K-MUG Session

Yesterday I came to attend the monthly user group meet organised by Kerala Microsoft User Group(K-MUG) held at Orion. Being a technology enthusiast I always enjoy being part of such tech communities, which really helps one to keep posted with the current developments in and around the developer arena; moreover I see events like these as venue to meet and network with like minded professionals in the industry as well.

The session kickstarted with "Design Patterns in .Net" by Yanesh Tyagi. He started by discussing on Gang Of Four patterns, which was well covered by backing with real time scenarios on when and where to apply these patterns. The best part of the session was the code demo, where he showed patterns in action with sample applications using C#. While discussing the "Null Object" pattern, a question turned out from the audience like can a line be drawn between a Null Object pattern and a Monad.The session was well delivered and shed insight on how the GoF patterns can be put to use for writing better libraries and frameworks. 

The second session was by me, which was on "Profiling & Instrumenting .NET Applications". The talk started with a brief overview on the types of software profilers, which was followed by a demo on profiling .NET applications with CLR Profiler, Performance Monitor and the VS.NET 2010. Some of the common caveats which could lead to memory leaks in .NET applications were also discussed during the session.

While the final session was on "JavaScript MVVM in ASP.NET with KnockoutJS" by Shiju Varghese. The presentation started with why one should use KnockoutJS (A JavaScript library by Steven Sanderson's a Program Manager for Microsoft), the talk moved on to discussing its technology\browser agnostic nature and the minimal footprint in of terms of file size. Thereafter he demoed a simple web application written in ASP.NET. The demo application implemented two way data binding at the client side using KnockoutJS. I was amazed to see how easy it was to implement such a kind of functionality using KnockoutJS, with very minimal lines of code. I would say every web developer should give it a try.

If you wish to present a topic which you feel like worth sharing, then please feel free to drop in a mail to admin@k-mug.org