ACCU Cambridge’s next talk will take place on Wednesday 5th December from 19:00.

Synopsis

What is iteration? Is rolling round in a loop from one end of a list to the other the most an iterator can hope for in its brief life? Given modern inventions like foreach, do iterators even have a place in modern programming?

By examining some of the ways iterators and enumerators are used in various languages (including procedural and functional styles), perhaps we can widen the horizons of an iterator and take them beyond simple for loops to become a significant and useful part of the programming toolbox.

Speaker - Jez Higgins

Jez sits in his attic and types for a living. He’s let out to walk the dog and go swimming occasionally.

He describes himself as a C++ programmer, but currently spends a reasonable amount of time working in Java and C#, with the odd bit of Python on the side. Over the last several years, without really seeking it out everything he has done has had some type of XML data flying around.

For more information and to preregister visit the ACCU Cambridge page.

The programme for next year’s BCS Software Practice Advancement conference is now online at http://www.spaconference.org/spa2008/index.php?page=programme

I’ll be running my workshop When Good Architecture Goes Bad on Tuesday 18th March.

Today was a little quieter than day 1 of ESS.

This was a little surprising as the second day had been busier at last year’s ESS and we were also expecting increased footfall due to today’s Model-Driven Development stream at the associated IET Technical conference.

However, we did get a fair number of people visiting the stand but between visits I was able to go round and speak to some of the model-based development tool vendors about Code Generation 2008.

IIRC I spoke to ARTiSAN Software, Connective Logic Systems, Esterel, Kennedy-Carter, Mentor Graphics, No Magic and The Mathworks all of whom have some sort of MDSD capability albeit addressed at a wide variety of problem domains.

I didn’t explain earlier but some of you may have spotted the silver objects in a large bowl on the table in our stand photo:

Here Danilo Beuche of pure-systems, the developers of pure::variants, illustrates:

These silver stress balls were the must have giveaway at ESS 2007. (OK, of the 4 companies giving away stress balls these were the must have ones.)  I think we must have shifted around 60 of these things - people must be stressed in embedded land, although one visitor said it would be ideal for her dog!

In case you didn’t notice these stress balls fit in with our new ‘Relax…‘ campaign as illustrated on our stand.

However, by the end of the day we were all pretty unrelaxed. Being on your feet for a couple of days takes it out of you - although on the whole I personally find it an enjoyable experience. So, after the exhibition closed, we packed up in a surprisingly short time and headed back to Cambridge.

It will be interesting to see how ESS 2008 fares. Although it is the largest embedded exhibition in the UK it is around 20-25 times smaller than Germany’s Embedded World. I also get the feeling that an increasing number of people are simply turning to the web to find information and see product demos.

However, what you can’t get through the web is an immediate interaction with the product experts. At best this means it takes you longer to work out how the product could be used in your environment, at worst you could wrongly reject a product that could in fact be very beneficial to you. This is particularly difficult for us as variant management and software product lines are not (yet) well-known terms and so we find it hard to explain exactly what pure::variants could do for people.

With the stand in place we waited for the exhibition to open…

This year, like 2006, we’re demonstrating pure::variants the leading toolset for variant management and software product line development.

This is the UK’s largest exhibition for embedded developers by far and with an increased number of exhibitors we expected more people through the door.

By 10:30 a number of people had made it to our stand near the back of the hall. We find that people tend to work their way through the stands nearer the front first.

We generally do a short demonstration when people arrive on our stand and try and find out how pure::variants maps to their specific problems. The embedded space is very diverse and this is reflected in the types of participant that visit the stand.

Sometimes people with little software knowledge come onto the stand to find out exactly what it is we do. This seems to be a recurring pattern as companies that once produced little software are finding themselves having to produce more and more of the stuff.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are very experienced software developers who already know about the problem of variant management, have read about us and are keen to explore in great depth precisely what pure::variants can do for them and how it integrates into their overall software life cycle. Until you have a chance to find out more about the person you don’t know where in this spectrum their knowledge lies.

The press were also in attendance and I was happy to speak to a small number of editors and journalists about pure::variants and next year’s Code Generation 2008 event. There is a growing interest in model-based software development in the embedded community and hopefully our event is contributing to this as well as benefitting from it.

More on ESS 2007 tomorrow.

A short drive from Cambridge saw us at the NEC car park unloading our stand for this year’s Embedded Systems Show which took place from 17th-18th October.

I guess most people never see what these things look like before the exhibitors arrive. In general there is a mass of activity as the shell-schemes are assembled and wired up and furniture is delivered.

Here’s the view from our stand on our arrival:

and here’s the view of our ’stand’:

Richard and Sally Blackburn of Energi Tech were around doing some work for their clients SDC Systems. I know both Richard and Sally from the Embedded Masterclass events so I said hello.

Then, over the next hour or so, we gradually transformed the raw stand into our finished product…

Step 1 - The frame for the ‘pop-up’ stand

Step 2 - Completing the ‘pop-up’ stand

Step 3 - The assembled counter

Step 4 - adding the roll-ups and literature stands

Step 5 - the finished article.

We’d wrapped up the stand assembly by 18:00 and headed off into Birmingham for the night.

All in all we were pretty pleased with the new stand design and reckon it’s a significant improvement over our stand at ESS 2006.

