Time : Thu 01-Jan-1970

From : Craig Murphy

Subject : Scottish Developers Xmas Update

Scottish Developers - Xmas newsletter ______________________________________ Season’s greetings from Scottish Developers! In this issue: 1. 27 November 2003: Conference Day, Glasgow 2. 03 December 2003: Agile Scotland conference with Martin Fowler, Mary Poppendieck and Ammar Kaka 3. Java User Group membership 4. INETA membership 5. Membership success. 6. Articles, etc. 7. Other events... The next event you might be interested in is being held in Edinburgh, January 22nd 2004. If you are interested in Content Management Systems, the Scottish Developers team will be discussing how they put ScottishDevelopers.com together in a very short space of time. Our next full-day conference, also to be held in Edinburgh, is on Febuary 26th 2004. Topics we are covering include: * Test-Driven Development. Rob Lally educates and amuses us with his great presentation style. * Web Design 101. Tim Munro passes on some gems from his vast experience of web design. * Ruby: An Overview. Barry Carr intends to discuss the programming language Ruby, hopefully in glowing terms. * FxCop: Craig Murphy puts on his policeman's hat when he discusses Microsoft's .NET code policing tool, FxCop. Full abstracts and more details about both events will be published over Xmas. Wishing you the compliments of the season! The Scottish Developers Team ____________________________________ 1. 27 November 2003: Conference Day, Glasgow The Glasgow conference was a excellent. The sessions were top-notch, the attendees were interactive, and the lunchtime food was brilliant. If you didn't attend, here's what you missed: Introduction to Agile Methods: So You Want To Be Agile?, John A Thomson of Roundtrip Solutions Limited, http://www.roundtripsolutions.com Introduction to Aspect Oriented Programming, Maurice Naftlin of Morningside Light Ltd Application Security: Keeping the Hackers Out, Colin Rose of Quarter Past Five Ltd, http://www.quarterpastfive.com Extreme Programming and Agile Software Development, Rob Lally of JP Morgan Need more info? Try this: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/mydownloads/viewcat.php?cid=12 ____________________________________ 2. 03 December 2003: Agile Scotland conference with Martin Fowler, Mary Poppendieck and Ammar Kaka Scottish Developers helped Agile Scotland market, promote and organise three excellent sessions discussing the subject of "lean development". Fowler's session was thought provoking, he stated: "The code is the design and an IDE can be considered a design tool."...another take-away quote: "Evolutionary design is the key". Meanwhile, during Q&A;, Agile Scotland major player and ThoughtWorks very own Alan Francis was heard stating: "Legacy code is code without tests". What does that say about the code we all wrote last week! :-) More info can be found here: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=11 ____________________________________ 3. Java User Group membership Barry (bscarr) has been busy signing us up with the Java User Group. Affliation with this group means that we, Scottish Developers, become platform agnostic - we aim to try and provide a general resource for Scottish developers, without being specific to any one language or platform. Kudos to Barry for perservering with this! More info can be found here: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=13 ____________________________________ 4. INETA membership Scottish Developers (and this includes you!) are members of Microsoft's International .NET Association. This means we will be able to offer Scottish Developers a greater spectrum of presentations, [possibly!] free gifts, and other goodies from Microsoft. It also entitles us to discounts, the first of which we've noted here: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=12 ____________________________________ 5. Membership success. Since migration from the Yahoo group, Scottish Developers has seen more than a doubling of members. The increased number of members is tantamount to our success, and means the Scottish Developers' Web Community (SDWC) can be, and is, more active that the Yahoo group ever was. ____________________________________ 6. Articles, etc. Barry has been proficient - he has published Scottish Developers' first article: A Wee Blether about Smalltalk. More kudos to Barry for beating me to it! :-) Read and rate Barry's masterpiece here: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/wfsection/article.php?articleid=5 Apologies - I, camurphy, have been rushed off my feet this month. I had hoped to get a style guide put up on to the SDWC - I know a few of you are itching to "get yourself published!". I will get a style guide published over Xmas. In the meantime, if you have an article or even an article idea, please send it to us: we're agile, we can help you get your article prepared, proofed and published on the site for all to see. ____________________________________ 7. Other events... Site Visit To IC CAVE (Date : 2004 January 27): A BCS Tayside Event This centre at the University of Abertay Dundee develops research to support the computer games and digital entertainment industry. Leading experts innovate technology and usability to a number of different services and products, specialising in: networking and multi-player gaming; rapid prototyping; mobile entertainment; and virtual heritage. More info:http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/agendax/index.php?op=view&id;=5 * BCS - Web services demystified (Date : 2004 February 10): Mike Coutts, NCR Financial Solutions Group Ltd: 6:30pm for 7pm Web Services have the potential to what proprietary mechanisms such as COM or standard mechanisms such as CORBA failed to do in the past, provide for the interoperation of different application server architectures. It is achieving this by using standards based communications mechanisms accepted by the major industry players such as IBM and Microsoft. This talk will attempt to demystify the technologies, acronyms and issues that surround Web Services More info: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/agendax/index.php?op=view&id;=7 * IIE : Introduction To Agile (Date : 2004 February 19) This presentation is a lecture being hosted by the Institute Of Incorporated Engineers (IIE). A presentation by Hubert Smits, Project Manager, VisionWare, Dunfermilne and founder member of Agile Scotland (http://www.agilescotland.org). The East and Central Scotland Section presentation will cover Agile Development Methods that have been receiving much attention for the past three years or so. Extreme Programming (XP) is regularly in the news and project management methods like Scrum and Feature-driven Development are gaining more and more interest. This talk will introduce agile principles and characteristics of some frameworks, methods and practices. More info: http://www.scottishdevelopers.com/modules/agendax/index.php?op=view&id;=10 END