Daniel May

Last Saturday (30th Jan) I attended DDD8 – my previous blog post describing my general excitement can be found here.

I’ll start off by saying I had an amazing day meeting fellow like minded developers and getting to see some of the sessions I’d been looking forward to seeing since they were proposed. Below are the overviews of the experiences I had with the sessions I attended:

Real World MVC Architectures by Ian Cooper

This was the first session of the morning – as much as I enjoyed the session overall, I had a bit of trouble keeping myself awake after waking up at 6AM on a Saturday – ha! I thoroughly enjoyed this session though, it gave a real overview of MVC in a nutshell as well as leaning into a bit of MVVM with ViewModels being mentioned also. This session dealt with all the common misconceptions about MVC also – just because you can use MVC, doesn’t mean that you should or that it’s going to improve your website instantaneously, you’ve got to be wise. Overall, a great session – and I’m glad to hear I wasn’t the only one drifting off due to the early start

Lessons Learned on Unit Testing by Andrea Magnorsky (was originally attending Commercial Software Dev, switched)

Another great session here – I’ve always been a bit of an advocate of unit testing so it was great to hear Andrea’s take on TDD as well as hearing some general tips from what she had learned from using TDD. She mentioned an excellent book – The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove – which is a truly invaluable read if you have the time. Andrea mentioned multiple different unit testing frameworks such as NUnit, XUnit, along with recommendations for IoC frameworks such as NInject. One thing emphasised throughout the entire session was the importance of meaningful names for unit tests – this helps when referring back to retest months later. There was more information regarding the creation pattern, Mocking, Stubs and overviews of potential test code smells. I learned a lot from this session and Andrea did an excellent job of getting the gist and point of the session across.

C# 4 by Jon Skeet

What can I say? This session had its distinct popularity from the fact there was next to no room for anyone in the room. I hear over 240 people attended this single session – I’m thankful it was over two conference rooms. Skeet went over the main new features of C# 4 – sadly minus his furry friend Tony the Pony. Named Arguments, Default Parameters, Generic Variance (Covariance and Contravariance), Better COM integration and dynamic types were the new features presented and in an excellent way in my opinion. There were around 7 slides for the entire session, simply explaining the agenda. The way Skeet managed to catch the attention of the audience without the need for further explanation via slideshows – by simply using Visual Studio was inspiring. As much as I think I might need to have another, longer look into Covariance, Contravariance and Generic Variance as a whole, I took a lot from this (especially after not being a C# in Depth MEAP!). Wholly enjoyable session not only due to the masses of information crammed in, but the gentle banter Jon Skeet works well with.

Not Everything Is an Object by Gary Short

I don’t know whether it was Gary Short’s distinctive Scottish accent that captured my attention or if it was the excellent overview of OOP over the past 50 years. Either way, my attention to this session was focused solely on what Gary had to say. The audience were taken back to the 19th century and through the beginning of OOP, functional programming and eventually somehow we ended up with Clojure.  Not my language of choice but it was interesting to see how Clojure can simplify multi-threaded programming. One of the memorable quotes from this session would have to be: “How many of you do multithreaded programming in your day-to-day job? And how many of you find this easy, simple and enjoyable to do?”. Needless to say many hands went down after the latter question. I enjoyed this session because it not only went over the origins of OOP, but the downfalls and benefits of using a OOP language.

A Developer’s Guide to Encyrption [sic] by Barry Dorrans

Now this was about the funniest time I had at DDD8. Between the constant humiliation of Barry and Ben Hall (whose birthday it was on the day) – there was some content on Encryption and to be quite honest, I actually took a lot from this also. Refining my skills about hashing, salting, encryption keys (public & private) and the different algorithms now internationally accepted or deemed ‘unsafe’ was extremely interesting. Truth be told, Barry might have done better with a spell checker (if you’re reading this Barry, check this out) but overall the session was not only involving and interesting, but turned into quite a laugh.

Overall, I had an amazing day. I loved meeting new people and networking (@silverspoon, @colin_gemmell, @blowdart, @jonskeet, @rorybecker) with some of the people that help the whole development community come together like this. Obviously need a few thanks – Thanks to @plip, @zimakki, and all of the mentors mentioned above. Along with Microsoft and DevExpress – and not forgetting SQLbits without whom I wouldn’t have made it to the conference area!

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The only problem now is I wish DDDSW was closer and we had DevEvening weekly instead of monthly. Ah well.