Here are all the examples from this evening’s introductory talk on Parallelisation at Scottish Developers.
The slide deck is available as a PDF file (10.5Mb)
The latest Scottish Developers newsletter is now available. Get it while it’s hot!
I was recently answering the questions of a speaker at an upcoming Scottish Developers event that I suddenly realised that I keep answering pretty much the same questions over again. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to put them in a blog post that I can amend from time-to-time and point new speakers at that.
First, I should point out that Scottish Developers have a number of “branches” and we all do things a little differently to fit the local community. Take, for example, the starting time. In Glasgow we usually start at 18:30. In Dundee it is 19:00.
I usually have the venue booked for one hour before the event is due to start. This gives myself or Frank ample time to set the room up and the speaker ample time to set up. We will normally be there at least 30 minutes before the start, sometimes we’ll even be there the full hour before.
I normally advertise “Doors Open” to be half an hour before the event starts to give attendees good time to get here and get seated.
At Glasgow Caledonian University the room will have a lectern with power, a VGA cable and an audio cable. There is access to a whiteboard or flip chart but we need to know in advance in order to bring suitable pens.
At the start of the event, either myself or Frank will go through the Health and Safety spiel, talk about upcoming events that Scottish Developers are doing and anything else in the community that may be important to developers. We will then introduce the speaker.
As a speaker you will have up to 2 hours to talk. We suggest that if your talk is over 75 minutes that you allow for a 10-minute break midway. The two hour limit is an absolute maximum. We must be cleaned up and vacated by 21:00.
If you are appearing on the same evening as another speaker, please be mindful of the time. If you overrun that means less time for the other speaker. If, unfortunately, you are starting late then we will have to ask that you still finish on time, especially if the evening’s schedule is tight.
At the end of your talk you would hand back to the host (either myself or Frank) and we’ll encourage the audience to fill in the feedback. We usually encourage this by entering the feedback forms into a prize draw and the lucky winner or winners will go home with a prize. In the past prizes have ranged from a pair of Microsoft socks, to t-shirts, books, software licenses for things such as DevExpress’ Refactor!Pro and CodeRush or JetBrains’ ReSharper. Our top prize to date has been a one year MSDN Premium Team Suite Subscription (that’s worth over £8000)
We normally go to Waxy O’Connor’s for a drink after the event.
When I get home I’ll try and collate the feedback as quickly as possible and send out the aggregate results. The feedback to the speaker is always anonymised. Normally I’ll get the feedback out that evening, sometimes it will be the following evening before it is sent out.
We are always on the look out for new speakers who may wish to speak at our events. If you are interested, please contact me at colin@scottishdevelopers.com. If you are unsure, and don’t want to commit to a full length presentation we occasionally run open-mic nights (also known as Grok Talks) where you get 10 minutes to talk about something development-oriented.
We’ve been busy lining up some great talks between now and the end of the year. It is a great opportunity to learn new techniques and new technologies and keep yourself ahead of the game.
We are continuing to trial a new events systems, so we’d be keen to hear what you think of it. The events pages will now be on Event Brite. You will be able to see all the details about an event there and register for it. There is also an RSS feed of all Scottish Developer’s upcoming events too.
After the talk earlier this month by Paul Cowan on ALT.NET he managed to get a lot of people interested in ASP.NET MVC. There was a real buzz about it after the event as it really grabbed people’s attention. I’ve managed to arrange for Mike Ormond from Microsoft to come up to Scotland and give a talk on the subject. An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC is on 16th October in Edinburgh.
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, Chairman, Scottish Developers
Goodbye Mocks, Farewell Stubs: Roy Osherove discusses why terminology could be an obstacle to people taking up TDD practices.
Foundations of Programming: Karl Seguin’s primer on all things that make us better developers.
1-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
Using Git in a Team
FREE – Registration Optional
This talk will introduce you to Git and show you what you need to do to enable Git to work over the wire and how your team can synchronise their repositories with each other.
8-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Edinburgh (BCS)
The Three Ghosts of Microsoft Security
FREE – Registration Required
In this talk Stephen Lamb will take us through the history of Microsoft security, bringing us up to date on where Microsoft is at today and point out the direction of security improvements coming down the pipeline. He will also discuss how Microsoft responds to security incidents and explain the process to release updates and patches to fix vulnerabilities. Come along to hear why Microsoft software is now some of the most secure on the planet.
