I'll be in Boston, MA on March 22 to teach an open enrollment course for DevelopMentor. If you want to learn about WCF, WPF, Silverlight, LINQ, Entity Framework, and more there is still time to sign up (note the date may no longer appear on the public calendar).

   http://www.develop.com/course/new-net3-net35-linq

Mention this blog post and you'll receive a discount as well.

I recently did a webcast for DevelopMentor on using the routing framework introduced in ASP.NET MVC within ASP.NET WebForms based applications to build more modern websites without a major rewrite of existing web applications. The talk was called "Building Modern Websites with ASP.NET WebForms".

Here's all the related downloads. We had some microphone troubles so I want to apologize in advance for the sub-optimal sound quality.

   

     

You can also download the slides and peepleocity.com sample website built during the presentation.

At DevelopMentor we have been running a bunch of free webcasts. Last month it was TDD and Agile. This month we are running 4 webcasts celebrating the announcements around .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and PDC 2009.

Join me Monday, November 23rd and register here:

     http://bit.ly/aspwebforms

We’ll talk about integrating ASP.NET’s routing infrastructure into existing an ASP.NET WebForms application. This allows you to build SEO websites with URLs like

      http://dotnet.ubbuzz.com/tag/.NET+4.0

while still taking advantage of all the productivity features of WebForms such as post-backs, controls, UpdatePanel, and so on.

We have room for a couple hundred more attendees so please register and be part of the fun. I promise lots of demos and somedisdainful comments about PowerPoint!

Share it with your friends (social, virtual, real, and other types) using the widgets below!

ASP.NET MVC: What’s that, you’d rather hear about ASP.NET MVC, not this creaky old WebForms stuff? That’s Brock Allen’s talk: http://bit.ly/intromvc

WF 4: Is WF 4 and visual programming your thing? Check out Maurice de Beijer’s WF 4 talk: http://bit.ly/meetwf4

New Parallel Extensions your thing: Check out Andy Clymer’s PFX talk. (link to follow soon).

Cheers,
Michael

Recently Llewellyn Falco and I did a webcast for DevelopMentor where we demonstrated some TDD techniques and introduced Approval Tests. We let the audience choose our project and they chose Space Invaders. It was all great fun. Now the videos and MP3 streams are online and available for download.

  

Be sure to check out the write-up we did afterward where we talked about the tools and gave you a chance to try it for yourself:

   TDD Space Invaders Write-up

You can also watch two other, higher level agile webcasts by Bill Nazzaro here:

   Agile Webcasts at DevelopMentor

Cheers!
Michael

A joint post by Llewellyn Falco and Michael Kennedy

[Update: Get the videos and additional downloads for this webcast.]

As a follow-up to our "Avoiding 5 Common Pitfalls in Unit Testing" article we did a webcast where we took a problem from the audience and solved it live and unrehearsed on stage. These kinds of performances are always a risk but that's part of what makes them fun.

Of course, the question is could we have done it better? Here's your chance to try it for yourself (details below).

The Problem:

Our viewers chose to have us build the game Space Invaders. The first thing we had to do to sketch out a basic scenario we could implement. We started with a picture to remind what Space Invaders even was:



This was too big of a scenario for us to tackle in the allotted 40 minutes for programming. So then we started by creating a simpler scenario which we sketched out on the "whiteboard":


               Click for full size image.


Flushing Out the Scenario:

In doing this, a couple of things were revealed about the game.

First, we wanted to make the tank and aliens all be the same size so we could put them on a grid. But then we saw that our bullet wouldn't fit that story, so we introduced the idea of relative sizes. We also realized that even though we drew the block, it was too complex for the first scenario and it would have to wait.

Notice that as we started writing the scenario in English, there are mistakes, irrelevancies, and problems with the order. This is OK. The thing to remember is that all of this was done for the sole purpose of creating a recipe for a scenario we could test. That scenario is the following:

[TestMethod]
public void TestSimpleKill()
{
   // 1. Create a 15x10 board.
   // 2. Place a 3x2 tank at 1x8.
   // 3. Place a 2x2 alien at 7x3 heading west.
   // 4. tank shoots
   // 5. advance 4 turns
   // 6. not won
   // 7. advance
   // 8. win
}

Now that we had the recipe, we could go about writing the code.

