VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2010 photos

I have just posted photos from the VA Smalltalk Forum Europe 2010 that was being held in Stutgart earlier this week. The Forum had over 45 attendees, mostly from Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands. They witnessed a series of informative talks, enjoyed good food and had a lot of fun before, at, and after the Forum. Thanks to Joachim and others for putting it together.

Marten Feldtmann was rewarded for the numerous uploads he made to VAStGoodies.com by Louis Andriese of Delta Lloyd, (hosting) sponsor of VAStGoodies.com.

Click the photo above for some more.

VAStGoodies.com downtime

We are moving offices Friday the 14th of May. This means that the VAStGoodies.com server will be moving too. Unfortunately this will come with some downtime. Everything should work again not later then Monday the 17th. Initially the internet connection will be a bit slower, but should soon be the same as before.

Learning Smalltalk driving a tank

Soermirno Kartosoewito first announced his slot at the Devnology Community Day as an introduction to Smalltalk. Later on he morphed it into a workshop that would give the participants the chance of a first hand experience with Smalltalk. Ernest Micklei provided his game server and the participants were invited to write a client to that game server. The goal of the game was to control a tank in a battlefield. The battlefield was projected with a beamer as shown in the photo.

The squares that look like bricks are bricks and the other ones depict the tanks. The participants all got a prepared Pharo installation that had already parts of the client implemented and a handout with the task to complete. The Smalltalk first-timers were supported by a number of experienced Smalltalkers, including myself, to overcome any difficulty they might run into. One gave up, others did very well.

Some 80 people attended the Devnology Community Day. It had 4 tracks and the workshop got a fair share of attendees. It was really cool to get people to know (more) about Smalltalk like this. The only downer is that the game server is not available on-line, so people can't continue to work on their client if they want to.

More photos of the workshop here.

Introduction to Smalltalk at Devnology in the Netherlands

Soermirno Kartosoewito will give an introductory workshop to Smalltalk at the Devnology Cummunity Day on Saturday, the 7th November. Devnology is a community driven organisation (geek-to-geek) that aims to exchange knowledge and experience.

The workshop will be in Dutch. Registration for the Community Day is required but free.

VAStGoodies.com (Tools) updated

During the Camp Smalltalk at the ESUG Conference Soemirno Kartosoewito and I have been working on a list of updates for VAStGoodies.com, which are now deployed.

The list includes:

• VAStGoodies.com (server)
  • Migration from VA Smaltalk 8.0.0 beta1 to VA Smalltalk 8.0.0.
  • The statistics page now includes the last 5 downloads and uploads.
  • Tags are now links and effectively functioning as a filter on the projects page.
  • Possible existing exports are deleted from the server cache on every upload.
  • Replaced the wiki renderer and put the syntax on the help page.
  • The help page now includes an explanation of how to use the annotations.
  • A list of best practices for using VAStGoodies.com (Tools) is now on the help page.
  • The developer description, if any, is now rendered on developers page.
• VAStGoodies.com Tools (client)
  • Some enhancements in the UI.
  • Annotation fields are more logically ordered.