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Wednesday, September 24, 2008
ReMix UK - Day two
Following on from my Day 1 review of yesterday... Day 2 started with more of the same, another day packed full of talks - 5 sessions this time.
Internationalizing WPF and Silverlight Applications - Guy Smith-Ferrier
I've seen Guy speak before, and know him to be an engaging and enthusiastic speaker. I think he had probably one of the most difficult timeslots - first thing Friday morning, when judging by the tweets coming through the geek dinner had been quite alcohol friendly - and so there weren't a huge amount of people present. I own a copy of Guy's .Net Internationalization book and so was ready to learn more. I aren't in a position to need to internationalize WPF or Silverlight at the moment, but am working with a team who are doing it for .Net and so I thought I'd go and see what recommendations he had, and what I could learn to take back and apply to .Net.
One of the interesting takeaways was with regards to the subtle difference between CurrentUICulture and CurrentCulture. CurrentUICulture is about language, CurrentCulture is about date format, currency etc. I've since found an interesting post which explains in much greater detail than I noted down at the time.
One potential gotcha: when manipulating the CurrentUICulture in a multi-threaded environment, you need to set it on each thread - I know that this will come back to haunt me if I don't make a note somewhere :-)
Guy also introduced the concept of post-build localization - i.e. shipping the assemblies to a specialist team who are language specialists. There is a tool locBaml (which is not production ready, but which is used by Microsoft internally) which can be used to help manage this process. There seemed to be quite a few steps to the process involving msbuild, updating the csproj file and generating csv files.
Another takeaway point pertained to the inheritance of resources - if you're localizing an application into English and Dutch then there probably isn't much overlap in content, maybe except for Ok and a few similar words. If however you're localizing an application into English and American English then the majority of the words will be the same with the exception of colour/color, theatre/theater etc. It is easy to see that in a true multi-language environment having to define each resource for each language, even if they're the same content, will have an overhead in storage. So, he mentioned the concept of resource fallback - if the application can't find an exact match for a resource in a specific culture then it would fallback to the resource that most closely matches the users request. The post build tool locBaml doesn't have this inheritance and so would result in full storage of all words.
A brief mention was made about Silverlight 2 and internationalization - there is no flow direction support at the moment, so you can't switch right-to-left, up-to-down etc.
ASP.NET Front End Performance - Chris Hay
Another talk mentioning Fiddler as a great tool - but with a disclaimer - it doesn't work against localhost, but does against the machine name.
The first part of Chris's talk focussed on reducing the number of requests being made. He used Firebug and IBM Page Detailer to show the results in Firefox and IE respectively.
Some of his takeaways were:
A useful session with some food for thought.
No Silverlight App is an Island (of Richness) - Mike Taulty
Having seen Mike talk not long ago at a Brighton VBUG I had high expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.
This talk got into what you can and can't do to interact with HTML, javascript, the machine, HTTP, SOAP etc and was entertaining and thought-provoking.
One potential gotcha is that you can't make cross-scheme requests, i.e. HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa - another thing I'm noting down in case I ever stumble across such an issue.
Mike has blogged and provided sample code from his session here.
Robots and Beyond - See what you can do today - Paul Foster
I didn't know anything about the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio before this talk so was interested to find out about what it is (a pictorial drag and drop way to control robots), and what it can offer (a virtual environment to play with virtual robots - which reduces the barrier to entry rather). I was quite intrigued by the idea of the iRobot Roomba - a robot vacuum cleaner - shame it doesn't do stairs...
A good talk, but then again with a robot demo it would be hard for it not be captivating to some extent :-)
20/20 Talks - Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and more
A great final session - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 speakers. I tried to note down who talked about what:
The day ended with a Sneak Peeks session, showing new ideas, projects and potential products but the numbers were quite well down by this point. I quite liked the Family Archive device - a scanner, an interactive table (a bit like surface) - but there was a lot of advertising going on which was a bit of a sad way to close and otherwise good conference.
Internationalizing WPF and Silverlight Applications - Guy Smith-Ferrier
I've seen Guy speak before, and know him to be an engaging and enthusiastic speaker. I think he had probably one of the most difficult timeslots - first thing Friday morning, when judging by the tweets coming through the geek dinner had been quite alcohol friendly - and so there weren't a huge amount of people present. I own a copy of Guy's .Net Internationalization book and so was ready to learn more. I aren't in a position to need to internationalize WPF or Silverlight at the moment, but am working with a team who are doing it for .Net and so I thought I'd go and see what recommendations he had, and what I could learn to take back and apply to .Net.
One of the interesting takeaways was with regards to the subtle difference between CurrentUICulture and CurrentCulture. CurrentUICulture is about language, CurrentCulture is about date format, currency etc. I've since found an interesting post which explains in much greater detail than I noted down at the time.
One potential gotcha: when manipulating the CurrentUICulture in a multi-threaded environment, you need to set it on each thread - I know that this will come back to haunt me if I don't make a note somewhere :-)
Guy also introduced the concept of post-build localization - i.e. shipping the assemblies to a specialist team who are language specialists. There is a tool locBaml (which is not production ready, but which is used by Microsoft internally) which can be used to help manage this process. There seemed to be quite a few steps to the process involving msbuild, updating the csproj file and generating csv files.
Another takeaway point pertained to the inheritance of resources - if you're localizing an application into English and Dutch then there probably isn't much overlap in content, maybe except for Ok and a few similar words. If however you're localizing an application into English and American English then the majority of the words will be the same with the exception of colour/color, theatre/theater etc. It is easy to see that in a true multi-language environment having to define each resource for each language, even if they're the same content, will have an overhead in storage. So, he mentioned the concept of resource fallback - if the application can't find an exact match for a resource in a specific culture then it would fallback to the resource that most closely matches the users request. The post build tool locBaml doesn't have this inheritance and so would result in full storage of all words.
A brief mention was made about Silverlight 2 and internationalization - there is no flow direction support at the moment, so you can't switch right-to-left, up-to-down etc.
ASP.NET Front End Performance - Chris Hay
Another talk mentioning Fiddler as a great tool - but with a disclaimer - it doesn't work against localhost, but does against the machine name.
The first part of Chris's talk focussed on reducing the number of requests being made. He used Firebug and IBM Page Detailer to show the results in Firefox and IE respectively.
Some of his takeaways were:
- Combine css files into one file to cut down the number of file requests being made
- Combine js files into one file to cut down the number of file request being made
- Make use of file compression - but be careful about what you compress - PDFs don't like being compressed
- If possible use Server.Transfer instead of Response.Redirect as obviously this is done at server not client side saving a round-trip
A useful session with some food for thought.
