The Orlando Code Camp was a huge success.  Lots of great sessions and talented speakers. A special thanks goes out to Shawn Weisfeld of the Orlando .NET Users Group and Roy Lawson of the Lakeland Users Group, as well as the many other volunteers and speakers.

Below, I've posted my Power Point slides and code samples for both my sessions at the Code Camp.

The Unity Application Block

Beginning Test Driven Development

Orlando Code Camp 2008 - Saturday March 22, 2008

The FREE Orlando Code Camp will be on Saturday, March 22, 2008. Last year's Orlando Code Camp had 481 registered attendees, 52 sessions, and 38 speakers. If you are looking for free .NET developer training by hardcore .net developers in the Florida community, mark your calendar for this year's Orlando Code Camp.

Signup now, its filling up fast!

I am giving 2 presentations this year:

Beginning Test Driven Development
In this session I will discuss Unit Testing Goals, Principles and Philosophies such as Test First, Test Last and the dreaded, Test After. Learn what creating good unit tests mean and how it will help improve the quality of your applications.

The Unity Application Block
The Unity Application block is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. Microsoft has finally developed an Inversion of Control (IoC) container that will appear in the Enterprise Application Block. In this session I will introduce the basic concepts of Dependency Injection and review how the Unity Application Block is used.

Lots of good content you can watch online or download for later viewing.

Mix08 Sessions

This Month's Meeting

Register for this meeting.

I'm giving a presentation at the Lakeland Users Group this Tuesday, January 15, 2008 from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM  entitled "Unit Testing Principles and Goals". 

I will discuss Unit Testing Goals, Principles and Philosophies such as Test First, Test Last and the dreaded, Test After.   Learn what creating good unit tests mean and how it will help improve the quality of your applications.  Learn to leverage to power of Test Drive Development and, when necessary, how to write Unit Tests for existing code.

Location:
2525 Drane Field Road, Suite 10
Lakeland, FL 33811

Updated:

ThoughtWorks has a new IT Matters Podcast that discusses the business and technology issues facing the IT Industry. The First topic is on Domain Specific Languages Part 1 of 2.  A panel of ThoughtWorks employees including, Martin Fowler, Dr. Rebecca Parsons, Neal Ford and Jay Fields; all participate in a discussion around domain-specific languages (DSLs).

Topics include: 

1. How to build effective DSLs

2. When to use a DSL

3. What pitfalls to avoid

4. Some real-world examples of DSL best practices.

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SDK that includes tools for Developing Domain Specific languages in Visual Studio 2008, the timing could not be better.  I am looking forward to listening to Part 2.

One of the best ways that I've discovered to keep up to date with the constant change of technology is to listen to podcasts.  I find this a great way to learn during my daily commute and exercise regiment (refilling my coffee AND getting the mail). 

One thing I would encourage is to attempt to listen while coding.  If you can listen to music while you code you can probably listen to podcasts with little effort.  Everyone is different but here is what I've discovered about myself.

• If both ears are listening to a podcast I get too distracted and cannot concentrate enough on coding.
• If I listen using my right ear, I grok almost nothing of the podcast content.
• If I listen with my left ear, it seems to be a good balance between listening and doing.

I've heard of some who code while listening to a podcast in double speed to save time.  I can't do that but, apparently, some can. 

Here are the podcasts I find invaluable as a developer

	Polymorphic Podcast	Craig Shoemaker brings insight into software development in the .NET platform along with interviews with industry luminaries. Good content, good quality but an inconsistent schedule.
	ARCast with Ron Jacobs	Ron Jacobs is a Microsoft employee and delivers a weekly podcast on Channel 9 that dives into some tough .NET architecture topics.
	Software Engineering Radio	Not specifically .NET related but contains a wide spectrum of Software topics from Dynamic Languages to Transactional Memory to Fault Tolerance.
	Software Quality Engineering Conferences Podcast	Interviews with speakers from the Agile Development Practices 2007 Conference
	OnSoftware	Weekly interviews with some of the software industry's leading developers about a wide range of programming and development issues
	WebDevRadio Podcast	Web Development Discussion
	Agile Toolkit Podcast	Topics covering all things Agile.
	.NET Rocks!	.NET Rocks! is a weekly talk show for anyone interested in programming on the Microsoft .NET platform. The shows range from introductory information to hardcore geekiness
	Hanselminutes	Scott Hanselman discusses utilities and tools, gives practical how-to advice, and discusses ASP.NET or Windows issues and workarounds.
	ASP.NET PodCast	The ASP.NET Podcast brings a technology focus to the area of podcasts.  This podcast is geared towards developers with applications that scale to a large amount of data and users.

I would like to hear what others are listening to and what software you use to manage your podcasts.  I have a love/hate relationship with ITunes.

UPDATE:

Top Developer Podcasts Part II

Right now Techsmith is offering Camtasia and Snag-It for free.  You download the demo then register for a free license key.  These are previous versions of the software but they are still feature packed and will solve most of your screen capture needs.

If you don't have an MSDN subscription and you can't wait to try out the new Visual Studio 2008 features you can download the express edition and learn the new features while you wait for the professional edition to be available in stores.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

 When: 11/28/2007  6:30 PM - 8:00 PM

Abstract: You can run, you can switch jobs, and you can write unit tests, but invariably at some point you will run into legacy code. Legacy code hides in many forms - sealed classes, spaghetti and big-ball-of-mud code, data in disparate data sources (or incompatible schemas). As an architect, there are steps you can take to get ahead of these issues and begin to make your codebases something you actually want to change. In this talk, we will discuss concepts from Michael Feathers' work on Working Effectively with Legacy Code as well as Scott Ambler's work on refactoring databases. You'll see tips and tricks to model your legacy code and data, and hear about ways to begin to turn your legacy code into a usable base."

Speaker: Cory Foy is an agile developer passionate about languages such as C# and Ruby. He currently works for Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer, has been a developer on the NUnit team, and is known to speak at code camps and user groups across the country. He lives just north of Tampa with his wife and 2 daughters.

Registration: here