This should have been posted and promoted earlier but things have been pretty hectic lately.

I am organising a wee get-together in Dundee this week for any developers who wish to attend, the details are as follows:

Where/When

Dundee: Wednesday, 9th September @ 19:30

The Event

The nights are drawing in, the days are getting colder so what better time to announce a gathering of like-minded souls in a warm friendly pub for a few drinks and some conversation. If you are in or around the Tayside area come along to Laings Bar in Dundee next week and join us for a something we hope to make a monthly event (in Dundee). No agenda, no speaker, no registration, just some drinks and chinwag.

This should have been advertised sooner but September sprung out of nowhere but we do look forward to seeing you there.

The Venue

Laings Bar, 8 Roseangle, Dundee, DD1 4LR

From: http://scottishdevelopers.com/2009/09/06/tayside-devdrinks/

So if you are interested, just come along to Laings Bar this coming Wednesday and have fun. If you get lost send me a message on Twitter

epicenter 2009: 26th – 28th August, Dublin

Just over a week to go until this Irish development conference. Already on the speakers list are those such as Craig Murphy, Alex Mackey, Barry Carr and Barry Dorrans and in addition I will be speaking on Selenium for the first time.

From the website (http://epicenter.ie):

“epicenter is three days of software excellence – it’s a conference, it’s an expo, it’s a place to hang out! It’s for software architects, CTO’s and developers of all knowledge and experience levels.

epicenter is organised by IrishDev.com – News, Events and Jobs for Irish Software Developers.

website development, design, effects, scripting and backend software is provided by Agile Technologies – expert in innovative Web Interfaces and bespoke SaaS development.”

Scottish Developers

Planning is already well under way for the next season of events and already we have some exciting talks coming up.

September

• Credit Crunch  Code: Time to Pay Back the Technical Debt
  Tuesday 8th September, Glasgow Caledonian University
• When agile goes bad: How to stay calm and move forward
  Wednesday 23rd September, University of Dundee
• An introduction to OpenRasta, An MVC Framework with strong opinions
  Thursday 24th September, Edinburgh

If you are in the Tayside area you may be interested in coming along for a couple of drinks on Wednesday 9th September. We will be meeting in Laings Bar at 7.30pm and all are welcome.

October

• Advanced TDD – An Introduction to Testing Patterns and Behaviour Driven Development
  Tuesday 13th October, Glasgow Caledonian University

November

• Web Application Testing With Selenium
  Tuesday 13th November, Glasgow Caledonian University

If you would like to do a talk for us, even if you have never spoken before, please feel free to drop us a line, we would love to hear from you.

As most sane people do I binged (that just does not sound right!) for an answer to my problem and came across a few interesting things but the closest I came initially was a post from Phil Haacked on his HttpSimulator cache where someone mentioned that using HttpRuntime got around the issue. I tired, it failed and I went back to Bing and came up with a post on Scott Hanselman’s blog where he details a conversation about simply including System.Web along with System.Web.Caching in non-web applications. I was skeptical but people have noted success with this method so I tried it and what did I find, it sodding well worked!

Granted the articles I found are old but this is the first time I have tried to unit test the Cache before so this was quite useful.

In other news I have ordered a copy of Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers from Amazon after @chriscanal recommended it, looking forward to having a read.

The full article can be found at: http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/newsandevents/newsdetail.asp?861

This prompted me to look back through my life and my online personality, reading old journal/blog posts and realising how much has changed in even such a short space of time. I used to use the internet handle or nickname “Syberius” which was entirely made up on the spot back during 2002, four years after I first found my way onto the internet. It has been used all over the place, on the PHP Code Gallery, my tag for UberNet and IGUK when I work with them, a domain name… the list goes on. An added irony is that in the new Star Wars film, there is a debate over whether or not Kirk says James ‘Tiberius’ or James ‘Syberius’ which I find amusing if a little strange that people obsess over these things.

So, while playing on the 360 this week between sorting out admin stuff and unpacking the flat (GTA 4 for anyone interested, wanted to complete it before I start work ) I felt that the Xbox Live Gamertag needed to change, that I needed something newer and fresher. It took 4 hours, 5 Simpsons episodes and the Simpsons Movie to do it, not to mention a string of names that were already taken but my new Gamertag has been created!

Ok, so I changed my Gamertag, why write a post about it? Two reasons, if I am on your Xbox Live or GFW Live friends list then you may be wondering who ForbiddenBacon is, well now you know. Second so I can close this door in my own mind and say goodbye to the tag that served me well for 7 years.

So, I look forward to see you out there on Live, just hoping I get more time to play games once I start work but somehow I doubt it

Hard to believe that my 4 years of student life at the University of Dundee are coming to an end today. In some respects this has been an uphill struggle, in others it has been a wonderful, enjoyable and rewarding experience. I have made mistakes a long the way, I have learned important lessons and I have worked hard to better myself not only as a software engineer, but as a person throughout this experience.

