Welcome

It seems a long time since I last put out a newsletter. In fact it was before Developer Day Scotland which seems to me to be long since past. Now that DDS is over for this year I am concentrating on getting the evening events organised in Glasgow for the remainder of the year. This is an ideal time to email me and let me know what subjects you would like to know about and I’ll try and find speakers that can talk on that topic.

But Scottish Developers is about serving software developers across Scotland and with that in mind the exciting news that we are amalgamating with the North East Scotland .NET User Group (NESDNUG) means that are going to be able to bring events to Dundee and hopefully further afield.

There are some fantastic events coming up in Scotland over the next couple of months. Between Scottish Developers and VBUG we will be taking a functional view of the world starting in Dundee when Barry Carr asks “What is Functional Programming?”, to get us one step closer to understanding Oliver Sturm is in Glasgow to show us “Functional Programming in C# 3.0” and one week later moves to Livingston to show us “F#” which is a functional programming language that targets the .NET framework.

As always, we are on the look out for new speakers. If you would like the opportunity to do a presentation on a software development topic from 10 minutes to 90 minutes then get in touch with me at colin@scottishdevelopers.com. 

Regards,
Colin Mackay on Behalf of Scottish Developers

Events

2-June-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (BCS)
BCS Glasgow Branch AGM 2008 with Survey of Job Market
FREE

The speaker will be Sam Wasom, Principal Consultant, Edinburgh Office of Computer Futures. Sam will talk about the “ICT job market Scotland 2008 – Opportunities and Skills requirements”. There will be as before, an opportunity for those interested to have an individual meeting with the Computer Future’s people.

4-June-2008 @ 18:30 in Edinburgh (SQL Server UG)
Using Visual Studio Team Edition for DB Professionals
FREE – Registration required

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals for the first time makes the database developer a first class citizen in the Microsoft development family. In this presentation Richard Fennel will cover the complete development life cycle using this tool, addressing issues such as schema management, source control, testing, data generation and deployment.

10-June-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
LINQ to XML: Everything but the kitchen SINQ
FREE – Registration optional

Colin Angus Mackay will be giving an introduction to the new XML classes in .NET 3.5, how they work and what can be done with them. After the break he’ll then show how the new XML classes can be used in LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) in order to get data out in the way that you want.

11-June-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers / NESDNUG)
What is Functional Programming?
FREE – Registration optional

The past few years or so has seen a resurgence of interest in functional programming. In addition, some functional language features are finding there way into imperative languages. Why is this? There are couple of reasons; firstly, functional languages are well suited to certain problems. Secondly, functional languages have features that can help the developer to take advantage of the current and future generations of multi-core computers. This presentation aims to provide you with insights into what Functional programming is and show you how functional languages can help you develop systems for multi-core machines. This presentation will use Scala (http://scala-lang.org) to demonstrate the concepts that will be introduced.

8-July-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
Functional Programming in C# 3.0
FREE – Registration optional

The newest version of C# introduces a number of language features that finally make it very easy to employ a functional style of programming. However, from the perspective of an imperative programmer, there are lots of questions surrounding functional programming. Why would I want to do it at all? Should I drop all state information in my apps? What useful functional patters are applicable to C#? In this session Oliver Sturm uses many practical examples (and some theory) to try and answer these questions.

16-July-2008 @ 18:00 in Livingston (VBUG)
F# with Oliver Sturm
FREE – Registration Required

Taking efficiency one step further – F# Microsoft Research describes F# as “a scripted/functional/imperative/object-oriented programming language”. Combining all those aspects in one language is certainly not an easy task, but they’ve done a good job of it. F# is interesting both as a language to actually consider for your projects and as a source of features that might make it into the mainstream .NET languages tomorrow. The session uses many examples to give you a good general overview of F#. To complement the introductory session, Oliver is going to show some more advanced samples from his talk “Data Handling in F#” and there will also be room for Q&A as well as discussion.

Further Afield

September:
  SQL Bits III (Herts)
  Paul Cowan talks about ALT.NET and using Open Source technology (Glasgow)

November:
  VBUG Conference (Reading)
  TechEd Europe (Barcelona)
  Developer! Developer! Developer! (Reading)

Useful Links

MSDN Roadshow: This year the MSDN Roadshow was held at the Odeon Cinema in Braehead, Glasgow. This links to the slide decks and other resources from the event.

Developer Day Scotland: Slide decks, code samples and other resources are now available from the Developer Day Scotland website.