DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 is being held on the 29th of January 2011 at Microsoft’s Thames Valley Park campus in Reading, UK. Registrations filled up within 12 minutes – I think the only way we could better that is by throwing more hardware at it.
Thanks to everybody who submitted sessions, voted and took part in the registration process. It is worth getting on the waitlist as it’s actively managed – folks that cancel free up their place for others, there’s a queuing system in place so you can keep track of your position.
I am pleased to see a mix of new and old (as in spoken at previous DDD events!) speakers! DDD is all about community, it’s about sharing your learning experiences with your peers. New speakers are the life-blood not just of DDD events, but of user groups. DDD audiences are tend to be forgiving, new speakers are given the break they need to hone their skills and go on to delivery that second killer presentation!
There are some great topics, including a some from respected authors. A few of the sessions have been run elsewhere, which tells us how good the speaker is and how topical the session is too.
There will be two guests making appearances: Barry Dorrans (author of Beginning ASP.NET Security) and Jon Skeet (author of C# In Depth and Real World Functional Programming)
In the interests of saving the planet and keeping costs down, it’s unlikely that we’ll have copies of the session abstracts available. If you need to, please print this information and take it with you to DDD9!
I will print the abstracts out and will stick copies on the doors to the respective rooms.
—
09:30 – 10:30
Go Asynchronous With C# 5.0 – Liam Westley
Anders Hejlsberg announced the Visual Studio Async CTP at PDC 2010.
This CTP means you don’t need to create callback functions anymore and can write code in the same way as if it were synchronous. The compiler will do all of the heavy lifting for you.
public async void GetDDD9Sessions()
{
var ddd = “http://ddd.com/ddd9/Sessions.aspx”;
var sessions = await new WebClient().GetSessionsAsync(new Uri(ddd));
}
In this session we’ll see how the GetDDD9Sessions method works and why it allows you to make a pot of tea while it runs.
More info on the Visual Studio Async CTP, including download details at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/csharpfaq/archive/2010/10/28/async.aspx
.Net Collections Deep Dive – Gary Short
The .Net framework provides a rich set of collection classes, but how much do you really know about them? In this presentation we’ll take a deep dive into the .Net 4.0 collection classes and examine which are best for what scenario and why. By the end of the presentation, you’ll no longer be happy just reaching for the same old collection you always had before. Instead, you’ll be armed with the information required to pick the best collection for your needs.
Functional Programming in C# – Oliver Sturm
C# introduced a number of language features that finally make it very easy to employ a functional style of programming. However, from the perspective of an imperative programmer, there are lots of questions surrounding functional programming. Why would I want to do it at all? Should I drop all state information in my apps? What useful functional patterns are applicable to C#? This session uses many practical examples and some theory to answer these questions, and it requires a good understanding of C# 3.0 language features.
AJAX with jQuery – George Adamson
Getting started on AJAX with jQuery:
We’ll hurtle straight into using jQuery to handle your AJAX; Rummage about in code, ‘hijaxing’ links and doing fashionable things like Progressive Enhancement; JSON and JSONP; solutions to get around the ‘Same Domain Policy’. We’ll work through a bunch of examples to POST and GET data from various sources. If there’s time we’ll explore more of jQuery’s AJAX methods and events and maybe even look at live ajax event handling in large single-page apps.
George’s presentation style is entertaining and leaps along at quite a rate. (If you’ve attended George’s Get Going with JQuery session then you have an idea what you’re in for.) There will be a few minutes’ refresher on jQuery basics then it’s non-stop AJAX. Some experience with JavaScript will help but if your world is C# and curly brackets then I’m sure you’ll be as happy as a pig in, er, shift+]
10:40 – 11:40
Monads! What are they and why should I care? – Mike Hadlow
Or: How to bend Linq syntax to your will.
These days, monads are the “celebrities of programming language theory”. But they also inspire fear in the hearts of lowly imperative programmers like myself. However they are a very useful and powerful abstraction and they pop up everywhere. C#’s Linq syntax is Monadic, for example. Having an understanding of Monads will give you the conceptual tools to greatly simplify many programming challenges, from dealing with nulls and managing state, to asynchronous programming and parsing. This talk will be mostly C#, but I will also be introducing a little F# and even some Haskell.