14-October-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
SQL Server Double Bill
FREE – Registration Optional
Two talks on SQL Server. One by Frank Kerrigan entitled “Practical Integration Services for SQL Server 2005/8” and the other by Martin Bell called “How do you do Hierarchies?”
15-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
Erlang
FREE – Registration Optional
In this talk you’ll learn how Erlang discards traditional imperative assumptions, such as mutable data, liberating you to write programs that can scale to efficiently use thousands of cores concurrently!
16-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Edinburgh (Scottish Developers)
ASP.NET MVC Framework
FREE – Registration Required
In this session we’ll take a look at the drivers behind MVC, the architecture of a typical ASP.NET MVC application, new features in ASP.NET that make it possible and we’ll build a simple ASP.NET MVC application to explore the key concepts.
29-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
Look! There’s my data! Virtual Earth san Javascript
FREE – Registration Optional
The Windows Live team have recently made available ASP.NET Server side controls for Microsoft Virtual Earth. In this talk Colin Angus Mackay will show you how to use this control to visualise your data, from sticking some simple pins down for store locations, to drawing thematic maps. All this without writing javascript.
November:
VBUG Conference (Reading)
TechEd Developers (Barcelona)
Dynamic Language Runtime (Dundee)
Red! Green! Then What? (Glasgow)
Developer! Developer! Developer! (Reading)
Functional Programming in C#3.0 (Dundee)
December:
Andrew Westgarth on ASP.NET development on IIS7 (Glasgow)
Equator: Senior Developer, C# 2.0/3.0, .NET 2.0-3.5, ASP.NET, XML, SQL Server 2000/2005. More Info…
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
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
[More details and registration]
16th October 2008 at 19:00 in Edinburgh
Today, ASP.NET webforms is a well established and highly productive platform for building web applications. Some people though, crave more control. They want to operate that bit closer to the metal, enjoy a clear separation of concerns and ensure that unit testing their application is made as easy as possible.
Enter ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications with the ASP.NET framework as an alternative to ASP.NET webforms.
In this session we’ll take a look at the drivers behind MVC, the architecture of a typical ASP.NET MVC application, new features in ASP.NET that make it possible and we’ll build a simple ASP.NET MVC application to explore the key concepts.
Speaker Bio
Mike Ormond gained a BSc(Hons) in Information Engineering from the University of Strathclyde before moving south of the border many years ago. After spending some time with the Defence Research Agency, Mike joined Mars Electronics where he worked on automated payment systems. In 1996 he joined Mercury Interactive before heading over to Microsoft in 1997 to work in their developer support organisation.
In 2003 he joined the Developer and Platform Group as a Developer Evangelist. Since then he’s travelled the length and breadth of the land talking about Microsoft’s platform and developer tools. Currently Mike’s interests include ASP.NET, AJAX, Silverlight and developing solutions with Office Open XML.
When he’s not working, Mike likes to potter in his allotment and listen to Radio 4 on the wireless.
You can contact Mike at: http://mikeo.co.uk
[More details and registration]
I hope you’ve all managed to have a great summer as we enter into our Autumn schedule.
The big news in the Microsoft world this month is that SQL Server 2008 was released to manufacturing (RTM) and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 along with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 was also released.
We are currently trialling a new events systems, so we’d be keen to hear what you think of it. The events pages will now be on Event Brite. You will be able to see all the details about an event there and register for it. There will also be an RSS feed of all Scottish Developer’s upcoming events too.
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, Chairman, Scottish Developers
25-August-2008 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Glasgow ALT.NET UG)
Monday Night Coding Session
FREE
The Glasgow ALT.NET user group will be meeting in McGinns at 18:30. First timers are welcome, there will be a sign to point you to the group. The topic will be on creating an IOC container.
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
In this talk Stephen Lamb will take us through the history of Microsoft security, bringing us up to date on where Microsoft is at today and point out the direction of security improvements coming down the pipeline. He will also discuss how Microsoft responds to security incidents and explain the process to release updates and patches to fix vulnerabilities. Come along to hear why Microsoft software is now some of the most secure on the planet.
