With all the talk about big data, Internet of things, and the value that can be derived from the analysis of all of that information, no one seems to talk about how we collect it. There are a number of traditional ways. Those ways usually have problems with how to handle data spikes, durability, and distribution for processing. Azure Event Hubs may be an answer to part of those problems. We will go over what they are, how to set them up, the costs, and the various ways to send and receive information.

Harold Pulcher is a developer, network engineer, magician, woodworker, and part time grease monkey. He has over 25 years of experience working in Information Technology. During that time he has done everything from running network cable, setting up various companies infrastructure from the absolute bare metal, and building line of business software for many of those companies. As passionate as he is about technology, you might happen to see him checking his air reserve while at a depth of 60 feet, cooking up a mean “free-range” fruit cake, doing pre-show table magic at the improv, or making a nice piece of wood into a lot of sawdust so my wife will have potting benches for her plants.

We are teaming up with TekSystems to bring in a panel of hiring managers to get your questions answered about the hiring process of a .NET developer. The panel will consist of managers from different industries including Manufacturing, Finance, Energy, and Healthcare. The panel will be on hand to give you insight about interview questions, skill sets, emerging technologies, and other factors that they look for when reviewing potential candidates. If you have a specific question that you want answered please email president@fwdnug.com or reach out to @FW_DNUG on twitter in advanced.

Now that we have a released version of Visual Studio 2015, and .NET Framework 4.6, come spend some time learning about what the latest changes in the C# programming language enable you to do that you've never done before. This will be a code-centric talk giving you concrete examples of how to use all of the language features, and how those can affect your choices for object design.

Tim Rayburn is a Vice President of Consulting with Improving Enterprises, a software and project management consulting company in Dallas, TX. He is a passionate advocate of apprenticeship and mentorship in corporate environments. Since 2007 he has been awarded the Microsoft MVP in recognition of his expertise and community leadership. He is also a conference organizer, an author, and can be found speaking across the nation on agile processes, software design, and career management. He lives in the North Dallas area with his amazing wife Kate and their loyal dog Gandalf.

Are you baffled by the community's obsession with Git? Do your knees tremble at the thought of encountering a merge conflict, or even worse: getting thrown into "detached head" state? When a new team says they're using Git, do you wonder why they're turning up their noses at the centralized VCS you know? Everybody understands adding, committing, pushing and pulling; but trying to understand Git with the same paradigm as you approach centralized version control systems is a recipe for fear, uncertainty & doubt. Git doesn't work like a centralized version control system, which can be confusing. If you want to understand how Git truly IS different, this session is for you. Git becomes much easier to understand, once you approach it with the understanding that it's fundamentally different from a centralized VCS. The goal of this talk is to shed some light on how Git works under the hood. To develop a mental model of how Git works, we'll start with, "The Git Parable," by Tom Preston-Warner. We'll take a look at some of Git’s core concepts including its basic object storage, how commits work, how branches and tags work, and we’ll look at the different kinds of merging in Git (yes, including rebase). You’ll walk away with a better understanding of these concepts, able to use Git with more confidence.

Cori Drew is a senior consultant with Improving Enterprises in Addison, TX. She started her programming career as a web developer before cutting her OOP teeth (& falling in love with C#) in 2003 in .NET Framework 1.1. Cori was a programmer for 8.5 years before discovering there was a developer community in 2009. Appreciation for growth & learning, enabled by our tech community, has inspired her to try to pay it forward.

We will spend some time discussing what Windows 10 is and why it is important to get involved early with developing Universal Windows Applications (UWA). We will cover what it means to be a UWA application and what kinds of things can you do with UWA across desktop, tablet, phone, Xbox One, Hololens and even the Raspberry Pi 2... to name but a few devices that UWA currently targets.

I will also speak to personal experience moving from Windows Vista/7 (WinForms) to Windows Phone 7/7.1 (Silverlight) to Windows 8/Windows 8.1 (XAML) to Windows 10 (UWA). In this specific application, I transitioned from pure WinForms to a hybrid application leveraging Portable Class Libraries (PCL). Because of this I not only was able to transition between these different platforms, I am able to continue supporting all of them from within Visual Studio 2015.

