Rune Grothaug from Microsoft and NDC has interviewed Scott Hanselman with questions from the Norwegian .Net User Group! Scott will do the keynote at the Norwegian Developer Conference this year and will also have sessions on IIS7 and ASP.NET MVC.

I just wanted to welcome our latest member of the Norwegian .Net User Group community; Haugesund. Welcome! This is especially fun for me since Haugesund is where I grew up and lived for my first 18 years. Looking forward to see an active user group down there and promise to drop by if I'm ever in town when you have a meeting.

Live in Haugesund and want to be a member? Go here to sign up.

The first .Net user group ever (as far as I could find out) was started by Ruth Walther in Seattle December 2000. It seams like this group is no longer active and I was unable to find out why. Anyway, today you'll find a user group in almost every major city in any country. And if you don't have a user group where you live, I think it's about time you start one! :-) Seriously, it's not that hard and you'll be a hero where you live! :-)  I can really recommend the experience and people will defiantly appreciate someone taking the first step to get your city on the user group map.

After the first user group started up in the US many others soon followed during 2001. To pick a few other countries I'm familiar with I can say that my home country Norway started their first user group in Oslo October 2001 and in my city Bergen we started up in December 2002, the London .Net User Group was started in 2002 and Sydney Australia in April 2002, .

It's free
Most user groups I know of don't charge for membership. Many don't even have memberships, but use the word of the people to announce their meeting or that "everybody" knows that their having a meeting last Wednesday in every month, and it's just to show up. User groups rely on local, national and/or international sponsorship. If your country have a Microsoft company present, they usually help out. This can be to help you get in touch with speakers, sponsor travel costs (for speakers), pizza and the like. The user group I run in Bergen use local sponsors for pizza, but get some help from Microsoft for travel costs. When requesting speakers it's often smart to provide them with consulting when they visit your city. This is a nice way of helping your local companies get excellent consulting and it make the speakers trip to your city a bit more attractive.

Why are user groups so popular?
There are many reasons for this and they vary from user group to user group. But from my experience there are some general things that should more or less apply to all user groups:

• It's free
• You get free food (usually pizza)
• You get to meet other people from other companies to share experience with, that you would usually not meet outside the user group
• You learn a lot
• Keeps you up to date on what's going on
• Communities in general are popular

INETA
INETA is the mother organization for all .Net user groups. Its an acronym short for International .NET Association. You will find user group related to SQL server, VB, SharePoint and other .Net related products. They all have in common that they focus on some type of Microsoft .Net related technology. INETA is divided into five geographical areas; North America, Latin America, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and Europe. My experience is with INETA Europe, but I expect it to work much the same in the rest of the world. INETA Europe have among other things a Speaker Bureau with lots of good speakers. As a member your user group can request two speakers per year. These are top notch speakers! In Europe you'll see names like Ingo Rammer, Christian Weyer, Dino Esposito to mention a few. As a member your user group will also get a quarterly kit where you can select some books, cd's and other stuff to use as giveaways for you members, prizes etc. INETA also helps getting user groups started, especially if it's the first user group in the country. If there are existing groups in the country, the other groups usually helps you getting started in your city. That's how communities work!

The 27th of February Anders Norås will come and have two presentations on Domain Specific Languages (DSL). First we only planned one, but when I asked Anders if the presentation would be strictly .Net he suggested having two presentations, one on .Net and one on Java :) I thought this was a great opportunity to get the two local communities in Bergen together under the same roof. Sometimes there is sessions that is not directly connected to a technology platform and these types of presentations are great for joining forces and share experiences. Hopefully NNUG will visit JavaBin next time something like this comes around.

I will post more info about the sessions later and if you're a member of NNUG you will get the meeting invitation shortly. The same goes for JavaBin members.

Really looking forward to this and I hope to see you there.

