Category Archives: Community

Community, Developer Events, Podcasts, SQLBits-10/2007

032 – SQLBits – Martin Cairney on Securing SQL Server


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

Welcome to podcast#32. In this show, I’m talking with Martin Cairney. Martin delivered a session at SQLBits all about Securing SQL Server. Recorded live, in the bowling alley after the SQLBits event, there is some background noise, apologies for that!

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast: http://www.craigmurphy.com/podcasts/032-SQLBits-Martin-Cairney-Securing-SQL-Server.mp3

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Community, Developer Events, General, Podcasts, SQLBits-10/2007

031 – SQLBits – John Van Hoof

1 Comment

“Great conference, really enjoyed, it has been fantastic, well worth the Saturday”


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

Welcome to podcast#31 – In this show I’m talking to John Van Hoof. John asked me about Martin Cairney’s session about Securing SQL Server, which I knew very little about. So I invited John to follow me to the speaker’s area where I knew Martin was busy prepping – unorthodox perhaps, but Martin was very willing to “sell” his session! SQLBits. Watch out for a podcast with Martin – coming soon!

“So you came to SQLBits to pick up some bits”…I’m in the wrong business, move over Peter Kaye, Ricky Gervais, you’re on my comedy turf.

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast: http://www.craigmurphy.com/podcasts/031-SQLBits-John-Van-Hoof.mp3

Recorded at SQLBits, 6th October 2007, Dave does a good job entertaining a packed room of 120 delegates in a Top of the Pops style!


Video: SQLBits – Dave McMahon – Top Ten SQL Keywords

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Community, Developer Events

Deep Lean Seminar : Nov. 3-4, Cambridge, MA.

A two day deep dive into lean software development success

Further information can be found here:
http://www.agilebazaar.org/DeepLeanAgenda.htm

  • Only do things that deliver value to the customer!
  • Focus on high priority/high payback features first!
  • Eliminate waste – especially in corporate processes!
  • Don’t do it unless the customer wants it!
  • Decide as late as possible!
  • Deliver early/deliver often/deliver good!
  • Build high performance teams – and then keep everything that doesn’t add customer value out of their way!

A seminal 2-day event at MIT in Cambridge, MA. with Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Jeff Sutherland and Nancy Van Schooenderwoert.

This will be a unique opportunity to be in a relatively intimate conversation with these Lean/Agile/Scrum/XP thought leaders for two days. This will be an in-depth discussion of Lean/Agile/Scrum software development challenges, principles and practices. The event is all volunteer run and produced by the Agile Bazaar, an Agile Alliance Affiliate and newly an ACM chapter in the Boston Area.

For one competitive price, you will get:

  • 2-day registration covering all presentations and workshops
  • A formal set of lecture notes
  • Breakfast, lunch and snacks
  • You are invited to dine and socialize with the speakers and volunteers at a local restaurant on Saturday night (all participants are responsible for their own expense).

Deep Lean is an in-depth seminar targeted to people familiar with Lean, Agile, Scrum and XP software development. For those needing more background, we recommend reading Mary & Tom Poppendeick’s first book: Lean Software Development – An Agile Toolkit in advance of the seminar.

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Community, Developer Events, General, Jobs

DDD6 – The Recruitment Panel – Your help is needed!

Colin needs your help! Whilst we’re still voting for the DDD6 sessions, Colin is keen to prepare this session! If you can spare some time, and the panel topic interests you, would be kind enough to consider providing Colin with “your question”?

Thanks in advance.

A panel of experts will answer audience questions on the subject of recruitment – chaired by Colin Mackay. This session is for you if you are looking for a job and want to find out what companies are looking for. You are trying to hire someone but don’t know what to look for. You have been burned in the past and don’t want to repeat the experience. You have a question about recruitment no one else seems to have an answer to.

There will be a question box on the day for you to post your questions, but if you want to email in advance, you can email your questions to colin@scottishdevelopers.com.

Submissions by email close at 23:59 on the 23rd November.

