11 March 2010  
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Agenda

Here is the outline of the day (the capacity of each room is shown in brackets):-  

 
Track 1
Queens Hall (350)
Track 2
Performing Arts Centre (100-110)
Track 3
Music Room (70-80)
Alternative Track
Conference Room (30)
8:00 – 9:00
Registration And Light Breakfast (Croissant/Danish)
9:00 – 9:15
Welcome And Introduction
 
 
 
9:30 – 10:30
Silverlight 3
Richard Costall
Embracing a new world – dynamic languages and .Net
Ben Hall
Red Gate
A PC in the living Room – Enter Vista Media Center
John Price
Park Bench Discussion
10:30 – 10:40
Break
10:40 – 11:40
Introduction to Windows Azure
Chris Hay
Get Going With jQuery
George Adamson
Introduction to Video Game Development with XNA
Kris Athi
Balloon Debate
11:40 – 12:00
Break (Tea, coffee)
12:00 – 13:00
Real-world MVC architecture
Steve Sanderson
Everything you Wanted to Know About Refactoring but Were Afraid to Ask
Gary Short
DevExpress
What is Scrum?
Richard Fennell
Black Marble
Small Is Beautiful And Hard
13:00 – 14:15
Lunch
13:10 – 14:10
Grok Talks
 
 
 
14:15 – 15:15
What’s New In C# 4 ?
Guy Smith-Ferrier
ASP.NET Front End Performance
Chris Hay
 Express Yourself
Marc Gravell
Planning Poker
15:15 – 15:40
Break (Cream Teas)
15:40 – 16:40
Game Shows (TBA)
Creating extendable applications using MEF
Ben Hall
Red Gate
Real World Interoperability With WCF
Jimmy Skowronski
Workshop – Issues for single handed developers
16:45 – 17:00
Close And Prize Draw
 
 
 
 
 
Geek Dinner

Download the slides for the Opening Session here

Download the slides for the Closing Session here

The Sessions

The day is made up of traditional technical sessions and an Alternative Track. Details of the sessions in the Alternative Track are in the box on the right and the traditional technical sessions are listed here.

 

Everything you Wanted to Know About Refactoring but Were Afraid to Ask (Gary Short)

Refactoring is a skill all modern developers need. In this presentation we'll take a deep dive into refactoring, starting with what problem refactoring solves, before moving on to look at some refactoring patterns and finishing with a look at tooling and why we should use a refactoring tool. Throughout this presentation there will be many code examples demonstrating the patterns and topics being discussed.
 

A PC in the living Room – Enter Vista Media Center (John Price)

Take a look at why Media Center can make your life richer. There are a number of different personal video recorders on the market, but Media Center has one major advantage, YOU... and the software you can write for it. We will look at MCML (Media Center markup language), and look at how the XBOX 360 can be used for more than just games when working in conjunction with Media Center. We will also look at how we can react to things that the user does and how we can use that information to affect the physical world, like dimming the lights automatically when you play a video, and other home automation ideas.
 

Creating extendable applications using MEF (Ben Hall)

Creating extendable applications has always been troublesome and time-consuming, there are many different approaches you could take each with their own set of issues. However, this is changing with the release of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) which is available from CodePlex and will be included with .Net framework 4.0. MEF makes extensibility more effective and can be taken advantage of both from within your application allowing for a more loosely coupled system, but also externally to allow 3rd parties to create extensions to hook into your application. In this session, you will learn how you can integrate MEF into your application for creating extensibility points, how to create the addins themselves and understand how MEF handles multiple versions of your core application and external addins. Finally, we will look at the relationship between MEF and MAF (Managed Addin Framework) and how MEF can be extended to meet your own requirements.

Embracing a new world – dynamic languages and .Net (Ben Hall)

.Net developers are about to enter a brave new world. With Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) developers can start taking advantage of dynamic languages, such as IronRuby and IronPython, on top of the .Net platform. However, why is this important?  In this session, Ben will provide an insight into when dynamic languages should be used and why they could result in a simpler, quicker solution. By using the DLR, you will learn how you can take dynamic languages and integrate them into your existing C# applications, allowing you to choose the appropriate language for the appropriate feature. Finally, Ben will look ahead at C# 4.0 and the changes it will bring in terms of dynamic language support and bring the two worlds even closer together.
 

Introduction to Windows Azure (Chris Hay)

In this session we will take a flight through Microsoft's new Cloud platform. We will take a brief look at the fluffy stuff and then skydive straight into writing our first cloud service. At the end of this session you should have a good understanding of the new platform and its capabilities and be able to start developing for it.
 

Real-world MVC architecture (Steve Sanderson)

If you could rewrite your current web application from scratch, how would you architect it? In this session I'll show how ASP.NET MVC supports up-to-date thinking in clean software design, including key domain driven design principles, test-driven development, and swappable data access technologies using repositories. I'll even throw in a bit of Silverlight, just to show how a strong domain model lets multiple UI technologies share not just data but also a single set of business rules. The focus will be on code, not slides or abstract explanations.
 

What is Scrum? (Richard Fennell)

There is a lot of talk about agile project management in general and Scrum in particular. In this session I will give a basic overview Scrum and how it can be applied to your projects.
 

