Category Archives: Misc

Red Gate sponsors Developer Day Scotland

Redgate

Red Gate Software are an award-winning organisation that provides simple tools for comparing, synchronizing, packaging, backing up and recovering SQL Server databases, as well as a range of tools for developers and testers working with .NET technologies. We supply over 500,000 IT professionals with effective and reliable tools to help get jobs done and done well. To download 14-day, fully-functional trials of any of our products please visit www.red-gate.com for more information.

Red Gate will also be providing a copy of SQL Refactor and SQL Dependency Tracker as prizes.

 

Developer! Developer! Developer! is coming to Scotland

SQLBits sponsors Developer Day Scotland


SQL Bits are an independent co-operative of leading SQL Server professionals in the UK with a strong passion for Community; our goal is to grow the experience and knowledge of those people who participate in the community, be it attending conferences or through blogs or through regional meetings of the UK SQL Server User Group.

SQLBits will be sponsoring the SQL Server Track at Developer Day Scotland.

 

Developer! Developer! Developer! is coming to Scotland

Stats for February

Top 10 posts

Position Last Month Title Posting Date
10 New Entry Creating Many-to-Many joins 21-Jan-2008
9 New Entry Iteration in .NET with IEnumerable and IEnumerator 11-Sep-2004
8 New Entry Spatial References in SQL Server 2008 05-Feb-2008
7 New Entry Always show the solution, Dammit!!! 08-Dec-2007
6 7 Getting started with Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008 01-Dec-2007
5 5 What is a DAL (Part 3) 13-Oct-2007
4 2 What is a DAL? 28-Aug-2007
3 3 What is a DAL? (Part 2) 05-Sep-2007
2 4 SQL Exception because of a timeout 17-Oct-2005
1 1 Internal Error 2755 caused by folder encryption 15-Oct-2006

Browser Usage

Position Last Month Browser Percentage this month Percentage last month Change
5 4 Opera 1.17 1.01% +0.16
4 3 Safari 1.50 1.31% +0.19
3 4 Mozilla 4.43% 1.01% +3.42
2 2 Firefox 34.29% 32.58% +1.71
1 1 Internet Explorer 58.41% 63.85% -5.44

Location of Visitors

Position Last Month Location
10 New Entry Belgium
9 6 Netherlands
8 7 Germany
7 8 Sweden
6 10 France
5 5 Australia
4 4 Canada
3 3 India
2 2 UK
1 1 USA

Scottish Developers Events Newsletter

I mentioned in my last newsletter that time just seems to get faster. Technology is pulling forward at a relentless pace. Windows 1.0 had an API of just 450 functions. That is an achievable amount to remember for many developers. .NET 3.5 has well over a quarter million members on over 11000 types (classes, structs, enums, etc.). Then there all the third party components and open source frameworks that are available. The key to managing all this without filling your head to the point it explodes is to know where to find the information when it is needed. Just as well that in March we have an evening of Grok talks to give you pointers towards all this information.

But before that we have an event from TechEd and DevWeek speaker Oliver Sturm. He is talking about what WPF can give to business applications. That is something that has always intrigued me. When I first saw WPF I thought it was wonderful and fantastic and colourful and flashy, but what use would it be to me when I write business applications for an insurance company all day? It seems there is a use and Oliver will be explaining it.

Now, I was doing a little checking the other day and I worked out that to see a speaker like Oliver at TechEd it would cost somewhere in the region of €80 for a single presentation (well, that’s the cost if you could see TechEd in such bite sized chunks, but it is an all or nothing proposition and I don’t have a spare €2000 + tax + flights and accommodation). Oliver’s session is a double length presentation (don’t worry there is a comfort break in the middle) so that is €160 worth of information. And how much are we charging for this? Well, at the moment we are charging £25 if you go on to our website, which you have to admit is excellent value for money. But we are running a promotion so you can see this for as little as £10!

 

Business Applications with WPF – The Full Monty

Edinburgh, 5th March 2008 @ 127 George Street (Microsoft’s Office)

Lots of demonstrations of WPF show flashy User Interfaces with animations and videos and trickery worthy of a Hollywood production worked over by ILM. Is that what your next business app is going to look like? Probably not. Nevertheless, WPF can do a lot for you, because it’s the most powerful and most productive UI platform out there. Full stop. This double session walks you through the whole process of creating a business application with WPF, focusing on how it saves you development time.

