David Buck - Blog

Smalltalk, Lucene, and a few surprises
Dorin Sandu
Dorin will present an overview of the Apache Lucene search engine, talk about adding search capabilities to a Smalltalk application, and outline some of the design and implementation challenges he encountered in the process.

Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 at 6:00pm

There will be a $5 charge to pay for the room.

Undo Techniques
David Buck
Implementing an undo mechanism is one of the more difficult tasks you can have in a GUI application. In this talk, David will cover various approaches to the problem of undo and show how some of them work in Smalltalk.

Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010 at 6:00pm

There will be a $5 charge to pay for the room.

Simberon will be offering an Introduction to VisualWorks Webcast course from Nov 29th to Dec 3rd 2010. Since this course will be webcasted, there's no need to travel to take the course. You just need a web connection and a browser.  The instructor will be James Robertson.

For information and to register, visit Simberon's web site:

http://simberon.com/introvwwebcast.htm

Store in the Cloud
Alan Knight
Alan Knight will present his talk on Store from the European Smalltalk User Group, discussing recent developments, possible upcoming work, and demonstrating an extremely rickety prototype of a "Store Server" that can load packages from a server running in the Amazon EC2 cloud in a single round-trip rather than needing to connect directly to the database.

Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 6:00pm

There will be a $5 charge to pay for the room.

I've published a package called FindAgain to the Cincom public Store 
repository.  It allows you to search for senders of a selector or 
references to a class or shared variable (which you could do before) and 
when you select one, find subsequent references to that selector or 
variable in the method (which you couldn't do before). The Code Tool's 
popup menu in the Browse Senders or Browse References windows will have 
two new menu items called Find Next and Find Previous. If there is more 
than one reference to the selector or variable in the method, Find Next 
will be enabled to allow you to find the next reference. Once you reach 
the last reference, Find Next is disabled.  Once you use Find Next, the 
Find Previous menu item will be available until you hit the first reference.

This code is released without restrictions and without warranty. Use it 
for whatever purpose you wish. If it doesn't work for you, fix it and 
publish your fixes.

Have fun

Deep Dark Secrets of the VisualWorks Debugger
David Buck
Smalltalkers user the debugger all the time to see what a program is doing and to help familiarize themselves with new parts of the system. Most developers, however aren't familiar with some of the more advanced features of the debugger. In this talk, David will present some of the more obscure areas of the debugger including various options for stepping, breakpoints, one shot breakpoints, watchpoints, variable watches, class watches and more.

Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 6:00pm

There will be a $5 charge to pay for the room.

Introduction to Cocoa Application Programming in Smalltalk
Dorin Sandu
We will provide an overview of model-view-controller as implemented by Cocoa, introduce key-value coding, key-value observing, key-value binding, and review some of the provided controllers and views. We will illustrate all these concepts through several example applications implemented in Smalltalk.

Location: The Code Factory
246 Queen Street, Ottawa
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 6:00pm

There will be a $5 charge to pay for the room.

At the end of March, Simberon will be delivering an instructor-led web-delivered course on Refactoring Object Oriented Design in Smalltalk. This course is 4 days long from March 29th to April 1st.  We'll be web-casting the course allowing you to take the course without travelling.  Lectures start at 11:00am EST and 3:00pm EST allowing you to attend the course fairly conveniently in any North American time zone.  Participants can ask questions through a chat channel or by e-mail.

This course is an advanced object oriented design course that covers many topics that are usually not well understood by software developers.  It explains when and how to refactor to improve your object oriented designs.

The course consists of lectures and hands-on exercises.  The exercises will be performed using VisualWorks NC, so familiarity with VisualWorks NC will be beneficial.  Students will receive a binder with the course slides along with the materials for the hands-on exercises and the solutions for each section of the exercises.

You can register for the course on Simberon's web site.