29-October-2008 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
Look! There’s my data! Virtual Earth san Javascript
FREE – Registration Optional
The Windows Live team have recently made available ASP.NET Server side controls for Microsoft Virtual Earth. In this talk Colin Angus Mackay will show you how to use this control to visualise your data, from sticking some simple pins down for store locations, to drawing thematic maps. All this without writing javascript.
September:
SQL Bits III (Hatfield)
October:
Frank Kerrigan talks about SSIS (Glasgow)
November:
VBUG Conference (Reading)
TechEd Developers (Barcelona)
Developer! Developer! Developer! (Reading)
Functional Programming in C#3.0 (Dundee)
December:
Andrew Westgarth on ASP.NET development on IIS7 (Glasgow)
Blue Dot: Project Engineer, .NET Development Lead / Glasgow / Salary based on Experience. More Info…
Scottish Developers: Where are you from and how did you get interested in software development?
Paul Cowan: I am from Belfast, Northern Ireland. I was about 11 or 12 when I wrote my first programs in BASIC on a Dragon 32. I wrote my own textual adventure game as there were very few games for the Dragon. I then did not program again until I was about 30 when after years of getting hacked off working for my family business in Belfast, I did an MCSD course covering VB6 and SQL Server 7. That was in 2000.
SD: You are a major proponent of “ALT.NET”. What does that actually mean?
PC: ALT.NET means many things to many different people. To me, it simply means that there are alternatives out there. Not just tools and frameworks but practices like TDD. Microsoft has only recently got on the testing band wagon. This push came from the open source community. It means an alternative voice. People need educated that there are alternatives out there that come from various different sources.
SD: At what point did you get introduced to the concept?
PC: I got introduced to Castle and NHibernate in a place I worked in London. Working with an ORM and IOC just changed my way attitude to development. Obviously I had never heard of an IOC or an ORM on MSDN or whatever Microsoft propaganda I was reading at the time. Ayende wrote a blog about how to achieve generics with NHibernate and I started reading his blog. Sometime after that people started blogging about ALT.NET.
SD: So what is ORM and IOC?
PC: ORMs or Object Relational Mappers have arisen to ease the pain of converting data between relational databases and objects. They essentially take the pain away from having to hydrate and rehydrate your objects from the database. This mapping can be expressed with xml, attributes, fluent interfaces etc.
IOCs or Inversion of Control containers arose from the pain of having to create multiple object factories to create your components. Think of the inversion in this context as passing the control of the creatio
n of your components to a higher process or indeed a container that holds all your dependencies. Side effects of IOC are separation of concerns, interface driven design, greater testability and component oriented programming. If done right the experience is seamless.
SD: Did you hit any stumbling blocks when your first started using ORM or IOC?
PC: My first experiences of the above were with Castle Windsor’s IOC and the NHibernate ORM. Both sent me on a steep learning curve. The thing that eased my transition was being able to refer to working source code of a project I was working on. NHibernate in particular is a vast framework. The forums did and continue to solve the bulk of any grey areas. Most problems I have had are problems that others have had and as such a recorded posting is there to suggest an answer.
SD: In your session you’ll also be talking about AOP, ASP.NET MVC and JQuery. What are those?
PC: AOP is technically being able to add or introduce new modularised pieces of code into a component without changing the source. I currently use custom attributes to specify the methods I want to intercept so I am actually changing the source but I could achieve the same effect by specifying which methods I want to intercept via a configuration file. I achieve the interception on the back of the IOC container.
ASP.NET MVC is unsurprisingly Microsoft’s web implementation to the Model View Controller pattern. This too is a reaction to keep the vocal minority of ALT.NET onside by producing this framework. The concept is not new and facilitates a better separation of concerns and a greater testing story than is currently available with web forms.
JQuery is a JavaScript abstraction library that allows truly great things with very little code. You can select any number of DOM nodes via a CSS selector like syntax and perform actions against your result set. There is an AJAX story and a multitude of plug-ins that can create various visual and technical themes.
SD: Thank you, Paul, for taking the time to talk to us.
Paul Cowan will be talking about ALT.NET Technologies on the 9th September at 18:30 in Room 6 of the Continuing Professional Development Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University. He also runs the Glasgow ALT.NET User Group. If you want to find out more please visit http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/glasgow_altdotnet_usersgroup/
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
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 (13th 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 13th 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
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.
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)
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
The Blog of Colin Mackay 