Scot Alt.Net and StormId are proud to annouce Scotland’s first [citation required ] F# Code Retreat!

What is a Code Retreat?

The first Code Retreat took place in January 2009 and was created by Patrick Welsh, Nayan Hajratwala and Corey Haines.  Their aim was to create a repeatable, day-long event that was focused on practicing the fundamentals of software development.

How it works?

The goal is to tackle a set problem, in pairs, for 45 minutes with a 15 minute retrospective after.  Everyone pairs off with someone different and the problem is tackled again.

Do I need to know F#?

Knowing a little will help, but not required.

What do I need?

- Passion
- Laptop
- Visual Studio 2010 (msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/vstudio/bb984878.aspx)

When?

3rd July 2010

Where?

Schedule

0830 – 0900 – Welcome
0900 – 1000 – Introduction to F#
1015 – 1100 – Session #1
1100 – 1115 – Retrospective, break
1130 – 1215 – Session #2
1215 – 1230 – Retrospective, break
1230 – 1330 – Lunch
1330 – 1415 – Session #3
1415 – 1430 – Retrospective, break
1430 – 1515 – Session # 4
1515 – 1530 – Retrospective, break
1530 – 1615 – Session # 5
1615 – 1630 – Retrospective, break
1630 – 1715 – Session # 6
1715 – 1730 – Retrospective, break
1730 – 1800 – Final retrospective on day

Glasgow: Tuesday, 8th December, 2009 @ 18:30

The Talk

There is more to doing TDD well than just Red-Green-Refactor, and creating a maintainable test suite as well as maintainable production software is vital. In this presentation we will look at common testing patterns, techniques and tools that can help make maintaining the test suite easier. From Shared Fixtures to Stubs and Mocks, we will take a look at common patterns that have been proven to work and the tools that help you take advantage of them. We will also take brief look at what Behaviour Driven Development is and the problem it tries to solve.

The Speaker

Chris Canal has worked at a Web Developer for the past 7 years. Starting with procedural languages like ASP and PHP, he quickly moved onto the .NET Platform when first released. A great believer is continual–improvement, Chris is constantly looking for new technologies, tools and methodologies that will help in creating robust and maintainable software applications and has become an active member of the Scottish Alt.Net Community to share his findings and ideas with like-minded developers.

The Venue

We are meeting in Room M402 on the 4th Floor of the George Moore Building at Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA

You can find more information and book your spot here.

Speaker

Robert Lewis is a software engineer at Spacelabs Healthcare. He has been writing commercial software since 1998, and programming in C# since 2002. Robert is a proponent of good process for software teams, aided by the right tools.

Location

ScottLogic, a leading financial software and consultancy company based in Edinburgh, have been kind enough to offer the use of their premises for an evening of BDD knowledge sharing and discussion.  The event will take place on 4th of November at 7.30pm at ScottLogic, 17 Gayfield Square Edinburgh EH1 3NX.

Inversion of Control is one of the most useful practices in an enterprise developers toolbelt and IOC containers can make it the management of these dependanies even easier.

Castle Windsor is one such container that can do a lot more than manage your dependancies. In this we will look at configuring the container, using it in various desktop and web senarios and other features including facilities and interceptors.

ScottLogic, a leading financial software and consultancy company based in Edinburgh, have been kind enough to offer the use of their premises for an evening of Castle Windsor knowlege sharing and dicussion.  The event will take place on 3rd of Septtember at 7.30pm at ScottLogic, 17 Gayfield Square Edinburgh EH1 3NX.

Speaker

Colin Gemmell is a Web/Application Developer working in the Medical Faculty of Glasgow University for the past 3 years. An avid follower of agile principles and practices he is always happy to pass on his views of software development to anyone that will listen. Colin is also a regular participant of the Scottish Alt.Net Community.

Location

ScottLogic
17 Gayfield Square
Edinburgh,  EH1 3NX
Google Maps

Boo

Domain Specific Languages is a topic that is very ‘in’ with developer buzz word popularity. Boo is a statically typed OO language with a Python based syntax. It supports Macros, an open compiler pipeline and has specific features that were explicitly designed to make DSL building easier. This overview will walk through the creation of an English like grammar that can be used to configure business rules for an application and can be reused across other applications with differing rules.

Oslo

It could be argued that the most valuable aspect of Microsoft’s ‘Oslo’ framework is the tooling it provides to create external DSLs. This talk will cover the basics of what is required to create and implement a DSL using Oslo. These steps will include (1) creating the grammar (2) parsing an input (3) deserializing the output to an object graph (3) generating code from the object graph. I will use my own Oslo DSL project bdUnit as an example.

About the Speakers

Agenda

• 7.00 – 7.15 – Welcome
• 7.15 – 7.45 – Boo – Paul Cowan
• 7.45-7.50 – Change over
• 7.50-8.20 – Oslo – James Lynch
• 8.20 – 9.00 – Open Discussion

Location

Dell Corporation Limited,
City Park,
368 Alexandra Parade,
Glasgow,
G31 3AU

View on Google Maps

Register Now!

Hope to see you all there

The development of components for use in SharePoint is a complex process, and often seems to fly in the face of what is considered good development practice in a Test Driven Development world.

In this session Richard will show how using some good design practices and tools such as Typemock Isolator you can develop testable components for Sharepoint without even having to have Sharepoint on your development PC.

Speaker Biography

Richard is the Engineering Director of Black Marble Ltd a Microsoft Gold Partner based in the North of England. Black Marble specialises in BizTalk & SharePoint based business automation. As Engineering Director Richard is responsible for the delivery of systems and tools to allow the company, and their clients, to deliver solutions efficiently. All Black Mable’s development activity is underpinned by Team System using Scrum as a process model. Richard is a Certified Scrum Master. Richard is a regular presenter at community events in the UK and Ireland (and the rest of the world given a chance) where his most common subject is software testing and development process.

