Virtual Meetup: Feb 2021

Wednesday, February 3, 2021
6:30 PM to 8:30 PM GMT

Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/Scottish-Developers/events/275643581/

In the first of our 2021 meetups we’ll have 2 great talks:

⭐ Future of HTML controls
⭐ A Piece of Cake – C# Powered Cross-platform Build Automation

Let’s get to know our speakers a bit more…

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Stephanie Stimac

Stephanie is a Program Manager for Developer Experiences on Microsoft Edge who comes from a background in web and user interface design as well as front-end development. She’s worked on developer tooling in the browser as well as the open source project, http://webhint.io and is currently responsible for Edge developer engagement through the Web We Want initiative.

“Future of HTML controls”

Native HTML Form Controls can be some of the most painful elements to style and customize. 25 years after the first HTML Standard introduced them and developers have resorted to building custom controls from scratch to achieve what they need to. I’ll discuss the history behind native form controls, where we’re at presently with styling them and take a look at the proposed solutions by standards groups and browser vendors to standardize controls and solve the pain points developers have been complaining about for years.

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Gary Ewan Park

Gary Ewan Park has over 10 years experience working as a developer on technologies such as ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WPF, SharePoint, Silverlight, and many others. Throughout his career, Gary has always looked to see how things can be automated, using the mantra that if you do the same thing more than twice, it is time for automation. In 2017 he was awarded a Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies. His day job has him working for Chocolatey Software, Inc.

In his spare time, Gary contributes to a number of Open Source projects including Chocolatey, Boxstarter, Cake, Cake-Contrib, GitVersion, and GitReleaseManager.

Gary is a founding member of the Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group, that holds monthly sessions on any topic related to the Microsoft .Net Technology Stack.

“A Piece of Cake – C# Powered Cross-platform Build Automation”

In this session we will start with a standard .NET Solution and incrementally add a build and orchestration script to compile the application, run unit tests, perform static analysis, package the application, and more, with the C# skills that you already have, using the Cake Build Automation System.

See you all there!

Sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/Scottish-Developers/events/275643581/

Julie Lerman visits Scotland.

Hello!

The Scottish Developers team have an exciting announcement, we have a special guest joining us for 2 events across east and west coasts: Julie Lerman.

We have partnered with Experis and are pleased to have them support Julie Lerman’s mini-tour of Scotland.  In her presentations in Glasgow and Edinburgh, she will be sharing her latest insights on EF core as well as architectural guidance around dealing with data in the context of modern web development on the .Net stack

About Julie

Julie Lerman is a Microsoft Regional Director, Microsoft MVP (since 2003), software coach and consultant. You can find Julie presenting at conferences around the world on Entity Framework, Domain Driven Design and whatever other technologies catch her eye. Julie blogs at thedatafarm.com/blog, is the author of the highly acclaimed “Programming Entity Framework” books, the MSDN Magazine Data Points column and popular videos on Pluralsight.com.

Glasgow: May 16th – @ Glasgow Caledonian University

Mapping DDD Domain Types with EF Core

Entity Framework half-heartedly supported DDD patterns. But the new-from-scratch EF Core has brought new hope for DDD practitioners to map your well-designed domain classes to a database, reducing the cases where a separate data model is needed. EF Core is very DDD friendly, even supporting things like fully encapsulated collections, backing fields and the return of support for value objects. In this hands we’ll review some well-designed aggregates and explore how far EF Core goes to act as the data model between your domain classes and your data store.
Sign up on meetup here

Edinburgh: May 21st –  @ Microsoft, Waverly Gate.

Building Cross-Platform Server-Side Data APIs

Front ends are cool but mostly useless without data. Sure, some of your data sources provide REST APIs so you can just write queries directly against them but that is so old school. Instead, you can build back end APIs that address the specific data needs of your web application and relieve front end devs from tangling with database schema, query syntax and other distractions. In this session you’ll learn the basics of creating a back end API as well as some smart architectural guidance to make moving data between your front end and your data store. We’ll start with an ASP.NET Core Web API, EF Core and a relational database, then look at a data API built with Azure Functions to support a Cosmos DB document database.

