On the departure of UK DPE stalwart Daniel Moth, NxtGenUG have released a tribute podcast to "The Greek Wonder".  Check it out here.  Enjoy, it's a cracker!

I forever wonder at the shortness of human memory.  What do I mean by that?  Well a typical example is a football fan.  3 years ago Rafael Benetiz took Liverpool to the Champion's League Final and at the time Liverpool fans were touting him as the man who could lead Liverpool to former glories.  Those same fans now want rid of him, even though at least 16 other clubs would love to be where Liverpool are ...

Just about every year since 2000 has been the Year of the Linux Desktop and that latest distro is just as easy to use as Windows, and despite all efforts it's still a poor third on latest adoption figures. If Windows XP is loosing out to anyone, its to the Mac and Windows Vista.

Oh yes, and about Windows XP.  I don't know how many people I've heard say in the last year "Oh XP was so good and quick, Vista is just too slow, you need new hardware to run it properly".  Well if you're in the the latter group, take a peruse through some of these links below from around 2002:

http://www.michaelhanscom.com/eclecticism/2001/11/16/xp-sucks/
http://4peeps.com/ivb/index.php?showtopic=1098
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-2233-Slow-Loading-with-XP.html
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5746046.html
http://www.sciforums.com/Windows-XP-Sucks-t-6958.html
http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/windows-xp/11951-windows-xp-slow-freezes-ect.html

Sound familiar? I do seem to remember that when Windows 98 came out it ran slowly compared to Windows 95 on the same machine? Ditto Windows 2K over Win 98, Ditto XP over W2K, so is it really surprising that Vista appears slow over XP on some hardware?  Want to see Vista fly? Go get a £400 Inspiron from Dell with Home Premium. It really flies! My wife and 2 lads use it, no problems - gave a 2 min lesson on a few enhancements (Search, Tagging and UAC), they've found everything else via Search themselves. Installed AVG Free Edition - not had a single virus issue, mind you not even had one found!. Couple of problems with a couple of older games (haven't we always had that? Remember 16 Bit to 32 Bit?), but they still run (sort of).

Personally, I think the move to Vista has been much less hassle than the move from Win 95 to Win 98 and less hassle than XP to XP XP2.  Microsoft still have some work to do, the urgent stuff should be out in SP1 I hope, I hope.  Vista should be the Dogs B*****ks and way better than XP ever was by end of 2008 (it already is in my opinion).

Back to Haskell next time I think

Cheers

Dave

Well I've been keeping at it, despite the fact that it is somewhat of a slog, learning Haskell that is.

The documentation is somewhat sparse, done in that somewhat haphazard fashion of 'not-quite complete' style you get with a lot of Open Source stuff - really makes you appreciate what we have in MSDN, I can tell you.  But I thought I'd share a sort of Hello World style of Haskell Program, although it does do a bit more than that  ...

module Main
    where

import Char   

main = putStrLn ( show ( my_map Char.isLower "Hello World" ) )

my_map f [] = []
my_map f (x:xs) = f x : my_map f xs

That's it.  So what does all this do?  What does it mean?

Lets start with

module Main
    where

This is fairly plain. I'm declaring a module, a unit of code really called Main.  The where refers to what comes next.

import Char   

The import Char means I'm referring to the namespace Char which has a number of functions, well one in fact which I need.

main = putStrLn ( show ( my_map Char.isLower "Hello World" ) )

The next line is the actual main function.  Note that functions or more generally expressions in Haskell begin with lowercase letters whilst types such as Main begin with upper case letters.  This is required by the Haskell compiler.  The main function essentially writes output using the putStrLn to write the output of show, which converts a type into a String, and the input to show is the output of the my_map function.

my_map f [] = []
my_map f (x:xs) = f x : my_map f xs

The my_map function is declared on 2 lines and takes two arguments a function and a list.  Lists are defined in square brackets in Haskell  i.e [].  What the declaration says is that if the second argument is an empty list, then return an empty list (first line). If the list is not empty, then  (x:xs) represents the non-empty list as a list element x appended to the front of an existing list xs.  In this case we apply the function f to the individual element x and append it to the output of my_map f as applied to xs, i.e in a recursive manner.

In essence the function is applied to each member of the list.  In the actual code of main, the function applied is the isLower() function which outputs a Boolean value of True if the character is lower case and False if not.

