CloudCamp Scotland

Following on from the great success of the first two London CloudCamps, and various other CloudCamps around the globe, this is Scotland’s first CloudCamp and it’ll take place in the Concourse at Appleton Tower, 11 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE on Wednesday, March 25th 2009.

What is CloudCamp? It’s free and it’s an unconference where early adopters and industry leaders of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you have the opportunity to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

The Scotland CloudCamp format is still being finalised, but it will most likely be very similar to the London format, starting with 6-8 five minute ‘Lightning Talks’ followed by 2 breakout ‘unconference’ discussions. Finally you get the chance to do some serious networking over beer and pizza - all free!

More information here: http://www.cloudcamp.com/?page_id=396

February Newsletter

Welcome

Last week in the pub after an event I was asked why there wasn’t much non-Microsoft stuff at Scottish Developers. Fair question. We are after-all supposed to be here to cater for the entire developer community, not just one section of it. The reality is that the current committee mostly use Microsoft tools and the areas in which we happen to operate on a daily basis are within that sphere of influence. It therefore becomes easy for us just to invite speakers that we already know. Not a very good reason, and really rather a poor excuse too. But, I want to change that.

I would like to invite anyone who knows of an event that would be of interest to folks involved with non-Microsoft developer technologies to let me know and I’ll add it to the events page and announce it on the website. If you want to get more involved, such as being able to speak at an event, then we would be very interested in that too. Finally, we always welcome feedback, so if you have any other ideas then let me know. We already do joint events from time-to-time with the SQL Server User Group, so why not joint events with other organisations. All feedback, comments, suggestions, etc. can be sent to [email protected]

Things are now moving forward quite well with Developer Day Scotland 2009. The session voting is currently open, but hurry, it closes at the end of the month. I hope you will take the opportunity to vote for the sessions that you want. It is a tough choice as we have so many excellent sessions. The delegate registration will open early during the first week of March, so keep an eye on the website for details.

As I mentioned above, we are always keen to find out what you want, so if you have any suggestions then please let us know. You can email event suggestions to [email protected]

Did you know we have a twitter feed? You can follow us @scottishdevs.

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 [email protected].

Regards,
Colin Mackay, Chairman, Scottish Developers

Events

24-February-2009 @ 18:30 in Edinburgh (Scottish Developers)
An Introduction to the Live Framework
Registration Required - Cost FREE

26-February-2009 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Linux Society)
Squid
Registration Unknown - Cost FREE

12-March-2009 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Linux Society)
OpenLDAP Replication Strategies
Registration Unknown - Cost FREE

19-March-2009 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
Inversion of Control and Testability
Registration Optional - Cost FREE

26-March-2009 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Linux Society)
Web Penetration, Privilege Escalation and Maintenance
Registration Unknown - Cost FREE

8-April-2009 @ 19:00 in Edinburgh (Scottish Developers)
jQuery - An introduction
Registration Required - Cost FREE

14-April-2009 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers & SQL Server UG)
Two DBAs walk into a room full of developers…
Registration Required - Cost FREE

Further Afield

March:
  DevWeek 2009 (London)
  SQL Bits IV (Manchester)

April:
  DDD Belfast (Belfast)
  WebDD ’09 (Reading)
  ALT.NET North (Bradford)
  ACCU 2009 Conference (Oxford)

May:
  Developer Day Scotland 2 (Glasgow)
  DDD South West (Taunton)

Sponsor’s Message

23-27 March, LondonDevWeek 2009
23-27 March
Barbican Centre, London
www.devweek.com

DevWeek is the UK’s biggest conference for software developers, IT architects and DBAs, and the 12th annual event takes place in London at the end of March.

The main three-day conference features eight concurrent tracks, and there’s also a wide choice of pre- and post-conference workshops, which can be booked in addition to or separately from the main event. /p>

Session and workshop topics include Visual Studio 2010, Ruby on Rails, .NET Framework 4.0, Cloud Computing, SQL Server 2008, Enterprise Design Patterns, Silverlight 2, Productive Programming, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, Architecture Awareness, LINQ, and Code Metrics.