Here's your chance to play at home!

1. Set your timer to 40 minutes.
2. Create a new test project.
3. Paste that method above.
4. Translate the comments into code.

If you believe there's a better process, we invite you to try that as well.

We made it to step 4 during our presentation (download code below) and estimate another 15 minutes would have had the whole scenario done, tested, and well-factored.

Stories vs. Requirements (stories win):

We'd like to point out a couple of things about the story. First, it was quick to write the story. We did it in 5 minutes. Second, it translates well to code because it has behavior and objects working together. Let's compare that to the requirements that this story flushed-out.

Need a board Boards should have width & height Boards contain game objects Game objects have a witdth, height Game objects have the ability to move each turn Aliens move either left or right each turn Bullets move either up or down each turn Bullets are 1x1 Tanks are 3x2 Aliens are 2x2 The game is not won until all the aliens are killed The game is won if alll the aliens are killed An Alien is killed if it is hit by a bullet Tanks can fire Firing with a tank creates a bullet going up from the space directly above the tank

Now we want to point out that this requirements doc is much hard to understand than our story. For example, if you were to add more requirements (e.g. an alien also shoots) is that easy to determine whether we have complete requirements? It also takes much more effort to create and especially to tell if it is complete. People aren't made to handle requirement documents well but we are story-telling machines. We embrace this in our coding techniques.

We'd also like to mention some of the tools discussed at the end.

For remote collaboration we use:

Skype (audio / video)
VNC for screen keyboard sharing
RDP (windows remote desktop) -- requires Windows 2003/2008 server for pairing.

Source Control:
TortoiseSVN
TortoiseGit

Developer Tools:
Resharper
CodeRush

Testing Tools:
MsTest (in Visual Studio Professional and up)
NUnit
NCover
TortioseDiff
Approvals Tests
Approvals Tests CodeRush add-in
Rhino Mock
TypeMock

If you try this scenario yourself, please leave a comment about your experience.

Download the code and slides from the webcast here:

   Code: TddWithLlewellynAndMichael.zip
   Slides dmtdd.pdf

Cheers -- Michael and Llewellyn

[Update: See the follow-up post here: TDD Invades Space Invaders]

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 10am Pacific time Llewellyn Falco and I will be giving a live, unscripted, and no safety-net demonstration of Test Driven Development (TDD) as part of the DevelopMentor webinar series (this particular series is a 3-part series on Agile development).

We already have a bunch of attendees registered. But we have room for as many of you who are interested in agile and TDD. Sign up here:

   http://bit.ly/dm-tdd-m-and-l

In addition to core TDD techniques, you will see how an amazing technique and set of tools designed by Llewellyn called Approval Tests makes writing tests as simple as verifying an image or text file. Tired of writing 50 lines of test code for every 50 lines of production code but you still want the power of TDD? You need to learn more about Approvals and we'll demo that live tomorrow!

I hope to see you all online. Feel free to help me get the word out by tweeting this or shouting it (see icons below).

Cheers, Michael.

I recently wrote an article for DevelopMentor's Developments newsletter entitled Azure Storage. Read it at the DevelopMentor website here:

http://www.develop.com/content/newsletters/aprilazure

I've republished here for my readers. Enjoy!

---

Developments: Azure Storage

by Michael Kennedy

[Listen to this article as a podcast: Azure-Storage-Article-Kennedy.mp3]

October 27th 2008, Los Angeles CA - It's 9 AM and Microsoft is hosting PDC (their most forward looking developer conference). Ray Ozzie and company are introducing Windows Azure: A new platform which is their first foray into the nascent world of large-scale utility computing. This scalable and reliable platform-as-a-service functionality is commonly referred to as "Cloud Computing" because it runs somewhere out there on the Internet.

Computing platforms that rival the reliability of the utility grids (e.g. electric and gas) which we daily take for granted have long been the stuff of dreams.