By running this program in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler Interactive window (GHCi), the following is the resulting output.

[False,True,True,True,True,False,False,True,True,True,True].

So this simple program shows the following facets of Haskell:

1.  The program is in fact one function
2.  You can define functions on separate lines (curried).
3.  You generally define functions (non-trivial) as recursive functions
4.  You can pass functions as arguments
5.  You use Actions to deal with IO Issues (putStrLn is an Action)

I've done a few other bits, I'm keeping reading bits over and over again, and found some other documentation. Its proving to be a bit of a rough ride and I'm trying to find something 'useful' to do and to produce, which is always the issue with these sorts of things.  Still another post will come soon, and I'll try to produce something better for you next time, maybe try to interact with another library or something...

Meanwhile, have a great New Year, see you around the community!

Cheers

Dave

Browsing via Google Reader and my Live Desktop I noticed one of Daniel's latest posts on How You Start A User Group. As one of the co-founder's of NxtGenUG I thought I'd put my slant on this one from a UK perspective.  Chris William's 21 thoughts on starting a User Group are interesting, valid and I'd say cover a good deal of what is required. 

I do disagree with a few of his points particularly No 10 about avoiding certain months of the year.  NxtGenUG have a meeting EVERY month, come rain, shine, whatever.  In this December we've had nearly 100 people register for meetings and of the 2 we've had so far we've had about a 90% turnout rate.  In July 2007 we had one of the biggest month's ever for attendances at NxtGenUG meetings, ditto August, the so called 'quiet' months.  The reason?  People are hungry for information, not everybody goes on holiday the whole of July/August, people work up until 24th December quite often, why not have a meeting in December?

On Chris's point No 6 I would quibble too.  Whilst DPE at Microsoft are a great help and a fantastic support to the community, there is a difference between being a support and being a crutch.  I wouldn't get necessarily get a DPE guy in to do a first meeting.  To me when starting out with NxtGenUG, it was a point of pride for me that we wanted to prove that we could organise, fund and build a group without direct help from Microsoft whilst effectively promoting their technology.  This to mind my strengthens our position as a User Group as it makes a statement about who is really driving it.  It strengthens Microsoft's position too, whereby they can point to us and say, "these guys are doing these great things, promoting our stuff, with no direct support from us, we must be doing something right!".

Funding is always a hot subject in the User Group leader arena.  Chris skirts a bit around the issue a bit in No 8 and talks about sponsorship.  It comes down a bit to what you want to achieve with the group  you are starting.  With us at NxtGenUG it has always been a passion and a drive to put on the best possible meetings, without the need to worry about finance.  To that end NxtGenUG is primarily a subscriptions based User Group.  Our promise to our members is to provide top content in our meetings, food of course, swag of course but above all else VALUE for MONEY! 

Because we generally achieve that we don't get the situation in No 15 on Chris's list.  We hardly ever have people complain.  We do have comments occasionally and we act upon them, but because we actively promote feedback, read it, act on it (as Chris states) be it positive or negative and we make it easy to gather online.  As a result,  we nearly always get only constructive or positive feedback on our meetings.

Other User Groups do things differently and have just as valid but different models.  London .NET, Scottish Developers, DotNetDevNet, VBUG all run different types of groups and get support different ways.

Daniel challenged us to add to the list ...

22. Have Fun.  Make meetings enjoyable.

23. Give the speakers you invite a GOOD introduction, not a wishy-washy "Here's what-sit-face?"

24. At a meeting if you're an organiser/helper, mingle with the attendees, chat, have a laugh.

25. Have fun, smile, enjoy it, don't take it too seriously ...

26 through to 100. Have Fun ...

Nice spot Daniel,

Cheers

Dave Mc

That's a question I get when first asked "What are you doing at the moment?" and I reply "Learning Haskell".

Let's go back to April 2007, and Ian Cooper comes along to NxtGenUG to give a great session on Object Orientated Practices. During that session he mentions The Pragmatic Programmer as a good book to read to improve oneself as a software developer. As luck would have it my co-worker, utility 'king' and good friend Andy Maggs has a copy.  I borrow it,  read it, well most of it, but that one piece of advice in the book which sticks, really sticks, is "Learn a new language each year".

That seems like an awful lot of work, and I put that thought aside. 

Along comes VBUG Conference for which I do a session on LINQ to XML.  During my research, I have a brief flirtation with monads which brings me into contact with Haskell for the first time. Interested, I see its a pure functional language, but don't really give it much attention.

