Events

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.

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

What's New in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

Colin Angus Mackay — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:18:26 GMT

Finally, Microsoft have a date for an event in Scotland. It is on 16th of October in their new offices in Waverley Gate, Edinburgh. Here are the details:

[Register for the event here]

16 October 2008 13:30 - 16:15
Welcome Time: 13:00

Microsoft Scotland
Waverley Gate
2-4 Waterloo Place
Edinburgh EH1 3EG

Event Overview

Timings
13.00 for 13.30 Registration

13.30 - 14.45 Session 1

14.45 - 15.00 break

15.00 -16.15 Session 2

16.15 close

Overview:

“Service Pack? We’re calling it a Service Pack? Are you kidding??!?!”

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 will release later in 2008 alongside .NET Framework V3.5 Service Pack 1 and, together, they represent a significant upgrade to Visual Studio 2008. There are enhancements across many areas of the .NET Framework such as data access, windows application development and web development and there are also corresponding changes in the development environment to support the new framework features.

Session 1: What’s New for Web & Windows Development?

Here we’ll explore the changes to web and windows development with Service Pack 1. In the web space, we’ll take a look at the new controls added to ASP.NET for easy playback of media and Silverlight content and we’ll take a good look at the new Dynamic Data framework for quick “scaffolding” of a web site. In the Windows world, we’ll look at the new capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation V3.5 Sp1 and the new, smaller, subset of the .NET Framework in the .NET Client Profile that makes deployment of WPF applications much easier.

Session 2: What’s New for Data?

The ADO.NET team have been busy for Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2008. There are two major new pieces of functionality – the ADO.NET Entity Framework provides a level of abstraction over your data store with a LINQ-enabled, object-relational-mapping API. The other new piece of functionality, ADO.NET Data Services easily exposes arbitrary data over a RESTful set of web services. In this session, we’ll explore both to give you an idea of what’s happening in data access. We’ll also make a brief mention of the changes around SQL Server 2008 data types and tooling.

Speaker Biogragphy:

Mike Taulty

Mike Taulty, Microsoft: Mike has been in the team since 2003 and is currently looking at technologies such as Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, Silverlight V2 and SQL Server 2008. Before joining the Community team, Mike worked in Microsoft's Services group as a developer consultant focused on helping ISVs and Enterprises develop their applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Mike spent the previous nine years working as a software developer for a number of different software houses, end-users and consultancies, making use of various operating systems, databases and what used to be called 'middleware’.

Read Mike's blog

Eric Nelson

After many years of developing on UNIX/RDBMS (and being able to get mortgages) Eric joined Microsoft in 1996 as a Technical Evangelist (and stopped being able to get mortgages due to his new 'unusual job title' in the words of his bank manager). He has spent most of his time working with ISVs to help them architect solutions which make use of the latest Microsoft technologies - from the beta of ASP 1.0 through to ASP.NET, from MTS to WCF/WF and from the beta of SQL Server 6.5 through to SQL Server 2008. Along the way he has met lots of smart and fun developers - and been completely stumped by many of their questions!

In July 2008 he switched role from an Application Architect to a Developer Evangelist in the Developer and Platform Group. Currently Eric’s interests include digging into LINQ to Entities, ADO.NET Data Services and switching from C# to Visual Basic development.

At home, he battles rat infestations, comes second to the family dog and uses any spare moments he has after 10pm to team up and play online with and against friends - keep an eye out for 'erknel' and say 'hi'

Read Eric’s blog

[Register for the event here]

Technorati Tags: msdn,microsoft,visual studio,sp1,software development

VBUG Manchester - Spatial Queries

Colin Angus Mackay — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:08:47 GMT

Just a reminder to anyone that is interested that I'm speaking tomorrow (Thursday July 24th) Evening at VBUG in Manchester on the topic of SQL Server 2008 Spatial Queries, slide decks are available on my website.

Technorati Tags: VBUG,Manchester,Spatial Queries,SQL Server 2008,SQL Server,SQL,spatial,slide deck

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.

Technorati Tags: ddd scotland,developer day scotland,feedback,evaluation

LINQ to XML event summary

Colin Angus Mackay — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:14:18 GMT

The LINQ to XML talk was earlier today. We had a slightly smaller turn out than expected and I'm wondering if it was the weather (it was warm), people went on holiday (it is June - but then why sign up?) or if it was the string quartet in the lobby that people shied away from.

Yes, you read that right! Tonight our event was accompanied by a string quartet playing Pachelbel, Bach and pieces from many other composers. But it wasn't for our event, one of the neighbouring events in the university had the entertainment laid on. And if you've never heard a string quartet playing up close and live before then boy are these guys LOUD!

Anyway, for those that turned up we had a fun night and we issued prizes of a copy of JetBrains Resharper and a copy of Daniel Moth's famous book (something to do with Mobile Development).

If you want to learn more about LINQ to XML then you might want to read my series of posts on the subject, it is still in it early stages at the moment but more posts will added shortly.

The presentation was a new style for me. I had but two slides in total. An introduction slide and an overview of LINQ slide. For the remainder of the two hours I staying in Visual Studio. I'm hoping that was more effective that sitting in slides the whole time, or bouncing back and forwards between slides and code.

Technorati Tags: Scottish Developers,LINQ,LINQ to XML,XML,JetBrains