A few companies have realized this dream - Google and Amazon come to mind as a couple of the rare exceptions who have accomplished this goal. These companies' web properties seem to handle unbounded amounts of traffic with zero down time. The data centers, redundancies, software engineering and operations know-how required to make this happen are exceedingly expensive. Some reports have Google spending over $2.4 billion (that's 2,400 million dollars) on data centers in 2007 alone.

Prior to large-scale cloud computing efforts (circa 2005), most of us could only dream of such scalability and reliability. Today we have at least three highly reputable companies offering some kind of pay as you go cloud computing platform - Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

Microsoft's Azure is a new comer to the industry. But for .NET developers, it is not to be ignored. Azure allows you to use your existing skills to build essentially the same .NET applications you are familiar with and "deploy them to the cloud."

These scalable, reliable, and geographically-replicated applications that run on Azure depend on data of course. Virtually all applications we write will be nothing without their underlying data. But if we simply use the tried and true methods of data storage such as the file system or a (single) database server our data is not all that scalable or reliable. Because we cannot have a scalable and reliable application without data, we need a new mechanism for storing and accessing data from our Azure applications.

Enter Azure Storage

Azure storage is the storage component of the Azure platform. It is actually three data services in one:

• Blob Storage - stores unstructured data essentially as a file, limited to 50 GB of data per blob.
• Table Storage - stores structured data that is somewhat like a database. For full database capabilities there is a high level feature called Sql Data Services (SDS).
• Queues - provides interprocess communication functionality between various web and worker roles in your hosted services or even applications running outside of Azure. Queues can pass small xml or binary messages - less than 64 kb per message.

In this article, we will cover just the basics of the three storage services of Windows Azure. I want to give you a sense for what it's like to program against Azure Storage. At the base level all access to Azure Storage uses pure REST APIs. This means that you can access it from any HTTP enabled platform / language. For example, to download the blob data called "config.xml" in the container called "settings" for the Azure project "kennedy" you would simply issue a GET to the Uri:

   http://kennedy.blob.core.windows.net/settings/config.xml

To save data in a blob you do HTTP POSTs and PUTs in a similar fashion. However, real life is full of edge cases, error handling, security, and serialization which makes the pure HTTP model error prone. Thus, a sample library serves as the de facto .NET API to Azure Storage and ships with the Azure SDK. It is called StorageClient and can be found in default installs here:

   C:\Program Files\Windows Azure SDK\v1.0\samples\StorageClient

We will examine working with each of the storage services from the perspective of the StorageClient library - but keep in mind that ultimately this library is a wrapper around a basic and open RESTful API.

Setting The Stage: The Sample Application

To explore Azure Storage I have written a simple photo sharing distributed application. These set of applications allow users to upload photos to a photo sharing site. These photos must be reviewed and approved by moderators of the site. Once approved, the general public can view and interact with the photos. For a concrete example, you could imagine writing a distributed version of the wallpaper sharing site InterfaceLift and deploying it on Azure in this fashion.

You can download the sample application and follow along if you want to see the full source code and try it out yourself. Just be sure to start the Development Storage utility that comes with the Azure SDK before running the application.

Our distributed application consists of three parts.

A typical use case might be as follows (see diagram below).

1. We upload a photo submission with our uploader application. The photo is uploaded to Azure blob storage and a message is sent via an Azure Message Queue to all available reviewer applications. Additional information about the submitter is associated with the photo in Azure table storage.
2. The reviewer application watches the message queue for new messages. When one arrives, the photo is added to a list of pending submissions. The reviewer can either reject (delete) the submission or approve it - move it to a permanent blob storage location where it will be publicly viewable.
3. Users visit our website and can view all approved photos. This list will change in real-time because it is driven by the reviewer application. The web application simply pulls all photos from the approved photo container in Azure blob storage.

Saving Data: Creating Azure Blobs

To save data to Azure Blob Storage, you must realize blob storage follows the ACE pattern (Authority, Container, Entity) to describe a blob. Authority is simply your Azure solution name. Containers are analogous to folders. And entities are analogous to files.