Along comes MIXUK, and in the last session Simon Peyton-Jones delivers what I have described elsewhere as a 'thunderbolt' of a session on Transactional Memory.  During this session Simon mentions Haskell again and the fact that he is one of it's architects.

By now, my interest is up but so are my commitments, speaking at several UK conferences including DDD, MIXUK, SQLBITS and VBUG Conference.  Also looming is TechEd 2007 where I would be delivering my XSLT Extreme Session.  So I put everything on hold until post TechEd. 

So November 13th I decide that I will grab that thought from above , learn a new language and its going to be Haskell!  Why?  Well here's my rationale.  I'm not saying you should learn Haskell, just here is why I'm learning Haskell:

1. XSLT is my favourite language - it's functional albeit in the XML domain, so functional programming is not entirely alien.
2. Functional languages seem to offer a potential for coping better with the multi-core future we're facing, time will tell if this potential can be realised.
3. Silverlight is not a technology I can really embrace. I have little or no designer skills.  I can understand and do understand the underlying technology, but I don't believe can make the most of it, besides there are plenty of guys and gals looking at it. Ditto LINQ.  And I felt I needed to do 'something completely different' to quote Monty Python.
4. I spoke to Don Symesat TechEd, one of the main architects of F#, and he encouraged me to learn Haskell as it would stand me in good stead when learning F# if I decided to learn that.
5. I plan to put together a session over the next 6 months describing what functional programming is and what pluses it offers developers like myself, plus its pitfalls and drawbacks.

That's why I'm learning Haskell, but why am I writing about this? It's that man Ian Cooper again.  At DDD6 Geek Dinner, I told Ian what I was doing and how it was actually all his fault, his response: "Make sure you blog your journey through Haskell". 

So, who am I to argue with a lynchpin of the UK community and great speaker that Ian is.  So this was blog number 1 on Haskell, more to come as I delve further and further into this somewhat different world ... Next time we'll have a chat about getting started with Haskell, and what I did to write my first Haskell program ...

Cheers

Dave Mc

I've uploaded to SkyDrive the complete code for the XSLT 'Extreme' session which I delivered on Friday 9th November at 15:15 as part of TechEd Developers 2007.  Any problems you have accessing the code drop me a line at dave@nxtgenug.net

http://cid-59f714755d6e2a69.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/TechEd2007?uc=1

If you attended the session and provided feedback, thank you for the feedback and the kind comments. I hope the content of the session will help you in your work.

Cheers

Dave

If you missed Daniel Moth's session at NxtGenUG Coventry last week, you've another chance to see him in action at the Coventry VBUG meeting, details here: http://www.vbug.com/Events/November-2007/VBUG-Visual-Studio-2008-for-the-web-developer-with-Daniel-Moth.aspx.  Daniel's  a TOP presenter, so I recommend you go along and check him out. 

Cheers

Dave

It's all getting a bit frantic here. One week to go before TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona and there's a bunch of things to do before we go:

• Got to pack, obviously
• Got to host the Birmingham NxtGenUG meeting on Wednesday
• Got to prep up some game shows prior to flying out.
• Need to shoot some footage for some videos we're going to be showing as part of Speaker Idol
• Got to release Podcast No 43 (VBUG Conference)
• Got to get in 5 good days work!

Never been so busy in me life!  But I wouldn't have it any other way. There is some really interesting stuff going on at the moment.  For instance ...

Expression Blend

Had a good workout with Expression Blend over the weekend, building a NxtGenUG Game Show (To Be Announced at TechEd), and although I am the archetypal developer with 0% Design DNA, I'm quite proud of the result!  There's a few foibles with it but after a while getting some swanky motion going through the Timeline stuff is pretty easy. Some of the GUI editing in the background of the XAML seems a bit limited sometimes and I had to on occasions dive into the XAML to get it to do exactly what I wanted. It seemed to run OK.  I think it bombed on me once during the whole weekend, which I thought weren't bad for a first release.

Overall I'm pretty impressed. A few oddities:

• It seemed to refuse to acknowledge the fact that I did have a App.xaml.  Only when I compiled it in VS2008 and reloaded did it want to know, this meant it was a little fiddly to test the application.
• Another little 'gotcha' was the Timeline drop down.  Sometimes the Timelines just seemed to disappear, only to reappear when I created a new timeline. 
• I also seemed to get a little stuck when selecting container objects and when I got the yellow banding around my selected object. At one point it wouldn't let me do anything to the objects within the container.
• Not sure about that grey either ... still I suppose I could change it.