In my previous post about Developer conference in Bergen I said some not so nice things about the .Net community in Bergen (also called criticism). After today's meeting I take it all back. Everybody that showed up today proved me wrong. On previous meetings we were satisfied if 20 people showed up. Actually 20 people is/was our goal for average attendance for 2008. So what happened today? 43 people showed up to see Erik Leivestad and Thomas Eyde talk about Agile Project Management and Test Driven Development! For a time there I was worried that we didn't have seats for everybody. I really hope that this is the new norm at NNUG Bergen and not just a onetime incident.

We also did a quick survey before we started the meeting. We asked how many project managers and how many developers was in the audience. To my surprise almost everybody was developers. I was thinking that because of the Agile PM talk we might have attracted a different type of crowd than we usually do, but that was not the case.

The second question was how many was here for the first time. About 50% of the crowd raised their hand. This was not a surprise for me since I checked the statistics the day before, but it's nice to get it confirmed :)

The last question was how many will come to the next meeting, and that was depressing. The response was 3-4 hands at best. I guess you where thinking: "let’s have this meeting first and see how it goes" :)

A big thank you to everybody that showed up today and a special thanks to Erik and Thomas for spending their spare time to educate us about agile processes and tools. It's really awarding to see a big crowd showing up when you've spent a lot of time (without getting paid) getting speakers and subjects that you hope people will like and find interesting. Finally I hope to see you on our next meeting the 27th of February. Until then, happy coding!

We've now added NNUG as a group to LinkedIn so you can get a nice NNUG logo on your LinkedIn profile. If you're a member of NNUG and have a LinkedIn profile, go to http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/51477/4686F07FF0B2 to add NNUG to your profile. For now the approval is manual, so there might be a short delay before it gets displayed on your profile. On my profile it looks like this:



Thanks to Lars Wilhelmsen for setting this up.

During my involvement in NNUG I've been playing with the thought of having a developer conference in Bergen. Funny enough I first started to consider this when we had some problems getting people to come to our NNUG events. I couldn't figure out why Bergen had such a low participation when other (smaller) cities in Norway managed quite good. I've also got reports from Microsoft saying that MSDN Live didn't do to well in Bergen either. Is this just how it is in Bergen? We just don't want to get our hands on new knowledge? Or is there so much info on the web that we don't see the need for meeting up in person? Maybe Bergen is just the worst city in Norway to be a developer? We just go to work to get our paycheck and don't really want to be bothered with updating our knowledge unless forced to? I don't think so and sure don't hope so! My impression is that the Java community in Bergen does not have the same challenges.

We will of course always have Mort though (see Jeff's articles here and here). Maybe Bergen is just overloaded with Morts? ;) However, I think a dev conference in Bergen has something to offer him as well.

So why do I want a dev conference in a city where developers don't participate in their local .Net community? First of all it's because I don't think the above is true. I think there is a lot of great developers and companies in Bergen working with development that would both see the benefit and be proud to host a dev conf in their city. Second, I think NNUG will benefit greatly from this and raise the visibility around the .Net community in the city. Thirdly, I have too much free time on my hand so I'm looking for something to do in my spare time (kidding).

So what do you think my dear reader? Is there room for a dev conference in Bergen? Would you come? And even better, would you volunteer to make this a reality? I'm volunteering now, but I need some helpers... :)

You might state that we already have a developer conference in Bergen and you would be right. It's called Roots, but I'm thinking about a different kind of conference. Roots is an international niche conference around OO (Recent Object Oriented Trends), but I want a general Norwegian (Nordic) dev conf. Even though I'm a .Net guy and would like .Net tracks, I also think there is room for Java and agile tracks.

And to all of you who have been going to NNUG regularly I apologize. The criticism in this post is to everyone except you ;)

On Wednesday NNUG Bergen was lucky enough to get Einar Ingebrigtsen to speak for us. He held a great session about XNA and some game dev history. Einar did game development for about 8 years and then jumped to business development. His background was perfect to highlight some of the similarities between the two. Especially interesting was the similarities around layering.