Sign up on meetup here

As you can imagine, we are really excited to have Julie visit us here in Scotland and give not one but two talks for the Scottish Developers group. Both events are free to attend thanks to our hosts and sponsors Experis.

We hope to see you all there!

The Scottish Developers Team.

DDD Scotland: Thank You!

We would just like another opportunity to thank everyone who made DDD Scotland a success: speakers, volunteers, sponsors and of course all of you who attended. We had > 250 attendees on the day, which considering the very rainy Scottish weather we had, is impressive!

We have had some lovely feedback and some things to work on for next year to make it even better. You can still give feedback on the event here and on specific talks here.

In the meantime, let’s remind ourselves of the day with these blogs from the community (if you have blogged but we haven’t included it, let us know and we will add it to the list!):

https://theliddler.site/2018/02/11/ddd-scotland-2018/ – @The_Liddler

https://gregorsuttie.com/2018/02/11/dddscotland-restrospective/ – @gregor_suttie

https://carolelogan.net/blog/developer-diary-ddd-scotland/ – @crgrieve

https://peat.me.uk/2018/02/16/ddd-scotland/ – @RTPeat

http://blog.craigtp.co.uk/post/ddd-scotland-2018-in-review – @craigtptech

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dddscotland-net-talent-blog-darren-dalrymple-1/ – @NetTalent

Some of our speakers have shared their slides online so we thought we would gather them all on one place for you (again, if we have missed any, let us know!):

PWAs- @jmaciver22

https://speakerdeck.com/jamesmaciver/progressive-web-apps-ddd-scotland-2018

https://github.com/jamesmaciver/dddscot-demo

Accessibility in Modern Web Apps- @stuartashworth9

http://www.stuartashworth.com/ddd/accessibility-in-modern-web-applications.pdf

http://www.stuartashworth.com/ddd-transcript/accessibility-in-modern-web-applications-transcript.pdf

Leveling up to become a tech lead

https://speakerdeck.com/tourismgeek/levelling-up-to-become-a-technical-lead

Teaching an old dog new tricks- @ismailmayat

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1p4UU6t0dn8J0dIsTqK1b5UyyAOSN_o_KSEnXN6HxD6c/edit#slide=id.g258d29308c_0_0

Adding a layer of chocolate(y) – @gep13

https://gitpitch.com/gep13/ChocolateyDemos/dddscot#/

Writing Simpler ASP .Net Core – @jchannon

https://github.com/jchannon/t1000

ReactJS and Friends- @paulaik

http://ddd18.paulaikman.co.uk/#/

APIs on the scale of decades- @garyfleming

https://github.com/garyfleming/apis-for-decades/releases/tag/v0.3

Interactive C# Development- @filip_woj

http://filipw.github.io/dddscotland-2018/#/

Thanks again to everyone for contributing on the day, looking forward to seeing you all at our upcoming Scottish Developers events, and of course DDD Scotland next year!

Carole, Andrew and Christos.

(The Scottish Developers Team)

DDD Scotland: Useful Information

It’s nearly time for DDD Scotland and we are really looking forward to seeing this event come to life!We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors and supporters, without all the funding and spreading the word of this event this wouldn’t be happening.

Here is the plan for the day, let us know if you have any questions.  Just get in touch via scottishdevs@gmail.com

Getting there

Our hosts at UWS have this useful guide on finding the campus:

https://www.uws.ac.uk/university-life/campuses/paisley-campus/travelling-to-paisley-campus/

If travelling from Glasgow there are trains often from Glasgow Central to Paisley Gilmour Street. Looks like there are these timings on Saturday morning: 8am, 8.05am, 8.25am, taking about 1-15 minutes… you may even bump in to some developer friends on the way to DDD!

There is limited parking space availability at the university and it’s first come first served.

On arrival

When you arrive, please make your way to the registration table and let us know you are here. There will be tea, coffee and breakfast snacks (thanks to Streamba) to help us wake up and get ready for a day of learning.

