There and Back Again : Events

Call for Papers on Software Testing

hdierking — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:15:37 GMT

One of the fun aspects of my job is that I get to work with some really brilliant folks - and every now and then they give me the opportunity to participate in some of the things that they are involved with. One of those cases as of recent is the 6th International Conference on Information Technology. Test Run author, Dr. James McCaffrey is heading up the software testing track for the conference and invited me to also participate as a track chair.

Check out the software testing track description here, download the template for submitting a paper, and send it to James here.

SharePoint Goodness

hdierking — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:57:06 GMT

SharePoint is one of those technologies for me that is large enough in scope and ambition that I am simultaneously in awe of it and confused by it. To elaborate on the confusing aspect, SharePoint feels like it has multiple masters - more specifically, it's hard to know who should be paying attention to it. Is it a system admin type of product? Is it a developer platform? Is it a collaboration portal for use by regular users. The answer, which speaks both to the power and the confusion, is "absolutely yes".

I personally buy into the vision of SharePoint as a web application platform. I don't think we're there yet, but it makes a lot of sense to me that we'll get there. That said, it's still really confusing as a developer to know where to get started with SharePoint (although Ted has done a fantastic job at trying to help dense folks like myself). I was recently forwarded an email, however, with some great resources for getting started as a developer. First, there's the Web site http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/ - there are a lot of great jumping off points here. There's also a great set of getting started Webcasts. For more information on that, check out Paul's post.

Check it out.

TechEd 2008 - Great Time/No Voice

hdierking — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:50:07 GMT

This year's TechEd was a fantastic experience - thanks again to everyone who came out to the MSDN Magazine booth and to everyone who came to my session on how to be an author - even though I had completely lost my voice. The XBox 360 giveaway was a huge success as you can see from the pictures - congrats to everyone who won!

Following are some pictures from the event - enjoy - and hope to see you next year!

TechEd Slides

hdierking — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:50:00 GMT

Hi everyone - well, it's now time for life to get back to normal. Parental leave is over. TechEd is over. Back to the grind for me. Thanks to everyone who come out to my TechEd session on how to become a MSDN Magazine author. I hope that you found it to be good information and even mildly entertaining given the fact that my voice was shot.

I've posted the slide deck as an attachment to this post. If you weren't able to make the presentation, there's a bunch of helpful bits in the deck to get you on your way to becoming the next world's best selling technical author!

ALT.NET Conference, Day 2 - Taking the Good With the Bad

hdierking — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:57:27 GMT

Today's post is actually a nice continuance of yesterday's because it deals very specifically with one of the issues that I raised yesterday - specifically the issue of the emerging tenuous relationship between the ALT.NET community and the rest of the professional .NET developer community. That said, today was fantastic - great people, great discussions - and a great show of forthcoming technology by ScottGu. So, in sum, we'll deal with the good and the not so good in tonight's post (IMHO <g>)!

The Not So Good - How to Be a Catalyst for Change In the Community

I went into this session hoping that individuals would come in wanting to share success and/or failure stories related to creating an environment that bought into at least some of the principles of agile - or at the very least became more passionate about writing great software. I also went in expecting there to be a fair amount of Microsoft bashing because of designers, code generation, NIH, etc... (I would mention MSDN/MSDN Magazine here, but that session is tomorrow, so I'll deal with that in the morning). What actually unfolded actually surprised me a bit. So firstly, I should say that there were some success stories shared. J.P. Boodhoo talked about some of the successes he has had with "lunch & learns" - Scott Hanselman and Jay Flowers talked about growing influence exponentially via a style that for this post we'll call "influencing the influencers" (Jay - you had mentioned a book that dealt with this topic - if you're reading, please post the title in the comments). Past those (and a few other) examples, though, the conversation took what I considered a fairly cynical and elitist turn. Earlier I mentioned that I was surprised a bit by what unfolded. What surprised me was that the frustration expressed was not as much directed at Microsoft, but was directed at the general development community. It basically came across as "why won't all these people stop calling me dogmatic and listen to what I'm trying to tell them?!?" Several in the room made the argument that energy should only be expended on influencing those who wanted to be influenced. Huh?? If they...want to be influenced....doesn't that already....nevermind. Anyway, I basically came away from that session with 2 concluding saddening thoughts about many in the ALT.NET community.

They will always be 10 steps ahead of the rest of the professional development community because they are incredibly smart, talented, and motivated.
They will always be frustrated because they are narcissistic.

OK - maybe it was because I drank more coffee, maybe it was something else, but the day got much better as it progressed. Let's move on.

The Good - DSLs/NHibernate

I'm grouping these together because I walked in half way through the DSL talk and I just didn't take that many notes from the NHibernate talk. In fact, I think I'm just going to do bullet points here.

DSL

I hadn't realized that Microsoft released the source code for the .NET Framework Class Library. Totally cool - especially since, as ScottGu mentioned, they shipped it with the symbols, so profiling and debugging into the framework itself is now simple.
There was a lot of talk about DSL support in Ruby. I haven't worked in Ruby so I really can't speak to this - but now I'm curious.
One really interesting comment that ScottGu made, regarding DSLs is to make sure that you have mastered your GPL first, as this will provide you the best platform from which to jump into DSLs.

NHibernate

It was tough to blur the lines between where we crossed into a general DDD discussion and when we were still talking about NHibernate - particularly when we were discussing architectural patterns for DALs, etc...
To the NHibernate team (or someone with the time to look at this on the forge) - It would be totally cool if we could get JIT loading of HBMs, or at least have the option to suppress fail-fast when building the session factory. This came out of a discussion where many in the group were expressing the pain felt when one invalid HBM file caused every unit test to fail (or nearly every view to crash) because the session factory couldn't be created.
On that note, a MSBuild/NAnt HBM validator build task would be nice for plugging into the build.