No Silverlight App is an Island (of Richness) - Mike Taulty
Having seen Mike talk not long ago at a Brighton VBUG I had high expectations, and I wasn't disappointed.
This talk got into what you can and can't do to interact with HTML, javascript, the machine, HTTP, SOAP etc and was entertaining and thought-provoking.
One potential gotcha is that you can't make cross-scheme requests, i.e. HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa - another thing I'm noting down in case I ever stumble across such an issue.
Mike has blogged and provided sample code from his session here.
Robots and Beyond - See what you can do today - Paul Foster
I didn't know anything about the Microsoft Robotics Development Studio before this talk so was interested to find out about what it is (a pictorial drag and drop way to control robots), and what it can offer (a virtual environment to play with virtual robots - which reduces the barrier to entry rather). I was quite intrigued by the idea of the iRobot Roomba - a robot vacuum cleaner - shame it doesn't do stairs...
A good talk, but then again with a robot demo it would be hard for it not be captivating to some extent :-)
20/20 Talks - Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and more
A great final session - 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide, 6 speakers. I tried to note down who talked about what:
- David Pugh Jones - Digital advertising
- Sara Ford - 20 vs tool tips - some repetition from Thursday's session but most impressive to have a tool tip demo in 20 seconds
- Richard Costall - Silverlight 20 Sliders - he had an mp3 of his kids counting down to mark end of slides which started off quite cute
- Travis Leithead - IE8 Accelerators and web slices
- Seb Lee-Delisle - Rich digital content although he cheated the format a little by having some flash samples/videos which lasted for 2 or 3 multiples of the allowed 20 seconds but as he said cutting the videos down to 20 seconds was going to be a lot of work
- Dave McMahon - How to do a 20/20 session - based on observations from the previous speakers
The day ended with a Sneak Peeks session, showing new ideas, projects and potential products but the numbers were quite well down by this point. I quite liked the Family Archive device - a scanner, an interactive table (a bit like surface) - but there was a lot of advertising going on which was a bit of a sad way to close and otherwise good conference.
Labels: Brighton, conference, event, remix
// posted by Jane @ 7:35 PM 
Comments:
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
ReMix UK - Day one
So what was ReMix and who was it aimed at? Well, to tell you the truth I'm still wondering that myself. In my opinion it wasn't completely targetting any one audience - there were talks for developers, talks for designers, and some more business related talks too. Madgex were one of the sponsors, and so we had our stand there and had the Remix Bubbler bubbling away nicely - less people contributing than with the dConstruct bubbler, but still a great talking point and having the stand also gave the Madgex attendees somewhere to congregate too.
Day 1 started with the opening keynotes - Bill Buxton spoke first from a design and user experience perspective [Review at The Register]. Then came Scott Guthrie with lots of Silverlight demos (including ITV's Catch up service), some talk about Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (like it comes with support for javascript libraries like prototype and jquery etc) and some talk about IE8.
There were 4 streams to chose from on a combination of themes 'more developer', 'more designer', 'user interaction/business', 'beyond work' and 'everyone'. No room specialised in a single topic - the talks were allocated to rooms roughly based on expected audience. There were 4 sessions on Day 1.
Building Silverlight 2 Applications - Part 1 - Scott Guthrie
I only attended part one of this talk, as it failed to inspire. It was a bit too drag and droppy for me, and didn't show me anything really exciting or code focussed. It also left me wondering about accessibility, and internationalisation (which is why my first session on Friday was Guy's Internationalization of WPF and Silverlight).
Photosynth: Art, Science and More - John Penrose & Joshua Edwards
This was an introduction to a neat looking photographic tool, photosynth. There are 2 parts to this, one is a downloaded tool which allows you to select a set of JPG images and produce a synth, the second is an online space were synths are stored. The online space is pretty limited at the moment - there is no way to hide your synths, and every synth is automatically put up there - so you wouldn't want to use it for sensitive photos. Behind the scenes, the software generates a point cloud to determine the edges of your images, and then uses this cloud to work out how the photos should be slotted together - it skews and stretches the images to fit them together. There are some really impressive looking synths, but I think you need to plan what you're doing. In the wild this is being used on the London Eye site (which, of course following the law of demos, failed to work properly during the demo!).
No colour adjustment or exposure levelling happens in the process, which leads to some dramatic colour differences between the photos used in the synth.
This changes the normal rules for photography - instead of trying to take one killer image, you're deliberately trying to capture the whole image in a series of photos, at different focal lengths, to allow different points of detail. Done well, these give a real feeling of exploration.
This inspired me to head back to the Madgex stand, take a stack of photos of it and synth them - the results can be seen here.
ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project "Astoria") - Mike Flasko
An interesting, well presented session explaining how the restful data services work. We had an overview of the data services and keywords ($top, $skip, $orderby, $filter, $expand), as well as the formats the data can be presented in (JSON, XML, Atom). I'm still not sure what I think of this as a service, but I do like the fact that it makes use of the normal HTTP verbs, and results in standard HTTP outputs (404, 201 etc) and that it is fully secure by default, needing permissions to be explicitly granted.
During this demo the tool fiddler was demonstrated to see and interact with what was going on at the http protocol level, and this tool looks really useful.
Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks - Sara Ford
This was a whistle stop tour of 21 of Sara's tips and tricks for Visual Studio. They were broken down in to Coding (9 tips), Customising (5 tips) and Debugging (7 tips). Of these, the ones I didn't know about were incremental search, box selection, clipboard ring (I've often ended up with a blank line in my buffer), tracepoints and removing unused usings
As day 1 drew to a close, Bruce did a presentation on oAuth for "Ready Steady Talk" (but failed to get through to the final). I managed a beer at the Brighton Centre before seeking food (and more beer) at The Hop Poles with other Madgexians.
Day 1 started with the opening keynotes - Bill Buxton spoke first from a design and user experience perspective [Review at The Register]. Then came Scott Guthrie with lots of Silverlight demos (including ITV's Catch up service), some talk about Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (like it comes with support for javascript libraries like prototype and jquery etc) and some talk about IE8.
There were 4 streams to chose from on a combination of themes 'more developer', 'more designer', 'user interaction/business', 'beyond work' and 'everyone'. No room specialised in a single topic - the talks were allocated to rooms roughly based on expected audience. There were 4 sessions on Day 1.
