Thanks to everyone who could make it to what turned out to be an excellent SBUG event.  First some thanks to: 

1. Speakers: Anthony Ross and Elton Stoneman
2. Host: The various people at Hitachi who helped to organise and arrange the venue.

 

Session 1 - Getting up and running with Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus

In this session Anthony discussed some considerations for using Windows Mobile and the Windows Azure Service Bus from a real-world project which Hitachi have been working on with EasyJet.  Anthony also walked through a simplified demo of the concepts which applied on the project.

 

In addition to the slides and demo it was also very interesting to discuss with the guys involved on this project to hear about their real experiences developing with the Azure Service Bus and some of the limitations they have had to work around in Windows Mobiles ability to interact with the service bus.

 

On the back of this session we will look to do some further activities around this topic and the guys offered to share their wish list of features for both Windows Mobile and Windows Azure which we will look to share for user group discussion.

 

Another interesting point was the cost aspects of using the ISB which were very low.

 

Session 2 - The Enterprise Cache

In the second session Elton used a few slides which are based around one of his customer scenario's where they are looking into the concept of an Enterprise Cache within the organisation.  Elton discusses this concept and also a codeplex project he is putting together which allows you to take advantage of a cache with various providers such as Memcached, AppFabric Caching and Ncache.

 

Following the presentation it was interesting to hear peoples thoughts on various aspects such as the enterprise cache versus an out of process application cache.  Also there was interesting discussion around how people would like to search the cache in the future.

 

We will again look to put together some follow-up activity on this

 

Meeting Summary

Following the meeting all slide decks are saved in the skydrive location where we keep content from all meetings:

http://cid-40015ea59a1307c8.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/SBUG/SBUG%20Meetings/2010%20April

 

Remember that the details of all previous events are on the following page.

http://uksoabpm.org/Events.aspx

 

Competition

We had three copies of the Windows Identity Foundation Patterns and Practices book that were raffles on the night, it would be great to hear any feedback on the book from those who won it.

 

Recording

The user group meeting was recorded and we will look to make this available online sometime soon.

 

UG Business

The following things were discussed as general UG topics:

 

3. We will change the name of the user group to the UK Connected Systems User Group to we are more inline with other user groups who cover similar topics and we believe this will help us to attract more members.  The content or focus of the user group is not expected to change.

 

4. The next meeting is 26th May and can be registered at the following link: http://sbugmay2010.eventbrite.com/