Silverlight 3 (Richard Costall)

Announced at Mix09, Silverlight 3 is packed full of features, helping RIA developers in Styling, Graphics, Animations and much more. In this session Richard will go through this latest release in a demo packed session sure to have a wow factor!
 
 

ASP.NET Front End Performance (Chris Hay)

 
 

Express Yourself (Marc Gravell)

One of the core concepts that makes LINQ work is the "Expression" class - a versatile API for describing our intent without writing regular methods. In this session we will look at how we can use Expression ourselves, both with LINQ, and within our regular day-to-day code.In particular, we'll look at writing our own LINQ queries by hand (and why we might want to do this), and using Expression as a lightweight compiler, avoiding the pain of Reflection.Emit. We'll also take a quick look at what might be available in .NET 4.0.
 

Get Going With jQuery (George Adamson)

Introduction to the jQuery library and the happiness it can bring. Binding events with unobtrusive javascript; using the css-inspired selector syntax; chaining; visual effects; easy peasy AJAX in just one line; working in harmony with AJAX.Net; Simpler cross-browser, unobtrusive, progressive enhancement with jQuery.
 

Real World Interoperability With WCF (Jimmy Skowronski)

Living in the SOA world we have expect that one day we will have to cross the .NET borders and communicate with rest of the world. Either there are web services over the world that we would like to integrate into our applications or we would like to expose our application to the world. While Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) offers a dozens of configuration options, which should cover as much various needs as possible, many of them are either too sophisticated or limited in this or another way. In this session we will see to use WCF to ensure interoperability between .NET and other platform. We will investigate available configuration options and build code that will not only work with web services out there, but also will be available for other platform clients. My aim is to show you that interoperability is simpler than it looks like.
 

Introduction to Video Game Development with XNA (Kris Athi)

Video Games are fun. Whether you’re playing the latest halo shooter game on the Xbox or just a quick session of good old solitaire these works of art can bring many hours of enjoyment and offer a break from the business of real life.
In this session, we’ll be exploring the Microsoft game development framework   - XNA.
This exciting framework aims to democratize game development and make it a fun and enjoyable experience. We will explore what XNA is, what it can do for you and just how simple it can be to create a basic game using the programming skills you already have.
 

What’s New In C# 4 ? (Guy Smith-Ferrier)

At PDC 2008 Microsoft unveiled C# 4 and all of the new features within. So now we start the roller-coaster of catch up all over again as we desperately struggle to keep up with what’s new and why we should be interested in the latest flashy feature. In this session we will look at dynamically typed objects, optional and named parameters, type embedding, type equivalence, loose type coupling and more. In addition if we have time we will look at the “compiler as a service” feature to be released after C# 4.
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Alternative Track

The majority of sessions at DDD South West are the traditional 60 minute presentations from one person, a laptop and a projector. But oranges are not the only fruit and the Alternative Track is something different. The Alternative Track is a collection of quite different sessions that take advantage of the power of community. Here's what we've got in store:-

Park Bench Discussion

The Park Bench Discussion uses a Park Bench big enough for three people at the front of the room. Anyone in the room can ask a question, but if you want to speak in answer it, or they want to speak to respond to an answer or discuss their own situation they have to come and sit on the bench. When this happens, two of the people on the bench will kick the person who has been on the bench the longest off, to make way for the new speaker. The topic of this discussion is ‘Your working environment and experience. What you like, What you don’t like, what worked, what didn’t. We expect to talk about team size, structures, hierarchies, pair-programming, good leaders, clients who change their minds, nightmare bosses etc…..
 

Small is beautiful and hard

A session for those who like to get the detail right which will focus on three 5 line example methods, looking at how they can be transformed from average (C#) code to something that is more readable, more testable, faster and generally more beautiful. Since beauty is subjective and may well be confined to the eye of the beholder, we expect some lively discussion.
 

Workshop – Issues for single handed developers

This workshops aims to attract people who are either experienced single handed developers, who may choose to act more in a mentoring role, those who are new to or thinking about being single handed developers or just anybody interested.  The session takes the format of a half hour talk followed by half an hour of general discussion and sharing of experience around the issues such as working on your own, working at home, need for a sounding board / mentor, finance, insurance, keeping up to date etc. covered in the talk.
 

Balloon Debate

A chance to argue the relative merits / value to mankind of C#, VB, Ruby, C++ and F#. At the start of the debate the balloon contains 5 people, each representing one of the languages. But the balloon is sinking fast and some people need to be thrown out. Each of the people has 5 minutes to make their case as to why they should not be thrown out. After half an hour the audience will vote which 2 should remain.  The audience then has the chance to say why one of the remaining two should be thrown out, and then each remaining speaker has five minutes to say again why their remaining balloon mate should be thrown out and they should not be. There is final audience vote to select the winner.
 

Planning Poker

An opportunity to gain an insight into how your peers estimate. A simple and well known development task will be given to the group in the form of 'User Stories'. As individuals, you must each provide an estimate for the work involved by all, 'Showing your hand' simultaneously. That was the easy bit; now you must discuss and negotiate with the other members of the team so that you can come to a consensus on the estimate. Through the negotiation process you will discover different approaches to estimating tasks based on experience, naivety and paranoia. You will also see that not everyone has the same technical approach to solve the problem.
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