Event: Edinburgh, 1 May - Windows 8 for Application Developers

Calling all Scottish Developers!
Microsoft will be bringing Windows 8 to Edinburgh on May 1st – join the UK team for a day of developer-level, demo-driven sessions and see first-hand the opportunities for designing, developing and selling apps world-wide via the Windows Store.

Windows 8 offers unparalleled new opportunities for application developers to build and sell apps world-wide via the Windows Store. In this event, we’ll deliver developer-level, demo-driven sessions that give you an accelerated entry into what it means to design, develop and publish exciting, modern, polished, world-ready applications for next-generation devices running Windows 8.

Level of knowledge required:

1. A familiarity with .NET development and Visual Studio would be advantageous but not required.
2. We will talk about building Windows 8 applications with JavaScript and with .NET with an emphasis on the .NET technologies.

Agenda (subject to change):

0900 - 0930 Registration Opens
0930 - 1030 Windows 8 for Modern App Development
1030 - 1045 Break
1045 - 1130 Metro Design Language
1130 - 1145 Break
1145 - 1245 “Metro Style” Apps - The Power of the Device Part 1
1245 - 1330 Lunch
1330 - 1430 “Metro Style” Apps - The Power of the Device Part 2
1430 - 1445 Break
1445 - 1545 “Metro Style” Apps - The Power of the Cloud Part 1
1545 - 1600 Break
1600 - 1700 “Metro Style” Apps - The Power of the Cloud Part 2
1700 - 1730 Wrap Up and Close

Click here to register now.

Book Club – February 2011 – The Pragmatic Programmer

In February Scottish Developers starts its book club. It will alternate between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The first book on the agenda is The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master.

You can now get more details and sign up for The Pragmatic Programmer in Glasgow. In March the book will be RESTful Web Services in Edinburgh – Further details to follow.

We are aiming to keep the books fairly technology independent (focussing on higher level processes and practices) in order to appeal to a wider audience. If you have any suggestions for books you’d like to see in the future then please contact us at [email protected]

Developer Day Scotland 2011 – Call For Speakers Open

DDD Scotland LogoHot on the heels of the record-breaking sell-out of DDD 9 in 12 minutes yesterday (congratulations to the DDD 9 team!), we are pleased to announce that session submission for DDD Scotland 2011 is now officially open! You have until the 6th of February to submit as many sessions as you wish however they MUST be within the scope of Software Development.

You can submit sessions via the DDD website at
http://www.developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2011/Default.aspx

For those of you unfamiliar with DDD events, check out our earlier post.

 

Developer Day Scotland 2011 - Date Announced

DDD Scotland Logo

Building on the success of Developer Developer Developer Day 2010, we are currently in the process of organising next year’s event and are pleased to announce that DDD Scotland 2011 will be held on Saturday 7th May 2011 at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Developer Developer Developer events are founded on a number of principles which we think makes it unique and well worth a single day of your time once a year.

DDD events are free. It doesn’t cost you anything to attend. Think of any large conference that you might like to go along to. They costs hundreds of pounds, if not more. Sure, we might not have all the bells and whistles of a big fancy conference, but at the end of the day what do you want out of an event like that? Do you want the glitz and schmaltz or do you want to learn something new?

Speakers from the community. We invite people that have something to say, a story to tell, or an experience to learn from. This year we had 65 session submissions from all sorts of folks and on all sorts of subjects. The majority of these people are real day-to-day software developers or DBAs that actually work for a living.

DDD events are democratic. All the sessions are voted in by the community, so we only put on what people have asked to see. This year the 65 sessions were whittled down to 20. We had sessions ranging from ASP.NET MVC to MonoTouch, from Defensive Programming to HTML5 and from concurrency to behaviour driven development delivered by both community new comers and veterans alike.

No Marketing BS. The core philosophy for the sessions are that they contain useful information. Stuff that you can either take back and start using the next day or (if not yet available) to start planning how to move to that technology.

To paraphrase the Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Developer Day Scotland is of the developer community, by the developer community and for the developer community.

(Ok, so many of those words were written by my predecessor, Colin Mackay, but they are still true)

Call for Speakers

We will be opening the call for speakers shortly

Call for Sponsors

We wont lie, running a free community event like DDD Scotland isn’t a cheap thing to do and it is only through the support of our sponsors that we can make it happen. Last year one of our sponsors, Storm ID, produced the speaker t-shirts that are worn on the day and they included the Storm ID logo, those t-shirts have now been seen as far afield as Perth, Australia. If you are interested in sponsoring DDD Scotland 2011 and would like more information, please contact us: support [at] scottishdevelopers dot com.

