Thanks to Skillsmatter, I have been given some tickets to give away to the Progressive.Net tutorials at Skillsmatter, London between September 5th and 7th.
This is an event I have very fortunate to be presenting at. The event schedule can be found on the event page.
In order to be in for a chance to win a ticket, you will need to send me a mail answering the following question:
Why are you interested in going to the Progressive.Net Tutorials and what do you hope to learn from the event?
*COMPETITION IS NOW CLOSED!
Between September 5th – September 7th, Skillsmatter will be hosting the Progressive .NET Tutorials. The tutorials comprise of twelve 4-hour hands-on Workshops which provide a deep dive into advanced topics for Agile .NET developers. The Tutorials are in their 5th year and aim to provide a liberal dash of Agile and Software Craftsmanship skills as well as advanced .NET Topics. These are in-depth, hands-on tutorials run by real experts who are there to be quizzed, questioned and interrogated for three days of intensive learning!
I am extremely pleased and beyond excited to be able to be part of this event. I will be talking, as well as demonstrating, the journey from regular CI practices to the new goal for a lot of people, Continuous Delivery. The event has some fantastic speakers and sessions:
GHERKIN ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA, Christian Hassa & Gaspar Nagy
AUTOMATING GHERKIN ACCEPTANCE CRITERIA, Christian Hassa & Gaspar Nag
SOLVING THE PACKAGING PUZZLE, Ian Cooper & Sebastien Lambla
FRONT-END TIPS FOR BACK-END DEVS, Dylan Beattie
LOAD TESTING FOR DEVELOPERS, Simon Brown
CI TO CONTINUOUS DELIVERY, Paul Stack
TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT IN JAVASCRIPT, Damjan Vujnovic
ADVANCED WEBSHARPER TUTORIAL, Adam Granicz
RESTFUL WEB SERVICE DEVELOPMENT IN .NET, Ian Robinson
INTRO TO NANCY & SIMPLE.DATA, Mark Rendle & Steven Robbins
ASYNC METHODS IN C#5, Jon Skeet
If you are interested in any of these topics then I suggest you book yourself a ticket. This is a chance to speak with some well known names in their areas. I hope my session will be well enjoyed and that people actually learn a few things :) For full details of the event, and to register, go to the event page on the skillsmatter website.
UPDATE: Thanks to SkillsMatter I am able to give away a £50 discount for the event to readers of my blog:
Find more information about this years Progressive .NET Tutorials here. If you would like to register, don't forget to claim your £50 discount of the ticket price, by quoting Promocode: PROGNET50 when registering
Today, 06 June 2011, was the second Guathon London run the the DDD guys. On today's session listing was ASP.NET MVC 3, Knockout.Js, C#5 and asynchronous Web applications and cloud computing with Windows Azure.
First on the bill was Scott Guthrie to do a 2 hour round robin talk on building an app using ASP.NET MVC 3, EF Code First, NuGet, and IIS. This was a whirlwind talk as usual as there was so much to cover. It wasn’t anything new to me as I use these technologies on a day-to-day basis at work. I also used them to create GiveCamp UK.
Steve Sanderson then talked about knockout.js, his personal web UI framework. Knockout is a JavaScript library that helps you to create rich, responsive display and editor user interfaces with a clean underlying data model. This library uses an MVVM approach in order to bind data to a UI. The way of writing the code is very nice but I must admit I was not convinced of its usefulness to me in this short introduction to it. this was due to a number of reasons:
- non degradation of the JavaScript
- I have questions about its accessibility
- i have questions about how you would actually write maintainable tests for this framework
This is not to say I hate the framework. This just means that initially I must say that my barriers went up as it made me feel outside my comfort zone. I will have a look into it a bit more before I make my mind up on whether I’d use it or not. Right now I’m unconvinced.
After the lunch break, Steve Sanderson was back on stage to take about the use of the new C#5 features (async and await) in order to create asynchronous web applications in ASP.NET vNext. This mean that Steve showed off some of the new MVC4 features and used a NuGet package, called SignalR. The talk demonstrated how the syntax in MVC4 will be a lot cleaner and readable that MVC3 where we use the Async and Completed methods in order to carry out async tasks. It seems to me that async Task<ActionResult> will be of great use to me in the future.
Steve then talked about taking the real time web beyond ajax. The talk spoke about polling, long polling and web sockets. This was my first sight of web sockets and they look very useful although it was pointed out that it was not ready for production applications yet due to non finalised specification. Steve took the long polling example and showed how we can use async in a chat room and voting application. The demos looked simple and easy to read and the MVC4 code looked good
The last talk of the day was back to the ‘Gu’ himself. This time he was talking on cloud computing. Scott was quick to point out that this was his first time talking about Azure since he took his new job and that even though he had taken that job, he was still very much a part of the ASP.NET team.