Throughout the day

We will be kicking off at 9.15am with introductions and announcements so please try to be on time to get all the news.

We have talks and panels scheduled all day with enough time between to get a drink, have a quick break and make your way to next talk. Check out the schedule here.

If you don’t fancy any of the scheduled talks for a given time slot, head over to our community room and check out what’s happening.

We will have room monitors and volunteers available throughout the day, let us know if we can help at all. Or even just say hello, we are really looking forward to meeting you all!

12:30 to 13: 30

We have been able to supply lunch and afternoon coffee thanks to our platinum partners Arnold Clark and Screenmedia. If you would like to head out to the local area, that’s fine too. Please try to be back for 13:30 so we can get started again for the afternoon sessions.

15:15 to 15:30

Time for a quick coffee break between sessions thanks to Endjin!

17:30

Join us for thank yous, prizes and goodbyes!

Prizes

We have been gifted some awesome prizes from generous companies: books, licences, tickets and devices! We will distribute some of these throughout the day but make sure you stay til the end of the day for the prize giving!

Spread the word

Remember to tweet, Instagram, Facebook, blog about us, it will let us get the word out and make the event even better in years to come. Use #dddScotland and tag us.

@scottishdevs

@dddscot

Facebook: Scottish Developers

LinkedIn: Scottish Developers

 

Thanks,

Carole, Andrew and Christos

(The Scottish Developers Team)

 

 

Announcing the DDD Scotland Community Room

Not long to wait until DDD Scotland and we wanted to introduce you to our latest exciting addition, our DDD Scotland community room! This year we wanted to make DDD even more community focused and thought how better to do that than get people talking and giving new speakers the chance to get experience.

The other rooms will be fully booked with back to back talks, the community room will have a mix of sessions and also some unscheduled slots to allow collaboration.

This room will feature:

*Lightning talks are 15 minutes sessions for new speakers or new material from experienced speakers. A great way to test the waters with a friendly crowd!

*Panels

We have 2 panels of experts to discuss their experiences and take questions. These are “My journey as a software developer” and “What makes a graduate software developer employable”. We will keep the panellists secret for now but we think we have a great group that should make for interesting conversations.

Have a question for the “My journey as a software developer” panel? Leave them here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/8V26GKF

*Lean Coffee is an unplanned conversation where the participants suggest and vote for the topics. A great way to learn how others work in their organisation and get to know other developers.

*Mob Programming Taster

Joe will be giving us an introduction to Mob Programming, here is a description for his session:

“All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer” –Woody Zuill

Everyone working together on one machine, at the same time? That can’t possibly work. Or can it?

Come along to this session, and we’ll spend 45 minutes mobbing. You might find you like it.

*Unscheduled time– we are leaving some sessions unbooked in this room to allow for community conversations and collaboration. You never know, your next job, project or friendship might be made at DDD Scotland!

One of the main aims from Scottish Developers team is to grow our community of developers in Scotland and beyond so this is really exciting for us! We can’t wait til see you all there on the day.

—

Carole, Andrew and Christos

The Scottish Developers Team

Event: ‘Alexa open seeing eye’ with Jon Carlos

You may have heard recently, we are back and have a new team on board. We have been busy getting settled in and organising DDD Scotland but now the time has come for our first event!

Tuesday 5th December we will be joined by Jon Carlos from Screenmedia who will be sharing his expert knowledge on voice technologies.

Since co-founding award winning digital innovation practice Screenmedia 13 years ago, Jon has lead teams developing cutting edge solutions to keep his clients at the forefront of their fields. With over 18 years of commercial coding experience, he possesses vast technical knowledge of programming tools and services, and is a proactive and influential member of the open source coding community.

An active and curious developer, he can frequently be found experimenting with both hardware and software, translating his innovations into his work. His current focus is bringing machine learning, cognitive services, and natural language understanding to Screenmedia’s roster of global clients to support them in the transition to an AI first world.