The panel consists of:

Sarah Blow: Founder of Girl Geek Dinners and software Engineer at Cardinal Health. She has grown up around technology and HR with parents in both industry sectors and works closely with Women & Technology and companies to create a better understanding about how women may be recruited in different ways to men.

Barry Dorrans: Senior consultant for Charteris PLC and Microsoft MVP. When interviewing he takes the red pen and becomes intellisense for whiteboards.

Frank Kerrigan: Development team lead for Erinaceous Insurance Services in Glasgow. His team writes enterprise applications for internal customers using C# and SQL Server. Frank has been in devolvement and support of enterprise systems for 15 years.

Karl Lightfoot: Recruitment Consultant that for the last 9 years day in day out has only been recruiting developers in the Midlands region for the largest IT Recruitment consultancy in the UK. He has successfully recruited for large and small corporations through different market states of the supply / demand of talented Developers from Visual Basic 3 to .Net 2005.

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Community, Developer Events

Free [developer] conferences – I have a hypothetical question.

9 Comments

Gary has raised some great points over here.

Without thinking about any specific developer conferences that you’ve attended recently or are about to attend…

…would you be willing to pay a small sum of money, say £5 to £10 to attend a large scale (300+ attendees) full-day conference?

Yes, I know that they then aren’t free, but the monies raised would be used to help cover travel expenses for speakers and for subsequent events, etc.

Remember, this is a hypothetical question.

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Community, Developer Events, Podcasts, SQLBits-10/2007

030 – SQLBits – Attendees Jane Dallaway and Jim Shilling tell us what they think

1 Comment


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate


Craig, Jane and Jim

Welcome to podcast#30 – I spotted Jane and Jim squatting on the floor near Chicago 1, so I squatted down and had a chat to them about SQLBits. This podcast starts rather sharply, I had been recording a chat that the three of us were having, then just jumped into the podcast content!

Jane – I’m still waiting on that photograph of me!!

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast:

Resources
Jane’s web site, etc.
Brighton Bloggers
WebDD

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Community, Developer Events, SQLBits-10/2007

SQLBits – post-event


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

I attended the first DDD-style SQL conference held in Reading last Saturday: SQLBits. It was an excellent event, well organised and very slick. Some really nice touches too, like coaches from Reading railway station to the venue at Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park campus (it was held on a Saturday, so the free bus wasn’t running). And there was a super bowling event laid on as part of the after-event entertainment!

I was given the job of room monitor, which isn’t an onerous job, but one that is very much required. Speakers often need somebody to remind them that they have to wrap up, sometimes they need a 15 min, 10 min or 5 min warning as their session reaches its conclusion. Anyway, I was able to sit in on some interesting sessions, those noted below. I did jump between sessions in the other slots – I was also podcasting too, so didn’t sit in on other sessions in the entirety. Here’s the first podcast: 029 – SQLBits – Richard Fennell on SQL Server Unit Testing

I was amused when Sutha said words to the effect “everybody hates writing documentation, right?” I couldn’t resist replying with “speak for yourself!” – it got a good laugh in the room. Of course, everybody really does hate writing documentation!

Handling early arriving facts 200 BI
Sutha Thiru
How do we handle early arriving facts? If you are an experienced DW developer you would have come across this many times, if you are a novice you are certain to face this challenge in the near future. Each organisation makes decision to handle this scenario as suited to them. I have handled this scenario in one of these 3 categories. 1. Ignore early arriving facts all together? Is that the right way to do it? 2. During load process populate the dimension table with the Natural Key and default values and map surrogate key to the incoming fact record. 3. During fact load map default surrogate key and load those records into the “Rejected” table. I would be conducting a demo for point 2 and 3. In depth analysis on what happens to the records in the Rejected table and what do I propose to resolve these records? What is Business Intelligence Service Centre (BISC) and their involvement is going to mission critical for the success of your BI project?