This talk was split into numerous parts. The first few pointing out what Azure is, what it’s infrastructure is made up of and how to take a simple application, make it ‘cloud ready’ and then deploy to the Azure platform. The next part focused on fault tolerance and latency and this was useful to see. My experience of developers new to ‘the cloud’ is that they take a web app, deploy to the cloud and this it’s automatically scalable. This is of course not strictly true.
Scott then talked about using servicebus as a message queuing service to help create a more load levelled application. The scalability of applications created in this way, means that instances of an app can be increased at peak times through code, Azure management API or via service configuration file changes. The talk was then refocused on how the cloud has made data storage cheaper and more efficient as the cost has dropped considerably over the years. Storing terabytes of data is now not an issue. It was pointed out that Azure replicated data storage in 3 locations for availability and consistency.
Mentions of Sql Azure and Table storage were made and Scott explained the benefits they bring like auto backups, auto sharding etc. The final demo was federated security using WIF. This allows the use of partner API’s (facebook Id, Google Id, Live id and active directory) in order for users to sign into your website. This was a new thing for me and I am annoyed I didn’t know of it before as it would have made the creation of GiveCamp UK easier.
Overall, I enjoyed the event. Thanks to Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and the DDD team for organising the event at short notice. Also thanks to Scott and Steve for coming along to speak. It is great to listen to presenters who really do know what they are talking about. It makes me jealous of all the folks heading to NDC2011 to hear more of these kind of talks.
Saturday 7th May was DDD Scotland in Glasgow. I was fortunate enough to be speaking at the event so obviously had to travel up there for the weekend :)
There were a range of good tracks available – agenda is here – and I started the day going to see Kendall Miller talking about How to Grow Your Own Software Company. Kendall is a very good speaker and delivered a very useful session. I really enjoyed the fact that he was able to relate his talk to his own experiences. If you can get a chance to see this session then I would recommend it – especially if you are thinking about setting up your own company!
I flitted in and out of a few other sessions throughout the day and really enjoyed the day as a hole. Got some great feedback on my session and Guy Smith-Ferrier very kindly critiqued my session for me so I can improve my delivery of my session.
Had a great day, met some great people and enjoyed having a day of being a geek. Thanks to the organisers – Colin MacKay, Craig Murphy, Andy Gibson and Barry Carr. Thanks again!
I found out that my session on “SpecFlow - functional testing made easy” was selected for inclusion on the DDD Southwest agenda for June 11 2011. This has made all 3 DDD events so far this year for me which I am very happy about :) More information about my talk can be found on this blog on my public speaking page
DDD Southwest registration opens on April 12th at 10am – Go to http://www.dddsouthwest.com/ and register as it will prove to be a great day judging by some of the talks I know that are selected. If you want to see the agenda before you sign up then you can find that one the dddsw site as well
On the day be sure to come and say hello :)
Today, I got an email to say that my session on “SpecFlow – functional testing made easy” was selected for DDD Scotland. I’m really pleased at this and am very much looking forward to presenting it. I haven’t got a chance to see the full schedule yet but I know of a few other sessions that were selected.
I’m disappointed I won’t get to present my more advanced TeamCity talk there but I will try for another conference for that. Who knows maybe I’ll finally get my workshop up and running for it!
If you are interested in going to this free event run for the community, by the community then registration opens on march 14th 2011 at 1230pm (GMT). The registration site is at developerdeveloperdeveloper.com.
I hope to see you there! :)
So Saturday past, 29th January 2011, was DDD9, Organised by Craig Murphy, Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman et all. All I can say is what a thoroughly enjoyable day. As I was speaking in the last session of the day, I was a bit too nervous to go to every session. But I dipped in and out of a few. Here’s my highlights:
.Net Collections Deep Dive – Gary Short
Well I have seen Gary present before and I think he's an awesome presenter but I hadn’t seen this session. So I thought I could learn a lot. I wasn’t wrong – I learned a lot of new data structures that I didn’t know existed as I don’t use them for anything.
This session has prompted me to really think about what I use and for what scenarios. Shame there wasn’t time for more of this talk – but the questions kept on coming for Gary and people made him run out of time I think.
Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY – Mark Rendle
What can we say about Mark – his sessions are fun. This is like the 4th time I have seen this session and I keep picking up new parts to it. What made it even better was the interaction between Jon Skeet and Mark on ways which things could be done differently to Marks way
Is your code S.O.L.I.D ? – Nathan Gloyn
I has seen a lot of talks on SOLID and have been inspired by quite a few but this one was completely different. Nathan related the SOLID principles to real world code and that made such a huge difference. Well delivered and with good explanations.