Ah well, into the week of weeks, and out the other side into TechEd - hope to see you there

Cheers

Dave

(To be read perhaps in the style of Stuart Hall)

Well yet another conference done, this time SQLBITS the first DDD Style conference in the UK dedicated to those bastions of the IT world - the database guys and gals.  

Yes, for a whole Saturday, a crowd of 321 ANSI standard, execution plan, nanosecond and performance obsessed people including myself, milled around Microsoft Reading building 3, when they should have known better.  There was a time, I'm sure in ages past, when to ignore the spectacle of an English Rugby Team beating the colonial outcasts of Australia would have been a treasonable offence, not so these days, more's the pity, and that noble and glorious victory went virtually unnoticed in the unrelenting fervor to obtain that one piece of SQL know-how which might make for a serene workplace or perchance create a rampaging database capable of putting a man on Mars before the year is out.

No question, SQLBITS was a success, in my eyes at least.  The overseers were Tony Rogerson, Simon Sabin, Martin Bell and Chris Webb.  The 'top brass' of the UK SQL Community, gathered in a single place surrounded by an army of followers, willing or otherwise, and a sterling performance by all it has to be said.  Development, SQL 2008, DBA, and BI were the pillars of the day deployed in Chicago 1, 2, Memphis and Everest to which the faithful were guided and shepherded by the ever present Microsoft Events staff (do they ever sleep?). 

The mood was light, the smiles ever-present, they enjoyed themselves it seemed, as sessions on SQL Server Deployment Security, Analyzing Indexes, Analysis Services in SQL2008, SQL Integration Services, Unit Testing in SQL Server and Database Mirroring came  faster than Louis Hamilton around Silverstone and more often than repeats of Big Brother on Channel 4.  The day was packed, with barely time to grab a chicken sandwich and foil-fresh packet of Cheese and Onion crisps, it was session after session of tips and tricks and news and gems.  To cap it all the vendors were there, flaunting their wares in a bold and sassy manner that would put a cockney street seller to shame. Idera, vibrant Orange, Quest, blue and serene and Solid Quality quiet, unassuming, professional. 

But where were Redgate? Those pinnacles of quality and good form in the SQL World? They were in the crowd, so give them a cheer, I said, they paid for the busses to the knees-up after the event! And so the day ended, the crowd rolled away, dissipating like confetti after the wedding with some going to the Group By party for a last bowl, beer and chips.  The rest, including me, exhausted, fulfilled, stuffed with knowledge, wound our way home to reflect on the wonder that is Community ... Podcast to follow.

Don't miss the next SQLBITS if you do any SQL, and don't forget about DDD6 at the end of November if you do any sort of development.

Cheers

Dave

Fellow NxtGenUG-er Barry Dorrans of Cardspace and Hacking Websites for Fun and Profit fame has been made an MVP in Visual Developer - Security specialization.  Good on you Barry, it's gonna be fun at the Summit this year, you and Alun Rogers together - Oh Dear!

Cheers

Dave

Well I went to MIX UK 07 with a little trepidation, I'm not much of a designer and I'm more a frameworks and SQL kind of guy, albeit in the web space and I've never really embraced whole-heartedly the ASP.NET Server Controls stuff, being content to use the ASP.NET process and to work with XSLT to publish my web pages.

I have to say though Visual Studio 2008 with Expression Suite looks the business.  I was particularly taken with some of the enhancements relating to Java-scripting and the Expression Blend Designer.  I was also really impressed with a simple but effective demonstration of converting a PDF to an XPS format file (XAML) and then editing it to be used as a data entry form, Mike Hawes from Sage did the demo and you can hear an interview with him on the latest podcast from NxtGenUG.  The speakers included Scott Guthrie, 'The Man Who Never Stops Coding or Blogging ...' who did some great sessions on writing web apps using a bunch of the new features available.  I enjoyed 'A Nice Cup of Tea and a Chat' again with Scott, Phil Winstanley (one of the MIX organisers), Dave Sussman and others.  It was a general open microphone session and we chatted about the effects such technologies might have on BI and Windows applications.