Agenda

• 18:30 Doors Open & Refreshments
• 19:00 Welcome
• 19:10 Developer Testing for Sharepoint (Part 1)
• 20:10 Break
• 20:20 Developer Testing for Sharepoint (Part 2)
• 20:50 Feedback and Prizes
• 21:00 Close and Repair to the Bar

Venue

We are meeting the the Broker Suite at the Ramada Jarvis Glasgow City Hotel at 201 Ingram Street, Glasgow, G1 1DQ.

More Info

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/359662761

Kathleen Dollard will be talking about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and the Managed Add-in Framework (MAF)

Talk Description

Decoupling portions of your application has tremendous payback during both development and maintenance. Your application becomes more testable and flexible and can more easily evolve to meet changing demands. Decoupling your application also allows a new level of partnership with external groups because you can safely incorporate their code in your application without recompiling or releasing source code. Microsoft has exposed different provider models in many areas of the framework and libraries, and this year has moved toward consolidating its efforts at decoupling with the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF. This tool differs from an IoC container because its focused directly at simplifying the extension of applications and focuses at extensibility, discover, and composition. The underlying engine can support Microsoft efforts like Visual Studio and your own applications. MEF comes up short when you encounter isolation and versioning issues, such as wanting that external code to run in its own AppDomain. The Managed Add-In Framework, or MAF, focuses on these problems and the significant complexity they bring with System.AddIn namespace of .NET 3.5. You’ll learn more about architecting applications in pieces and the sweet spot of using MEF and MEF together. You’ll leave ready to evaluate the role of MEF and MAF in your applications.

Speaker Biography

Kathleen Dollard is the Chief Technologist for AppVenture (www.appventure.com) where she leads the application generation efforts. She has been a Microsoft MVP for 11 years and is a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau. Kathleen has worked extensively with application code generation and is the author of Code Generation in Microsoft .NET (from Apress). She has published numerous articles on a range of .NET technologies and writes the monthly column “Ask Kathleen” in Visual Studio Magazine (www.visualstudiomagazine.com). Kathleen is also active in the Northern Colorado .NET SIG, Denver Visual Studio User Group, Northern Colorado Architect’s Group, and IASA Denver.

Agenda

• 18:00 Doors Open
• 18:30 Welcome
• 18:40 Your Application in Pieces – MEF and MAF (part 1)
• 19:30 Break
• 19:40 Your Application in Pieces – MEF and MAF (part 2)
• 20:20 Feedback and Prizes
• 20:30 Pub (back bar at Waxy O’Connor’s on West George Street)

Venue

Room M126 of the George Moore Building at Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow G4 0BA

More Info

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/202772498/ ]]> http://scotalt.net/blog/2009/06/18/scottish-developers-your-application-in-pieces-%e2%80%93-mef-and-maf/feed/ 0 http://scotalt.net/blog/2009/06/18/an-evening-of-orm-more-spots/ http://scotalt.net/blog/2009/06/18/an-evening-of-orm-more-spots/#comments Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:26:25 +0000 Chris Canal http://scotalt.net/?p=122 Our first proper event, An Evening of O/RM, sold out in 3 days!  I’m really chuffed that there was such a great response and would like to take this chance to thank Mike Perrin and everyone else at ScottLogic for supplying the venue!

It appears there might more standing room if anyone missed getting a spot and would like to come along.  If you are interested, please leave a comment or send me tweet, @chriscanal

It should be an awesome evening, I’m excited to see what Paul and Colin have to say, and I hope everyone leaves with a good impression of how they can get up and running with NHibernate quickly and easily.

ScottLogic, a leading financial software and consultancy company based in Edinburgh, have been kind enough to offer the use of their premises for an evening of O/RM knowlege sharing and dicussion.  The event will take place on 2nd of July at 7pm, 17 Gayfield Square Edinburgh EH1 3NX.  All are welcome!

The agenda for the evening is as follows:

7.00 – 7.30 Paul Cowan – An Introuction to NHibernate
7.30 – 8.00 Chris Canal – FluentNHibernate
8.00 – 8.10 Break
8.10 – 8.40 Colin Gemmell – NHibernate vs Entity Framework – which is best?

After the meeting we will retire for a beer and some heated discussion.  If you are planning to attend, please let us know by registering at the Scot Alt.Net Edinburgh EventBrite page (http://altdotnetedinburgh.eventbrite.com/).

About the speakers

Paul Cowan has recently started his own business Cutting-Edge Solutions.  He is a keen advocate of iterative development, test driven development, continuous integration and modern techniques.  Paul is a regular committer to the horn open source project.  He recently gave a presentation on horn at the Dsl DevCon at Microsoft in Seattle.  You can follow his blog here.

Chris Canal has worked at a Web Developer for the past 7 years. Starting with procedural languages like ASP and PHP, he quickly moved onto the .NET Platform when first released. A great believer is continual–improvement, Chris is constantly looking for new technologies, tools and methodologies that will help in creating robust and maintainable software applications. Having felt the pain of using Microsoft “Demoware”, Chris has become an active member of the Scottish Alt.Net Community to share his findings and ideas with like-minded developers.

Colin Gemmel is a Web/Application Developer working in the Medical Faculty of Glasgow University for the past 3 years. An avid follower of agile principles and practices he is always happy to pass on his views of software development to anyone that will listen. Colin is also a regular participant of the Scottish Alt.Net Community