Welcome

As the last newsletter came out a little late the time to this newsletter seems quite short. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t lots of good stuff happening. We are filling out our programme of events until the end of the year and have some quite exciting things lined up. Some things are still in the planning stage so there isn’t much to tell and its subject to change, other things are a little more advanced. You can see what’s on the horizon in the “Further Afield” section below.

One of our members (Paul Cowan) has a job opening at the moment. If you are a C#/ASP.NET developer looking for a job in Glasgow then he would be interested in your CV. For full details see the website.

If you are a “Girl Geek” and would like a chance of winning a one year MSDN Premium Subscription then head over to the “Girly Geekdom Blog” and enter the competition.

Glasgow Caledonian University are in the planning stages of a Postgraduate course on .NET Application Development. If this is something you think you might be interested in, or if you know someone that might be interested in it then they are running a survey to find out what people would want from such a course. The survey can be found here.

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

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 (Hatfield)
  Paul Cowan talks about using ALT.NET technology (Glasgow)

October:
  Frank Kerrigan talks about SSIS (Glasgow)

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

December:
  Andrew Westgarth on ASP.NET development on IIS7 (Glasgow)

Useful Links

Firefox 3: The browser that has it all (apparently). And Microsoft’s IE team sent a congratulatory cake to help the Mozilla guys to help them celebrate.

jQuery UI 1.5: One API to rule them all! jQuery is a JavaScript library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, etc.

Sponsor’s message

SQL Know How are offering top quality SQL Server training courses at excellent value. Not only is the price great, but by entering the site from the links in this newsletter or on the Scottish Developer’s website you’ll get an additional 5% off the price. Their upcoming courses include the following

Best Practices in Performance and Availability for SQL Server 2005/2008
Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul S. Randal 1st – 3rd September 2008 Hatfield, Hertfordshire

Indexing for Performance in SQL Server 2000/2005/2008
Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul S. Randal 8th – 9th September 2008 Edinburgh

Smart Database Design
Paul Nielsen 22nd – 23rd September 2008 Hatfield, Hertfordshire

Smart Database Design
Paul Nielsen 29th – 30th September 2008 Edinburgh

SQL Server Data Storage Formats: Internals, Performance and Best Practices
Kalen Delaney 3rd November 2008 Harpenden, Hertfordshire

SQL Server Concurrency Control: Locking, Blocking and Row Versioning
Kalen Delaney 4th November 2008 Harpenden, Hertfordshire

SQL Server Data Internals and Tuning
Kalen Delaney 5th – 7th November 2008 Harpenden, Hertfordshire

SMALL PRINT: You are receiving this message because you signed up to receive information from Scottish Developers at an event. If you no longer wish to receive information from us please reply to this email (colin@scottishdevelopers.com) and ask to be removed from the list.