If you book your place by 27th February you can save up to £100.

More Sponsors sign up for Developer Day Scotland

We are pleased to announce that we have attracted more sponsors to Developer Day Scotland.

Conscia are a web applications development company focusing upon the delivery of business solutions via Microsoft tools and technologies. Our client list includes: NHS, HBOS, Gleneagles Hotel, Gael, Biggart Baillie, etc. A solid web application development focus, the selection of highly skilled key staff, supported by an extensive range of industry experience combine to offer an extremely secure foundation from which to build web-enabled solutions to high standards.

Coeo provide SQL Server Consulting and Remote DBA Managed Services to Microsoft customers and partners with complex requirements and business or mission critical systems across Europe.

Ramada Jarvis Hotels are supplying a number of reduced price rooms for delegates in their Glasgow City hotel which is within easy reach of Glasgow Central and Glasgow Queen Street railway stations. Details of the offer will be in the delegate registration confirmation email.

Abertay Linux Society: Squid

The Abertay Linux Society would like to introduce “Squid

Speaker: Robert “Swifty” Ladyman

On 26/02/2009 at 19:00 - 20:30

Robert has agreed to do another talk, this time about the local caching proxy known as squid. This talk should go down like a storm if his last was anything to go by.

The Abertay Linux Society meetings are held every other Thursday at 7pm, and they are reasonably easy to find: Cinema (3rd floor) Students Association Building Bell Street, Dundee (Just across from the main University of Abertay Campus building - http://www.abertay.ac.uk/About/documents/AbertayMAP.pdf)

After the meeting you are welcome to join them for a beer (or whatever you drink in the Union bar) and a good old chin-wag. All their events are open to all students and non students alike.

ALT.NET conference in the north of England

There will be an Alt.net Open Space Conference in Bradford on the 17/18th April this year. The event will be hosted by Black Marble at their office in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and there will be space for 50 attendees. The format will be the same as previous UK Alt.net conferences.

For more information please visit Richard Fennell’s blog, and the post Announcing the ALT.NET.UK ‘in the North’ Conference.

Got something to say, but not enough for a full presentation?

On Wednesday 18th February in Dundee Scottish Developers will be running an evening of Grok talks and Micro-presentations. If you want to talk about something come along and tell us about it!

A Grok Talk is a short 10 minute presentation or demo where you give people enough information to understand something new.

A micro-presentation is a short slide based presentation where you have a maximum of 20 slides and a maximum of 20 seconds per slide.

If you are interested just sign up and bring your laptop. If you don’t want to bring a laptop and your presentation is purely slide based we’ll have a laptop with PowerPoint 2007 on it that you can use.

If you don’t want to talk then that’s fine, just come along and take in information from a variety of people on a variety of subjects - There will be something for everyone.

Voting for Developer Day Scotland

We’ve now closed the call for speakers and started the session voting for Developer Day Scotland. There have been over 80 sessions submitted by some excellent speakers so we’d like to know what you want to see.

Developer Day Scotland is a free community conference for software developers, testers, DBAs, and managers organised BY the community FOR the community that takes place on the 2nd May 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University.

Slides from SQL Server UG meeting

For those of you that weren’t able to the meeting on Thursday, you missed an excellent presentation from Rob. As promised Rob has put his slidedesk onto his blog for those wishing to see it. http://blogs.technet.com/rob/archive/2009/01/27/scottish-sql-server-user-group-meeting-29th-january.aspx

The SQL Server User Group are still in the planning stages for the next meeting which should be on the 23rd February. They will most likely be doing some more nuggets, so here’s plenty of warning to sort something out. Who knows you may be a lucky prize winner!!

Don’t forget SQLBits is on 28th March, register and vote for your favourite sessions at www.sqlbits.com and Developer Day Scotland on 2nd May where voting for sessions will be starting in the next few days. 

Scottish Developers January Newsletter

Welcome

Things are now moving forward quite well with Developer Day Scotland 2009. The call for speakers is now closed and the session voting will start in a few days. I hope you will take the opportunity to vote for the sessions that you want. It is a tough choice as we have so many excellent sessions. The voting will remain open throughout February so there is plenty of time to choose.

