Omaha .NET User Group February Meeting
Fellow .NET Users,
It was great to see so many of you at our last meeting. The last Thursday of the month is always something I look forward to. If you haven't attended a .NET User's Group meeting in a while, we would love to see you at the next one. Also, we're going to wrap up our feedback survey and will be giving away 6 $50 gift cards to random people who submitted a survey response (only one survey entry per person please). There's still time to give us your feedback! We'll close the survey at 4:00 on February 26th.
This month's .NET User's Group Meeting will take place on February 26th, starting at 6:00 PM. Food and drinks will be served by our sponsor starting 15-20 minutes before the start of the meeting. After the presentation, Improving will be giving away a few Amazon gift cards. Please join us for some time to learn and chat with like minded software developers.
Host:The Waterford Building
18881 W Dodge Rd Suite 120E, Elkhorn, NE 68022
Map
While there is a Visitor Parking sign that points to the north-side of the parking lot, it is easier for attendees to park on the south-side parking lot and enter through the East doors, which are labeled.
Topic:
The Critter Stack: Event-Driven .NET Without the Ceremony by Erik Shafer
Modern .NET frameworks often promise simplicity but deliver boilerplate. And that in-house mediator library? It's simple—until you need retries, observability, and durable messaging, and suddenly you're maintaining a framework. The Critter Stack offers a different path. Wolverine and Marten are mature, open-source tools that give you all of that out of the box, letting you write plain C# methods while the tooling handles messaging, persistence, and observability.
In this session, we'll build out features in a working event-driven system, demonstrating how commands and queries stay cleanly separated (hello, CQRS), how events flow across service and module boundaries, and how projections keep read models up to date—all without the indirection you've come to expect. You'll see what ships out of the box: durability, retries, flexible transports, and OpenTelemetry tracing. More importantly, you'll see how these patterns reduce complexity while increasing robustness and extensibility, with a gentler learning curve than you might expect.
Whether it's a modular monolith, a distributed system, or the API you're shipping next sprint, you'll leave with practical patterns for your .NET projects.
Speakers:Erik Shafer
Erik Shafer is a Senior Consultant at Improving and a core team member of Wolverine and Marten—the open-source libraries that form the Critter Stack. He spends his days building event-driven systems in .NET and helping other developers level up along the way. His evenings are split between gaming, concerts, travel with friends, and convincing developers to stop overwriting their data with CRUD and embrace event sourcing. He occasionally writes and produces videos at event-sourcing.dev.
Sponsors:Improving
We are a modern IT services company dedicated to positively changing the perception of the IT profession. Our mission is to deliver innovative technology solutions and foster cultural change that inspires continuous improvement. We specialize in consulting, software development, training, and community engagement, and we are guided by principles of trust, involvement, and excellence to create environments where people thrive and clients succeed.
We partner with organizations of all sizes to help them grow and adapt through innovative solutions and cultural transformation. What truly sets us apart is our focus on people—investing in growth, sharing knowledge, giving back, and strengthening the tech communities we’re proud to support, including groups like this one.
Thanks,
Matt Ruwe
mruwe@omahamtg.com
.NET User's Group Co-Leader
Brian Olson
bolson@omahamtg.com
.NET User's Group Co-Leader
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