It’s a real shame that I wasn’t able to watch the end of the session since my laptop started to not work well when I was messing with some demos before my own session
Enforcing Code ‘Beauty’ With StyleCop – Guy Smith-Ferrier
I have to admit I was a bit interested in this session as I have had some interesting times with StyleCop before so i thought I’d go along. I was actually going to go to Colin Gemmell’s session (I’ll have to catch that another time). Good fun session and really made me see the benefit of Style Cop – I shall be trying this product out more soon 
Overall
Great day with lots of good people and good sessions. I can’t wait for DDD Scotland and DDD SouthWest this year. I will be at both! Massive thanks to all the team for the day and thanks to all the people who voted my session in! Got to meet loads of people I have been talking to on Twitter (too many to mention) but shame I couldn't meet more. I'm gutted I couldn't clone myself so I could have been to more talks but human cloning is a taboo topic.....
I am currently sitting in the hotel reception ready to leave for the airport after a cracking weekend in Dundee for the 1st NoSql developers conference.
I am quite new the the NoSql space and really though it would be way over my head. But the speakers helped me to really understand what the movement is and what its about. The conference had a few different NoSql databases for speaking about. They included Cassandra, Hadoop with HBase, CouchDB, RavenDb and VoltDb.
First up, before any of the actual implementations on NoSql, was Gary Short of DevExpress to speak on “Is NoSql the future of data storage?”. This was a very interesting talk for me. It taught me a lot about what NoSql databases actually are, all the different types of NoSql databases are, real word examples of where NoSql implementations are in place. Twitters example of a NoSql database, FlockDb was broken down to show what it has to deal with and what it effective does. I'm going to have to make a blog post on the back of this session alone.
Next up was Dundee university’s own Andy Cobley to speak on Cassandra. This session was an introduction to Cassandra and where it sits on CAP theorem. The session them became a bit advanced for a NoSql n00b such as myself as it went into replication, topology and consistency levels of NoSql. I know facebook used to use Cassandra so it must be very good at what it does, but I wasn’t overly keen on it, mostly due to the fact of how to interface to Cassandra. I’m sure the interfacing will continue to evolve, but as Facebook no longer use the technology, I question its longevity??
There was a proposed session on Windows Azure by Marcus Tillet, sadly Marcus wasn’t able to make it due to problems at Birmingham airport. All the other slots were moved forward so Jonathan Forbes took the stage with Hadoop and HBase. Now it really pains me to say it, but this was more of a sales pitch for the product rather than showing an actual example of implementation. There was a very very short demo but by that stage I really felt disjointed from the speaker. Maybe if i re-read Jonathan’s slides then I may be a bit more connected to the product.
CouchDb was next presented by Simon Wells of University of Dundee. Now Simon admitted he hadn’t actually been using CouchDb at an enterprise level but from his demonstration and knowledge of the product I wouldn’t have known that. He deserved a big amount of credit for that. Ok so the presentation talked about what CouchDb is and the history of its existence. An example of how to use the product from both Curl and Futon. Finally I was getting a demo of a product that I could see myself using.
RavenDb was then presented by Rob Ashton. This was a product I had seen before and I was impressed with it then. Since that last time, Rob had changed the presenting of the product and it was absolutely fantastic. I really connected with the product. This was a presentation with a lot of actual coding and better yet, since Raven is built on C#, I actually followed it a lot more than I did with that of Cassandra demo. In my eyes, this product is a real winner and it will really help me in things I plan to do.
Last spot was Mark Whitehorn speaking on VoltDb. Not it seemed to me that there was not really a lot of speaking about Voltdb. That I really didnt mind about because Mark really tied the entire show together with his presentation. He really made me understand what the NoSql movement is doing and help understand the problems of RBDMS that it tries to overcome. He was a fantastic speaker and the entire room was engrossed. Even the event twitter feed went silent for his talk (and that was going mad all day with some real good banter).
I really enjoyed the weekend as it gave me a chance to meet some people who I have been speaking to on twitter for quite a while and it was great to put a face to a name. I am looking forward to seeing them all at DDD9.
My huge thanks go to Andy Cobley and all those involved in organising the event. There is a real interest in this subject from the community it seems and I’m sure a bigger version towards London would be much busier.
Yesterday [13th August 2010] was the Guathon and i was lucky to get a ticket to it as they usually get all booked out after minutes of opening registration. On the bill was the following topics:
- VS2010 and ASP.NET 4.0
- ASP.NET MVC2
- Windows Phone 7
- Web Futures
All topics were covered by the 'Gu' himself apart from Windows phone 7 which was taken by Mike Ormond. I guess session 1 and 2 were revists for me as i have been using VS2010 and .Net 4 since it went RC earlier this year. But there were still a fair few new shortcuts i was able to pick up to help me use visual studio more effectively (maybe i should blog my favourites??)