Real World Application Development with NHibernate, FluentNHibernate and Castle Windsor – Chris Canal
In this session we will look at how we can use a number of popular .Net OSS projects to develop a real world application. Based on production code, we will look at how using a combination of NHibernate, FluentNHibernate, Castle Windsor and a number of other OSS (AutoMapper, MvcContrib, FluentMvc) to reduce the friction of application development and remove a lot of infrastructural concerns. We will explore how we can leverage these tools to drive a convention based development experience and make it easier for ourselves and team mates to write applications and deliver what the client wants.
CQRS, Fad or Future? – Ian Cooper
Command-Query-Responsibility-Seperation (CQRS) is the new ‘hotness’ but beyond a desire to use the latest ‘fad’ what might actually lead you to adopt this approach over a conventional layered architecture. We will look at the business drivers behind command and query separation as well as a technique known as event sourcing. We will also look at steps to begin moving your application to CQRS
Rewriting software is the single worst mistake you can make – apparently – Phil Collins
Joel Spolsky once said that rewriting software from scratch is the single worst strategic mistake a software development company can ever make.[1] We all know of the Netscape story and the never-released v5.0. So as a developer how do you react when you’re faced with the fact that there is little other choice than do exactly what you’re told you should never do.
During this session I will describe how as a team we are managing to beat the odds and rewrite our main flagship product from a legacy platform into VB.net; as well as describing the decisions behind the choice of language, the choice of development methodology, how we built the project plan, how we learnt from our mistakes and our successes, how working with Bournemouth University and their study of our rewrite has helped us, and whether or not we still think it’s something you should never do.
[1] Joel Spolsky, Things You Should Never Do, Part I
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
12:00 – 13:00
A Primer to RavenDB – Rob Ashton
RavenDB is a relatively new document database written by Ayende Rahien as an open source .NET project.
This is quite exciting as it means a focus on being able to talk to a document database with your chosen .NET language and support for writing custom map/reduce functions in your chosen .NET language too.
This means up front queries written using familiar LINQ syntax, and the ability to write plug-ins for RavenDB in a familiar environment.
In this session, I aim to give an introduction as to what RavenDB is, how to use it, and give a brief comparison to the other popular NoSQL projects that have appeared on the .NET scene in recent times.
Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY – Mark Rendle
C# 3.0 and LINQ have made anonymous delegates and closures a hot topic. C# 4.0 improves on them. But these “functional” features have applications beyond messing about with IEnumerable. In this session I’ll present 10 simple and not-so-simple uses of first-class functions to help cut down on repeated code and improve maintainability; hopefully you’ll discover a new and exciting way of approaching coding problems.
The main thrust of it is that F# is cool and groovy but there’s a lot of mileage in functional-style programming in C#, which people are using every day, so let’s look at some cool examples there.
Learning from the HTML5 Boilerplate – Dan Maharry
The best place to start your development is on solid foundations and in the web world, that means with a sound knowledge and understanding of HTML and script and those little browser quirks and tweaks which mean you can wrestle the best performance once server-side code has done its job. This session looks at the HTML5 Boilerplate project, the tips and tricks we can learn from it (cross-browser normalization, performance optimizations, even optional features like cross-domain Ajax and Flash) and suggests some additions we can add to it on the server-side.
Writing Maintainable Tests for Selenium – David Burns
Selenium is one of the most widely used testing frameworks in the world. It has great support for driving a wide range of browsers and writing tests for it is extremely easy. People with little to no Selenium experience can write/record tests with little to no effort.
It can be very easy to write brittle or hard to maintain tests – simple UI changes can require large amounts of work on the tests.
Imagine that you have 1000 tests and all your tests require you to login before completing a bit of work.
If someone on your team changes the ID of the username text box and all your tests will start failing.
Updating 1000 tests is going to be a lengthy, tedious process – something that you would want to avoid!
This talk will show how to create maintainable Selenium tests using the Page Object Model, with the goal of allowing even non-technical members of the team to be able to write new tests.
14:00 – 15:00
What’s New In ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and 3.0 – Andy Gibson
ASP.NET MVC has been making waves over the past 2 years within the ASP.NET community and quite rightly so with features such as promoting separation of concerns, strongly typed views and a great routing system but it doesn’t stop there. ASP.NET MVC 2.0 is now publicly available and is also being shipped with Visual Studio 2010 and hot on its heels is version 3.0 which adds Microsoft’s new Razor view engine to the mix. But what new features have been brought to the table? What has changed? And most importantly, how will you be affected by upgrading from 1.0 or even 2.0?
