This week we had our very first attempt at a virtual .NET Oxford event! And it seemed to go pretty well! We were joined by Mark Rendle to talk all about Roslyn! We also had a 10-minute lightning talk by Megan who works at our sponsor company, Corriculo Recruitment talking about the state of the the job market due to COVID-19.

Now that .NET Oxford is going virtual for the time being during the COVID-19 lockdown, we'll be using Zoom for next few meetups. The first one is next week where we have Mark Rendle talking about Roslyn!

It's been a while since I've written a .NET Oxford blog post, choosing to replace the detailed blog posts with summarised "show notes" on the new .NET Oxford website (you can read about my reasons here). However, last month, we had an additional 'weekend' meetup with guest James Montemagno(!!) flying into the UK especially to talk at our little old' user group! So I thought this was definitely worth a blog post!

Over two and half years ago, I wrote a blog post about starting .NET Oxford. I started it with good friend and ex-colleage, Matt Nield. Since then, .NET Oxford has grown to be a thriving community in Oxfordshire. We've had a wide variety of talks and speakers - ranging from famous names like Jon Skeet and Uncle Bob, to first-time speakers who have never been on stage before! And some of those first-time speakers might never have ever gotten on stage if it hadn't been for the .NET Oxford community! It's facts like this that really make starting a user-group worthwhile!

I recently wrote a blog post saying that I've decided to stop all the in-depth write-ups for each and every .NET Oxford meetup that we have. This was mainly due to the time it took to write them, and I now want to be able to spend that time writing content of my own choosing, rather than being restricted by our speakers' topics.

For the past two years, I've written quite in-depth blog posts about each of our monthly .NET Oxford meetups. Whilst I enjoyed writing these at first - they do take up quite a lot of my time each month. Time that I'd now like to start using for other stuff - eg. writing blog post content of my own choosing rather than effectively someone else's topics. I also have a couple of startup ideas I'd like to have more time to focus on.

For this month's .NET Oxford, we were joined by Chris Bacon from Google for a fascinating talk about how to build a .NET runtime in C! Chris's talk was pure code all the way through (no slides whatsoever!), and even though it was quite a complicated topic, he did a fantastic job of explaining it - extremely clear - and surprisingly given the topic, very funny too!

Earlier this month we sent out survey for .NET Oxford to get a little bit of feedback. Are our members happy? Or should we be banned from ever gracing a meetup ever again? Well thankfully, it turns out our members seems pretty happy! Here are the results!...

This month was our first .NET Oxford of 2019, and we were very pleased to welcome back Ian Cooper, who was this time talking about NGINX! For more details about the last time he joined us, see my blog post from March 2018 where he did a talk on 12 Factor Applications.

This month was our last .NET Oxford of 2018, and this time we had another lightning talk event! I always really enjoy these lightning talk events, as there's always a lot more variation, and much more of a community feel with more people getting up on-stage. And being December, our Primary sponsors Corriculo Recruitment adding even more to that social (and Christmassy!) feel by bringing along plenty of Mulled Wine too!