Getting Started with SQL Server Reporting Services 200 BI
Tim Leung
SQL Server Reporting Services provides a powerful mechanism for generating reports. This session provides an introduction to the many features and capabilities of Reporting services. Topics covered will include installation, managing reports and security. The session will also show you how to author reports using the Business Intelligence studio. Highlights include using Stored Procedures as data sources, passing parameters into reports and running conditional logic inside reports. Tips and tricks are included throughout the session to help you on your way.

Daves Top 10 SQL Keywords 200 DBA
Dave McMahon
‘Top of the Pops’ might be dead, but Dave will give you his own countdown of his 10 most useful/favorite SQL keywords. No secrets to giveaway here, suffice to say that you will know some of them (but maybe not used this way) and some may be unfamiliar to you. The whole ‘Countdown’ will be demoed and Dave will explain why they make his top 10. This is a session for people who use SQL regularly as Developers, know the standard DML but maybe never had the chance to peek around the corner to see what else was there! Both SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 syntax will feature, so this is stuff you can take away and use today …

Catch the end of Dave’s “Top of the Tops” styled session over here.

Related Podcasts035 – SQLBits – Simon Harriyott – On SQLBits and Dave McMahon in a wig…
034 – SQLBits – Liam Westley, Matt Barrett discuss SQLBits and Dave McMahon
033 – SQLBits – Colin Mackay on SQLBits and events in Reading
032 – SQLBits – Martin Cairney on Securing SQL Server
031 – SQLBits – John Van Hoof
030 – SQLBits – Attendees Jane Dallaway and Jim Shilling tell us what they think
029 – SQLBits – Richard Fennell on SQL Server Unit Testing


Dave McMahon, podcasting


Recursive photography?


Dave’s pre-session nerves are showing now


Thank you Solid Quality Mentoring for the sustenance


Hey, Rich, look, it’s an XBOX 360 – you should’ve come along and tried to win it! One lucky person won this, meaning that Quest Software went home with less than they arrived with.


Fernando (blog and blog) and Helen on the Solid Quality Mentoring stand


The boys from Idera had “iPods” as prizes!


Another full session


Super Simon Sabin struts his stuff (here’s Idera’s Super Simon)


Uh oh. Quiche. Developers. The two don’t work. For real: look here, here and here.


Dave tells us who he is to a packed room


Martin Cairney: can bowl.


I so nearly won with 140. Liam came back from 127 to win with 142.

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Community, Developer Events, Podcasts

029 – SQLBits – Richard Fennell on SQL Server Unit Testing

1 Comment


SQLBits, the sponsors: Microsoft | Idera
Quest Software | Solid Quality Learning | redgate

Test driven development is one of the current hot topics in software development, but how far can these principles be applied in the world of SQL? In this session I will look at the principles of TDD and other testing options using both freeware tools and Microsoft’s Visual Studio Datadude.

SQLBits was another fine piece of event engineering, huge congratulations to Tony, Simon, Martin and Chris on the success of their first DDD-style SQL conference.

In this, podcast#29, I’m chatting to Richard Fennell about his session. I’ve known Richard for a few years now, as the photograph above confirms (regular followers will know that maroon shirts were issued to speakers at DDD3!) I was pleased to be able to catch up with Richard and talk about his session before he delivered it. Richard was talking about unit testing SQL Server (using tsqlunit), which certainly caught my attention being an avid TDDer.

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast: http://www.craigmurphy.com/podcasts/029-SQLBits-Richard-Fennell.mp3

Related Posts
SQLBits – post event

Resources
Data Dude
Richard’s Blog

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.net, Community, Developer Events, Development

db4o – an object database, for .NET (and Java)

2 Comments

JimPaterson

Last night, I was lucky enough to attend a Scottish Developers meeting in Glasgow.  It worked out rather well actually: upon arriving in Glasgow I had beer and a burger with top bloke and colleague Alan.  Then the event itself.  To finish, a beer with fellow Scottish Developers Colin, Frank and with SQLBits organiser supremo Martin.  All in all a great trip, and a great event – you should have been there!

Anyway, the session itself was impressive stuff.  Whilst I had thought that the session was going to be all about an object database in Java, it turns out that db4o has a .NET implementation too.  And it supports the .NET Compact Framework, i.e. mobile devices.  Speaker Jim Paterson did a really good job of explaining db4o, its use, its positives and its negatives.

