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!

This month at .NET Oxford, we had Benjamin Howarth joining us to talk about Performance in the Javascript Era! Yes, I know - we're a ".NET" user-group - but not to worry - there was tons of server-side .NET in there too - so don't let the talk-title put you off!

This month, we had our biggest meetup yet, as we welcomed Jon Skeet himself to .NET Oxford to tell us about some of the upcoming C#8 features. And as you can see from the photo below - he certainly filled the house!...

Anyone who is subscribed to the .NET Oxford Meetup.com mailing list, would have received a group email from me last week about what looked like a bug in Meetup.com. At the time of writing that email, it appeared that Meetup was taking members from the wrong end of the waiting list when places became available!

For this month's .NET Oxford meetup we had two talks - one from .NET Oxford co-founder Matt Nield, speaking about Bots; and the other from Clifford Agius talking about Pilot Decision Management.

Our .NET Oxford meetup this month was all about Microsoft's globally-distributed database, Cosmos DB - and we were very pleased to welcome James Broome and Mike Larah from Endjin to tell us all about it! It also turned out that Endjin (being a remote working team), decided to spend the day in sunny Oxford for their team catch-up. Which was perfect, as it meant that we also had the entire team joining us for the meetup!

Last week was our July .NET Oxford meetup, and this time it was all about Quantum computing and Microsoft's new Q# programming language! Joining us this month was Anita Ramanan and Frances Tibble from Microsoft, doing a fantastic job with introducing us to the fascinating world of Quantum computing!

Earlier this week we had our 15th .NET Oxford meetup. This time it was another lightning talk event, making it our 3rd one to date. For normal events, we have one or two long talks - but the idea behind the lightning events is that we have shorter talks, where more people can get up. I really enjoy these types of meetup, as they add much more variation and also have a great social feel!

Last week, we had our May meetup with guest speaker Jon P Smith, telling us all about Entity Framework Core! And Jon did not only one, but two EF packed talks! The first explaining Entity Framework Core, and after the break, the second talking about performance tuning Entity Framework!

Last week we had our 13th .NET Oxford, with a Security double-bill from Robin Minto talking about lessons learnt from past infosec failures, and Frans Lytzen telling us about how to secure your webapps in Azure!