CodeCamps and other events

Looking to learn new things, network with colleagues, be inspired and maybe even have a bit of fun? Here’s a list I’ve compiled of upcoming events. I’m aiming to attend and speak at CodeCampSA. I’ll have to see whether I get to any of the others!

June 1-2nd

REMIX 10 - Australia’s version of Microsoft’s MIX conference - which has a particular focus on web design and development.

July 24-25th

Heading into its fourth year, CodeCampSA is on again this July. Whilst it’s always been a bit smaller than the Wagga event (see below), it’s always really encouraging to see a solid contingent of interstate speakers volunteer their time to come and support us locals to put on a great training weekend.

August 24-27th

Tech-Ed Australia, back again at the Gold Coast Exhibition Centre.

October 9-10th?

SQL Down Under Code Camp is traditionally held on the weekend after the October long weekend. Keep an eye on Greg Low’s blog for any announcements.

November 8-11th

I’m told any SQL enthusiast worth their salt will be aiming to attend the 2010 PASS Summit. True, it is in Seattle, but apparently that has the nice side effect of allowing a lot of the Microsoft SQL team to attend and speak too.

November 20-21st

April has traditionally been the time keen .NET developers head to Wagga Wagga for CodeCampOz, but Mitch has announced that Australia’s original Code Camp will be held this year in November.

Updated 5th May to add REMIX

Narelle is blogging again

Narelle has dusted off her blog and posted some new content after a short break of 5 years!

Subscribe to her feed if you’re interested in a bit of craft and the odd recipe or two.

Seeing how the other half live

Over the weekend I had the chance to sit down with a friend who is studying a computer science degree and give some suggestions on their software engineering assignment. What made this interesting was that the assignment was in Java.

I hadn’t used Java since the early days of Java 1.0/1.1 when we used it to create some browser applets to be used in teaching electrical engineering at UniSA, so I wasn’t sure how much help I was going to be.

As someone who spends most of his professional life using Microsoft tools, I was pleasantly surprised to see that most concepts I use with C# and Visual studio have equivalents in Java language and IDE (NetBeans in this instance). That Java and C# are similar shouldn’t be any surprise, but I certainly gained an appreciation of how C# has learned from it’s older brother. It was only an hour or two so the comparison is certainly not extensive, but it is interesting to observe some of the subtle variations:

• Having to deal with exceptions that might be thrown (or the Java compiler fails your build)
• Properties seem to be just a convention of methods named getXXX/setXXX
• Importing namespaces and having to append .* on the end of the namespace
• Coming to grips with Swing and AWT (versus coming to grips with GDI/WinForms/WPF!)
• Inheriting a base class uses ‘extends’ instead of ‘:’
• NetBeans had familiar features including refactoring, project references, breakpoints and step through debugging, intellisense (kind of)

I think there’s probably more the same than different, and I can understand how you could reasonably easily swap from one environment to another.

It did cause me to wonder how these languages and environments are going to change over the next few years. It does seem ironic that in many ways Microsoft may have some advantages in being able to innovate their language more easily than Oracle/Sun. On the other hand I think it is very healthy for there to be competition to encourage new features that will improve the development experience in both camps.

In the end we made some good progress on the assignment, though in my opinion it seemed it was trying to force the use of a particular design pattern into a scenario which didn’t really need it, which probably ended up being more confusing and less useful to the students.