Of course, the first thing I did today was go off and download db4o and set about a simple “hello world” style example.  True enough, everything that I saw last night worked like a charm.  In fact, here’s the C# that I threw together in about 5 minutes:

[code lang=”C#”]
using Db4objects.Db4o;

namespace db40Ex
{
public partial class Form1 : Form
{
IObjectContainer db;

public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
db = Db4oFactory.OpenFile(@”D:\data\_test\db4o\data.db4o”);
}

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
myRecord mr = new myRecord();
mr.Name = “Frank Butcher”;
mr.Telephone = “123 456 789”;
db.Set(mr);
}

private void button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
myRecord mr = new myRecord();
IObjectSet res = db.Get(mr);
listBox1.Items.Clear();
foreach (myRecord s in res)
listBox1.Items.Add(s.Name);
}

private void button3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
myRecord mr = new myRecord();
mr.Name = “Butcher Frank”;
mr.Telephone = “123 456 789”;
db.Set(mr);
}
}

public class myRecord
{
public string Name;
public string Telephone;
}
}
[/code]

Object databases aren’t without their pitfalls, I will use db4o in a “real” project – I am sure it’ll perform perfectly well.  Expect to see a more detailed follow up post here shortly.

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Community, Developer Events, Podcasts

028 – MIX07 – Turning The Pages – 3D Books


Michael, Mark and Alex

Designing and delivering 3D solutions on the Web
Having a widely deployed full 3D platform which can be hosted in the browser allows for a new range of internet accessible applications. The British Library’s implementation partners (Armadillo Systems and Shaxam) built the next-generation treasure book reading experience to the web with the launch of Vista. This session will discuss the designer-developer workflow that was used (from 3D models in Lightwave to Expression Blend to Visual Studio and then deployment into a live server-farm implementation). It will also cover their use of Silverlight to drive wider platform adoption as well as the decisions they made and the things they learnt along the way.

This is podcast #28 – I’m talking to the team behind the British Library’s Turning The Page project. These are the chaps who have put many of the books listed below “on-line” with some really impressive 3D graphics. It’s a rather short podcast – the chaps had places to go, etc. I recommend that you watch the You Tube video below and visit some of the web sites that I list below too. It was an awesome demonstration of graphical power…and all served up via the Internet and Silverlight.

Jane Austen’s History of England, Elizabeth Blackwell’s Curious Herbal, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (in production), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, The Diamond Sutra, The Golden Hagadah, The Golf Book, James Joyce Ulysses (No. 1 of the first edition), James Joyce Paris and Pola Commonplace Books, James Joyce notebooks used in the creation of Ulysses, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Arundel, The Lindsfarne Gospels, The Luttrell Psalter, Magna Carta (in production), The Mercator Atlas of Europe, Mozart’s Thematic Catalogue (in production), The Sforza Hours, The Sherborne Missal, Stars of Science, Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, Vesalius’ De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, The Wellcome Apocalypse, Robert Willan’s On Cutaneous Diseases, WB Yeats Rapallo notebooks (in production)

Podcast feed – subscribe here!

This podcast:

Turning The Pages 2.0, in action:

Resources & Related Posts
Armadillo Systems
Shaxam
British Library
Turning The Pages
Lightwave 3D

MIX in Las Vegas
Scott Lovegrove interviews Danny Thorpe and Angus Logan
NxtGenUG chaps on Mix07, including mentions of Scott Guthrie, Robby Ingebretan, Simon Peyton Jones
027 – MIX07 – Jim McNiven and Chris Hardy – Viral Marketing
026 – MIX07 – Men Of Iron – Michael Foord, Dave Verwer – IronPython, IronRuby, the DLR
019 – MIX07 – Danny Thorpe – on Borland, Google, Windows Live and .NET
018 – MIX07 – Scott Lovegrove on Windows Live Services
017 – MIX07 – Hugh MacLeod – the inspiration behind the Blue Monster

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