Monthly Archives: September 2011

Sept 15, 2011 – Lab “Up and Running with RabbitMQ”

Leave a reply

Special Theme Night: “Up and Running with RabbitMQ”
RabbitMQ provides robust messaging for applications. Rabbit is open source, easy to use, scales well and is supported on all major operating systems and developer platforms. What can it do for a .NET developer? Using Rabbit will help you write decoupled (better) C# code. It will also minimize the pain of writing reliable, distributed code in .NET. Another benefit is it makes interop between .NET and other languages (and platforms) very simple.

At the end the lab, everyone:
- will have RabbitMQ running on their laptop
- will be able to explain the benefits of messaging
- will have written code to distribute tasks among workers
- will have written code to broadcast messages to many consumers

To follow along, please bring a laptop with Visual Studio. We will start the lab by getting Rabbit installed on everyone’s laptops. No prior Rabbit/messaging experience is expected. If you have used Rabbit please join us, and offer to help out.

Happy to report Alex Robson (area Rabbit expert) will be on-hand to help.

Links to get smart:

  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#what-is-messaging
  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#scenarios
  • http://www.rabbitmq.com/faq.html#managing-concepts-exchanges
  • Quick start posts and videos: http://www.rabbitmq.com/how.html#quickstart
  • Alex Robson’s devLink slides: https://github.com/arobson/rabbitmq-demos/blob/master/Messaging%20Patterns.pptx
  • Buy the book: “RabbitMQ in Action (Early Access Edition)” http://www.manning.com/videla/

September 8, 2011 – Geek Harvest + David Neal – “REST Easy”

Leave a reply

Geek Harvest is a summer-long, parent-kid programming project that culminates in a 10-15 minute show-and-tell presentation to the user group (read more). We will be kicking off the lecture with these cool topics:

Ben and Will Henderson present “Scratch” Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

Calvin and Kinzie Bottoms present “Project Euler” Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that require more than just mathematical insights to solve. The use of a computer and programming skills are required to solve most of the problems.

…and after the w00ts and hurrays! have subsided we will move on to the feature presentation

Topic: REST Easy
In today’s increasingly connected, service-oriented world, sooner or later you are likely to use or create Web services that are based on REST. In this presentation, we will learn why REST has gained great popularity, and look at some of the tools for .NET that make it easier to consume and create REST APIs.

Speaker: David Neal
David is the Director of Development for Cell Journalist, an online media service provider for TV stations, newspapers, and radio. Prior to joining Cell Journalist, David was a senior software engineer for Telligent, the premier social networking platform for .NET that powers some of the largest online communities such as Microsoft’s ASP.NET Forum, MSDN Blogs, Dell, and Game Informer. David is passionate about software craftsmanship, user experience, music, and bacon. You can follow him on Twitter @reverentgeek.