October 2017 Meetup

For the Monday, October 9th meetup, we will be joined by Ryan Miller for a discussion on building an Alexa Skill using Azure Functions. Please join us on Monday, October 9th for what is sure to be a very entertaining and information meeting.  Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps to ensure we have the right amount of food & drinks).

Abstract: I have an 11-year-old child and a 14-year-old child and I’ve discovered a real pattern with the speech of these two. Unfortunately, sometimes they aren’t around because they’re at school or maybe off at camp. In those times, I have no one around to tell me how much everything sucks. That got me thinking, “Some poor folks don’t even have a teenager in the house. How would they know that everything sucks?” With the proper skill, Alexa can help them out.

In this session, we’ll see what it takes to build an Alexa Skill called Teenage Daughter. The code is C# and the service host is Azure Functions. We’ll cover Custom Slots, Intent Schema, Utterances, and Testing; we’ll delve into Azure functions and how to create multiple environments to keep our production instance separate from development instance; and we’ll cover any other tips and tricks that I’ve learned while creating my Teenage Daughter, which can be found at https://github.com/Intranoggin/AlexaFunctions.

Presenter: Ryan Miller – Principal Consultant, Cardinal Solutions

I am a Solutions Architect with over fifteen (15) years of professional experience. I enjoy building enterprise solutions because those solutions affect change in an organization that can have a long term, positive impact on employees and customers. For the last decade of my career, I have been helping clients design and build enterprise web solutions efficiently on SharePoint and .NET. It can be a challenge to create robust solutions that seamlessly blend out-of-the-box platform capabilities with custom .NET features, and integrate them with other systems. The rapid growth in utilization of Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud (Office365 & Azure) has made these software challenges even more exciting because the available cloud resources are so diverse and extensive. I learned early on in my career that creating the right application can transform the way an enterprise works and have long lasting impacts. As an intern, I created an application for a local manufacturing company to electronically enter and track ISO 9000 & QS9000 documentation. As information became untethered from its filing cabinet, Engineers and Quality Assurance teams who once begrudgingly filled out the required paperwork and filed it, were suddenly collaborating around data that was accessible, discoverable, and pliable. Some years later, I had graduated, gotten married, moved to Boston, bought a bulldog, moved back to Columbus, and had my first child. I had transitioned through 3 different jobs in 2 states and other major life events and then found that this application was still in use and had become a key system for every product being produced out of this manufacturing facility. I was humbled by the application lifecycle and the durability of software in the enterprise. The experience underscored my belief that creating enterprise applications is an opportunity to cause long term business transformations that warrants a real investment in thought.

September 2017 Meetup

For the Monday, September 11th meetup, we will once again be joined by Neudesic’s Chad Thomas for a discussion on Service Fabric. Chad joined us in May for an introductory look at Service Fabric. This month he’ll share his guidance and experiences on building real-world solutions with Service Fabric. Please join us on Monday, September 11th for what is sure to be a great discussion. Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps to ensure we have the right amount of food & drinks).

The Central Ohio Azure group would like to thank Neudesic for once again sponsoring our meetup!

Abstract: Service Fabric is the foundational technology powering core Azure infrastructure as well as other Microsoft services such as Skype for Business, Dynamics 365, Cortana, Azure SQL Database, and many more.  Service Fabric solves the hard distributed systems problems such as reliability, scalability, management, and latency, so you can focus on building applications.

At the May meetup, we discussed Service Fabric’s architecture, use cases, and many of the problems it alleviates.  This month, we’ll dive a bit deeper and build a representative Service Fabric application that highlights Service Fabric’s programming models.  You will see how to use Reliable Services and Reliable Actors to build a solution. You will learn the pros and cons of each, and guidance on selecting the model for your solution.  We’ll wrap up by discussing exciting new features in Service Fabric, including using Service Fabric for hosting Docker containers on Linux or Windows and running them alongside other workloads.

Presenter: Chad Thomas – Director of Technology, Neudesic

Chad Thomas is Director of Technology for Neudesic’s Digital Platform service line, spanning mobile, web, architecture, and cloud. He and his team help companies transition from Agile to Continuous, from monoliths to microservices, and ultimately from incremental improvement to innovation at scale. Azure is a big part of Neudesic’s strategy and they are very excited about the Service Fabric.
Even when Chad is not working, technology is deeply engrained in his daily life. Currently, that manifests itself in the form of modernist cuisine, sous vide immersion cookers, and digital electric smokers. If anybody wants to start an open-source autonomous electric vehicle project, hit him on Twitter or LinkedIn.