DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Ireland 2008
I’m pleased to say that the first ever DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event ever held in Ireland was not only a successful event, but also a ton of fun. If you’ve never heard of DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper, you should check out the intro video here: http://www.dddireland.com/. It does a nice job explaining the concept.
For our first DDD event, we got a ton of help from the Microsoft MVP community. UK MVPs Craig Murphy and Barry Dorrans organized the event from the speaker/agenda side and Mick Lohan (who runs the Galway Microsoft Technology Users Group) along with Damien Costello and Gary Allen, also from GAMTUG, did the coordinating locally.
The agenda was jam-packed with superstar speakers that you pay a fortune to see at big conferences, all here to speak to Irish developers for free. There were *six* tracks, including one dedicated to WCF, and they covered everything from Regular Expressions to Silverlight to Design Patterns to Agile Development to IronPython and a lot more. Not only that, but afterwards there was a fun game show called “Swaggily Fortunes” where teams competed for cool swag!
As most of the organization was taken care of by the user group and the speakers, I didn’t know an incredible amount about how the event is usually run. After attending the event and talking to the seasoned DDD participants, I got a great feeling for how an event like this is used to grow and strengthen user groups and communities. I was incredibly impressed and am already looking forward to the next one. Here’s how it works:
- No Microsoft employees are allowed to present – the only presenters are those “in the trenches” and working with the technology fulltime
- Anyone (well, besides us Microsofties) is allowed to submit a proposal for a talk
- The community votes on speakers based on proposed topics
- New members of the community and those who are interested in getting into speaking and presenting are encouraged
- Sponsors are recruited to help with speaker travel, venue and food costs – the event is completely free for attendees
- You leave with some pretty sweet swag
Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it? It was.
But Martha, what about the talks? Oh, right. I wanted to go see some speakers I hadn’t seen before and do some filming as well. The talks I saw were Michael Foord’s IronPython talk, Dave McMahon on XSLT Extreme, Michael Willers and Daniel Fisher talking about Distributed Applications with WCF, and Dave Sussman’s talk on Silverlight with ASP.Net. They were all excellent speakers, and if I had one regret it was only that there were too many tracks and I had a tough time choosing. I would have loved to see a lot more. During lunch, I also watched Kieran Stafford, a student at IT Sligo and part of the Irish team who won the Imagine Cup for 2008, present his team’s winning solution: ParkIT. And of course I had to see what this Swaggily Fortunes was all about after the talks.
Michael Foord – IronPython: Dynamic Languages on .NET and Silverlight
Michael has been a Python developer for around five years and is currently working on a book called IronPython in Action. He talked about why dynamic languages are cool, where IronPython and the DLR came from, and showed off how to work with .NET using IronPython. To illustrate a real life IronPython application, he showed off the very slick Resolver One. He also showed off the interactive interpreter tool for IronPython to illustrate some of the language’s features. He walked through information on Silverlight 2 with IronPython, highlighting his IronPython and Silverlight 2 Interactive Interpreter as well as his very cool IronPython Web IDE, which I have used several times & love. Lastly, Michael showed off some examples of embedding IronPython in .NET applications using the IronPython Evaluator. A great speaker and an incredibly nice individual, I definitely look forward to seeing more of Michael’s talks in the future.
Dave McMahon – XSLT Extreme
Dave used the word “Extreme” in his talk’s title because basically anything that is called Extreme is instantly cool. I fell for it anyway, so nice work, Dave. But it turns out that was great, because his session was excellent. I used XSLT & XPath a lot when I was working in Redmond, but haven’t much with it since I moved to Dublin. This session reminded me why I need to be using it more. Dave described various pros of XSLT and scenarios where and why to use it. He showed off some very nice demos including debugging XSLT in Visual Studio, extending capabilities and providing alternate output formats. The demos were excellent because they were enough to show realistically what the code might look like, but also streamlined enough so that I didn’t get lost in the application. The session was jam-packed with lots of solid information and practical scenarios, so it was really useful (and extreme!). Plus Dave is always entertaining, so even if you don’t know much about XSLT, you’ll have fun listening to him.
Michael Willers and Daniel Fisher – Distributed Applications with WCF: Design, Develop and Deploy – Part 1
Michael and Daniel conducted two sessions as part of the dedicated WCF track. This first session started by describing scenarios like the German train ticketing kiosks and eBay where usage is underestimated and can cause problems in the future. Their stories were both interesting and impactful. They then walked us through a system they worked on for the German government including the architecture & development. Using a combination of Visio diagrams, white boards, threat modelling and data diagrams, Michael and Daniel discussed the different discussions and scenarios that developers and architects need to think about in order to ensure they are building their applications the right way and the secure way. I learned a lot from their stories and the processes they discussed, and I heard great things from people who attended the second half of their session as well which went into more implementation depth. Definitely lots of solid and important content for developers here.
Dave Sussman – Integrating Silverlight into ASP.NET Applications
Dave’s session took a look at where the web is today (including how it’s currently broken) and gave an overview of where Silverlight fits. He discussed a lot of the new features in Silverlight 2 like controls, layout, the Base Class Library. He talked about areas where Silverlight is appropriate for websites today and the strengths it can bring to a web application by creating “islands of richness”. Dave showed off some really nice demonstrations using sweet controls and layout along with the HTML bridge. He described really well how Silverlight communicates with JavaScript, and I was really impressed by the depth of his sample apps. I also owe Dave an apology because my spare camera battery went missing during the day and so I missed a few minutes of his talk while I rearranged the camera. Great talk, and I hear through the grapevine that Dave will be back in Ireland later this month giving a .NET Masterclass, so I’ll be sure to post those details as soon as I have them all.
I can’t miss mentioning of course our Geek Walk and Talk to “Craggy Island”, or Inis Oírr. We had fabulous weather, and as I had never been to any of the Aran Islands, I was really excited to get the chance to wander around. A few of us were a bit disappointed that we never found the Internet cafe on the island, but we did find the Father Ted boat as well as some good food. One of the best benefits of an event like this is getting the chance to talk more with the attendees and speakers about their technology and projects, and the Geek Walk and Talk is a great example. We had a great group along for the day, and I think everyone enjoyed it a lot. I put some pictures here of the day if you’re interested – go on and take a look and be jealous of the gorgeous day we had: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martharotter/sets/72157604901586174/
Thanks so much to all the attendees, the sponsors, the speakers, the coordinators, and everyone else I’m forgetting. If you’d like to be involved in the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Ireland, please feel free to e-mail me at martharo [at] microsoft.com and let me know. I’m interested especially in hearing from people who would like the chance to speak, but also from people with suggestions about topics and technical content. Thanks!
