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.

An evening with Gojko Adzic on Challenging Requirements

Challenging Requirements

Wednesday 7th December 2011, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Gojko Adzic

Room 4.31 (fourth floor), University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB -map (click on Informatics Forum in the list of buildings).

Synopsis

In this presentation, Gojko Adzic talks about common failure patterns with requirements and specifications on agile projects and talks about ideas, patterns and practices for requirements and specifications that lead to much less rework, more consistent specifications with less functional gaps and ultimately happier customers. Learn how to:

  • spot and avoid common failure patterns in requirements/specifications
  • get to the right requirements and specifications
  • focus projects on delivering business goals.
Registration for this event is not required, simply turn up on the night.

About the speaker

Gojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve the quality of their software products and processes. He specialises in agile and lean quality improvement, in particular agile testing, specification by example and behaviour driven development. To get in touch, write togojko@neuri.co.uk or visit http://gojko.net.

SQL Server User Group–Edinburgh meet up

The SQL Server User Group will be meeting at 18:30 (for 19:00) on 29th June at Microsoft’s offices at Waverley Gate.

Agenda

18:30 – 18:50 – Introduction, Networking and Food

18:50 – 19:40 – How to get throughput of over 1GBytes per second for less than 2.5K using commodity kit – Tony Rogerson SQL MVP

In this session Tony will talk about the recent paradigm brought into play through the NoSQL movement for dealing with high performance, high scalability requirements but at a fraction of traditional costs. Tony will demonstrate a box built using commodity kit and will talk about how it may be used to good effect in a Business Intelligence setting. It will be an open discussion.

19:40 – 20:00 – Break

20:00 – 20:50 – SQL Injection Attacks (and how to prevent them) – Colin Angus Mackay

With recent reports of a man convicted of stealing the details of 130million credit cards by use of SQL Injection Attacks, isn’t it time to find out how to defend your systems against them? In this talk Colin Mackay will show you what a SQL Injection Attack is, what they look like, how they work and most importantly how to harden your application and database security in order to defend your systems against them.

Although the technologies used in this talk are SQL Server and the .NET Framework, the general ideas presented apply to any database that uses SQL as a query language, and to any framework that may interact with that database.

Colin Angus Mackay

Colin Angus Mackay is a software developer specialising in Microsoft technologies located in Glasgow, Scotland. A former Microsoft MVP (C#) for four years running, the Treasurer of Scottish Developers, Code Project MVP for five years running, and has co-organised four DDD Scotland events. While not involved in software related pursuits is an amateur photographer (which generally involves wondering why his camera’s autofocus mechanism chooses the potted plant off to the side rather than the main subject).

20:50 – 21:00 – Close

To register for this event visit: http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/262/Scottish-Area-User-Group-Meeting-June.aspx

Event in Edinburgh: Lean Startups

This just in from Agile Scotland:

We’re Back! Our next AgileScotland event takes place on the 18th April 2011 in Edinburgh at 19:30. The subject: Lean Startups.

Lean Startups are the hot new kids on the block – and like all the new hot things it is a ball of hype wrapped round a steely core of good practice.

Gordon Guthrie (CEO/CTO at Hypernumbers, formerly Chief Technical Architect at if.com, currently Convenor of the Scottish Lean Circle) will provide some perspective.

  • Lean Startups are a combination of influences:
  • Japanese quality management like the Toyota Production Systems
  • software development methodologies like Agile, Scrum and XP
  • theories of company building like 4 Steps To The Epiphany
  • practical experience
  • These have been synthesized to address a very specific problem: “I have an idea for a product – how to I get to having a sustainable repeatable business based on that without running out of money”

The evening is organized by Paul Wilson and generously sponsored by his company EdgeCase – providers of rapid sustainable development here in Edinburgh.

If you are interested in joining us then please email me at clarke.ching@gmail.com. I’ll book you a spot and send you location details.

Cheers,
Clarke Ching

UPDATE:
The date has now moved to Monday 18th April. The above text has been amended to reflect this change.

Discovering Startling Things from Your Version Control System

BCS Event: Monday 11th April, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Michael Feathers, Chief Scientist at Obtiva Corporation.

University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9ABmap (click on Informatics Forum in the list of buildings).

Synopsis

The industry is awash in an epidemic of bad code. We all know what bad code looks like – it’s opaque and impenetrable. But, we spend little time trying to figure out how it got that way. We assume it’s tight schedules or lack of discipline, but perhaps there’s more.

In this talk, Michael Feathers will relate several things that he’s learned by taking a longitudinal view of a system – by issuing queries of a code base and relating the results back to events on a team. The more we know about how we behave as teams in our code, the more likely we are to be able to control our development well enough to hold bad code at bay.

Event: Developing applications for iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices

There is an upcoming event in Edinburgh on the 9th March at 18:30 on the topic of “Developing Applications for iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices”

An introduction to iPhone development for beginners or those who are casually interested and want a leg up the learning curve

The iPhone, iPad and their iOS relatives are becoming an increasingly popular and important platform. More and more developers are looking into what the platform can offer and how to harness its power for
their products.