Building Silverlight 2 Applications - Part 1 - Scott Guthrie
I only attended part one of this talk, as it failed to inspire. It was a bit too drag and droppy for me, and didn't show me anything really exciting or code focussed. It also left me wondering about accessibility, and internationalisation (which is why my first session on Friday was Guy's Internationalization of WPF and Silverlight).
Photosynth: Art, Science and More - John Penrose & Joshua Edwards
This was an introduction to a neat looking photographic tool, photosynth. There are 2 parts to this, one is a downloaded tool which allows you to select a set of JPG images and produce a synth, the second is an online space were synths are stored. The online space is pretty limited at the moment - there is no way to hide your synths, and every synth is automatically put up there - so you wouldn't want to use it for sensitive photos. Behind the scenes, the software generates a point cloud to determine the edges of your images, and then uses this cloud to work out how the photos should be slotted together - it skews and stretches the images to fit them together. There are some really impressive looking synths, but I think you need to plan what you're doing. In the wild this is being used on the London Eye site (which, of course following the law of demos, failed to work properly during the demo!).
No colour adjustment or exposure levelling happens in the process, which leads to some dramatic colour differences between the photos used in the synth.
This changes the normal rules for photography - instead of trying to take one killer image, you're deliberately trying to capture the whole image in a series of photos, at different focal lengths, to allow different points of detail. Done well, these give a real feeling of exploration.
This inspired me to head back to the Madgex stand, take a stack of photos of it and synth them - the results can be seen here.
ADO.NET Data Services for the Web (a.k.a. Project "Astoria") - Mike Flasko
An interesting, well presented session explaining how the restful data services work. We had an overview of the data services and keywords ($top, $skip, $orderby, $filter, $expand), as well as the formats the data can be presented in (JSON, XML, Atom). I'm still not sure what I think of this as a service, but I do like the fact that it makes use of the normal HTTP verbs, and results in standard HTTP outputs (404, 201 etc) and that it is fully secure by default, needing permissions to be explicitly granted.
During this demo the tool fiddler was demonstrated to see and interact with what was going on at the http protocol level, and this tool looks really useful.
Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks - Sara Ford
This was a whistle stop tour of 21 of Sara's tips and tricks for Visual Studio. They were broken down in to Coding (9 tips), Customising (5 tips) and Debugging (7 tips). Of these, the ones I didn't know about were incremental search, box selection, clipboard ring (I've often ended up with a blank line in my buffer), tracepoints and removing unused usings
As day 1 drew to a close, Bruce did a presentation on oAuth for "Ready Steady Talk" (but failed to get through to the final). I managed a beer at the Brighton Centre before seeking food (and more beer) at The Hop Poles with other Madgexians.
Labels: Brighton, conference, event, remix
// posted by Jane @ 7:51 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
VBUG Brighton: MVC, Test 1st and Ajax with ASP.NET
This evening I helped Nick with VBUG Brighton held at Madgex. Our speaker was Sebastien Lambla who
He gave a brief introduction to MVC within an ASP.NET world before moving on to some demos. Seb was a great presenter, obviously understood his subject and continued smiling even when his code failed. He was even prepared enough to pre-post the blog post relating to his talk including a link to the code he was demoing (he promised to tweak it and make it work).
We had some new attendees this evening, mainly because it's ReMix tomorrow and Friday and so people who'd arrived early popped along to join us. Amongst these was Andrew, chairman of VBUG, so it was interesting to find out what his thoughts on all things Microsoft related.
runs Caffeine IT, a .net consultancy, helping the good people of London adopt new technologies, new processes, new methodologies and in general anything that's new and shinyspeaking about ASP.NET MVC, test driven development and Ajax with ASP.NET MVC.
He gave a brief introduction to MVC within an ASP.NET world before moving on to some demos. Seb was a great presenter, obviously understood his subject and continued smiling even when his code failed. He was even prepared enough to pre-post the blog post relating to his talk including a link to the code he was demoing (he promised to tweak it and make it work).
We had some new attendees this evening, mainly because it's ReMix tomorrow and Friday and so people who'd arrived early popped along to join us. Amongst these was Andrew, chairman of VBUG, so it was interesting to find out what his thoughts on all things Microsoft related.
// posted by Jane @ 10:16 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
"Grow your wiki" with Stewart Mader
This evening, I headed over to The Werks to hear Stewart Mader, author of Wiki Patterns, talk about using a wiki successfully within a work environment.
I have been using TiddlyWiki to collaborate on a project level for about a year or so now - and the most recent project has probably been the most successful to date as we've sent each other links to wiki pages, both frequently updated pages as more information is uncovered, and used it as a central point. I was interested to find out how I can use a wiki more, and more effectively. I was hoping for some organisation strategies and tips, but that wasn't really what the evening was about so I will have to do some research myself on that.
Stewart was a really engaging speaker, and is obviously passionate about his subject. He had some really good uses for a wiki which I'd not thought of but actually make a whole lot of sense - things like meeting agendas. His example was that you write up an agenda and email it out to the attendees. You get three replies asking for changes to that agenda - someone wants an item removed and two others want items added. So now as the meeting organiser you've got 3 changes to make, and then you have to send it out again. As he said, you can almost guarantee that someone will have already printed out the agenda before the revised version is sent out and so will end up at the meeting with an out of date version. Instead, if you put your agenda on a wiki, then every attendee can check it out, and make changes as appropriate. During the meeting minutes can be typed into the wiki directly if it is a laptop friendly meeting by any or all attendees. So, the whole process immediately is a lot more collaborative.
During the Q&A session someone mentioned using google docs as a more collaborative mechanism for documents. As Steward pointed out this isn't the same thing as a wiki, and he is also concerned that google docs is quite geeky. He mentioned Buzzword as a less geeky, more UI friendly alternative - so I'm off to have a look at that.
We also discussed enterprise wiki tools, and the following were mentioned as being worth a look
In summary, a great talk, which resulted in me adding lots of "consider a wiki for x" tasks to my remember the milk task list to give some thought to when and where a wiki would be a benefit in my working life
I have been using TiddlyWiki to collaborate on a project level for about a year or so now - and the most recent project has probably been the most successful to date as we've sent each other links to wiki pages, both frequently updated pages as more information is uncovered, and used it as a central point. I was interested to find out how I can use a wiki more, and more effectively. I was hoping for some organisation strategies and tips, but that wasn't really what the evening was about so I will have to do some research myself on that.