Biography

Oliver Sturm is an experienced software architect, developer, trainer and author, with a strong background in various different fields including system and framework architecture and design, process modeling and user interface design. He is a C# MVP and he works for Developer Express as a Technical Evangelist and Lead Program Manager for the Frameworks Division.

http://www.sturmnet.org/blog

Cost: £25 before March 1st or £30 thereafter or if turning up on the day.

Promotion rate: You can get the promotional rate of £10 if you quote promotion code “SDGW82” when registering for the event. The promotion rate is valid until 23:59 on Friday 29th February.

For more details visit: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/extcal/event.php?event=40

 

The Grok Talks

Glasgow, 11th March 2008 @ CPD Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University.

A Grok Talk is a short 5 to 15 minute presentation on a specific subject aimed at giving a broad overview to the audience. Or it may be a way to explain a smaller concept that does not require a full length presentation.

For the audience it acts as a taster allowing you get to know a little about a subject you may not already have known much about.

For the speaker it gives a chance to folks who may not have had the opportunity to speak before, or for those that would like to speak but are unsure about it. (If you would like to speak then please get in touch by emailing me at colin@scottishdevelopers.com)

The evening will be a smorgasbord of subjects packaged in to short 5 to 15 minutes talks with lots of interaction as well. The subject area of software development is too large for everyone to know everything, so this is a fantastic taster for learning a little bit about stuff you don’t know much about already.

For more detail (and an update on the topics that are going to be covered) please visit:

http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/extcal/event.php?event=47

 

Visual Studio 2008 Community Launch

Glasgow, 8th April 2008 @ CPD Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University

The world wide launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will happen on 27th February. On the 19th of March in Birmingham the UK launch will take place. And on the 8th April Scottish Developers will be doing its own launch event.

For more details visit: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/extcal/event.php?event=48

 

Developer Day Scotland

Glasgow 10th May 2008 @ CPD Centre, Glasgow Caledonian University

The session voting is currently open. Please register on the website and help shape the day if you have not already done so. The voting will close on the 8th March. The delegate registration will open sometime on the week commencing 10th March.

For more details: http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Default.aspx

 

How does the voting work for Developer Day Scotland

Developer Day Scotland is a BY the community FOR the community conference based on the Developer Developer Developer! community conference. We accept sessions from the community on any aspect of software development. When the call for speakers closes we go in to a voting phase. At the end of the voting phase we tally the votes and work out which speakers we need to contact to ask to speak, and which we need to contact to say sorry.

I’ve been asked by a few questions how we will be going about our voting process.

When the voting closes all the sessions will be ranked from most popular to least popular. The simplest thing to do at this point would be just to pick the top sessions. However, we want to ensure that a broad range of subjects are covered and that we get a diverse set of speakers.

If an individual speaker gets more than one session into the top set of sessions we will ask the speaker to hold the second session in reserve in order to give another speaker a shot at speaking. This may sounds like a strange thing to do, but we want to avoid “The Joe Bloggs Show” from emerging because a particular speaker has submitted a large number of sessions that are all quite popular. Also, if we have one speaker taking too many session slots we run the risk of having a big hole in our schedule if they were to be ill or have some other emergency on the day which prevented them from speaking. By the time the process is complete we would be looking at getting as close to as many separate speakers as there are session slots – one for each available session slot.

However, if two sessions that are broadly similar make it into the top list then the duplicates will be removed. We will try to be as fair as possible with this. If one of the speakers has another session that made it into the top list then their duplicate will be removed to give a chance to a speaker that may not have the opportunity to otherwise present.

Naturally, some speakers will have just missed the cut and others will have sessions dropped because of some kind of duplication. These speakers will be asked to come along anyway with their session up their sleeve just in case one of the other speakers has to drop out at the last moment.

At the end of the day we are aiming to get as much community involvement as possible. The process is part science in that the voting shows what people want to see and part jiggery-pokery in that we have to schedule all this into a day that works.

We have almost 30 speakers who have submitted sessions with over 50 session proposals in total. Inevitably there will be some disappointment for the speakers who didn’t get picked and we are very sorry that we have to reject any of the speakers as we have so many excellent sessions.

In the meantime the session voting is open, so vote for what you want to see.