The listing below is essentially the code that runs when the uploader application uploads a pending image submission to blob storage.

Listing 1:

Sending Notifications: Azure Queuing

In addition to uploading the image to the pending images container in blob storage, we will send a message to a message queue to notify any active or future reviewers of the new submission.

Listing 2.

Saving (More) Data: Structured Storage and Azure Tables

Finally, for the upload application, we must also save some information about the contributor. In Azure Storage we have two reasonable places to store this information.

First, we could save this information directly in blob storage as meta-data associated with the blob itself. This is straightforward and easy. But there is a big limitation: information in this meta-data is not queryable. Suppose I want get all images associated with a single contributor. There is no way in Azure Blob Storage to say give me all the blobs with this filter on the meta-data. You would have to pull the properties of every blob and do the comparison client-side. That's tantamount to filling a DataSet with "SELECT * FROM PendingImages" and it's a bad idea.

Instead we will use the third type of Azure Storage: Azure Table Storage. Table Storage allows us to store data with up to 256 properties and query this data as if it were a database. It is exactly what we need for the contributor information. However, you must realize this is not a database. A better mental picture is a durable collection of Dictionary object (as in Dictionary from System.Collections.Generics) with querying built on top. I say this because there is no schema or relational constructs in Azure Table Storage. If you need that, then you'll want Sql Data Services - a service on top of the core Azure platform.

The code to add an entry to Azure Table Storage does not fit into a single method as it's driven through the interaction of several classes we must define. Azure Table Storage can be accessed via ADO.NET Data Services (client-side) and this is the method we will use.

First we'll define a client-side schema for our entry by creating a class called Contributor which derives from the class TableStorageEntity (from the StorageClient library).

Listing 3.

Additionally we must define the tables and queries available to ADO.NET Data Services by created a class derived from TableStorageDataServiceContext and we do that below. We simply have one table called Contributors.

Listing 4.

With those two items in place, we can insert a "row" into Azure Table Storage as follows:

Listing 5.

As for querying Azure Table Storage that is very straight-forward. Because we are using ADO.NET Data Services, querying can be done via LINQ as in "from c in svc.Contributors select c.Name". Ultimately ADO.NET Data Services is also built on a RESTful API so this translates to the underlying HTTP REST calls. Alternatively, you can use that REST API directly from .NET or any other platform.

Waiting on Queues: The Reviewer Application's Code

Next, let's look at how we monitor and pull messages from Azure Queuing. Ultimately we must poll the queue using a RESTful HTTP request. But the StorageClient resurfaces this to us as simple events.

Listing 6.

We won't cover how we move a blob from the pendingImages blob container to the approvedImages blob container which happens when a reviewer approves an image. You can look at the sample to see how that is done.

Ultimately It's About the Website

Finally, let's look at the web application that actually displays the approved images. We don't do anything fancy such as paging or error handling that you'd see in a real application. But this will give you a good idea how to work with the blob data as a collection.

Here we'll create a BlobStorage object and access the BlobContainer approvedImageContainer as we have been in most of the listings. But then instead of saving or reading blobs, we use the ListBlobs method to simply list all the approve images in that container. In order to show the images on our webpage, we just use the BlobProperties.Uri and directly reference that in our HTML. Our ASP.NET application does not touch the data. Rather the consumers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc) of the HTML pull the image data directly from blob storage as they would from any web server.

Listing 7.

Now you have a good idea of the concepts and motivation behind Azure Storage. You have seen some typical usages of each of the three storage features: blob storage, table storage, and queuing. Our samples made use of the sample storage API library called StorageClient. Underlying this library we saw that Azure Storage is entirely accessed via RESTful APIs.

Want to get started? Visit http://www.azure.com and choose "Try It Now" to register for a CTP Azure account. You'll need to download the various SDK's listed on that same page. They will install the Visual Studio projects required for working with Azure as well as the Development Storage and Development Fabric so you can develop and debug your applications before deploying them to the cloud.

