DotNet South West - October meetup

Thursday. October 31, 2024 - 1 min

This months trip ‘up North’ took in the October edition of the .NET South West meetup. Hosted by IO Associates in central Bristol, the evening contained a duo of talks for .NET devs and plenty of conversation on supporting topics.

The evenings two talks came from Adam Prendergast and Carl Sargunar.

Adam kicked off the meetup with the happy couple that is Astro and Umbraco. Starting with Umbraco’s relatively recently added ContentDeliveryAPI, Adam walked the room through the basics of architecting an Astro site to work with a headless CMS. It was a really well paced session that highlighted the benefits of both, with an emphasis on Astro. The talk urged the group to bake their websites (serve HTML) rather than fry them (serve js for hydration), a point that was well made. I really enjoyed Adams delivery style, and took a few notes which will hopefully refine mine.

Carl’s talk focused on .NET Aspire, a recently evolved tool from Microsoft for adding observability into our cloud based apps. Starting with a high level overview, the session quickly moved onto a trio of demos to show how to integrate aspire into an app. This was a great compliment to previous talks I’ve seen on Aspire, although both succumb to the whims of the demo gods. Perhaps Aspire is cursed! Regardless, it got across the point that Aspire is fairly straightforward to integrate into existing .NET apps.

The .NET SouthWest audience was super friendly and welcoming, plus I got to meet a few new faces and catch up with old faces. It was a long trip, and probably a bit too much for a single meetup, but the timing slotted in nicely with some other events and meetings en-route home over the next few days. If you’re in Bristol, it’s worth popping in for the meetup, but a 9hr round trip is probably a bit too much!