In this additional extra event, we took part in the UK .NET Tour 2020 event that was arranged by Steve Gordon and Karel Zikmund. This was the week of the NDC London conference, and they coordinated with various NDC speakers to speak concurrently at different .NET user-groups in the area. We were fortunate enough to be joined by David Wengier and Matt Warren for these two great talks...

"A (very) opinionated guide to MSBuild and Project Files" with David Wengier

"In this session we’ll dive into SDK-style project files and MSBuild to show you some of the techniques used by the .NET Project System team, and most of the rest of the dotnet org on GitHub, to make your project files easy to manage, author and maintain, make it easy to start new projects, and perhaps most importantly show you how to diagnose issues with your builds. Come and hear all of the things I wish David wished he knew about before joining the project system team, and hopefully you’ll be able to improve your project/build environment as a result."

"From ‘dotnet run’ to “Hello World”" - with Matt Warren

_"Have you ever stopped to think about all the things that happen when you execute a simple .NET program?"

This talk will delve into the internals of the recently open-sourced .NET Core runtime, looking at what happens, when it happens and why.

Making use of freely available tools such as 'PerfView', we'll examine the Execution Engine, Type Loader, Just-in-Time (JIT) Compiler and the CLR Hosting API to see how all these components play a part in making 'Hello World' possible."

Speaker Bios

David is a developer on the .NET Project System in Visual Studio team at Microsoft. Based in Melbourne, Australia, mostly interested in C#, good design and Lego Technic and Creator Expert cars. He can be found tweeting at @davidwengier, streaming at https://twitch.tv/davidwengier, helping to organize the DDD Melbourne conference, and on about a half dozen different slacks. A developer for the last 20 years, David has had experience in lots of different languages and environments, from cgi-bin scripts in Perl, to genetic algorithms in VB3, and Windows applications in COBOL. A series of terrible decisions, clearly, but he learnt in the end and now spends most of his time developing with .NET in C#, and enabling other developers to do the same.

Matt is a Microsoft MVP based in UK, and a C# dev who loves nothing more than finding and fixing performance issues. He’s worked with Azure, ASP.NET MVC and WinForms on projects for storing government weather data, medical monitoring devices and an inspection system that ensured kegs of beer didn’t leak! He’s previously been an Open Source Contributor to BenchmarkDotNet and RavenDB, nowadays he mostly blogs about the ‘Internals’ of the .NET Runtime at http://mattwarren.org. Matt currently works on the Contrast Security and lives near Pinewood Film Studios (home of James Bond) with his wife and 2 kids.

Photos and Video

Photos (thanks to John Parkin from Ocean Software for taking these!)
See above embedded videos. Thanks to Pusher for recording this for us!

Speaker's Links

Dave's MSBuild talk:

Matt's .NET Internals talk:

Prize Draw Winners

Jetbrains: Alex G
Manning ebook: Yves C
Raspberry Pi Starter Kit (New Orbit): Dave N