The session on Windows Phone 7 was something i was very looking forward to but i have to say that having looked at it i feel a bit let down. Mike Ormond presented it very well and done it a lot of justice showing how easy it is to make apps. But this product has been 'sold' to us all so far as the next generation of phones. But from this session there was something i was able to take away:
- The phone will actually put apps into a "tombstoned" state when its not running whilst you are doing something else
- The phone will not support silverlight in the browser
The first statement about tombstoning made the phone feel basic - you can read more about tombstoning at this post. The iPhone 4 and the Androids can multitaks - they don't tombstone apps so why is the latest phone to the market place going to do so? The non support of silverlight in teh browser seems absurd - i understand this is to make sure that people put their apps through the marketplace but what about sites that are silverlight based?? Am i to believe that we cannot browse sites created with silverlight?? I was so surprised with the answer that i had to check it with the person behind me [now found out to be Nathan Gloyn]!
Overall impressions of the Win Phone 7 - lovely UI [because of the metro theme] but i think it will take another generation or 2 of it before it even pushes the marketshare of android or apple phones.
Then i got to the session i was looking forward to most - Web Futures. The gu was going to cover the following topics:
- IIS Express
- SQL Server CE 4
- ASP.NET MVC 3 - with Razor view engine
- EF 4 'Code First'
All i can say is WOW!. The new technologies for developers [not that webmatrix stuff ;p] looks fantastic. IS Express - a fully functional light version of IIS 7 only difference is that it doesn't need an admin account to run it, SQL Server CE 4 is a simple db that we can deploy through the bin and app_data folder and will be able to be looked at via server explorer, EF Code First so simple to start to move towards a domain driven approach for our code without the need for a 3rd party ORM and Razor - what can we say about that! Razor looks unique - it is so simple to use, the syntax is very light and concise and with the replacement of <%: model.<propertyname> %> to @model.propertyname. Its a good area to be moving to - ill certainly be pushing MVC for my newest project.
the gu is such a legend he was even able to show dependency injection and IoC to MVC 3 in 8 minutes ;p!!
thanks to the organisers and speakers: Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman, Scott Guthrie and Mike Ormond
On Saturday 5th June, DDD South West was held at UWE Bristol. There are not many opportunities for a DDD event so it is always very busy. There were 6 tracks and 5 sessions in each track. A wide and diverse range of talks were given by dedicated speakers.
I started the day going to a session on the Task Parallel Library by Steve Strong. I had been looking into the TPL recently and thought this may be a good idea to go to to help me learn about it. There was an amazing amount of content that Steve tried to cover. I learned an awful lot and since then have implemented come concurrency in some of my applications. I recommend anyone to see Steve talk on this as he really does know his stuff.
I decided to attend the Alternative track for my next session. This track was a balloon debate on ORM vs SQL vs Entity Framework 4 vs NoSQL. Basically the speakers had to argue their corner in order not to be voted off the “balloon” by the attendees. First up, Eric Nelson from Microsoft to speak on Entity Framework 4. Liam Westley on traditional SQL. Steve Sanderson gave a well researched piece on NoSQL then finally Gary Short gave a very good overview of the use of ORM – it actually enlightened me to how wide a range of things that ORM’s can be used for
It then came to a session i was looking forward to, Crap Code and the Disasters it Causes by Phil Winstanley. I am very passionate about this subject so i was hoping that it would help me to improve the way i work. I wasn’t disappointed – Phil pointed out some truly awful code and sorted the code samples into the types of developers who made the errors. The one thing i took away from this session – I didn’t know you could put a GOTO inside a SWITCH statement [WTF???]
Grok talks were given over lunchtime – the ones of interest to me Cyclomatic Complexity and DotLess Css – i think ill make some future blog posts about these. Sorry to Silverlight 4 and BlogEngine.net but next time maybe :)
Code Contracts with Barry Carr was the next session. This was a truly heavy session to get my head around. I understood the concept of it – to make sure that the code does what it says it does and that the client will do what they says they will. But i couldn’t understand why you would do this as in massively overinflated the code base. I'm sure there are ways to do this and i will definitely be looking into this in the future as its a real extension of testing inputs and outputs [as well as lots of other stuff]
Last session of the day was CQRS with Neil Robbins. Bad start to the session of Neil as his laptop gave way and he had to borrow one to give the presentation. He gave an excellent talk on CQRS. It really made me see that the work im doing currently is very basic in comparison to this type of architecture. I didn’t understand this thoroughly but i think another talk or 2 on this [hopefully skillsmatter will come through for me on this :)] and i reckon i’d be very much taken by this
Overall a great day. I met a lot of people and there are others i really wished i had a chance to see or meet. Next time though. I shall definitely be at the next DDD event – talks are currently for Ireland on 25th Sept :) – and id recommend this to anyone.
Fingers crossed i get a chance to make some further posts on this :)