Community

Advert for SQL Bits III

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:24:50 GMT

SQL Bits III will be held on 13th September 2008.

Oxygene talk in Dundee

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:28:13 GMT

Last night's talk in Dundee on Oxygene was excellent.

My journey up was a little fraught as an accident on the A80 meant that it took me 1h15m to travel the 20 miles from Glasgow to Stirling. By that point was running late and had 45 minutes to cover the last 55 miles. In the end I arrive 15 minutes late, but that was okay because they hadn't actually started yet.

The journey back afterwards was a bit hellish too because the rain was coming down hard and the M80 between Cumbernauld and Stirling doesn't seem to be able to drain water quickly enough. Even reducing my speed I was aquaplaning every few hundred metres.

Anyway, Oxygene, if you don't know, is a Object Pascal based language that targets the .NET Framework. In terms of features it contains a lot of things that would be beneficial to C# such as interface delegates, parallel coding constructs and null handling.

I will be blogging in more detail about some of these features as I plan to look further in to this language.

Lincolnshire Microsoft Developers User Group

Colin Angus Mackay — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:08:50 GMT

Some colleagues of mine are in the process of starting up the Lincolnshire Microsoft Developers User Group. If you are in the area and are interested in joining a user group (an excellent way to learn about technologies) then you might want to join their Yahoo group. You can sign up here.

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Speaker Training full

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:01:41 GMT

As I mentioned in the Scottish Developers July Newsletter Microsoft are running speaker training sessions to help community speakers get started or improve their skills with regard to technical presentations. I just got an email earlier today to say that all the places are full already. Microsoft will be running another session at some point, so if you missed this opportunity there will be another sometime in the coming months.

In the meantime if you want to get your feet wet and have a go at speaking for a short 5-10 minutes session we always welcome new speakers at Scottish Developers. Just drop me an email to colin@scottishdevelopers.com. We also have an open mic night from time-to-time so drop me an email if you'd be interested in that.

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Speaking at SQL Bits III

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:05:24 GMT

I've just had the email through to let me know that my session has been selected for SQL Bits III on the 13th of September. I'll be talking on the subject of Spatial Queries in SQL Server 2008, an evolving talk I've done a couple of times before. It will be updated once again for SQL Bits III.

Here's the abstract: It is reckoned that 80-90% of data has a spatial component to it. But what do we do with it now? At best, we constrain it to postcodes. Well, that would be great if we were delivering letters, but the majority of us aren’t. In this session we look at Spatial Queries in SQL Server to see how it works and what can be done with it.

Technorati Tags: SQL server,SQLBits,SQLBits III,Spatial Queries

Scottish Developers July Newsletter

Colin Angus Mackay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:28:18 GMT

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

SQL Bits III Session Voting and Delegate Registration open

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:28:30 GMT

SQL Bits are going for a slightly different take on the registration process this time. You vote for the sessions you want to see at the same time as signing up for the conference. This is quite interesting because it means that you are signing up as a delegate without actually knowing what the final agenda will be. It's quite exciting really!

If you want to vote on the sessions you want to see and sign up for the conference then you can head on over to the SQL Bits website and sign up. Remember to vote for my session while you are there: "Where's my data? An introduction to Spatial Queries in SQL Server 2008"

Technorati Tags: SQLBits,SQLBits III,SQL Server,conference,community

Functional Programming in C#3.0

Colin Angus Mackay — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:38:22 GMT

Oliver Sturm spoke to to Scottish Developers in Glasgow earlier this week to a packed room! His topic was Functional programming in C# 3.0.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and he received comments such as "Great code examples" and "very worthwhile". So, if you missed last nights session, or you just want to review the code at a more leisurely pace then Oliver has them on his blog: http://www.sturmnet.org/blog/archives/2008/03/14/devweek-session-slides-and-samples-and-info/

Oliver is also talking to VBUG in Livingston next week on the topic of F#. For more information: http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/July-2008/VBUG-SCOTLAND-F-with-Oliver-Sturm.aspx

Finally congratulations to everyone who won prizes last night from the T-shirts right up to the MSDN Premium Subscription.

Technorati Tags: scottish developers,functional programming,c#

SQL Bits III - Call for Speakers

Colin Angus Mackay — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:45:01 GMT

Session submission is now open for SQL Bits III. SQL Bits III will take place on Saturday 13th September in Hatfield, Hertfordshire.

