The Morning Brew

Those who follow me on Twitter may recall a few weeks back I mused over doing a daily follow up to the main Morning Brew posting in the afternoon with some of the links that didn’t quite make it into the main Morning Brew. This is where the concept of ‘Afternoon Tea’ came about – and for now I will be occasionally producing these posts to complement The Morning Brew, probably with a more relaxed and varied format than the daily Morning Brew posts. With that introduction out of the way, here is what I have in store today:

• Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials
• Community Events and News
• Link Overflow

Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials

The kind folks at Skills Matter have allowed me 2 tickets to give away for the Progressive .NET Tutorials event being held in London next month. The event is a commercial training opportunity, running over three days (Monday 5th to Wednesday 7th September) and is organised in conjunction with the London .NET UserGroup. Each day features two tracks, with two in-depth sessions / Workshops on each of the tracks from great speakers (many of them with articles which have been featured in The Morning Brew) talking on their areas of authority.

Full details of the event can be found on Skills Matter’s site and you can get £50 off the regular registration fee of £425 using PromoCode PROGNET50 when registering.

As mentioned earlier, I have 2 tickets to give away to lucky readers, so to be in with a chance of winning, let me know what your drink of choice is when you read The Morning Brew by tweeting:

‘Reading @calcock’s #TheMorningBrew with a (cup|mug) of <InsertDrinkHere>‘

at some point before I publish Friday’s Morning Brew when I will pick (at random, or as close as I can manage) the two lucky winners.

Community Events and News

There are plenty of great Community conferences and community events coming up over the next few months:

• SQL Bits 9 – Liverpool – 29th September -1st October

  The SQL Bits team are bringing the SQL Bits conference to my doorstep (almost) with the venue for the 9th conference being Liverpool. The conference runs over 3 days, Day 1 being a pay for Training Day with 8 topics being covered by all day training sessions, the Friday features a paid for Conference day with 25-30 sessions over 5 tracks, and the Saturday is the Free Community Conference.

  The agenda is now set, and Registrations for SQLBits 9 are currently open, with early bird pricing for the pay for component of the conference being available until 26th August. If you are free that week/weekend be sure to check out one of my favourite conferences.

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North – Saturday 8th October 2011 – University of Sunderland

  New for 2011, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North takes the familiar DDD event format to the North of England for a Free all day event at the University of Sunderland. Session submissions have been open for this event for a little while already, and from the look of the sessions the conference will have a fantastic range of topics. If you are interested in speaking at the event, you will need to get your session submissions in on or before 26th August, after which the community will vote on the sessions people want to see before the agenda is finalised.

  The DDD North team are also very interested in hearing from potential Sponsors with a range of sponsorship opportunities available – full details can be found on their dedicated ‘Sponsors Flyer’

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Belfast – Saturday 1st October –
  University of Ulster

  DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper makes a return to Belfast this year with a free to attend all day event on Saturday 1st October. As with DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North, the Belfast event will feature a community voted agenda drawn from sessions submitted by potential speakers. As usual the event welcomes submissions from speakers both new and old (in age and experience), and the submission process is currently running – so if you are interested get your session abstract in soon.

• GiveCamp UK – 21st to 23rd October 2011 – London

  Following the success of GiveCamp in the US, 2011 sees the first GiveCamp event here in the UK. Over the weekend of 21st-23rd October teams of volunteers will combine with representatives from charities to work on producing technology solutions for the charity organisations. The event proved to e very popular when registration opened, and now the team are accepting registrations on a waiting list should places become available.

  The GiveCamp team are still very interested in hearing from organisations interested in sponsoring the event – pledges of either financial assistance or swag (or even both!) are very welcome. Further details (including news about the venue) can be found in this post on the Team’s official blog.

• NRW Conf – 8th & 9th September – Wuppertal, Germany

  Daniel Fisher dropped me an email to let me know about NRW Conf, a Community conference organised by JustCommunity e.V, bringing together speakers from across Germany (and the rest of Europe). The conference opens with a day of workshops covering PowerShell, Scrum and ASP.NET MVC, and the second day consisting of a traditional conference format over 4 tracks. Daniel has some more information over on his blog.

If you are involved in running a conference or similar community event either here in the UK, or further afield that you think Morning Brew readers may be interested in then please drop me a note.

Link Overflow

Quite a few people have been emailing me links to articles they have written or found intersting recently – some have made their way into the normal Morning Brew posts, but I’ve also been overrun with good content recently so not as many as I would like have made the transition. If you email me a link that is of Brew interest I generally subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog so I will see future posts when preparing the Morning Brew – and I always welcome link suggestions – if you’ve found something interested, or written something you think the rest of the world needs to see please drop me a note.

So, without further ado, here are a few links which slipped through the cracks:

• Create optimization programs dynamically with C# and the Microsoft Solver Foundation – Mathias Brandewinder has been exploring the use of Microsoft Solver Foundation from C# to solve a variety of Mathematical problems, taking an introductory look at its use before looking at more complex dynamic cases such as this post, and has started a series of posts looking at different approaches to solving a fabricated brewery problem
• Expression Tree Basics – Abul Kayes takes gives a nice introduction to Expression Trees in this CodeProject article, introducing them and taking a look at using them to create a strongly typed way or ordering objects based on the value of an arbitrary property.
• ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – Every quarter the team over at ThroughtWorks produce their Technology Radar whcih looks at the acceptance level, maturity and stability of various new and emerging technologies, classifying them and sharing their findings in the form of this report. This Quarter PowerShell made its entrance into the ‘Trial’ classification, as noted by Doug Finke
• A Better Team: Arrogance And Accepting Your Own Strengths – Derick Bailey posted an interesting discussion about taming some of the traits good developers are prone to, such as Arrogance, and accepting and becoming aware of our own strengths and weaknesses in order to be a better part of a team.
• Package that resizes and compresses images used with an ASP.NET web site and combines them into CSS sprites – Matt Perdeck shares a library which takes the hard work out of optimising and combining images into CSS Sprites. This CodeProject article discusses in detail the various features and parameters of the library , and the full source is available to download and try out.

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Last Thursday (15th May) I presented at the Liverpool Users of .NET monthly meeting on F#, the Microsoft Research Language demonstrating that the CLR is a good basis for Functional Programming. My talk was mainly a language overview, with the intention to give the audience a grounding upon which they could get started with the language and functional programming in general.

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The code samples from the presentation, including one or two I skipped out can be found here:
F# Presentation – Demo Code

My thanks to the audience – you made giving the talk very easy, and enjoyable and especially to Hakim Cassimally for the nice write up of the talk over on his blog.

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Last night I gave a presentation to the Liverpool Geekup group about NHibernate, thanks to everyone who came along – you were all a very nice audience. The slides from the presentation entitled Getting a Good Nights Sleep – ORM with NHibernate are available as a PDF, here. There are a number of links in the slides, but here is a more comprehensive list of links that people may find useful or interesting

• NHibernateDataSource: A DataSourceControl for ASP.NET 2.0
  The Article and code for the 2 way databinding library of NHibernate objects
• NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET, 1.2nd Ed.
  A good source of information about using NHibernate within web applications
• NHibernate Reference Documentation
  The official documentation for NHibernate
• TheServerSide: NHibernate
  Excellent Introductory article from TheServerSide.NET covering most of the basics of NHibernate
• NHibernate Query Analyser
  NHibernate query analyser allows you to work interactively with your NHibernate Mapped objects
• Ayende@Rahien – Presentations
  A collection of great NHibernate presentations, covering lots of the more advanced functionality

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