In this presentation, an experienced iOS developer provides a boot-strap in iPhone development. The talk is an overview of how to get started as an iPhone developer. You will gain an understanding of the platform, the tools, and the core technologies, including:

  • The main languages: Objective C/C++
  • Using the Xcode IDE, and various deployment/testing tools
  • Common iPhone/Mac OS design patterns, idioms, and practices
  • Becoming a native: how to "think in iPhone"
  • An overview of the libraries and facilities that exist
  • Limitations of the development environment.

We’ll see the pros and cons of iPhone development. You will leave with an understanding of how to deploy your applications on the device, and whether it is the right platform for you to target

All details can be found at http://www.edinburgh.bcs.org/events/2010-11/110309.htm

Application Lifecycle Management event in Edinburgh

This just in from Microsoft. They are holding a free event in to ALM on the 9th November

Here are the details:

Event Overview

This key event enables technical decision makers and heads of development to quickly grasp the exciting new features in the Visual Studio 2010 range. To see, with the benefit of experience from customers and our ALM technology partners, how you can increase your productivity, increase collaboration across roles, gain increased predictability and visibility to de-risk investments and increase returns on investment in software development.

Agenda

09.30 – 10.00     Arrival /Registration

10.00 – 11.10     Welcome/Keynote – Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2010

11.10 – 12.10     Agile development with Visual Studio 2010

12.10 – 12.40     Lunch

12.40 – 13.50     Testing with Visual Studio 2010

13.50 – 14.50     Build Automation with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Lab Management

14.50 – 15.05     Break

15.05 – 16.05     Understanding, defining and controlling architectures with Visual Studio 2010

16.05 – 16.15     Wrap up and Close

To register for the event use this link: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032459202&Culture=en-GB

 

Event: SQL Server User Goup meeting in Edinburgh

This just in from the SQL Server User Group:

Tony Rogerson SQL Server MVP, http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/tonyrogerson

Implementing Heirarchies

In this session Tony will show a number of techniques for implementing hierarchies using relational methods with T-SQL, non-relational methods will also be reviewed specifically XML and HierarchyId. Aggregation problems will also be discussed as well as dealling with multiple hierarchies.

Tony Rogerson has been working as a developer/database professional since 1986 working mainly with DB2, since 1993 he has worked with Microsoft SQL Server. He went freelance in 1997.

Allan Mitchell, SQL Server MVP http://sqlis.com/sqlis

StreamInsight

StreamInsight is Microsoft’s first foray into the world of Complex Event Processing (CEP) and Event Stream Processing (ESP).  In this session I want to show an introduction to this technology.  I will show how and why it is useful.  I will get us used to some new terminology but best of all I will show just how easy it is to start building your first CEP/ESP application.

The meeting is scheduled for Thursday 7th October at Microsoft’s offices in Edinburgh. More details here: http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/227/Implementing-Hierarchies-using-TSQL-and-the-HierarchyId-type-and-understanding-aggregation-problems-Tony-Rogerson-Complex-Event-Processing-StreamInsight-Allan-Mitchell.aspx

Event: Getting started with jQuery

This just in from VBUG:

Monday 1 November 2010 from 6:30 PM to 09:00 PM

Topic: VBUG Scotland: Getting started with jQuery

Overview
George Adamson will be providing an introduction to jQuery, and showing you how to take advantage of this powerful library in your Web applications.

An introduction to the jQuery library and the happiness it can bring. Binding events with unobtrusive javascript; using the css-inspired selector syntax; chaining; visual effects; easy peasy AJAX in just one line.

The mere mention of jQuery gets George all enthused. He’s a contract front-end web developer who loves Usability, UX, IxD, web dev and full on JS. He has spent many years working on accessible, standards compliant sites with progressive enhancement and unobtrusive javascript. Recent works include sites and web apps for BBC Doctor Who and other BBC sites, Nationwide, Waterstones, HMV, and Comet Electricals, with bucketloads of jQuery.

You can read George’s blog on web development and usability at http://blog.softwareunity.com/ and his tweets may be followed @GeorgeAdamson.

Location: Edinburgh TBC, GB

Price: FREE and open to everyone

To register for this event and further information go to: http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/November-2010/VBUG-Scotland-Getting-started-with-jQuery.aspx

Third party event: Technical Briefing on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework

Just got this in from Microsoft. Folks who are interested should contact Saqib Ahmed for more details and to register.

Technical Briefing on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework

WHEN: Tuesday 11th of May

WHERE: Microsoft Ltd (Scotland), Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/about/map-edinburgh.mspx for a map.

ABSTRACT:

This briefing is delivered by various members of our Application Development Consulting (ADC) team with the purpose of getting customers up to speed with the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 releases, and what it means for their organisations.

0915-0930 : Registration

0930-0945 : Introductions + .NET 4 Overview

0945-1015 : Visual Studio 2010 IDE enhancements

1015-1035 : Improvements to the .NET 4 CLR

1035-1100 : C# 4 Language Improvements

1100-1115 : Break and Q+A

1115-1200 : ASP.NET 4

1200-1245 : Windows Workflow (WF) 4 Overview

1245-1330 : Lunch and Q+A

1330-1400 : Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4 Overview

1400-1430 : Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4 Overview

1430-1445 : Break and Q+A

1445-1600 : Windows Azure

1600-1645 : What’s new in Entity Framework

Please contact me as soon as possible to confirm your attendance at this event. Places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

We look forward to seeing you.

Best Regards,

Saqib Ahmed

i-saahme@microsoft.com

Technical Account Manager
Microsoft Ltd (Scotland)

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