Stewart was a really engaging speaker, and is obviously passionate about his subject. He had some really good uses for a wiki which I'd not thought of but actually make a whole lot of sense - things like meeting agendas. His example was that you write up an agenda and email it out to the attendees. You get three replies asking for changes to that agenda - someone wants an item removed and two others want items added. So now as the meeting organiser you've got 3 changes to make, and then you have to send it out again. As he said, you can almost guarantee that someone will have already printed out the agenda before the revised version is sent out and so will end up at the meeting with an out of date version. Instead, if you put your agenda on a wiki, then every attendee can check it out, and make changes as appropriate. During the meeting minutes can be typed into the wiki directly if it is a laptop friendly meeting by any or all attendees. So, the whole process immediately is a lot more collaborative.
During the Q&A session someone mentioned using google docs as a more collaborative mechanism for documents. As Steward pointed out this isn't the same thing as a wiki, and he is also concerned that google docs is quite geeky. He mentioned Buzzword as a less geeky, more UI friendly alternative - so I'm off to have a look at that.
We also discussed enterprise wiki tools, and the following were mentioned as being worth a look
In summary, a great talk, which resulted in me adding lots of "consider a wiki for x" tasks to my remember the milk task list to give some thought to when and where a wiki would be a benefit in my working life
// posted by Jane @ 9:36 PM
Comments:
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Event: In The Brain of Gojko Adzic: Testing Web Applications with Selenium & Selenium Remote Control
On Thursday evening I attended the Skills Matter event In The Brain of Gojko Adzic: Testing Web Applications with Selenium & Selenium Remote Control which was a great follow up to Kerry Buckley's Web Testing with Selenium talk he did at Barcamp Brighton last September.
Richard has been to a few Skills Matter Java & JEE events before and had thought them useful, so when I spotted the Selenium talk I thought I'd go along and see what I could gain from it. My previous experience with Selenium had involved the Selenium IDE for firefox and recording various scripts to be used as a very basic regression suite - intended to be ran after a new deployment to a live server to ensure that the deployment hadn't broken anything and that response times were acceptable. So, I felt my knowledge was pretty basic and that this event should broaden my appreciation of the various aspects of Selenium as a tool.
The evening was broken into 3 parts, presented by 3 people and in total lasting an hour and a half, from 6.30pm to around 8pm.
Part One was an introduction to Selenium by Gojko Adzic and introduced the concepts and associated tools. Gojko has put together a blog entry detailing all the links he mentioned, and also links to the other speakers. From this introduction I heard about a few tools I didn't know off:
Part Two was Milan Bogdanovic, a tester from SQS-UK. This talk focussed on the Selenium IDE, which, as I mentioned above, is the only bit of Selenium I've every really played with and so I didn't gain as much from this part. I did, however, learn about the ability to use XPath expressions as the target and also got pointed at a useful Firefox extension XPath Checker to help work out the correct XPath expression for an element to check or select. I also found out about the ability to make use of the user-extensions.js file to store javascript functions and execute them via the IDE.
Part Three was Ivan Sanchez and was focussed on Selenium RC. As with Gojko he has put together a blog post of links based on his session. I knew very little about this, although I knew that Emily had made some good progress using it. There were quite a few hints and tips coming out of this session, many relating to the architecting of the tests:
All in all a good evening, well worth attending and I'll be keeping an eye on future events being run by Skills Matter as part of the Open Source .NET series
Richard has been to a few Skills Matter Java & JEE events before and had thought them useful, so when I spotted the Selenium talk I thought I'd go along and see what I could gain from it. My previous experience with Selenium had involved the Selenium IDE for firefox and recording various scripts to be used as a very basic regression suite - intended to be ran after a new deployment to a live server to ensure that the deployment hadn't broken anything and that response times were acceptable. So, I felt my knowledge was pretty basic and that this event should broaden my appreciation of the various aspects of Selenium as a tool.
The evening was broken into 3 parts, presented by 3 people and in total lasting an hour and a half, from 6.30pm to around 8pm.
Part One was an introduction to Selenium by Gojko Adzic and introduced the concepts and associated tools. Gojko has put together a blog entry detailing all the links he mentioned, and also links to the other speakers. From this introduction I heard about a few tools I didn't know off:
- StoryTestIQ - a mashup of Selenium and FitNesse which sounds like it is more tester friendly but with the ability to script database access for setup and teardown tasks
- WebTest Fixtures - an extension to FitNesse that implement a customer-friendly language for web testing, utilising Selenium Remote Control
Part Two was Milan Bogdanovic, a tester from SQS-UK. This talk focussed on the Selenium IDE, which, as I mentioned above, is the only bit of Selenium I've every really played with and so I didn't gain as much from this part. I did, however, learn about the ability to use XPath expressions as the target and also got pointed at a useful Firefox extension XPath Checker to help work out the correct XPath expression for an element to check or select. I also found out about the ability to make use of the user-extensions.js file to store javascript functions and execute them via the IDE.
Part Three was Ivan Sanchez and was focussed on Selenium RC. As with Gojko he has put together a blog post of links based on his session. I knew very little about this, although I knew that Emily had made some good progress using it. There were quite a few hints and tips coming out of this session, many relating to the architecting of the tests:
- Ideally start a new browser for each test - this ensures a clean base, but does make the process slow
- Extract configuration details into an external properties file - otherwise, as with all other areas of development, your code ends up littered with "special" values
- Make use of the PageObjects design pattern which presents each page as an object comprised of the services that the page offers - thus decoupling the HTML elements from the functional elements
- Think carefully about when and how often these tests get run, as mentioned above they can be slow to execute so don't put them into a continuous integration environment to be run at each check-in, instead do them in batch overnight or a couple of times during the day
- Consider using the Selenium Grid option to perform the tests across multiple machines to reduce the time to execute - this can also work using Amazon's EC2 service
All in all a good evening, well worth attending and I'll be keeping an eye on future events being run by Skills Matter as part of the Open Source .NET series
// posted by Jane @ 9:07 AM
Comments:
Hi,
I'm glad that you liked the event. If you filled in the card at the end, when the star was on the screen, you might be interested in the poll results (you'll probably be surprised) -- see how many points are there in a five point star?
I'm glad that you liked the event. If you filled in the card at the end, when the star was on the screen, you might be interested in the poll results (you'll probably be surprised) -- see how many points are there in a five point star?
Friday, July 04, 2008
VBUG Brighton: Understanding LINQ with Mike Taulty
Last night Madgex hosted an excellent VBUG Brighton session by Mike Taulty on LINQ.
Despite the sunny, warm evening we managed to pack 25 or so Microsoft technologies developers into our boardroom and listened intently whilst Mike talked and demo'd his way around LINQ, explaining some of the newer C#/VB9 language features as he went. Whilst not being the exact same slide deck, after a rummage around Mike's site I found a post about a similar sounding talk complete with presentation in PDF format.
I remain slightly dissapointed by the syntax for Linq to XML
var query = from c in data.DescendantsAndSelf("customer")
select (string)c.Attribute("id");
which as Mike said, involves a bit too much of hoping and praying (relying on no underlying changes, no strong typing etc).
However, I'm really encouraged by the idea of Linq to XSD which seems like a much better idea, tying the query to a schema rather than a document.
Fabrice has some sample code based on Linq to XML and Linq to XSD as follows, which goes to show the improvement using the XSD version
Here is a LINQ to XML query:
from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")
select (double)item.Element("Price") * (int)item.Element("Quantity")
Here is the same query as above, but written using LINQ to XSD:
from item in purchaseOrder.Item
select item.Price * item.Quantity
which I think looks much more elegant and less clunky.
Despite the sunny, warm evening we managed to pack 25 or so Microsoft technologies developers into our boardroom and listened intently whilst Mike talked and demo'd his way around LINQ, explaining some of the newer C#/VB9 language features as he went. Whilst not being the exact same slide deck, after a rummage around Mike's site I found a post about a similar sounding talk complete with presentation in PDF format.
I remain slightly dissapointed by the syntax for Linq to XML
var query = from c in data.DescendantsAndSelf("customer")
select (string)c.Attribute("id");
which as Mike said, involves a bit too much of hoping and praying (relying on no underlying changes, no strong typing etc).
However, I'm really encouraged by the idea of Linq to XSD which seems like a much better idea, tying the query to a schema rather than a document.
Fabrice has some sample code based on Linq to XML and Linq to XSD as follows, which goes to show the improvement using the XSD version
Here is a LINQ to XML query:
from item in purchaseOrder.Elements("Item")
select (double)item.Element("Price") * (int)item.Element("Quantity")
Here is the same query as above, but written using LINQ to XSD:
from item in purchaseOrder.Item
select item.Price * item.Quantity
which I think looks much more elegant and less clunky.
// posted by Jane @ 7:13 PM
Comments:
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
SQL Server User Group Review
On Thursday myself and Dave (the Madgex DBA) headed off to the Microsoft offices in Victoria to attend the SQL Server User Group meeting which was the launch event for SQL Server 2008.
There were 2 key speakers (blurb taken from an email from SQL Server User Group):
Update: Simon has posted a follow-up containing the answers to questions he didn't get time to answer.
There were 2 key speakers (blurb taken from an email from SQL Server User Group):
- Jasper Smith did the first stint on Admin stuff. He’s been an MVP for quite a while and has until recently been working at Nationwide. His blog can be found here and his website here. He’s got some great utilities like server manager for vista and Reporting Services scripter.
- Simon Sabin did the last session on dev stuff. He is also an MVP and is a freelance consultant and works as part of SQL Know How and SQL Skills. His blog can be found here.
- Database encryption – another enterprise only tool. You can now encrypt a database against a user defined key (stored as a certificate on the filing system). This will also result in tempdb being encrypted. When encrypted the mdf and ldf files are also encrypted, as are backups.
- Debugging has improved in the Management studio, can debug through a series of statements not just stored procedures.
- Using Inline variable assignment you can use a rowset to insert multiple data items in one line – Insert into
values (1), (2), (3) – at the back end this gets translated into a union statement (see more here). - Merge is introduced (finally) – see here for some posts about it. But the short version is the ability to do
Merge Into
Using
When matched then
Update set
When target not matched then
Insert
Basically doing an insert and update in one statement. Merge is deterministic, and appears to be quicker but mileage may vary. - CLR now handles larger data types (> 8000 bytes)
Update: Simon has posted a follow-up containing the answers to questions he didn't get time to answer.
// posted by Jane @ 6:55 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Geekyoto: Play in a changing public realm
Two students from Central Saint Martins did half-length presentations, and the second of these was Bruno Taylor on play.
One of his statements was along the lines that "71% of adults used to play outside when they were young, only 21% of children do now". He also showed some photographs of areas that had been "vandalised" by young people playing on objects that looked like they should have been designed for play, in an area with no real play facilities.
He'd installed a swing into a bus stop to enable play in that environment which looks like a fun idea.
One of his statements was along the lines that "71% of adults used to play outside when they were young, only 21% of children do now". He also showed some photographs of areas that had been "vandalised" by young people playing on objects that looked like they should have been designed for play, in an area with no real play facilities.
He'd installed a swing into a bus stop to enable play in that environment which looks like a fun idea.
// posted by Jane @ 6:33 PM
Comments:
Geekyoto: Secular Sabbath
Adrian Hon and Naomi Alderman talking about the idea of a secular sabbath. Naomi is from a jewish background, and in the world of the Orthodox jews what can be done on the Sabbath is quite restricted. This includes turning electrical devices on or off during the period - so a water reboiler tends to be used to cope with the need for a cup of tea, and timer switches are used for lighting.
The list of things that can be done, as seen in the slide above, are all rather pleasant sounding. One of the key points was that "behavioural changes don't need to be sacrificial" but that the concept of a day of rest has pretty much vanished - you can go shopping, read emails, work, etc pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, how about every now and again having an off-line day - no internet, no mobile phone, no landline phone - spend the day with friends, eating good food, enjoying good conversation? Give the car a rest, and walk around - slow down, de-stress.
Sounds like a pleasant change to me, I might just have to book one in.
The list of things that can be done, as seen in the slide above, are all rather pleasant sounding. One of the key points was that "behavioural changes don't need to be sacrificial" but that the concept of a day of rest has pretty much vanished - you can go shopping, read emails, work, etc pretty much 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
So, how about every now and again having an off-line day - no internet, no mobile phone, no landline phone - spend the day with friends, eating good food, enjoying good conversation? Give the car a rest, and walk around - slow down, de-stress.
Sounds like a pleasant change to me, I might just have to book one in.
// posted by Jane @ 6:21 PM
Comments:
Monday, May 19, 2008
Geekyoto: Christian Nold
The first speaker at Saturday's Geekyoto was Christian Nold who was mainly talking about emotional mapping. He mentioned some work he's done with communities and groups to map emotional responses to areas. This photo is part of the San Francisco emotion map. Participants are given handheld machines which monitor sweat levels (similar mechanism to lie detectors) to determine the emotional state of the person who additionally annotates their thoughts.
An interesting first talk, and some beautiful maps amongst his slides:
An interesting first talk, and some beautiful maps amongst his slides:
// posted by Jane @ 10:43 PM
Comments:
geekyoto
On Saturday I attended the geekyoto conference. The subject was "Fixing The Broken World" and we had 15 different speakers during the day covering topics from politics, products, mapping through to playing. A really enjoyable and thought provoking day.
I'll post some more thoughts and reflections as the week progresses, but in the meantime here are some photos.
I'll post some more thoughts and reflections as the week progresses, but in the meantime here are some photos.
// posted by Jane @ 10:13 PM
Comments:
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Sussex Geek Dinner - Mike Hadlow
On Wednesday evening, after I left the Contemporary Photography : Lydia Yee talk at the Friends Meeting House I made my way along to the Black Horse for a Geek Dinner. The speaker was Mike Hadlow, who I worked with for a while at Madgex late last year.
He gave a talk about Inversion of Control, a talk that he'd given previously at DDD6 last November. He has posted some links over at his blog.
The audience was more technical than usual, and a few usual faces were missing, possibly put off by the content. However, some new faces were also there, probably attracted by a more technical talk. All in all, another good evening organised by Simon.
He gave a talk about Inversion of Control, a talk that he'd given previously at DDD6 last November. He has posted some links over at his blog.
The audience was more technical than usual, and a few usual faces were missing, possibly put off by the content. However, some new faces were also there, probably attracted by a more technical talk. All in all, another good evening organised by Simon.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner
// posted by Jane @ 6:33 PM
Comments:
Friday, April 18, 2008
SQL Server User Group
Last night I went along to the SQL Server User Group meeting in Microsoft's London offices in Victoria (5 minutes walk from the station) to see what it was all about. The topics for the evening were:
• SQL Server 64 bit – advantages and choices
• Cursors – good or evil
The event was held at Microsoft London in one of the auditorium and was very professionally hosted.
It started at 6pm with an update on latest SQL Server related news – including the fact that SQL Server 2008 wouldn’t start on the 29th February 2008 - oops!
The next session was about SQL Server 64 bit, and when you should choose it – this was a bit too DBA focussed for me and was quite low level. But it was well presented and the presenter, Christian Bolton, obviously knew his stuff. His summary was that the question shouldn’t be "Why should I choose 64 bit?" but "Why wouldn’t I?".
There was then a break for pizza and drinks – no beer this time but apparently there normally is. I chatted to a few people and it would appear that LINQ has divided a community - with DBAs being suspicious of the load it was going to place on their databases without, necessarily, the ability to tune it as effectively as they feel they currently do. The developers liked the idea though.
The final session was about cursors and was presented by Eric Alsop – this talk’s summary was "Nothing divides the SQL community like a cursor, so why are they still around? In this session we are going to look at how to use cursors and when they are most applicable." This was an interesting talk, furnished with plenty of examples, to indicate at which points cursors will save you processing cost over using set based logic (mainly around aggregation, periodic optimisation (whatever that is) and matching issues.
All in all a good evening, and I'm planning to attend the one in June which is billed as a SQL Server 2008 UK Usergroup London Launch event. More details are available on the UK SQL Server Community website.
Update
I asked our Madgex DBA about his opinion on the 32 bit vs 64 bit question and his response was
"I think that the speaker was right to ask 'Why wouldn’t I?'. I think that the advantages for database applications far outweigh any additional cost. Considering that 64 bit is the future (or is that the present?), I think that rather than having to justify using a 64 bit system you would need to justify using a 32 bit system. Why would you want to use outdated technology? Obviously there is no point in upgrading to a 64 bit system just for the sake of it, but if your system has outgrown the capability of the current hardware and performance is suffering, or if the hardware has come to the end of it’s life and you were going to upgrade anyway, then I think that you would need a good reason not to upgrade to a 64 bit system.
The basic advantages are:
There is a good white paper that explains the issues."
• SQL Server 64 bit – advantages and choices
• Cursors – good or evil
The event was held at Microsoft London in one of the auditorium and was very professionally hosted.
It started at 6pm with an update on latest SQL Server related news – including the fact that SQL Server 2008 wouldn’t start on the 29th February 2008 - oops!
The next session was about SQL Server 64 bit, and when you should choose it – this was a bit too DBA focussed for me and was quite low level. But it was well presented and the presenter, Christian Bolton, obviously knew his stuff. His summary was that the question shouldn’t be "Why should I choose 64 bit?" but "Why wouldn’t I?".
There was then a break for pizza and drinks – no beer this time but apparently there normally is. I chatted to a few people and it would appear that LINQ has divided a community - with DBAs being suspicious of the load it was going to place on their databases without, necessarily, the ability to tune it as effectively as they feel they currently do. The developers liked the idea though.
The final session was about cursors and was presented by Eric Alsop – this talk’s summary was "Nothing divides the SQL community like a cursor, so why are they still around? In this session we are going to look at how to use cursors and when they are most applicable." This was an interesting talk, furnished with plenty of examples, to indicate at which points cursors will save you processing cost over using set based logic (mainly around aggregation, periodic optimisation (whatever that is) and matching issues.
All in all a good evening, and I'm planning to attend the one in June which is billed as a SQL Server 2008 UK Usergroup London Launch event. More details are available on the UK SQL Server Community website.
Update
I asked our Madgex DBA about his opinion on the 32 bit vs 64 bit question and his response was
"I think that the speaker was right to ask 'Why wouldn’t I?'. I think that the advantages for database applications far outweigh any additional cost. Considering that 64 bit is the future (or is that the present?), I think that rather than having to justify using a 64 bit system you would need to justify using a 32 bit system. Why would you want to use outdated technology? Obviously there is no point in upgrading to a 64 bit system just for the sake of it, but if your system has outgrown the capability of the current hardware and performance is suffering, or if the hardware has come to the end of it’s life and you were going to upgrade anyway, then I think that you would need a good reason not to upgrade to a 64 bit system.
The basic advantages are:
- Improved scalability through support of larger amounts of RAM and more processors.
- Improved performance through the ability to properly use all the available RAM (In a 32 bit system using AWE to increase the amount of memory, SQL only use the AWE memory for caching data pages. It cannot be used for other processes such as caching execution plans, sorting, hash tables, index creation etc.)
There is a good white paper that explains the issues."