The Rockin' - ScottGu's Show and Tell

So I haven't really had a lot of exposure to MVC in web applications (yes, I have let the whole RoR phenomenon pass me by - for shame, I know). And as a result, I really didn't see the point of the whole paradigm shift to MVC. I did DVC in MFC and it was a pain - so perhaps I was just avoiding the topic because of past aches, but for whatever reason, this was all new to me. So anyways, Scott demonstrated the new MVC framework that will be available in CTP form pretty soon. Honestly, it's pretty cool. I don't really buy into the argument that MVC is absolutely necessary to cleanly separate the logical layers of your application. I have been doing DDD for a while now and have never run into a major problem with bleeding of concerns on web projects - but maybe that's just me. However, if you're into having leaner, better controlled HTML and, more intuitive URLs, and reduced probability for concern-bleed, the MVC framework is definitely the way to go.

On a related note, let the record show that Scott Bellware is officially my favorite heckler. Scott - whenever you're in Redmond, the drinks are on me!

Back to the MVC discussion, my main next action is to see if I can actually find the bits so that I can get up to speed a bit. Who knows, maybe I'll even take the approach of one of my close friends at P&P and buy a Macbook Pro to play with RoR <g>!

The Confused - DDD

So since this post is getting long, I'm going to sum this session up with a pretty simple statement. Eric - A little help please? There continues to be a great deal of confusion and disagreement in the DDD community about some very fundamental concepts. Examples include the definition of a domain service, an application service, and the very distinctive characterics of DDD that make it different than simply good OOP heuristics.

On a closing note, I have never seen so many iPhones in one place.

ALT.NET Conference - Opening Day..Opening Thoughts

hdierking — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:32:00 GMT

I'm currently in Austin, Texas where I'm attending the ALT.NET conference. This conference is essentially a who's who of thought leaders in the .NET agile/open source community - everyone from Martin Fowler to Jim Newkirk to Scott Hanselman to Scott Bellware - the list goes on and on. In sum, over half of the people that you wanted listed as wanting to hear from in MSDN Magazine are attending this conference.

The conference is being conducted in a format called Open Spaces. This is one of the coolest things that I've ever seen in conferences. Basically, after a brief round of introductions, we launched into tonight's main activity - determining the schedule for the remainder of the conference. On a whiteboard was a 2-dimensional matrix - available rooms on the y-axis; time slots on the x-axis. Anybody that had an idea for a session wrote down the idea on a post-it note, presented it to the group, and placed it into a time slot. Once all the slots had been filled additional ideas were placed in a general holding space. Once all the ideas were collected, every individual marked which sessions they were interested in attending and based on this feedback, the schedule was renegotiated. It's worth pointing out that in this type of conference, there is no distinction between presenter and attendee. Everyone just shows up to whatever they are interested in. If you aren't interested in a session, get up and go. If you get sucked into a conference in the hallway - cool. It's incredibly exciting.

So there were 2 comments that I thought were really noteworthy/funny in tonight's opening session. The first was as follows.

"The values support the tools."

I'm not sure I buy this. I think that the values support the tools if you have values that make you interested in values. I think that many developers are perfectly content with using whatever tools they are presented with (e.g. - not going in search of 'better' tools) to do the job that they are being paid to do - solve the problems that they are being paid to solve. I'm not trying to make a value judgement on this group of developers (though I admit, it does kind of sound that way). At the same time, I believe that this is a reality, and as such, focusing on 'instilling values' is not the approach to take if the goal is to change behavior. I imagine that this theme will reoccur throughout this weekend. And that leads us to the second notable quote - ala Scott Hanselman.

"Mort is crying because mommy and daddy are fighting."

So in case you missed all of the conversations from last year on the blogosphere, Mort is the Microsoft persona to describe the group that I talked about in the previous paragraph. Unfortunately, Mort has become somewhat of a derogatory term as of late since he is used more as an accusatory glass that different communities and Microsoft throw at one another when arguing over products, methodologies, etc... you know - 'values'. As a result, Mort is sitting quietly on the sidelines wondering why Microsoft and it's community thought leaders can't get along - and he here's his name mentioned in so many arguments, he wonders "could it be me?"

Why do I care about this? Because I love agile - I love DDD, TDD, BDD, patterns, NHibernate, R#, et al. And I want to introduce more and more of this type of content into MSDN Magazine. However, I think that many of you who read the magazine are not as zealous in programming ideology as many here at the conference - and that's ok. What I refuse to do is allow the magazine to become a forum for the next religious war - to basically take the "C++ rules - VB sucks" argument and turn it into "ALT rocks - Mort sucks". So, for those of you who want more content on all of the cool agile things mentioned above, me too. For those of you who don't care about all of the ideology, that's cool too. I am interested in seeing MSDN Magazine provide practical solutions to all of its readers, no matter where they are on the programmer continuum. I think that a strong case can be made for many of the tools/methods in the agile space - and I want to present them in the Magazine in a way that provides a real incentive for using them. That incentive? Making programming easier and more enjoyable - not buying into a set of values.

Until tomorrow...

TechEd Europe - Getting Closer...

hdierking — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 02:25:40 GMT

If you're planning to attend, I'm doing a talk on writing for the magazine - so stop by and say hello. Looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona!