Why you need to buy @berkun’s new “Mindfire” book…

I’ve been reading Scott Berkun’s new book, Mindfire.

I’m not going to review it in this post, I’ll save that for later.

However, I’m will tell you why you should buy it!

Scott self-published Mindfire, a feat worthy of huge congratulations. He did so for a number of reasons. I was particularly taken by this one:

So, you should buy Mindfire if only to learn what it is Scott would like to write about that makes publishers run a mile.

I have deliberately added this post to the Project Management category, Scott is the project management guy 😉

Gill Cleeren on Windows Runtime & Metro Apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone App Development

Scottish Developers are pleased to present two talks by Gill Cleeren on Wednesday 23rd November 2011 in Edinburgh.

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (www.theregion.com), MVP ASP.NET, INETA speaker bureau member and Silverlight Insider. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina. Passionate about .NET, he’s always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF. He also leads VISUG (www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. He’s the author of the upcoming book called Silverlight Data Access Cookbook. You can find his blog at www.snowball.be

Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
Have you been dreaming about browsing through the Windows Phone Marketplace and seeing your application at the top-selling list but don’t know where to start? In this session, we’ll take a look at how to build an entire Windows Phone 7 application from the very start to deployment in the marketplace. You’ll be creating your own apps minutes after you leave the room.

Windows Runtime and Metro Apps for Windows 8
At BUILD 2011, Microsoft announced Windows 8. This upcoming version of Windows is probably the biggest change the OS ever went through. Windows 8 focuses on web, apps, touch and the tablet form factor. For developers, things will change as well. They need to be ready to build applications, called Metro applications, tailored for Windows 8 or adapt their existing applications for the new OS. Together with Windows 8, Microsoft announced Windows Runtime (WinRT), a new way of working with Windows.

As you can see, that’s a lot of new stuff to get your head around! To help you, Gill Cleeren, Microsoft Regional Director and Silverlight MVP will explain you the new strategy that Microsoft is taking. In this talk, we’ll see what WinRT really is, how we can use it to build Metro applications with and how we can leverage C# and Silverlight knowledge to build Metro applications. We’ll take a look at a fully working application as well to give you a clear picture of all the knowledge you’ll gather during this hour.

By joining this session, the developer story for Windows 8 will have less secrets for you!

Location
The Corn Exchange,
35 Constitution Street,
Edinburgh,
EH6 7BS

Agenda
18.30 – Doors open
18.55 – Welcome
19.00 – Building a Windows Phone 7 app from start to finish
19.55 – Break
20.05 – Windows Runtime and Metro Apps for Windows 8
21.00 – Close

This is a free event, but you do have to register!

DunDDD – Bringing a DDD Conference to Dundee!

The Developer! Developer! Developer! series of conferences has gone from strength to strength. This year saw DDD North added to the lineup to join Belfast, South West and of course Scotland as regional events taking place through out the year after DDD 9 in January.

Scottish Developers have teamed up with the people who brought you the NoSQL Autumn Conference last year and are proud to be bringing another DDD north of the border, to Dundee!

DunDDD is a 3-track, 15-session FREE conference that will take place on Saturday 19th November 2011 at the Queen Mother Building in the University of Dundee. There is an entire track dedicated to NoSQL and Big Data, a track dedicated to The Web and Web Technologies and a general track that isn’t based (too heavily) on any single platform, language or framework.

This is a fantastic opportunity to network with local developers from all across Scotland, learn some new tricks or even revisit some old ones. Spaces are limited so get registered before you miss out!

http://dundee.dddscotland.co.uk