You can get updates on Twitter by following @scottishdevs and @dddscot

The official DDD Scotland website will be live shortly and will be available from http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com

Regards,
Andy Gibson, Chairman, Scottish Developers

Call for speakers

We are preparing to start up our regular events once more after a hiatus over the summer and we thought it would be a good time to put out an open invitation to speakers (both new and experienced). We are looking for talks which are ideally 60 - 90 minutes long and we are open to topics as long as they are development focused and are not marketing a product.

We are also keen to hear from people wishing to do grok talks so if you have any you would be happy to do for us or if you think you could put one together we would like to hear from you.

If you are interested please send an email including your name, geographical location and information about the talk(s) you would be willing to do for us to support [at] scottishdevelopers.com.

We look forward to hearing from you

Web Application Testing With Selenium - Wednesday 17th March 2010 in Dundee

Testing is a fundamental part of the development process regardless of how you approach it however GUI’s have always been trickier to test and web based UI’s are some of the hardest. JavaScript, AJAX and browser compatibility are all things that make web UI functionality quite difficult and time consuming to test properly.

Enter Selenium, a web application testing framework which makes the creation and automation of complex web user interface tests a joy. Selenium is comprised of 4 components, Selneium Core, Selenium IDE, Selenium RC and Selenium Grid.

  • Selenium Core is the heart of the framework
  • Selenium IDE provides an easy to use interface for creating and running tests from within Mozilla Firefox
  • Selenium RC allows integration of Selenium into a variety of popular langauges such as .NET, Java and Ruby

This session will introduce you to Selenium and explain the core features of the framework before showing you, through live ASP.NET demonstrations, how it can be harnessed in your own web development.

The Speaker

Andy Gibson is an Information Systems Developer for an international computer games studio with a background in web application development including ASP.NET MVC, PHP and jQuery. He is always on the lookout for new technologies to playwith and loves to learn what he can about things especially in the webdevelopment arena.

Keen to give back to the community, Andy has spoken at a number ofcommunity events including DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Scotland and is currently an active committee member for Scottish Developers.

The Venue

We are meeting in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. After the meeting we normally retire to the the bar at Laing’s

The Agenda

18:45 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk (Part 1)
19:55 Break
20:05 The Talk (Part 2)
20:45 Feedback & Prizes
21:00 Retire to the Pub

Contractual Obligations: Getting up and running with Code Contracts - Wednesday 17th 2010 February in Dundee

Code Contracts is Microsoft’s implementatoin of Programming by Contract for .NET (also known as Contract Programming, or Contract-First development).  Code Contracts are a way of adding executable specification documentation to your code; they can also work hand-in-hand with your unit tests.  All-in-all, the aim of Code Contracts is to improve the quality and reliability of your software.

With Code Contracts you can: specify a method’s pre-requisites (pre-conditions) and what it guarantees to do for it’s caller (post-conditions); you can also specify what conditions must always be in-place throughout the the lifetime of an object (object-invariants).  Code Contract conditions can be tested at runtime and, if you’re using Team System, they can also be analysed and tested statically after your application has compiled. Using the features of code contracts in conjunction with your unit tests can help you find potential problems in your code sooner.

Code Contracts will be part of .NET 4.0 and are also available for .NET 3.5; they’re language agnostic and integrate into Visual Studio (08 & 10).

The aim of this session is to show you how to write code contracts: method pre and post condtions along with object-invariants and we’ll look at how Code Contracts work.  In addition, we’ll also be looking at using Code Contracts with TDD and how to use Contracts with Interfaces.

The Speaker

Barry Carr has been developing software since 1987.  Barry has written software for many business sectors, including: Chemical; Pharmaceutical; Oil and Gas; Banking; Accounting; Legal Accounting; Public Sector and now Mining and Geology. Barry has also developed and sold his own software components to other developers. Always keen to keep his skills current, Barry devotes a lot of his personal time to technical development as well as keeping abreast of the current trends in the world of software development. Barry is also active in the software development community running the Dundee branch of Scottish Developers.

When he isn’t coding, Barry likes to spend his time with photography, reading and unashamedly listening to progressive rock (especially while coding).

The Venue

We are meeting in the Queen Mother Building at Dundee University. After the meeting we normally retire to the the bar at Laing’s

The Agenda

18:45 Doors Open
19:00 Welcome
19:10 The Talk (Part 1)
19:55 Break
20:05 The Talk (Part 2)
20:45 Feedback & Prizes
21:00 Retire to the Pub