Welcome

We are now in the middle of summer, however as I write this over a period of several days I can tell you that it has been chucking it down and it has been roasting.

If you are interested in SQL Server, the SQL Bits III conference (13^th September) has now opened registration and session voting. They’ve opted to allow people to register for the event before they’ve even finalised which sessions are going to run. So, you could take pot luck and register now, or you can wait and see and take your chances that there will be places left.

I would have also been advising you of the ALT.NET conference in London (also 13^th September) but when I last checked it was full already! Delegate Registration had only been open for a few days. If you’ve not signed up already there is always the Glasgow ALT.NET User Group. Added to that ALT.NET supporter Paul Cowan will be talking at Scottish Developers in Glasgow in September.

We also have exciting news that we have finally (and formally) merged with the North East Scotland .NET User Group. This gives us a permanent presence in Dundee. It also means that we should be able to put on events in Aberdeen from time-to-time. If you are from either city then get in touch and let us know what you’d like us to be putting on for you.

Our new committee is as follows: Colin Mackay (Chairman), Gary Short (Secretary), Frank Kerrigan (Treasurer), Barry Carr (UG Coordinator) and Craig Murphy (UG Coordinator).

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. If you are interested, but don’t think you have the skills to stand up and talk to a group of developers Microsoft are running some technical speaking training courses for those that want to speak to user groups. The courses will be held in Reading. The first is on 29th August. If you are interested drop me an email.

Regards,
Colin Mackay, Chairman, Scottish Developers

Events

6-August-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
An Introduction to Oxygene and its parallel coding features
FREE – Registration optional

Oxygene (formerly known as Chrome) is an advance .NET (and Mono) language by RemObjects influenced by Object Pascal. Oxygene has all the features of C# plus several more powerful features unique to itself. These include: Interface Delegation which provide a similar behaviour to Mixins; A null safe member access operator; Full support for “Design by Contract”; Virtual static members and Virtual constructors that can make writing object factories a breeze.

9-September-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
An Overview of ALT.NET Technologies
FREE – Registration optional

Most of the patterns and practices that come out of Redmond A.K.A Microsoft are purely to get a response from attendees of conferences like MIX. The same old drag and drop demo ware is both untestable and unmaintainable. Examples of such demo ware are the CAB application block, SCSF (smart client software factory), ObjectBuilder (a very poor IOC container) and the Entity Framework which many believe to be the catalyst for the ALT.NET movement. The recent ASP.NET MVC framework appears to be an acknowledgement from Microsoft that they want to embrace some of the ALT.NET concepts. The discussion will outline some of the following techniques and frameworks by way of a code review. Attendees are encouraged to participate with questions throughout the duration of the discussion. Some of he concepts and frameworks include: * Test Driven Development (TDD) * Nhibernate (Object Relational Mapper) * Castle Windsor (Inversion Of Control or Dependency Injection) * AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming) * ASP.NET MVC Framework * JQuery (a write less JavaScript library from a very talented team).

8-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Edinburgh (BCS)
The Three Ghosts of Microsoft Security
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)

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)

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