This session will bring you up to speed with all the information you need to know delivered through slides and more interestingly, live demos. Topics covered include (but not limited to)
– Razor
– Model-Validator Providers
– Optional URL Parameters
– Template / HTML Helper improvements
– Improved Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control integration
– NuGet Package Manager
– Additions and updates to MVC Attributes
– Visual Studio integration improvements
– Breaking changes from MVC 1.0/2.0
– Pros and cons to MVC
– To upgrade or not to upgrade (or simply, Advice)
We will look at features brought in by both v2.0 and v3.0 of the MVC framework and provides a good source of information for those looking to learn more or to upgrade existing projects.
Is your code S.O.L.I.D ? – Nathan Gloyn
Everybody keeps on about SOLID priniciples but what are they? and why should you care?
In this session I’ll aim to walk through each prinicple telling you about that prinicple and examing why you should use it.
Once we’ve talked about the principle in theory we’ll look to how we can put it into practice.
Behavioural Driven Development (BDD) with F# – Phillip Trelford
BDD is an Agile methodology that aims to get business and development folks collaborating.
F# is the powerful new programming language from Microsoft bundled with Visual Studio 2010.
Use both to test your .Net code for fun and profit!
Scenario: Deliver customer value
Given collobaration with customers to produce user stories and acceptance tests
And some awesome .Net code
When a BDD framework that executes plain text specifications like SpecFlow or TickSpec
And F# to write the tests
Then profit!
Writing tests with F# is a great way to learn the language, this talk will take you through common steps with live code examples.
Computer, earl grey tea, hot – John Price
Ok, so this is a little more difficult to arrange with home automation, but controlling lights, heating, curtains and just about every other device in your house just by talking to it, is actually Science Fact. Take a tour around our automated house and see whats possible with a little effort.
15:10 – 16:10
CSS is code, how do we avoid the usual code problems? – Helen Emerson
CSS has a lot of the same problems that application code has but none of the language features that help us keep out of trouble. Start writing anything complicated and you end up with problems like dependencies, cohesiveness and creating the right abstractions. It’s pretty easy to end up with CSS that is impossible to predict unless you understand it all. I’m going to tell the tale of my team’s journey to write CSS that is flexible, easy to understand and easy to change.
From .NET to Rails, A Developer’s Story – Colin Gemmell
In May 2010 I changed jobs, leaving the land of .NET to the world of Ruby on Rails. In this talk I will go over what I found easy, hard or just completely misunderstood when starting with Ruby and Rails. While focusing on my experiences we will also look at the differences between .NET development and Ruby development.
Expression Blend for WPF and Silverlight Developers- Sam Bourton
Not many WPF/Silverlight developers are using Expression Blend yet; but those that are, couldn’t do without it…
In this fast-paced talk and demonstration I will be showing how to use Blend in your everyday design and development tasks to rapidly create visually engaging User Interfaces and controls, and dramatically increase your productivity in building WPF/Silverlight front-ends.
We will cover real-world practical tasks such as: How to use the Blend environment, access key functionality, and use the different types of controls; Create and manage Resources and resource dictionaries within Blend; Create, edit, and apply Styles and Control Templates to different controls; Bind controls to sample and runtime ViewModel data and Commands; Make your applications stand out with Animations, Visual States, Effects, Fluid Layouts, and Behaviors; and some random tips and techniques I’ve learnt along the way.
While the presentation is targeted at developers with WPF/Silverlight experience who have not yet gotten to grips with Blend, if you’re new to WPF/SL it will be a great introduction, and if you’re familiar with Blend already then hopefully you will pick up something new.
Enforcing Code ‘Beauty’ With StyleCop – Guy Smith-Ferrier
n May 2008 Microsoft released StyleCop. StyleCop does for C# source code what FxCop does for assemblies – it applies ‘good practice’ rules to your source code. This means all those controversial code beauty issues like spaces, where to put curly braces, how and when to use blank lines and over 150 similar rules. This session gets you started using StyleCop, investigates a selection of rules, shows how to integrate StyleCop into Visual Studio and your build process and finally shows how to write your own custom rules. This is a low tech session on an essential tool that all C# developers should be using.
16:20 – 17:20
Beginners Guide To Continuous Integration – Paul Stack
As developers who work in a team, we need to continually make sure that code we check in to source control works integrates with our existing code. In order to do this we need to get feedback from user check ins. If we don’t test code integration how do we know that our code still works?