Cory Smith maintains a .NET related blog at AddressOf.com and is very active in the .NET community. His community involvement includes: Microsoft MVP, former President of the Fort Worth .NET Users Group and Dallas/Fort Worth DNUX group, Microsoft VB Insider, Microsoft C# Insider, Microsoft CLR Insider, member of the South Central District Developer Guidance Council alumni and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau alumni. A veteran developer (professionally writing software for over 20 years) working on projects ranging anywhere from major e-commerce sites such as RadioShack.com and InterstateBatteries.com to applications that are at the heart and soul of over 4600 radio stations around the world. His work history includes working for Tandy/RadioShack, Rare Medium, Inc., Electric Works Corp., Scott Studios Corp. and Shiny Stone Digital.

In his spare time, Cory also owns and operates a combative martial arts academy, coaches a MMA fight team, is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and attempts to watch every action movie ever released.

There have been some major changes in the past couple months with the release of Visual Studio 2015 RTM. We will take a look at some of the new exciting features within VS, C# 6, as well as dive into what ASP.NET 5 development looks like.

Matthew Reily is an aspiring software craftsman who has a deep passion for learning and discussing new development technologies and practices. Matthew has worked diligently sharpening his skills for the past 15 years and has worn many hats. He has helped develop and deliver world class software, managed a couple of DevOps teams, and even spent a few years running his own consulting company. He loves spending time with his family, running ultra-marathons, and working on his next IoT projects. Matthew is currently perfecting his craft as a software architect for InterWorks, Inc.

If you are paying close attention to the front-end web development space, you have probably heard of things like Gulp and Grunt. Both are build systems/tasks runners. These sound terribly boring but in reality they are very handy tools. In this meetup we will focus on using one of them (Gulp) and how it can help us solve a number of problems in web development. Along the way we'll also discuss Node, NPM, Bower, JSX, Typescript, ES6, Browserify, Web Pack, SASS, JavaScript unit-testing automation, et al. So if you aren't already familiar with all these tools, I'll show you how you can use them to help you in your web development.

Eric is a Senior Architect for Match.com and works on its iOS app, web applications (ASP.NET and Node), API and whatever else comes up. In his spare time he plays with tech he doesn't get to use at work (Python and Clojure at the moment) and spends a lot of time studying Greek. He is the author of Mobile ASP.NET MVC 5 with Apress, rarely blogs at ericsowell.com and Tweets by the name @mallioch.

You've seen them. Those really big view models that take on far too much responsibility. They send messages to other view models, they call services, and they run business logic. It's really hard to understand how these things work, and even harder to avoid breaking them when they need to change. See how the message bus pattern -- far from its original intent -- is actually coupling your view models. See why business logic always seems to end up in the wrong layer. And most importantly, learn a better alternative. Writing clean view models is easy, but only if you have the tools to help you.

Software is math. Michael L Perry has built upon the works of mathematicians like Bertrand Meyer, Leslie Lamport, and Donald Knuth to develop a mathematical system for software development. He has captured this system in a set of open source projects, Assisticant and Correspondence. He teaches this system in the Q.E.D. Code podcast, and on several Pluralsight courses including Cryptography Fundamentals and Patterns for Building Distributed Systems for the Enterprise. As a Principal Consultant at Improving Enterprises, he applies mathematical concepts to building scalable and robust enterprise systems. You can find out more at qedcode.com.

Web development was a different game back in the early 2000s. Early versions of ASP.NET were aimed at Microsoft's existing customer base, and even tried to hide the nature of the web from developers who weren't ready for it. The platform has evolved steadily since the .NET Framework was released, but many of the technical decisions made early in ASP.NET's life don't make sense in the context of modern web development. By cutting loose some of the baggage from earlier versions, the ASP.NET team has been able to make sweeping changes to bring the framework in line with its lightweight, agile contemporaries. In this presentation, Brian will show how the next version of ASP.NET will be leaner and more flexible than the platform has ever been. Topics covered will include the new command line tools, changes to Visual Studio, cross-platform usage, tag helpers, view components, and more.

