lot of free materials!

Considering an average of 1.5 hours per session, it would require almost 4 working months to watch all of the sessions.

Even an avid learner like me, needs to give up on such idea. That's why I think that downloading all the sessions in advance is usually a crazy idea.

In the past, I watched only few sessions and I simply ignored all the others. The problem with that option is that you might easily miss some important news.

This year, I decided to follow a different approach. I decided to fully watch only the keynotes and to read the slides of all the other sessions. The goal is obviously to learn all the latest news from Microsoft without missing anything. Following this approach, allows me to identify topics I didn't consider and that might be of interest. In addition, nobody stops me to watch a particular session in full later if I need to understand more deeply a subject I am particular interested.

I spent almost 18 hours to do this and in this post I would like to summarize the conference showing the slides that I liked the most.

Statistics and Trends

This slide include really impressive information about the amount of data that is transferred on the Internet every minute. This is astonishing and it is growing incredibly fast.

The challenges faced today by the organisations are complex.

Cloud computing is the answer and hybrid cloud computing looks like the most favourite trend.



In addition, mobile malware is increasing in particular in the Android world. Security is surely a big and important topic.



Windows Server 2008 R2 is the most used Windows Server OS right now and there is still a significant portion of Windows Server 2003 deployments out there.



Windows XP is still incredibly popular and share a similar slice of the client OSs with Windows 7. Windows 8 instead is still quite irrelevant. Hopefully the future release Windows 8.1 will get more traction thanks to the reintroduction of the start button of the ability to further customize the desktop. As a consequence of this, there are still a lot of VB6 applications in production.



Microsoft Cloud Vision

Microsoft is clearly investing a lot in building a complete cloud infrastructure.

Microsoft and Citrix

Microsoft is the lead for desktops and Citrix is the lead of Desktop Virtualization. As a Citrix employee, I am quite interested in the relationship between these two companies, and in this edition of TechEd there were many sessions mentioning Citrix products.

First of all, it was quite interesting to read about the interconnected history of the two companies.

 

The following slides describes the power of combining XenApp and Configuration Manager 2012 and I am particularly proud to say that I personally worked in some part of these projects in Citrix in the last few years.

The Mobile SDK for Windows Apps allows to mobilize applications that are hosted on Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop and delivered to any mobile device with Citrix Receiver.



SQL Server 2014

Windows Server 2012 R2

I simply love the ability to create virtual networks. Thanks to the new Windows Azure Active Directory will be easier then ever to create a private virtual network that spans across Azure and the corporate network. This is a significant step forward for my point of view!



















Software Development

  

 

MSDN Benefits

The new MSDN benefits for Windows Azure are incredible. In particular, I like:

• No charge for Stopped VMs
• Pay by the Minute Billing
• Heavily Discounted MSDN Dev/Test Rates
• MSDN Monetary Credits