CI processes and CI tools can help us to do this in an effective way. In this session I will cover
- Benefits of CI
- Different types of CI tools
- Tips on choosing the right CI tool
- CI as a form of feedback to development teams
- CI as a tool for release preparation
Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications using Silverlight – Kris Athi
This session will look at using Silverlight as your weapon of choice to target the Windows Phone 7 platform. This session will focus more on the platform specifics including:
- Theming
- Input & Navigation
- Push Notifications
- Location Service
- Connected Apps (WCF)
- Lifecycle (Tombstoning etc)
- Launchers, Choosers
We will also take a look at how to architect an application using the MVVM design pattern.
Introduction to PowerShell – James Boother
So you’ve heard SysAdmins and DBAs discuss PowerShell but you’re not sure what it is or how to use it. Powershell is a powerful scripting engine that can be used to automate admin tasks making more efficient use of your time. This session will introduce Powershell so that you can add it to your toolbelt. I’ll discuss some general admin tasks that can easily be automated with PowerShell and look at some developer specific tasks that can benefit from PowerShell knowledge.
Mobile Panel – From iPhone to HTML 5 to Windows Phone 7 to Android – Chris Hardy
A mobile panel featuring some of the top mobile application developers in the UK. Should create some interesting discussions!
—
Most software projects have some sort of plan, a list of activities, a product backlog, user stories, perhaps even a schedule. Regardless of your religious view in the waterfall or agile space, you will have requirements noted down somewhere using whatever technique floats your boat. You may also have an “end date” (aka a go live date) that is either dictated by some form of time estimate based on the list of activities or, worse, by a third party. Invariably, you may not have a lot of say in the estimation process…you have to hope that the person is reasonably good at estimating how long it will take a somebody else to complete a task. Remember, that person is estimating how much time somebody else needs to complete a task: a task in a domain they most probably know very little about (“stick a button on that form there, how hard can it be?”) 
Thinking about scope: can you produce a flowchart outlining your current process, the process that you want a magical application to replace? If you can’t produce a flowchart, how do you expect other people to understand the start point, the processing and the end point? You can expect some help from your developer, programmer or system implementor when it comes to documenting your current workflow; equally you can expect some help from them when it comes to documenting your requirements. However, don’t turn to your developer, programmer or system implementor and tell them that you don’t have the time to document the requirements or document the workflow. If you don’t have time to tell us what you want in the first place, we know (from experience) that you’ll not have time to help us with user acceptance testing later on in the project – assuming we can build a system worthy of user acceptance testing in the absence of any real requirements.
All too often developers and IT departments have been getting it in the neck for project failures. However, little has been said about the fact that the blame really lies with those further up the project hierarchy. Failure to provide adequate work scope / definition results in confusion and the potential for large amounts of 
In a 
In the absence of a specification, 
Software development is a complicated process. Unstructured and unproven time/budget “guesstimation” just doesn’t work in this industry. You can’t say to software developer “two weeks” to write an enterprise class system that replicates the functionality of commercial of the shelf software costing many £000’s per license. Two weeks is how long it might take you to cut’n’paste a spreadsheet together…it’s hardly long enough to develop all but the most simple functionality. In the absence of a specification, database schemas are an ever-changing beast. In most data-driven applications, the database schema is comparable to the foundations of a building. The foundations are not something you want to change half way through the development. Granted, clever people have written applications with dynamic database schemas…but they weren’t written in two weeks, or part thereof. 
After the database design, there’s the user interface. Yes, it is easy to drop a button on a form! What’s not so easy is what that button does when you click on it. Anything beyond MessageBox.Show(“Hello, world!”); is where the time is spent. I’m grateful to have seen multi-page specifications for the action behind a single button – if you can find somebody willing to invest the time and effort in writing such detail, the payoff is amazing. However, such people are few and far between. In today’s day and age, agile is where it’s at and 
Software developers struggle to work with “what’s in your head today”, knowing from experience that it will change tomorrow. Even in the agile world, there has to be an element of commitment: if you change your mind day after day, you’ll get a reputation and folks will end up using baseball bats to extract requirements. That’s not a good look, trust me on that. Oh, and don’t take the picture too literally: don’t do things on a handshake, that doesn’t work either: put something in writing, a contract, something that sets the scene and defines the lay of the land. 
Requirements: however you document them – they are the light at the end of the tunnel for you and for the developer / development team. If your developer / development team ask you for “better requirements” very early in the project (or, shoot, even at the very start of the project), don’t dismiss it. Listen to them, they probably have a point. They are the folks who’ll be writing the software and they are the folks who’ll struggle to prepare a deliverable based on incomplete or inaccurate scribbles on whiteboard or sheets of paper. 