Brian Sullivan is a principal consultant for Improving Enterprises in Dallas. He got his start in programming maintaining legacy mainframe applications in COBOL at a large trucking company, but quickly realized he needed to find a more productive environment in order to stay sane. He jumped at the opportunity to help transition some of those COBOL applications to .NET, and he hasn’t looked back since. He has been working with Microsoft technologies since the .NET 1.0 days, and is interested in introducing modern web development techniques to the clients he works with. Brian is recipient of the Microsoft MVP award in ASP.NET and a graduate of Harding University.

Netduino is an open source electronics platform using the .NET Micro Framework. We keep hearing that March is for Makers, so for this month's meeting we are going to build something using a Netduino, a few components, and Visual Studio. We will have a few Netduinos on-hand for those interested in following along. If you already own a Netduino, we encourage you to bring yours as there will not be enough to go around.

To follow along, you will need to bring a laptop with the following installed:

• Visual Studio 2013 (Express Editions will work)
• NET Micro Framework SDK v4.3 (QFE2-RTM)

We will be providing the hardware components needed for the hands-on lab.
There is also a pretty good chance that we will be giving a Netduino away!

Cory Smith maintains a .NET related blog at AddressOf.com and is very active in the .NET community. His community involvement includes: Microsoft MVP, former President of the Fort Worth .NET Users Group and Dallas/Fort Worth DNUX group, Microsoft VB Insider, Microsoft C# Insider, Microsoft CLR Insider, member of the South Central District Developer Guidance Council alumni and a member of the INETA Speakers Bureau alumni. A veteran developer (professionally writing software for over 20 years) working on projects ranging anywhere from major e-commerce sites such as RadioShack.com and InterstateBatteries.com to applications that are at the heart and soul of over 4600 radio stations around the world. His work history includes working for Tandy/RadioShack, Rare Medium, Inc., Electric Works Corp., Scott Studios Corp. and Shiny Stone Digital.

In his spare time, Cory is also owns and operates a combative martial arts academy, coaches a MMA fight team, is an avid motorcycle enthusiast and attempts to watch every action movie ever released.

Xamarin allows you to put your C# expertise to work on Android and iOS. Previously, you had to know Objective-C and Java to write native applications. Xamarin apps are built with standard, native user interface controls. Apps look and behave as users expect them.

Sean Sparkman is a Father, Husband, Team Lead and Senior Developer at Infinity Interactive, Inc., and President of DFW Mobile .NET User Group.

At this year's Microsoft Connect() event in New York City, Scott Guthrie gave developers all over the world a quick taste of Visual Studio 2015 and C# 6. In this hands-on session, Casey Watson digs a little bit deeper and goes into even greater detail about what these updates mean to you. Included in this session will be a demonstration of some of the debugging improvements that have been made in Visual Studio 2015, "Smart Unit Tests" and some great new C# language features. If you are interested in the future of development with Visual Studio you owe it to yourself to attend this session. If you would like to follow along, be sure to grab Visual Studio 2015 for free at http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-downloads-vs before the meeting.

Casey Watson is a dedicated husband, proud father, community organizer and Senior Program Manager at Microsoft. Casey believes that is the responsibility of every serious developer to constantly "sharpen their saw" through both reading and community involvement and is a strong advocate of SOLID development practices. Over the last decade, he has been focused primarily on the .NET platform but has recently focused on building cloud-based applications on the Microsoft Azure platform. Casey is heavily involved in the local development community having spoken at and organized several user groups and conferences across the United States including Cowtown Code Camp, Dallas TechFest and Tulsa TechFest. When not learning about, speaking on, writing about or building software, he can be found spending time with his family, updating his Twitter status (@_caseywatson), or enjoying an ice cold bottle of Blue Moon.