If you want some intensive, expert-lead training on Azure and associated .NET 4.0 topics be sure to contact DevelopMentor. Or call 800.699.1932 to find out what classes we have available today.

I recently got the chance to record a screencast discussing REST-oriented web services in WCF. If you're interested in WCF you should definitely check it out because WCF and REST make an awesome combination.
   WCF-REST-Kennedy-Peepleocity.wmv 35 MB (WMV HD)

   WCF-REST-Kennedy-Peepleocity.mp4 96 MB (MP4 / iPad)

I cover building WCF services using REST princples, the WebGet and WebInvoke attributes, working with the SyndicationFeed & Rss20FeedFormatter classes, and configuration-free WCF hosting in IIS.

You can also download the source code of the project built in the screencast.

Finally, if you're willing to do without video you can download just the audio as an MP3.

My esteemed colleague, friend, and fellow instructor at DevelopMentor Jason Whittington gave a great presentation on advanced .NET debugging recently at the Oklahoma City Developer's Group. They luckily recorded it on video and published it on their website so that it may "live on in the Google".

   Debugging The Future: The Video by Jason Whittington

 


If you want to debug .NET applications right down to their memory footprint, this talk is for you.

If you like this type of presentation, be sure to check out the classes we offer at DevelopMentor.

ClickOnce is a great deployment model for many Windows applications built with the .NET Framework. Too bad it isn't supported for C++, VB 6, or other technologies. Or is it...

Surprisingly, you can deploy your unmanaged apps with ClickOnce. You just need a tiny .NET app to get it started.

Here's how it works:

1. Take your existing C++ project.
   
   
2. Add to the solution a .NET console application.
   
   
3. Change the project settings on the console application to "Windows Application".
   
   
4. Write the following code for your Main method of your .NET launcher application:
   

   static void Main(string[] args)
   {
       try
       {
           Process.Start( "TheRealApp.exe" );
       }
       catch ( Exception x )
       {
           string msg = "Error launch application:\n\n" + x;
           string cap = "Error Launching Application";
           MessageBox.Show( msg, cap, MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error );
       }
   }
   

5. Set the build path of your C++ app to be in the main folder for your .NET application.
   
   
6. Add the C++ app and its libraries (if any) as existing items in the .NET app.
   
   
7. Change the build action to "Always Copy" as shown here:
   
   
8. Then you publish your .NET application and when it runs, TADA!, the C++ app is deployed, versioned, and kept up to date as well.
   

If you want to try it yourself, you can run this sample application here:

   Run Michael's Useless C++ App via ClickOnce...

You can also download the source.

When I talk about LINQ people often ask whether it’s possible to have dynamic queries with LINQ. An example of this is presenting the user with a UI that allows them to optionally filter by some criteria or other and sort by some criteria. This was straightforward if you built-up a SQL string in code.

The compiled, static nature of LINQ makes dynamic queries appear difficult at first. They are not and this video and sample application shows you how to accomplish just this.

                        Screen shot of sample application

You can download the source code here:

           Kennedy-Dynamic-Linq.zip (88.34 KB)

And you can watch the screencast video here:

          Kennedy-Dynamic-Linq.wmv (35.7 MB)

Of course, if you like this post, please kick it:

You may have heard that the sessions for Mix 08 were posted online and you can view or download them until your heart is content.

Mix 08 is becoming an increasingly important event in the .NET space. I spent a fair amount of time watching the sessions in the evenings. I was teaching a class and couldn't attend myself.

So who wouldn't want to curl up with a cold beer, a warm laptop, and a bunch of .NET presentations? That's what I want to know. But, maybe you don't have time to go through all 89 sessions? Don't despair, I'll distill them down for you.

BTW, I'd love to link directly to them, but SilverLight and Flash are broken web metaphors (you can't link their content) so you'll have to find them at http://sessions.visitmix.com/.