In the meantime we have some excellent evening events coming up too. Craig Murphy will be talking to us about OpenXML. Mike Ormond will be demonstrating how to use the Microsoft Live Framework and Andy Gibson will be introducing us to jQuery.

We are always keen to find out what you want, so if you have any suggestions then please let us know. You can email event suggestions to [email protected]

Did you know we have discussion group on Google? You can find it here: http://groups.google.com/group/scottish-developers It is quite low traffic so it won’t fill your inbox. We’ll also upload files and slide-decks from events there from time-to-time.

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 [email protected].

Regards,
Colin Mackay, Chairman, Scottish Developers

Events

4-Feb-2009 @ 19:00 in Dundee (Scottish Developers)
jQuery - An introduction
Registration Required - Cost FREE

In this session Andy will introduce you to the basics of jQuery, showing you, through code, how to select and manipulate elements on the page, attach functions to events, implement ajax and more! This is the perfect opportunity to learn about jQuery and how it can make the life of web developer so much easier, allowing you to focus more on building your application! (Note: This event repeats in Edinburgh on the 8th April)

10-February-2009 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
Introducing OpenXML
Registration Optional - Cost FREE

With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft moved their document formats over to XML-based formats. This text-based format has many advantages, including, but not limited to readability, good compression and ease of reconstruction. Over the course of 60-75 minutes Craig will introduce OpenXML and will demonstrate how he is incorporating it into one of his line-of-business applications. Code examples will be written using C#.

24-February-2009 @ 18:30 in Edinburgh (Scottish Developers)
An Introduction to the Live Framework
Registration Required - Cost FREE

The Live Framework is the uniform way to program against Live Services from a variety of platforms, languages, applications and devices. As well as providing the operating environment and resource model, Live Framework also represents the way to access the synchronisation features offered by Mesh and provides a mechanism for replicating and hosting offline Silverlight (and HTML) applications. In this session we’ll try and demystify the Live Framework, clarifying what it is, what is does and what it looks like. We’ll then go on to look at how to get started developing with the Live Framework and explore some of the different capabilities it offers and types of application you can build.

19-March-2009 @ 18:30 in Glasgow (Scottish Developers)
Inversion of Control and Testability
Registration Optional - Cost FREE

The architectural design pattern, Inversion of control (IOC) at last appears to be gaining some momentum in the .NET mainstream. Frameworks such as Castle Windsor, Autofac, Structuremap and Spring have given rise to the .NET IOC (inversion of control) container. This talk aims to convince that side effects of both designing for testability and the use of an inversion of control container can lead to more maintainable software, cleaner code and push architects towards good design principles such as ‘separation of concerns’ (SOC).

8-April-2009 @ 19:00 in Edinburgh (Scottish Developers)
jQuery - An introduction
Registration Required - Cost FREE

In this session Andy will introduce you to the basics of jQuery, showing you, through code, how to select and manipulate elements on the page, attach functions to events, implement ajax and more! This is the perfect opportunity to learn about jQuery and how it can make the life of web developer so much easier, allowing you to focus more on building your application!

Further Afield

March:
  DevWeek 2009 (London)
  SQL Bits IV (Manchester)

April:
  DDD Ireland (Belfast)

May:
  Developer Day Scotland 2 (Glasgow)
  DDD South West (Taunton)

Sponsor’s Message

23-27 March, LondonDevWeek 2009
23-27 March
Barbican Centre, London
www.devweek.com

DevWeek is the UK’s biggest conference for software developers, IT architects and DBAs, and the 12th annual event takes place in London at the end of March.

The main three-day conference features eight concurrent tracks, and there’s also a wide choice of pre- and post-conference workshops, which can be booked in addition to or separately from the main event.

Session and workshop topics include Visual Studio 2010, Ruby on Rails, .NET Framework 4.0, Cloud Computing, SQL Server 2008, Enterprise Design Patterns, Silverlight 2, Productive Programming, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, Architecture Awareness, LINQ, and Code Metrics.

If you book your place by 27th February you can save up to £100.

www.devweek.com

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