We now have enough interest to make 2 definite seminar dates ...

Follow-up to Dyalog User Meeting - Sat Oct 22nd and Sun Oct 23rd 2005

Morten Kromberg has kindly offered us the use of the Hellebæk office for the weekend immediately following the Dyalog meeting. We will aim to start before lunch on Saturday (not too early - you deserve a short recovery period) and end around 4:00 on Sunday. How long we run on for is largely up to you - the last time I did this the delegates retreated to the pub and worked late into the night converting code!

Follow-up to APL2000 User Meeting - Fri Nov 11th 2005

We have arranged to stay on until Saturday afternoon at the Naples Beach, so we can definitely use the whole of Friday and Saturday morning to work on this with you. We can probably also take time out on Wednesday (effectively a break between the main conference and the All APLs day) if anyone would prefer to loaf on the beach and talk compilers.

Rough Seminar Agenda

Day-1: Introduction and First Steps

The first hour will cover the background to the C# project, and will leave you with a clear picture of what is possible now, what will never be possible, and what might get added if enough people ask for it.

After a break, we will aim to have everyone produce a valid .Net library from some simple APL functions. This will make sure that all attendees have the 1.1 version of the .Net framework, and some simple batch files to run the compiler from the command-line. We will also make sure that anyone with Dyalog 10.1 (or later) can access the library transparently from their APL session, so making sure that it is practical to export ‘bottleneck’ functions and have them compiled and called just as if they were still in the workspace.

Day-1 (evening): Code Workshop

This is where everyone gets a cold beer and settles down to get stuff working. Please bring along some examples of stuff you think should compile, and we will work through it with you. Depending on how time goes, we may just carry on with this into the second day, or we may get onto something new.

Day-2: Building a Library

A second use of the compiler technology is to build .Net libraries for sale to developers who have never heard of APL. This means that you need to comply with some Microsoft guidelines (on names and properties) as well as creating all the right hooks for Visual Studio.

We will look at properties and the way to ‘overload’ methods so that your APL functions show up with all the right argument types and signatures to the C# programmer.

After a break, we will continue to learn about the ‘approved’ documentation, examine some of the XML files that you need, and show how to add some simple structured comments to have these files spun off automatically from the code-generation process.

For more information ...

Probably best to phone Adrian! Call +44 (0) 1439 788413 at any reasonable hour to talk through what you need, and to find out how this technology could work for you.