Without further ado, I present to you my top 5 most important sessions from Mix 08:

1. T22 - Developing ASP.NET Applications Using the Model View Controller Pattern
   Scott Hanselman
   
   
2. T01 - Creating a RESTful API with Windows Communication Foundation
   Aaron Sloman and Haider Sabri
   
   
3. UX03 - The Back of the Napkin: Solving Design Problems (and Selling Your Solutions) with Pictures
   Dan Roam
   
   
4. T11 - What's New in Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5
   Rob Relyea
   
   
5. T26 - Building Applicaitons and Services with.NET Framework 3.5
   Justin Smith

Of course the keynotes were great too - but they don't really belong in this category.

So get out there and learn something! :) And kick it if you like it:

It was all going so smoothly. Jason Whittington, Mark Smith and I were teaching the big DevelopMentor event here in Los Angeles (Guerrilla.NET) when my presentation on the ThreadPool took a nose dive. It started with a great joke involving Wilson (the volleyball from Cast Away).

Wilson and I built an application to compute a multiplication table where each computation was (artificially) slow. To speed it up we threw it at the thread pool using delegate.BeginInvoke. We figured that the ThreadPool would allocate 25 or so threads and the table would display quickly. Here's the expected output - pretty much the same thing we've seen since about .NET 1.0:

    

Each color represents the thread that did that computation.

For the last 7 years, the behavior has been that as the ThreadPool was overloaded, it would steadily start up new threads at the rate of one every 500 milliseconds until it hits its upper limit (typically). Using Performance Monitor (perfmon) we can watch the thread pool adding threads. It usually looks something like this:

    

Much to our surprise we saw completely different behavior. The thread pool added the first 15 or so threads quickly (as expected) but then stalled. New threads were not created every 500ms, instead they were added at increasingly long intervals. My demo took almost twice as long to run as it had the last time I did this demo a few months ago.

Jason, Mark, and I took this code, ported it back to .NET 1.1 and ran it side-by-side with .NET 3.5 and here's what we saw (blue = 3.5, red = 1.1):

    

As of .NET 3.5 the upper limit of the ThreadPool was increased: Knew that.

But, it appears that v3.5 of the CLR changes the policy for adding threads to the thread pool. Rather than adding threads regularly when under load the thread pool uses a logarithmic backoff. My colleague Jason Whittington remarked that this behavior looked similar to the behavior of the thread pool in "Rotor" (the shared-source version of the CLR). We speculated that this backoff algorithm makes sense given the new 250-thread per CPU maximum - it would take a long time to reach that if the runtime waits longer and longer to start a new thread. The 250-thread limits makes it less likely that your application will deadlock the thread pool, and the exponential backoff algorithm keeps the thread pool from creating too many threads too quickly.

Why should you care? Usually you won't, but it could have dramatic impact if you count on that behavior. For example, in our contrived case, .NET 1.1 ran about twice as fast as .NET 3.5 ( ! ):

    

Here's the program and source code (trimmed down to run in both .NET 1.1 and 3.5).

    Math.zip (6.38 KB)

Needless to say, Wilson and I felt kinda stood up.

     

Please see the follow up post on Breaking changes and now there is screencast, movie version as well.

I'll be speaking tonight at The Central New Jersey .NET User Group (http://www.njdotnet.net) on one of my favorite topics: Five Fundamental Object Oriented Design Principles for Agile Development.

Thanks to Jason Beres (http://www.geekswithblogs.net/jberes) for inviting me to speak at his user group and welcoming me to New Jersey.

Once you've attended the talk, you might be interested in downloading the slides and sample code:

    http://www.MichaelCKennedy.net/Talks/Downloads/NJdotNet/AgileDesign.zip

You also might want to look into some of the tools I was using in Visual Studio. See an older post on my tricked out Visual Studio.

Thanks to Reza Madani and Mike Vincent for having me speak at the combined meeting of OC VBUG and OC C# last night. It was a packed house which was wonderful, but I felt bad for folks who had to stand in the back for 2 hours.

The audience participation was great. Thanks to everyone who asked questions or had comments.

