London .NET August 2018

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Join Jim Chapman for an in-depth look at porting a Windows/UWP app to Android using Xamarin.Forms, Shahid Iqbal on Kubernetes, and Tuhin Chakraborty on Automating Automation!

.NET Xamarin.Forms development for Android - an Indie developer's perspective

Having an existing XAML/.Net code-base, it was natural to use Xamarin.Forms, so the UI development for the Android app would not be starting entirely from scratch. And Xamarin.Forms certainly achieves the basics: getting a usable UI onto the screen. But it's not perfect - various things actually work quite differently in Xamarin, and Visual Studio performance and stability were a disappointment too. Conversely, some things (such porting graphics from Win2D to SkiaSharp) went remarkably smoothly. Sharing the core application code (Model, ViewModel, whatever) also worked just fine, with only a few nasty suprises.

Jim Chapman is "an aged geek, and tech enthusiast ever since I wrote my first line of code at the age of 12, on an Apple II. (there - now you can work out just how aged I am)." These days, his day job is IT Strategy and Architecture, working in the banking sector. But in evenings and weekends, he keep hands-on with coding, as an Indie app developer on various projects. He suspects it will never make him rich, but it does provide drinking money, and pays for assorted technology toys that would otherwise be hard to justify.

Shahid Iqbal: Kubernetes, Azure and .NET - What's it all about?

Everyone seems to be talking about Kubernetes with companies seemingly tripping over themselves to support or adopt it.

In this talk we'll introduce Kubernetes, discuss the key concepts of the platform, it's high level architecture and how to get a Kubernetes cluster up and running in minutes in Azure.

We'll talk about and demo deploying .NET applications to Kubernetes and we'll finish with a discussion of the future where you can deploy both legacy and modern .NET applications to the same platform.

If you're interested in Kubernetes and you're not a .NET developer this session still has something for you

Shahid Iqbal is an independent consultant and Microsoft MVP, working with companies to help migrate their existing applications to the cloud and to build natively for the cloud using technologies such as Kubernetes and Azure. A .NET developer/architect with over a decade of experience he is usually happiest working with the latest technologies or speaking about them at community events and international conferences. When he's not working he's usually playing around with gadgets or talking about cars.

Tuhin Chakraborty: Automating Automation: Learning by Observation

The state-of-the-art of software automation requires explicit programming by a developer. Tools that make this programming easier have gained popularity, but the paradigm is essentially the same: a human must program an automation step-by-step. This intricate, manual programming is time-consuming and error-prone, making automation prohibitively expensive for most of the world's businesses.

Can we learn automations using software? Mimica records clicks and keystrokes, and tries to identify repetition in this dataset. Once it learns a map of the process, it can generate code for an automation.

We face challenges in .NET, machine learning, and computer vision.

Tuhin Chakraborty is the CEO of Mimica, a young startup that believes its software can learn to automate work simply by observing it. Before Mimica, Tuhin led engineering teams at companies like Pandora and LinkedIn while building and selling enterprise software in his spare time. He studied machine learning at Stanford University before dropping out to build a startup in London.

PLEASE SIGN UP @SKILLSMATTER: https://skillsmatter.com/meetups/11237-ldnug-august-2018