Event: “Functional Alchemy” and “CoffeeScript 101”

Scottish Developers are pleased to present two talks by Mark Rendle on Tuesday 11th October 2011 in Edinburgh.

Mark is currently employed as Principal Software Architect by Dot Net Solutions Ltd, creating all manner of software on the Microsoft stack, including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, WPF and Silverlight. He is a Windows Azure Development MVP.

Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember. C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line. Those were the days. You kids today, with your IntelliSense and your ReSharpers, don’t know you’re born…

Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include functional programming, internet-centric applications, the Azure cloud platform and NoSQL data stores.

Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY*

C# 3.0 and LINQ have made anonymous delegates and closures a hot topic. C# 4.0 improves on them. But these “functional” features have applications beyond messing about with IEnumerable. In this session I’ll present 10 simple and not-so-simple uses of first-class functions to help cut down on repeated code and improve maintainability; hopefully you’ll discover a new and exciting way of approaching coding problems.
The main thrust of it is that F# is cool and groovy but there’s a lot of mileage in functional-style programming in C#, which people are using every day, so let’s look at some cool examples there.

*Awarded “Top Speaker by Knowledge of Subject” at DDD South West 2010.

CoffeeScript 101

Hidden deep within JavaScript, there is an elegant, powerful and clean language waiting to be discovered. This subset of the language was documented by Douglas Crockford in JavaScript: The Good Parts. Now, that subset is accessible through the CoffeeScript language. It’s like Python and Ruby spent a wonderful night together and spawned a beautiful baby scripting language that is succinct, expressive and compiles to The Good Parts.

Modules, classes, lambdas and more are supported, and you can interact with your existing JavaScript code, as well as all the diverse, wonderful libraries that are out there jQuery.
This session will cover the basics of the language, and interoperability with existing libraries. I’ll also show you how to integrate CoffeeScript into your development process, with Visual Studio and other tooling as well as runtime compilation for on-the-fly changes.

Location

18.30 - Doors open
18.55 - Welcome
19.00 - CoffeeScript 101
19.55 - Break
20.05 - Functional Alchemy: Tricks to Keep Your C# DRY
21.00 - Close