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What is a ‘DevJam’ Community Event?

Basically, it’s an event where the majority of (or all) speakers are local user group members. Each talk’s topic is targeted to your user group’s technology focus. Each talk should be around 5 – 10 minutes long, (depending on the number of talks you schedule). A good rule of thumb is that eight x 10 minute talks takes just under 2 hours (due to setup time between talks, and the occasional overrun, etc.).

Why are they a Good Idea?

• Some user groups suffer from a lack of presenters, so encouraging and supporting local developers is a great way of building your local presenter pool.
• Since the talks are short (approximately 10 minutes), people who might find preparing a complete 1 hour session a bit daunting are more likely to ‘have a go’. People often surprise themselves by being able to give a short talk without too much preparation.
• Having a wide range of talk subject matter means you are likely to get a good level of attendance.
• They promote face-to-face networking between local developers.
• They are a cost effective way of running a small event, especially if you can find a few sponsors.

How do I Run a DevJam Event?

• First decide how many talks you are going to have up front (8 works well).
• It’s a good idea to have some worthwhile prizes as an extra incentive. Whilst winning is not the focus, it’s always nice to win something!
• Email clear entry instructions. Check them several times for any mistakes (such as date and time) before sending.
• Prepare about 5 – 6 weeks in advance (give people enough but not too much notice).Follow up with presenters closer to the event date.
• Ask presenters to have their talk ready to go on a laptop, and make sure those that are not bringing their own laptop let you know in advance so one is available for them to use.
• Ask people to save their questions until the end of all the talks. Otherwise time will quickly overrun.
• Voting: low tech – high tech. We currently use a low tech paper voting system, where each audience member can cast one vote for each of their favourite top 3 talks.
• Have some extra material (or perhaps some awful jokes!) on hand just in case of unforeseen circumstances (such as a laptop failing).
• Try to provide food and refreshments so people can get together after the talks.
• Publicise the event as widely as possible (your user group web site, INETA newsletter, regional MSDN Flash email, blogs, etc.)

What Kind of Topics?

Here are the things I highlight when asking for talk submissions for our .NET User Group:

“You can talk about any development topic but it must be between 5 – 10 minutes long.

• Anything you’ve done.
• Any new technology or tools you’ve investigated.
• Any tips and tricks, or traps and pitfalls.
• Basically anything .NET software development related!”

[I should mention that conversations with Rob Farley, some time ago, got me interested in running this style of event.]

May’s DevJam meeting of the Perth .NET User Group was a great success. We had 50 people attend the two and a half hour event, which consisted of 8 talks from local developers on a range of topics, followed by some networking over a beer or two afterwards at ’43 Below’.

Congratulations to the winners of the top, audience voted talks, who were:

• Graeme Foster
• Rhys Campbell
• Dave Gardner

Thank you to all the presenters who did a great job of both educating and entertaining, and thanks also to everyone who attended and helped out. I had many people comment on how much they enjoyed it.

And a big thank you to all the sponsors that helped to make the event a success: Excom, Microsoft, JetBrains, Beacon Technology, O’Reilly, Joe Albahari, Dave Gardner, Patrick Smacchia.

I will be running another event in December. If you are interested in taking part but not sure what to do, or how to start, feel free to drop me an email.

WolframAlpha is a new online initiative from the company who created Mathematica. As the blog states it is not just a place to look up facts. Under the covers it uses Mathematica’s inbuilt algorithms:

For example, if you give WolframAlpha a mathematical formula, a polynomial say, or something involving sines and cosines, it will give you back a number of useful results: a graph of the function, a list of its zeros, factored and expanded forms, etc.

Try this one: integral of e^(-t^2) dt, t=-infinity to infinity

The SQL Server Blocked Process Monitor makes monitoring, tracking and troubleshooting SQL Server 2008 and 2005 blocked processes easy. You will no longer have to manually enable and run a trace to capture the blocked process report. In addition, the application will parse the Report XML and use the sqlhandle information contained in the report to capture the actual sqltext from the sys.dmexecsql_text DMV as the blocking occurs. There are 2 versions of the application, one targeted at SQL Server 2008, and one at SQL Server 2005. You can download from CodePlex here.

Nothing earth shatteringly new; just for my reference:

— Get a comma separated list of a table’s column names
SELECT STUFF(
(SELECT
‘,’ + COLUMN_NAME AS [text()]
FROM
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE
TABLE_NAME = ‘TableName‘
Order By Ordinal_position
FOR XML PATH(”)
), 1,1, ”)

The lineup for May’s DevJam community event of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 7th May), is as follows:

Tiang Cheng: Developing Software as a Service with the Google API
Graeme Foster: ‘Dude, where’s my memory?’: Finding managed memory leaks using Windbg
Andy Dent: WPF layer-cake: C#, C++/CLI and C
Dave Gardner: NDepend
Rhys Campbell: Introduction to ASP.Net MVC
Adrian McGrath: Measuring .NET Application Performance – Application Instrumentation
Jeremy Thake: ‘What’s this ReSharper all about then?’
Hadley Willan: Partial classes with LINQ-SQL

DATE: Thursday, May 7th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There are prizes for the presenters of the highest, audience voted talks (with the organisers’ decision as final in case of a tie break):

First Prize: Visual Studio 2008 Pro with MSDN Premium, worth approx. $3,500 (courtesy of Microsoft)
Second Prize: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), plus a copy of C# in a Nutshell (courtesy of Joe Albahari), plus a license for NDepend (courtesy of Patrick Smacchia).
Third Prize: a copy of Code Craft (courtesy of O’Reilly), plus a LINQPad auto-completion license (courtesy of Joe Albahari).
Audience Door Prizes: a Resharper License (courtesy of JetBrains), and a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

In addition, the top 3 voted talks will each receive a copy of Professional Visual Studio 2008 (courtesy of Dave Gardner).

There will be pizza and refreshments provided.

Paul Randal has posted the results from his latest survey of physical database file/filegroup layouts for various database size categories over at his blog. Given that he received over 1000 responses, this is very interesting info.

This Microsoft support article, How to identify your SQL Server version and Edition, shows how for all versions from SQL Server 2008 back to 6.5

For SQL Server 2008:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY(‘productversion’), SERVERPROPERTY(‘productlevel’), SERVERPROPERTY (‘edition’)

Microsoft have released an updated version of the Azure Services Training Kit:

The Azure Services Training Kit April update now includes the following content covering Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services:

• 11 hands-on labs – including new hands-on labs for PHP and Native Code on Windows Azure.
• 18 demo scripts – These demo scripts are designed to provide detailed walkthroughs of key features so that someone can easily give a demo of a service.
• 9 presentations – the presentations used for our 3 day training workshops including speaker notes.

The training kit is downloadable from here.