You can download the slides and samples from my website here:

http://www.michaelckennedy.net/Talks/Downloads/OCVBandCSharp/AgileDesign.zip

Many attendees also noticed the tricked-out Visual Studio I was using during the presentation. That was from CodeRush and Refactor! both highly recommended. You can check those out here:

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/CodeRush/
http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Refactor/

and DevExpress has some very interesting screen-casts demos here:

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/CodeRush/Training.xml

Also I was using the new Vista programming font Consolas, which you can download here:

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Thanks to David McCater for hosting my Agile Object Oriented Design talk at San Diego .NET Developers Group on May 2nd. I met some great guys and thoroughly enjoyed talking about agile and OOD topics with everyone.

You can download the slides at:

http://www.michaelckennedy.net/talks/downloads/sddotnetdev/agiledesign.zip

Dave, over at extremeplanner.com, wrote a nice summary of the talk I gave at XPSD. I completely agree with him that "a review of these fundamentals [is] refreshing." As you can see, I'm doing my part to spread the word:

• Upcoming Talk in Orange County
• Upcoming Talk in San Diego (Tentative)
  
• The Rock & Roll Code Camp (details upcoming)
  
  
• XPSD Object Oriented Design Talk (past presentation)
• January SoCal Code Camp Talk (past presentation)

Many pundits and authors in the software industry are busy promoting the next big product/feature/etc that they seem to forget that these things only provide second order benefits as compared to the more "fundamental" ideas such as good object oriented design. For example, looking through some of the user groups' upcoming meetings you'll find topics like:

• Looking at some Cool New Features of ASP.NET 2.0: Managing Membership and Role Management
• Leveraging the New Windows Mobile APIs
• Visual Studio Team System
• Closer to the Data: Using Managed Code in the Database with SQL Server 2005

Lots of neat, whiz-bang features, but I would contend that 90% of the audience would be much better off if they had heard a good talk about solid OOD or TDD or this list goes on. It's been my experience that much of these old (5-15 years), tried and true fundamentals are unfamiliar to most developers.

So here is my call to action:

If you are a speaker or author, reach for something big for your next topic. Yes it's easier to write/talk about the details of the next version of feature X. But you'll do your audience a service if you reach higher, think bigger, and go for something "fundamental."

If you are attending user groups and code camps, ask for and expect something more than a talk on the of latest version of product X.

I am tenatively scheduled to speak in San Diego, CA at the “San Diego .NET Developers Group” (http://sddotnetdg.org/). We haven’t arranged a date yet, but I think it will be around late spring / early summer.

This time I will again be presenting a talk on object oriented design and agile development, probably a slight variation on the general topics from my other talks.

I’ll provide more details as they become available.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking in Orange County, CA on May 9th from 6pm onward.

I’ll will be presenting a talk on object oriented design and agile development at a joint meeting of the “Orange Country C# Developers Group” (http://sddotnetdg.org/) and the “Orange County VB.NET User Group” (http://www.ocvbug.org/).

I encourage anyone in the Anaheim / L.A. area interested in the interplay between object oriented design and agile software development to attend.

[NOTE: This recent post refers to a much older (March 3, 2006) event.]

I want thank Carlton Nettleton and June Clarke for inviting me to present my “Five Fundamental Object Oriented Design Principles for Agile Development” talk at XPSD this past March. The audience participation was great and I really learned a lot myself!

You can download the slides and code samples here:

http://michaelckennedy.net/Talks/Downloads/XPSD/AgileDesign.zip

 

[NOTE: This recent post refers to a much older (Jan 21, 2006) event.]

I want to thank everyone who attended my talk at the first Southern California Code Camp. I really enjoyed speaking there and I got the sense that many of you got something from the talk. In case you weren’t there and are interested, here’s the abstract:

Five Fundamental Object Oriented Design Principles for Agile Development

This session will present five object oriented design principles that facilitate agile software development. These general design principles promote the creation of testable, maintainable, and reusable software. The principles include the Open Closed Principle and the Liskov Substitution Principle. The interaction between Agile Development and these principles will be demonstrated using several code samples.

 You can download the slides and code samples here:

http://michaelckennedy.net/Talks/Downloads/SoCalCodeCamp/AgileDesign.zip