Next day was good with a great session on getting started with XAML by Robby Ingebretsen and Paul Dawson.  Not sure I agreed with everything they said. I felt some of it was fine if you worked in a big company on big projects.  What they advocated with regarding to go watch people and gather information relating to personalities IS good to do, but try convincing customers of SMBs they should fork out for me to go watch them doesn't seem realistic to me. Notwithstanding that, they made some very good points, and I'm glad I attended.  I managed to grab an interview with Robby after the session which will be on podcast No40 from NxtGenUG.

In the afternoon of the second day Rich and me donned our speaking caps in the loosest sense of the word and delivered an 'Out of Sync' 20/20 talk which went well and then did a session of 'Swaggily Fortunes' which seemed to go down well too. It was all a bit of a laugh, no content but plenty of swag!

The highlight of the whole 2 days for me was a mini-sneak peek by Simon Peyton-Jones on Transactional Memory - a 20 minute thunderbolt of a session which blew my mind with its content and with its delivery.  Simon is the total enthusiast, but eloquent, witty and clear thinking with it.  Transactional Memory is a simple idea, hard perhaps to implement but simple never the less and is a means to simplify the growing need to make multi-threading computing an "undergraduate experience rather than a publishable achievement" as Simon put it.

To cap that was impossible, but hey I left bearing a copy of Vista Ultimate and Expression Web both of which will be re-appearing as 'swag' for some lucky NxtGenUG meeting attendee, seeing as I already have these via MSDN Subscription. Oh and I managed to gather a bit more swag for NxtGenUG meetings too, so watch out for that!

Great 2 Days, thanks to the organisers, events staff and everybody involved.

Cheers

Dave

VBUG are having their annual conference on 17th and 18th of October 2007.  A host of great speakers will be there, such as Guy Smith-Ferrier, Oliver Sturm and Mike Taulty. Just to bring you all down to earth, I'll be there as well, so avoid my 2 sessions ...A downloadable PDF file is available with all the gory details (well there is a brain on the cover) including details of sessions here, make sure you check it out, Andy Westgarth and Tim Leung who run VBUG do a great job and are great enthusiasts in the community, support these guys!

Hope to see you there!

Cheers

Dave

I just feel I ought to Live Blog from MIXUK just to prove that I'm not an old fart. So I'm sitting here in the front row of Track 1, listening to Scott Guthrie. He's currently answering a question by Guy Smith-Ferrier about when will an FxCop equivalent come out for Javascript.  he's now saying the word "Intellisense Libraries" ...

Actually the javascript intellisense in VS2008 looks real smoky, with the ability for intellisense tooltips able to pick up comments to help out debugging being particularly great!

Oh and last night Rich and I went into a real studio session and had our picture taken , you can see it here, I think it all went pretty well.

Cheers

Dave

The Boyz (that's Rich, John, Chris, Barry and me)  from NxtGenUG are absolutely delighted to announce the opening of a brand new NxtGenUG region - this time in Cambridge. So now Developers from the flatlands of East Anglia can gather together to learn, chat, eat Pizza and get 'swagged' in the 'NxtGenUG Way' along with their counterparts in Birmingham, Coventry and Oxford. The region will be run by Chris Hay and Allister Frost who live and work in the area. Chris and Allister have put in a great deal of effort to get the region off of the ground including securing a fantastic venue, courtesy of non-other than Microsoft Research Cambridge!

The 'Launch' meeting will be held at Microsoft Research on Tuesday 18th September 2007 and will feature Mike Ormond from Microsoft DPE speaking on Silverlight Microsoft's new Rich Web Application Development Platform. We'll also have a speaker from Microsoft Research covering a fanscinating new subject such as F#, watch out for details! Finally Rich, John and me will be there to do something or other, probably involving 'swag' (tut). Anybody is welcome to attend the meeting whether they are a NxtGenUG member or not. Just go to the NxtGenUG site at http://www.nxtgenug.net, register for FREE and book your place! The evening starts at 6:30pm and ends at 9pm.

As with other NxtGenUG regions details of events at Cambridge will be available at http://www.nxtgenug.net/EventList.aspx, and we know that Chris and Allister have a bunch of great sessions planned for Cambridge over the coming months.

Also check out the NxtGenUG site for Articles, 'Radio Style' Podcasts , Interviews, News Items, Competitions, details of membership and much more at NxtGenUG