// posted by Jane @ 10:02 AM
Comments:
Monday, March 31, 2008
Girl Geek Dinner - Copywriting
Relly of PoppyCopy spoke at the most recent Brighton Girl Geek Dinner last week on the subject of "Personality, Pulling Power and Prizes: Why good copy is your new BFF". Copy-writing isn't something that makes up any element of my job, but is something that I felt was worth knowing about, for this blog, and for who knows what exciting future projects might come my way.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Relly produced some great takeaway material for us, which contains examples of different styles of writing, and includes a Webiblography of useful material. It mentions a few articles from copyblogger - the Copywriting 101:An Introduction to Copywriting one caught my eye. My key learning from Relly's talk was to be authentic in my writing, so to write like I'd talk I guess, without using vocabulary I wouldn't normally use.
Labels: Brighton, event, girl geeks, photos
// posted by Jane @ 7:23 PM
Comments:
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Silverlight
On Monday evening I headed down to the Eagle to attend Josh's Silverlight Night. It wasn't really a presentation so much as a set of demos, around which a lot of questions and answers went on - especially from the Flash Brighton crowd. This was the first time I'd really spent any time learning about Silverlight, and I found the session really informative. I appreciate it isn't as mature a product as flash but I also don't really think it is targeting the same audience at this time - probably being best suited to video players and kiosk style applications. I really believe that the integration with other Microsoft toolsets, like the .NET languages, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, can only be a good thing allowing developers and designers to work together with a greater amount of ease. This is long overdue in my opinion.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
Labels: .NET, Brighton, event, silverlight, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:21 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
DDD6 Review
On Saturday I attended the 6th of the DDD days held at Microsoft campus in Reading. This was my first DDD, although I have attended a WebDD and the recent SQLBits day this year.
The day was again broken into 5 sessions, with 4 streams. The sessions I attended were:
I was pleased with my session choice and gained lots from all the speakers. I combined some talks that I knew aspects about (like the Continuous Integration one) with those that I'd not come across before (ASP.NET dynamic data controls - which look really handy for admin sites etc, and Astoria). I had to do a swift session swap for session 3 as I'd sat myself down ready to learn about Business apps with WPF with Oliver Sturm when he mentioned it was part 2 and I'd misread the agenda. Still, I got to learn about astoria which was really interesting and sounds really useful. My final session of the day was silly yet fun as Dave and Richard led a mass schwag giveaway hosting a game of "A question of swag" followed by a game of "Swaggity Swag".
The schwag bag wasn't great, consisting of just a pen - not even a notebook this time - but the hour of free training that innerworkings provided is a great gift to come away with.
All in all, another great developer conference and an opportunity to catch up with some familiar faces from the previous days.
The day was again broken into 5 sessions, with 4 streams. The sessions I attended were:
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data Controls with Dave Sussman
- Cruise Control.NET (retitled in the presentation as Continuous Integration) with Paul Lockwood
- Microsoft Codename "Astoria" with Guy Smith-Ferrier
- What is Scrum? with Richard Fennell
- Swaggily Fortunes with Richard Costall and Dave McMahon
I was pleased with my session choice and gained lots from all the speakers. I combined some talks that I knew aspects about (like the Continuous Integration one) with those that I'd not come across before (ASP.NET dynamic data controls - which look really handy for admin sites etc, and Astoria). I had to do a swift session swap for session 3 as I'd sat myself down ready to learn about Business apps with WPF with Oliver Sturm when he mentioned it was part 2 and I'd misread the agenda. Still, I got to learn about astoria which was really interesting and sounds really useful. My final session of the day was silly yet fun as Dave and Richard led a mass schwag giveaway hosting a game of "A question of swag" followed by a game of "Swaggity Swag".
The schwag bag wasn't great, consisting of just a pen - not even a notebook this time - but the hour of free training that innerworkings provided is a great gift to come away with.
All in all, another great developer conference and an opportunity to catch up with some familiar faces from the previous days.
// posted by Jane @ 6:28 PM
Comments:
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
VBUG Brighton - Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5
This evening Madgex hosted the first of what I hope will be many VBUG events. After a really informative session in August on LINQ I had high hopes for this evening, and wasn't dissapointed. Daniel Moth gave a rapid, but informative, tour of Visual Studio 2008 and some of the new features of .Net framework 3.5
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, vbug
// posted by Jane @ 10:28 PM
Comments:
Thursday, November 01, 2007
A week of skillswaps
Booking is now underway for the week of Skillswap events which are being run during the Brighton Digital Festival. These events are "Informal training by the local community for the local community" and I've been to a couple before. The events are:
- Monday 19th November - Photography 101 with Jane Dallaway
- Tuesday 20th November - Master Screencasting with Ian Ozsvald
- Wednesday 21st November - Agile: Iterating the Reasons with Joh Hunt & Tom Hume
- Thursday 22nd November - The Art of Storytelling with Charlie Davies
- Friday 23rd November - Software Testing with Rosie Sherry
Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:29 PM
Comments:
Thursday, October 25, 2007
DDD6
DDD6 will be held at the Microsoft Campus on the 24th November, and it's full already although apparently they're still accepting waitlist registrations.
This will be my first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day, but if WebDD and SQLBits are anything to go by I'll learn lots and be inspired.
This will be my first DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day, but if WebDD and SQLBits are anything to go by I'll learn lots and be inspired.
Labels: conference, DDD6, event
// posted by Jane @ 9:35 PM
Comments:
Saturday, October 13, 2007
SQLBits Podcast
The interview that Jim and I recorded with Craig Murphy is now up on his site.
The photo I took of Craig was truly awful and so didn't make it into the public domain. Sorry Craig!
The photo I took of Craig was truly awful and so didn't make it into the public domain. Sorry Craig!
Labels: conference, event, interview, SQL, SQLServer, SQLServer2005
// posted by Jane @ 11:14 PM
Comments:
Monday, October 08, 2007
SQLBits conference
On Saturday I attended the SQLBits conference held at Microsoft Campus in Reading. It was another free conference aimed at SQL Server developers and DBAs and consisting of 4 streams of 5 1-hour-long presentations. I teamed up with Jim, friend and former boss, and headed off to Reading ready for a day of learning.
SQL Server is probably my top skill, I've been working with it since version 7, and have designed databases, developed them, tested them and supported them. So, this conference really had my name written all over it. And it didn't disappoint.
I started off with Transactions and Exception Handling, presented by Eric Allsopp which was an in-depth exploration of the locking mechanics within SQL Server, isolation levels as well as exception handling and the advantages of the SQL Server 2005 BEGIN TRY... BEGIN CATCH syntax over the old @@ERROR syntax. Eric obviously knew his stuff, but I have to admit that following a highly technical (in fact, the most technical session I attended) presentation at 9:30 on a Saturday morning was a bit of a struggle.