In his talk ‘Alexa open seeing eye’,  Jon will be walking us through the creation of an Alexa skill, from planning intents and utterances through to connecting to a visual learning AI. Using C# end-to-end through .NET core and Xamarin, Jon will show how to connect Alexa to complex backend systems, including reading data from Azure and using some of its awesome shortcuts to train an AI. Not only will we have a working Alexa skill by the end of the talk, but we’ll also have trained a visual learning AI to recognise a couple of the Scottish Developers team.

Details:

18.15pm,  Tuesday 5th December.

Hamish Wood Building – Glasgow Caledonian University

Interested? Signup on our meetup page and come along to Glasgow Caledonian Uni on 5th December. We are very excited for our first meetup and look forward to seeing you all there!

Our new star signing!

With plans for our December presentation well underway and DDD Scotland scheduled for early 2018 we’ve decided to give our team a serious boost and are delighted to announce that Carole Logan is joining our team.

Carole is a senior web developer at Equator. Mainly working in the .Net stack after converting from Java, she has an interest in learning new technologies beyond websites such as IOT and voice. An enthusiastic member of the Umbraco community and current Umbraco MVP, Carole also runs the Glasgow Umbraco meetup as well as the Glasgow chapter of Ladies of Code.

Carole’s professional achievements and community contributions were recently recognized via a nomination and subsequent commendation in the Digital Professional of the Year Award, part of the Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards 2017 as well as being one of the winners of the We Are The City, Rising Stars in Technology Awards 2017.

When not coding you will find her long-distance running around Glasgow and baking.

.Net Core 2.0 is officially here!

Following hot on the heels of our article the other day about .Net Conf 2017, Microsoft have just made the official announcement of the release of both .Net Core 2.0 here and .Net Standard 2.0 here.

This is potentially a watershed moment in the evolution of .Net Core as the high performance, cross-platform  .Net runtime for web, windows desktop, console, holo-lens and IoT.

The new APIs should embolden and empower teams looking to start or continue developing applications using the .Net Core runtime.

For more information on why this is so significant, you can check out our previous post here.

One not to miss – .Net Conf Sept 19 – 21, 2017

Coming at one of the most significant periods in the evolution of the .Net Framework, .Net Conf is a free 3-day event with a series of presentations meant to inspire developers for their next project.

The sessions are live so attendees have the opportunity to ask questions live.

The event offers presentations on .NET Core and ASP.NET Core, C#, F#, Roslyn, Visual Studio, Xamarin, and much more.

It has some really big names such as

• Scott Hanselman
• Scott Hunter
• Jon Skeet

And many others from every major platform and aspect of .Net development.

 

So what’s the big deal?

Quarter 3 (which this event effectively rounds off) will see the launch of .Net Core 2 and .Net Standard 2.  Both are effectively game changers that should see a massive increase of both interest and adoption of the newer .Net platforms i.e. Net Core and Xamarin.  So there has never been a better time to take a look at the latest developments on your particular areas of interest.

.Net Core 2 – bringing back some old friends

With .Net Core being an effective rewrite of the framework it is no surprise that the first version had the foundational features included, but was missing many APIs that older applications relied on.  .Net Core 2 brings around 10000 APIs back into the mix which should increase the ease with which teams can start moving to using newer versions of the framework.

.Net Standard 2 – including the masses

.Net Standard has been a much better way of handling cross-platform compatibility for libraries than the old portable class library solution.  One limitation with v1 was that a library targeting .Net Standard would only be able to reference other .Net Standard libraries or portable class library thus omitting the vast majority of Nuget Packages.  V2 allows this via a compatibility shim and should allow around 70% of currently published Nuget packages to work with packages targeting .Net Standard.

You can read all about .Net Standard here

You can read more on the why .Net Standard 2.0 is so significant to .Net Core here.

Microsoft on a UK tour – All about Azure

It’s exciting to see that Microsoft is on the road again, this time around many UK cities to talk about Microsoft Azure. They will be visiting Edinburgh on August 30th and there’s a registration form that you need to use to secure a place.

You can find all about it at this blog post.

We hope that you will take advantage of this excellent and free event and maybe see some of you there.