Also, if you are feeling particularly artistic they are also running a competition to come up with a new logo.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server,SQLBits,conference,hatfield,competition

Event Organisation - The Feedback

Colin Angus Mackay — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:42:45 GMT

This is the first post in a series of random thoughts on community events that I'm writing based on my experience running a user group and the Developer Day Scotland conference.

In this post I'll concentrate on receiving feedback.

Photo by Craig Murphy

First, I should like to concentrate on the management of feedback. If the event asks people to fill in feedback then it should be collated and returned to the speaker as soon as possible. For my user group meetings I try and ensure that when I get home afterwards I collate the feedback and email the speaker before I go to bed. The quicker the speaker can receive the feedback the quicker they can see how they did. The closer to the event the more they will remember and the better they will be able to evaluate the feedback effectively. For Developer Day Scotland I got the feedback out to all the speakers within 3 days.

If the speaker doesn't receive their feedback after a number of weeks they they are most likely to have forgotten specific incidents during their presentation. The guy that writes "Loved the quip about..." or "It was most annoying when you..." has effectively wasted their time if you, as a speaker, can no longer remember making the quip or doing the annoying thing. The quip may have been an off the cuff remark made in the moment that you could have incorporated in to your future presentations - If you can't remember it, then you've lost the opportunity to re-use it and entertain as well as educate. Similarly, if you can't remember the annoying thing then the comment about it won't help you so much. It isn't easy to purge annoying habits if you don't remember doing them or associate a particular habit as being annoying.

Bottom line on this point is to get the feedback to the speakers promptly. Devote time to collating it and delivering it to speakers. The sooner the better.

It's all very well and good saying that but how do you turn around the feedback quickly?

If you have a paper based feedback system in place where you are collecting feedback after each session, you can have people help you input that into excel or a database. That will help you get the feedback processed quicker. In this case many hands make light work.

From personal experience, I don't recommend the online feedback that happens after the event. This style of feedback takes longer because you are waiting on the attendees actually fill it in. Some might do it promptly, others might take their time, and some will just plain forget. From an organiser's perspective, the online feedback may seem to be an easy win; it is much easier to collate as it is done online so the database is being populated by the actual attendees. Of course, as the feedback is filled in after the event the attendees recollection starts to fade.

If you want to get as many people to fill in the feedback as possible I've found that basing prize draws on the feedback forms submitted encourages more people to fill in feedback. For events such as Developer Day Scotland we had some prominent sponsors offer us developer tools as giveaway item. But smaller items such as books, T-shirts, mice can do just as well for user group meetings.

Having been responsible for collating feedback for a variety of speakers I've seen a fair amount of variety in the comments. However, I have to admit that I've never had a stunningly bad speaker at any of my events yet. For the most part feedback is positive. The audience generally really does want the speaker to succeed and will often give some leeway for things that go wrong that is out of the control of the speaker.

I've also found that there are a few really angry people out there who only ever give bad feedback. So, if you are a first time speaker and you've got one of those nutters at your session try not to take it too personally. I'm not going to go on at length about how to interpret feedback as Barry Dorrans, an experienced speaker at DDD and other events, has an excellent post on the subject on his blog: Is "bad" feedback the best feedback?

Finally, there is feedback form itself. What do you ask people? How do you want the results. There are two main types of answer, in my opinion. The first is the tick-the-box style where you just tick the box for the score out of 5 (or 10) on a particular aspect. The second is a question that requires a text based answer, a few words or a couple of sentences.

For the event organiser the questions that ask people to tick a box are often better because it means that when you collate all the feedback together you can rank the speakers. I did this for Developer Day Scotland (and published some of the results.) You can set a base line where you say, if anyone drops below this line they don't get invited back, or if anyone goes above that line they are automatically accepted next time. Or, if you are like NxtGenUG you can use these scores to give out prizes to the best speakers.

From the speaker's perspective the text based answers are often better because they give a greater variety of feedback and allow the evaluator to express themselves. This can be used to tell the speaker what they did well, to show appreciation, to point out a negative aspect, or to suggest a way to improve. The wide variations in what people can put would rule out giving them tick-boxes to mark off.

For the text based answers the questions have to be open. They have to encourage people to say what ever they want to say without constraining them into thinking that something isn't important because it wasn't asked for directly. I often reduce it to just two questions. "What did you like?" and "What didn't you like?" And other times I'll also include the catch all "Are there any other comments you'd like to make?"

Hopefully you've found this useful for your own events, or perhaps you have your own comments you'd like to add. Either way I'd welcome any feedback so feel free to leave a comment.

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