Einar is involved in many things and one of his latest projects is Game Camp. On November 23rd Game Camp will kick off with a great agenda in Oslo. Go here to check out the agenda and registration.

Another thing Einar has been doing lately is creating a 3D engine for Silverlight called Balder. As you may know Silverlight is a subset of WPF and one of the things they removed was the 3D stuff. But that didn’t stop him. Check out his 3D project over at CodePlex. To see the engine in action, check out this demo.

It's time for another NNUG meeting in Bergen. This time we've got Einar Ingebrigtsen talking about XNA and John St. Clair talking about continuous integration with TFS. This will be a great event! For complete agenda go to NNUG Bergen and sign up. Hope to see you there.

Most of us are back from vacation and so are Norwegain .Net User Group in Bergen. Check out the agenda and register for the August meeting here: http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-August/

If you’re not a member of NNUG, go here to register: http://www.nnug.no/Profil/RegistrerDeg/

While I'm on it, you should check out the agenda for upcoming MSDN Live as well: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032343418&Culture=nb-NO

and if your a student or new to asp.net you should check this out the introduction to asp.net development.

Just a reminder for MSDN Live in Bergen the 23rd of April. This time Microsoft have joined forces with Norwegian .Net User Group and me and John St. Clair are speaking at the last session of the day. I will talk about migration to WCF and John will do Debugging, Tracing, and Administration: Tips & Tricks. Here you'll find details about the "NNUG Agenda".

Because of circumstances outside our control, we had to postpone the NNUG meeting that where scheduled for 27th March. The meeting will be rescheduled to after Easter, with the same agenda. An exact date will be sent out to everybody next week. Sorry guys!

Great news! We have invited Christian Weyer from ThinkTecture to speak at NNUG in Oslo, Bergen and Kristiansand. I’m really looking forward to this. Christian is a well known speaker and especially known for his excelent expertise in SOA.

I had the opportunity to see him talk at TechEd in Barcelona last year, and this guy really knows his stuff. Come to our meeting in Bergen at May 30th and please tell all your friends and co workers!  For those of you not living in Bergen, he will also talk in Oslo the 29th and Kristiansand the 31st. More info will be available at NNUG later.

At NNUG on Wednesday (28 of February) I will have a talk about CMA Contiki’s experience with Scrum after 2 months (3 sprints). Frank Botnevik from Amitec will start the show with a talk about SOA, WSCF and his experience around this. Go here to register for the meeting. Hope you find these topics interesting and hope I'll see you there.

Just wanted to let you know that we have put out the agenda for the january meeting at NNUG in Bergen. You'll find it here: http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-Januar/. Don't forget to register so we know how much food to order. See you there.

I’m now officially the new leader of Norwegian .Net User Group in Bergen. I’d like to give Jon Andreas Bygstad great thanks for his excellent work and making NNUG in Bergen possible. And also for retire from his position to make room for me. Just kidding.

Even though Jon Andreas decided not to have the main responsibility anymore, he will still be on the board participating like before. I have a lot to learn and will depend on his experience to be able to make NNUG in Bergen even better than it is today. I think NNUG’s future looks very promising and I hope you as a developer, architect, student or whatever position you have know how to take advantage of NNUG. We work hard to give you free updates on technology, speakers and pizza every month. So if you’re not a member of NNUG yet, go register now! Did I say it was FREE?!!

If you'd like to participate, that being demo something you think is cool or try how it feels to be a speaker, we will be glad to hear from you. Our main goal is to make our .Net community in Bergen learn from each other by participating with subjects that is of interest to others. Also if you have any suggestions to how NNUG can be better, tell us about it! Go here to send us an email

Everyone who knows me knows that I have a special interest for memory leaks in .Net. At the company where I work we have solved a lot of these issues and I’ve also had talks about this at Norwegian .Net User Group (NNUG) in Bergen and Stavanger. One of our biggest problems was memory leaks related to events. Rico Mariani (MS performance guru) has set focus on this in his blog today by this blog post, so go check it out!

He focuses on the issue related to event generators, but there are other areas where you can get into trouble as well. I’ll try to explain our scenario:

1. We have a graphical engine responsible for creating graphical components (user controls) dynamically by using reflection.
2. All of these user controls inherit from the same class which exposes a lot of events.
3. When our graphical engine creates new instances of these user controls it hooks up these events.

This model is created to have loose coupling between the user controls, the engine and other components we have in our app. The engine has a lot of knowledge about other components and services in our app, which sometimes our user controls wants to communicate with. This communication is done through these events. Here’s an example:

I have a user control that wants to tell a service that he have made some changes the service should know about. For this we have created a special event on the user control that the engine listens to. So I trigger this event on the user control, the engine receives it and tells the service about it.

These event hookups caused us a lot of pain at some point. Our solution was the first that Rico mentioned in his blog post (IDisposable), which I personally would prefer. In addition to this we added some reflection code which found events and removed them. You’ll find more info about this here: http://channel9vip.orcsweb.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=180985

Before I end I want to recommend two tools you can use to find memory leaks in .net. The first one which we use is called .Net Memory Profiler. The other one which I’ve not personally used but I’ve heard others are using is the ANTS Profiler. So go find your leaks. Happy hunting!

On Thursday 7th of November I’m having a lecture about Memory Leaks in .Net at NNUG in Stavanger. In addition to memory leaks Per-Ove Joakimsen (from WebStep and leader of NNUG in Stavanger) is talking about his experience at TechEd in Barcelona. He’s also doing a short intro to WPF, WCF and LINQ. Go to http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Stavanger/Moter/Brukergruppemote-desember-2006/ to register for the event.

If you don’t live in Stavanger but another city in Norway and are interested in .Net, don’t forget to register at http://www.nnug.no/Profil/RegistrerDeg/ and you will be updated on NNUG happenings in your city. As of now we have NNUG in Bergen, Kristiansand, Oslo, Stavanger, Tromsø, Trondheim and Vestfold. For those of you who don’t know about NNUG, it is an independent INETA .Net usergroup. These usergroups exist all over the world, so if you live outside of Norway, look it up and you probably find a user group near you. If not you can start one!

At Wednesday 18th of October we will have a new meeting at NNUG in Bergen where Bård Strøm will talk about Agile development and I about Memory Leaks in .Net.

Agile development
In Norway agile development gain more and more popularity. Statistics show that 3 out of 10 software projects are delivered as ordered, but 7 out of 10 fail completely or partly. Based on techniques like extreme programming, agile development presents techniques to create products not only with higher quality but delivery on time, to the customer’s satisfaction.

Bård will talk more about this in his talk, so don’t miss out on this.

Memory Leaks in .Net
In a previous post in my blog I talked a bit about memory leaks and the importance of the dispose pattern. At my talk at NNUG I will go into the heart of the problem, show you the tools necessary to detect these leaks, demo common coding mistakes and show you some guidelines on how to avoid these errors in your software.

So if you live in Bergen, Norway don't miss this out. Go to http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Bergen/Moter/Brukergruppemote-Oktober/ to register.

If you have bought or planning to by a ticket for TechEd in Barcelona, you can register yourself at NNUG (http://www.nnug.no/Tech-Ed-2006/Hvem-skal-pa-Tech-Ed/). By doing this you tell NNUG and other members that you are going and where you are staying (which hotel). Then we can get together for a beer or a bite outside the daily techno babble (not mutually exclusive of course).

NNUG (Norwegian .Net User Group) in Bergen is back for full this autumn. As a new member of the board I just like to invite everybody in Bergen to come and be updated on new technology, meet developers and architects from other companies, enjoy some free pizza and just have a good time. I must also mention that if you’re interested in contributing on future NNUG meetings, just drop us an email! You will find more information about NNUG on our updated website at www.nnug.no.