Read more on ESS 2007 next week…

I organised a talk on Windows Presentation Foundation that took place in Cambridge last night as part of a series of talks for SPA Cambridge.

The speaker was Ian Griffiths, a developer and co-author of books such as the topically titled “Programming Windows Presentation Foundation”.

WPF shipped in Vista (but also works on XP) and is the next generation platform for Windows User Interface development.

Why WPF?

Ian cited three reasons:

• Hardware - The old UI technologies assumed memory was constrained. Resolution and processing power have moved on significantly since Windows 1.
• Raised expectations - Games consoles and cinema have increased user expectation.
• Lessons from the web - particularly w.r.t. branding and markup.

XAML 

WPF is intimately tied up with XAML - Extensible Application Markup Language - an XML format for representing trees of .NET objects.

XAML decouples the information necessary to construct a UI from the code that controls that UI. XAML also enables scalability and transformability of UIs - Ian contrasted a WPF button beautifully scaled using the Vista magnifier with a pixellated non-WPF button also magnified.

Using XAML also supports tooling as it facilitates integration between different parts of the tool chain. As an example Ian demonstrated ExpressionBlend a XAML-based toolset aimed at designers and showed how the XAML generated in that tool could be brought into Visual Studio.

The good news

With WPF and XAML there is a lot of flexibility in terms of defining your own layouts, appearances and data binding. Although I don’t do much UI programming these days I could recognise the power of the separation of concerns that has been designed into these technologies. This should help ensure some degree of longevity for WPF - a goal for the WPF designers.

The bad news

However, it’s not all good news. The tooling in VS is pretty basic at this stage according to Ian, but will grow of course. There was also no mention of support for mobile developers - perhaps the whole thing is just too weighty. There was some discussion of Silverlight, the cross-platform browser plug-in for WPF. This has a subset of the WPF rendering engine and a Javascript API but it’s not clear why this should be used instead of other (better) technologies. The next release of Silverlight does look more compelling though according to Ian.

and finally…

If you do get a chance to hear Ian speak then do so - he’s a knowledgeable guy and an accomplished speaker.

The next SPA Cambridge talk will be on December 12th, when Paul Wells will talk about Developing Eclipse Plug-Ins.

I spotted this rather cool (in a geeky sense) map at the weekend:

Upcoming Software Engineering Conference Map

Things are moving forward on the organisation for next year’s Code Generation 2008 event.

The event web site was launched back in June and had a makeover in July. There’s been a steady flow of traffic to the site over the summer and the site has been updated as planning has progressed.

We’ve recruited some volunteers to a program committee this time around and that should help spread the load of reviewing and also help generate an even higher quality programme than CG2007.

We are very grateful to the following people who have agreed to participate in the session proposal review process:

• Pedro J. Molina, Capgemini Spain
• Laurence Tratt, Bournemouth University
• Markus Voelter, Independent
• Jos Warmer, Ordina
• Andrew Watson, OMG

We also started recruiting sponsors and supporting partners back in September. So far NT/e have signed up as sponsors (again) and IASA and Cambridge Wireless have signed up as supporting partners. Members of these latter two organisations will get a discount on their conference fees in return for promoting the event to those members.

With the Program Committee we’ve developed a call for speakers which was launched at the start of October. We’ve promoted this as widely as possible and have started to receive a trickle of session proposals. The deadline for submitting a session proposal is Friday January 18th 2008 so we expect the bulk of proposals to arrive in December and early January. If you have an idea but aren’t sure whether to submit it then you can visit the event web site for more information. If you’re planning on coming and have a topic you’d like to hear someone speak on but don’t want to do it yourself you can also send us your ideas and we will post them on the web site.

We’ve also identified our two keynote speakers. These are household names in the code generation community and will be announced on the web site later this month.

That’s it for now, more on CG2008 soon…

The audio recording of the Code Generation 2007 panel looking at the evolution of Model-Driven Software Development tools and technologies is now online.

Here’s the panel description:

“MDSD, DSLs, MDA, DSM, Software Factories - a whole bunch of terms, all basically addressing the same idea: using notations that are specific to a given domain to formally describe structures or behaviour in that domain in order to automatically “manufacture” software systems for that domain. But how will these approaches evolve over the next couple of years? What are some of the promising technologies? Which standards will most likely gain practical importance? In this session we try to look into the future and discuss promising innovations and developments in the field.”

The panel, titled The next few years, was led by Markus Voelter (Independent Consultant) and included Steven Kelly (MetaCase), Andrew Watson (OMG), Laurence Tratt (Bournemouth University) and Krzysztof Czarnecki (University of Waterloo).

Download the audio here (MP3, 28.75Mb).

Follow-up on the discussion at the Code Generation Network forum.

Alan Cameron-Wills has kindly shared his notes from the Code Generation 2007 closing session.

In this session participants wrote up the important questions and issues they had on model-driven development and related approaches on 7 flipcharts. Then the group as a whole discussed the content of the various flipcharts.

The following topics were discussed:

• Domain-Specific Languages vs. UML
• Debugging and Testing
• MDD patterns and anti-patterns
• Scaling up MDD
• Authoring Languages, Frameworks and Generators
• The ‘edge’ of the domain in Domain-Specific Languages

I’ve posted the full notes onto the Code Generation Network General Discussion forum

Clemens Reijnen includes a short video of the start of the session here and Steven Kelly also mentioned the session here.