Next up we headed to the SQL Server 2008 Beyond Relational presentation by Keith Burns and found out about some the cool new features to be presented in SQL Server 2008 - the most interesting being spatial - using both geography and geometry aspects to allow for manipulation of location based data. A great presentation giving a glance into the new version - not that I've got to grips with SQL Server 2005 yet...
The final presentation of the morning was Simon Sabin with 77 SQL Server Myths (although we only got through about 16 or so). This was a really useful session, challenging some of the beliefs I've held over the years (mainly that were true at one point, but weren't any longer) and making me re-evaluate some of the queries I write.
During lunch there were a couple of talks from sponsors, and some Grok talks going on. I managed to attend neither but did do an interview about the day so far with Craig Murphy.
After lunch we headed to Dave McMahon's talk Daves Top 10 SQL Keywords which was truly excellent. He went through his 10 favourite keywords, and explained, giving examples, why they were in the list, with a final countdown in true Top of the Pops style.
We missed the final session altogether as the 2 sessions we'd identified as being useful had either changed, or after discussion turned out to be not what we expected, so we headed off home. A great day, and really refreshing to have a SQL based day like this. Thanks SQLBits.
SQL Server is probably my top skill, I've been working with it since version 7, and have designed databases, developed them, tested them and supported them. So, this conference really had my name written all over it. And it didn't disappoint.
I started off with Transactions and Exception Handling, presented by Eric Allsopp which was an in-depth exploration of the locking mechanics within SQL Server, isolation levels as well as exception handling and the advantages of the SQL Server 2005 BEGIN TRY... BEGIN CATCH syntax over the old @@ERROR syntax. Eric obviously knew his stuff, but I have to admit that following a highly technical (in fact, the most technical session I attended) presentation at 9:30 on a Saturday morning was a bit of a struggle.
Next up we headed to the SQL Server 2008 Beyond Relational presentation by Keith Burns and found out about some the cool new features to be presented in SQL Server 2008 - the most interesting being spatial - using both geography and geometry aspects to allow for manipulation of location based data. A great presentation giving a glance into the new version - not that I've got to grips with SQL Server 2005 yet...
The final presentation of the morning was Simon Sabin with 77 SQL Server Myths (although we only got through about 16 or so). This was a really useful session, challenging some of the beliefs I've held over the years (mainly that were true at one point, but weren't any longer) and making me re-evaluate some of the queries I write.
During lunch there were a couple of talks from sponsors, and some Grok talks going on. I managed to attend neither but did do an interview about the day so far with Craig Murphy.
After lunch we headed to Dave McMahon's talk Daves Top 10 SQL Keywords which was truly excellent. He went through his 10 favourite keywords, and explained, giving examples, why they were in the list, with a final countdown in true Top of the Pops style.
We missed the final session altogether as the 2 sessions we'd identified as being useful had either changed, or after discussion turned out to be not what we expected, so we headed off home. A great day, and really refreshing to have a SQL based day like this. Thanks SQLBits.
Labels: conference, event, SQL, SQLServer, SQLServer2005
// posted by Jane @ 7:05 PM
Comments:
Conference Schwag bags
I was at the SQLBits conference on Saturday (of which more later) and I started thinking about what makes an ideal conference schwag bag for me:
If you're giving me schwag to spread your name around, then for me, pens, notebooks, post-its and other office based stationery are the items that are likely to make it into the office, and so be seen by my friends and colleagues whilst if you're giving me schwag so that I remember you, and think of you as a thoughtful company, then bottles of water, or biscuits, or fruit are more likely to hit the mark.
- at least one pen
- a notebook
- a bottle of water
If you're giving me schwag to spread your name around, then for me, pens, notebooks, post-its and other office based stationery are the items that are likely to make it into the office, and so be seen by my friends and colleagues whilst if you're giving me schwag so that I remember you, and think of you as a thoughtful company, then bottles of water, or biscuits, or fruit are more likely to hit the mark.
Labels: conference, event, schwag
// posted by Jane @ 8:58 AM
Comments:
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Barcamp Brighton - afterthoughts
So, having had a few days to think about, here are my thoughts about barcamp Brighton.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).
Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was good because lots of people were already down in Brighton for dConstruct, and so people who might not have normally made the effort to get down to Brighton came along and everyone benefited. It probably added to the attractiveness of the proposition on this occasion. It also meant that people were already in a "learning" mode.
Having it the weekend after dConstruct was bad because lots of people (including me) were hungover after the after party and so some of them turned up pretty late on Saturday (I'm talking after lunch here). Also, some people only seemed to attend on Saturday as my impressions were that there were quite a few less people around on Sunday. I guess this is due to people having long distances to travel and so is understandable BUT means that people who would have been prepared to stay around all weekend potentially missed out (the tickets sold out in 21 minutes after all).
Overall, and after the success (and possibly due to the success) of this barcamp I don't think that the next barcamp Brighton needs to follow dConstruct to be a success - it may be a different crowd, but I have no doubts it would still be a rewarding experience and would have plenty of willing participants.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, event
// posted by Jane @ 7:20 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
BarCamp Brighton Day 2
Sunday arrived and having headed home to bed on Saturday evening I strolled into the office at around 9am to see what was happening. The first, and only, issue arose when Ian arrived and informed us that breakfast was half an hour late due to Pret's oven breaking down or something. We pushed the sessions back by 15 minutes and soon caught up again, so no real damage done.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
There were a few more Madgex people around and so we shared out the door watch duties between us so that we could all try and see some sessions, oh, and play table football :-)
I managed to see 4 sessions in total:
- Multi Lingual Sites - a discussion - led by Sjors Timmer
- i18n and l10n - Mark Norman Francis
- CSS tips - Vicky Lamburn
- Web testing with Selenium - Kerry Buckley
These talks were quite a mixed bag and I found that the one I gained the most from was probably the discussion led by Sjors about multi lingual sites, something that I've recently become interested in. I found Norm's talk (i18n and l10n) dissapointing as it turned out to be heading towards a product demo (which failed) rather than a study into the concept. I still ended up with a lot of links and articles to follow and read.
After the closing talk, and the clean up session, we headed off to the Madgex Arms for a few pints before heading home to recover.
Labels: barcampbrighton, Brighton, conference, event
// posted by Jane @ 6:42 PM