On January 20th Scott Logic attended the launch of NEBytes, a group that will be organising monthly IT based talks in the North East of England.

The group aims to attract an audience of both IT professionals and developers by featuring talks in both disciplines, with the hope that developers may be interested in how their software is being utilised, installed and deployed and that IT professionals and managers may learn something about development and new development APIs and tools.

The launch event, held in a lecture room at Newcastle University, featured three talks covering Sharepoint, Silverlight and Hyper-V. The event sold out and was very busy.

The first talk introduced the numerous enhancements to Sharepoint 2010 which is currently in Beta.

The second talk was was an entertaining introduction to Silverlight given at a whirlwind pace by Microsoft’s Mike Taulty. The talk featured demos of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010 as well as several new features of Silverlight 4 – mainly around increased access to devices such as webcams and printing, as well as the new trusted install process.

The final talk was an introduction to Microsoft’s relatively new Hyper-V technology, their attempt at taking on VM Ware, the market leaders in virtual machines. It was interesting to see the future of server technology, with support for 64-core architectures, dynamic parking of cores to save energy, and jumping virtual servers between different hardware without downtime. While acknowledging
Hyper-V is not yet as feature-rich as VM Ware, Microsoft appear to be aiming at gaining market share though its relative cheapness and integration into Server 2008 R2.

It remains to be seen how much of a common audience there is between IT professionals and developers, but if the group continues to attract the same numbers as the first meeting, then they may have got the mix just about right.

Next month will feature a talk on dynamics in .NET 4, and a second talk aimed more at IT professionals.