Dev Blog

Yesterday was DDD8, and was a highly enjoyable event.

There were a number of sessions which I attended, though for me, the most enjoyable was @blowdart‘s, mainly because it was an interesting subject, and had numerous interruptions (it was Barry’s last presentation before he’s indoctrinated to the mothership in Seattle).

Sessions

The first session I attended was Richard Hopton‘s ‘Test Driven Development to save time, money and your sanity’. It covered the basics of TDD, including using MSTest, which I’ve never used (I went straight to nUnit following a presentation by someone at Devevening). Was a good session, and it’s always good seeing different peoples take on TDD. Blog link.

Next I went to Liam Wesley‘s ‘Commercial Software Development’ session. This one discussed how his experiences of 20+ years of software development have given him insights into how not to go bust. Really interesting session, and covered alot of things that we could use for our company.  Blog link. 

The next session up was Jon Skeet‘s session on C#4. This covered alot of new features that’ll be in .Net 4. A very interesting session, that was streamed online, so I imagine, it’ll be as a video on the net at some point (hopefully!)

Lunch was next, and during that I got a book signed by blowdart, followed by the Grok talks, which were really interesting (though loudspeaker problems, and lack of space, despite being in a bigger location (B4 Atrium) ). Grok talks I saw were on Coderush Express (Very interesting and need to sort out my Coderush licence before the trial expires…) and a very interesting one on Personal Kanban by Chris Browne which I’m certainly going to look at.

The next session was on Entity Framework, with Simon Sabin. This was a good talk, and for me, helped clarify a few things on queries, and what EF can do, but didn’t go into as much detail as I’d have liked, however, did get me interested enough to have a look at it last night….. Blog link.

The final session was Barry’s Developers guide to encryption. It was an interesting session, and I’m sure I’ve seen it before (though not sure how, given it was a new session ) , but it was an interesting session, and it’s a topic that has managed to keep my interest over the years. There were numerous interruptions during the talk which only helped everyone’s enjoyment.

A great DDD8, and well done to the DDD Team!

Very excited this week, because there’s lots of fun developer stuff going on.

On Thursday, there’s DevEvening, and that’s going to be covering Git (heard of, but never used), PowerShell (used a while ago) and SharePoint 2010. Am quite keen on seeing what SharePoint 2010 has to offer, as I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing fun stuff with it at some point soon. Not to mention, I’ll be upgrading my SharePoint Certifications to it too.

I’m also going to be doing a short presentation at next months DevEvening, and talking about Telerik’s OpenAccess ORM, as part of the ORM Showdown.

Then, this coming Saturday, it’s DDD8! That’s really exciting. It’s been a long time since there was a Dev Event to attend (on this scale, DevEvening is most months… 😉 ), and it looks to have a load of interesting sessions, so I’ll need to see what I fancy attending. Probably the Entity Framework one, C#4 and @blowdart’s encryption one.

In a few months time, we’ve got DDD Scotland too, though whether I’ll get to that remains to be seen (we’ll have a 2 month old at that point…)

If you’re at any of these, then see you there!