I was planning on collating a number of resources and tit-bits of information and then posting them to the internal mailing list at university, however I changed my mind and decided to write this post making what I have to say open to all. I hope it is of use to someone as the advice I provide here comes from real, solid, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt” experience.

Not all of it may be relevant to you but it has helped me. Use the links below to view each page (I apologise as it is rather long).

[Update 06/07/09] – Need more proof of how social networking can ruin you if used carelessly? – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8136395.stm (see 5. Be social but be responsible)

In the mean time I have been invited to join the Scottish Developers committee and as of yesterday I have taken over the role of convener for the Dundee (well, soon to be Tayside) branch of the user group. I am very happy to be asked to fill this position and I look forward to getting started.

Thanks again to Colin and the rest of the committee for the opportunity.

jQuery Talks

I would like to say thank you to all of the people who voted for my jQuery Deep Dive session at both Developer Day Scotland and Developer Day Belfast, I will now be speaking at both events. I am still very surprised at how popular the sessions have been so far and I just hope that what I deliver on the days lives up to the expectations.

Developer Days

Ok, a bit of an update on these.

DDD Belfast 4th April 2009 in Belfast
Web: http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/
Status: Registration Open

WebDD ‘09 18th April 2009 in Reading
Web: http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/webdd09/Default.aspx
Status: Registration Opens on Monday 30th March

DDD Scotland 2nd May 2009 in Glasgow
Web: http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Default.aspx
Status: Registration Open

DDD South West 23rd May 2009 in Somerset
Web: http://www.dddsouthwest.com/Home/tabid/36/Default.aspx
Status: Registration Open

The events are getting pretty close now, Belfast is in less than a month so if you plan on attending any of the above, get your registrations in! If you are attending then I hope to see you there

In addition, if you are on Twitter you may wish to follow

• scottishdevs
• developerday
• dddsouthwest

In other news…

My blog is bothering me. I like WordPress, it has some nifty features that make blogging easier (although I probably should use Live Writer more often) however I still want to roll my own. Why?

There are a number of reasons:

1. Because I can (not a good one, but still top of the list)
2. Because I want to use ASP.NET MVC to build a blog engine
3. Because I want to demonstrate various technologies all working together
4. Because I said I would build one

The problem is time, I still maintain there are never enough hours in the day. Anyway, I have a couple more things to look into and then I will most likely start work. I want it to be an exercise in blogging because I don’t really blog as much as I should on some of my discoveries. Just something else to keep an eye out for.

And finally

Graduation is getting ever closer and the date is now set. On 25th of June 2009 I will graduate with a BSc (Hons) in Applied Computing. On June 26th, the first day of the rest of my life will begin (Actually, no, that is a lie, June 26th will most likely be a recovery day from the alcohol consumption of June 25th). I think I should go spin the job wheel and see what I can find

Update [23/02/08]: Relic put a post up on the forums after my blog post with pretty much the same information: http://community.dawnofwar2.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=11232

Ok, so this isn’t development related but since someone *cough*THQ*cough* forgot to inform some of the customers who pre-ordered Dawn of War 2 how to use their pre-order code, I felt I should post the missing information. Dawn of War 2 was released today but if you are in the UK and you pre-ordered from Amazon, Game, HMV or direct from THQ, you got a pre-order code which depending on where you ordered from, unlocked different things for the game. I believe other countries have similar things using the same pre-order code system.

I should point out that I got the game from Amazon.co.uk so I do not know if Game, HMV or THQ actually tell you what to do with it, but all I got from Amazon was:

Dear Amazon.co.uk Customer,

Thank you for pre-ordering Dawn of War II from Amazon. We’ve teamed up with THQ to offer you a free Sternguard Wargear set giving you a host of in-game items. Please find your code enclosed.

This was followed by the code details. Right, so first things first, the game uses steam as it’s deployment platform, lets start there. I checked the Steam client for any options around DoW 2 to add a coupon or something similar, I found zip.

Ok, maybe you need to enter it in game, perhaps through the Games for Windows Live interface as that is the multiplayer platform. I hopped in and started looking, played with the GfWL interface, looked around still no option to redeem this code.

I decided to google for it and I found a couple of people having various problems getting the code recognised but not saying where they were trying to enter it. Then I found references to a Games For Windows Live Marketplace client, ah-ha! The missing piece became clear, Microsoft have released a desktop client for Games For Windows Live (I was wondering how long this would take), once I installed it (you can find it here by the way if it isn’t already installed) everything became clear.

1) Load up the GfWL client and click marketplace in the top left

2) Click on Redeem Code on the left of the sceen

3) Enter the pre-order code into the boxes

4) Click redeem code and confirm the wargear set

5) Be happy that it all works and click on the My Media tab to see the download progress.

I hope this has helped, would be fine if Amazon gave clearer instructions on what to do with the code.