>> Click here to download the slides/ demos <<
Thanks to all who came and apologies to those who came and found standing room only – I intend to record these demos and host them soon, watch this space.
The demos are fully RC2 compatible now, that day was a close call to a non-working demo.
Update: The Release Candidate has been released. The demo below works fine with it too.
>> Click here to download the slides and second demo. <<
Wow! We had a fantastic turn-out last night, interest in MVC must high! Not having presented for almost a year I tried not to publicize the the talk; but still instead of the expected twenty to thirty people there must have been close to a hundred and we had to expand the room! Couple this with the Microsoft building now almost impossible to find with that road closure flummoxing us coming from the south-side – who knows how many found Old Roswell gone and went back home at that point. For those that missed last night this talk will be repeated at all local code camps that happen in the next few months, the Atlanta one is in March and 2009 details will soon appear at http://www.atlantacodecamp.com/.
Obviously that presentation covered only some of the very basics and there is a lot more to working with MVC. Watch this space for more MVC tips and if people request it, I’ll put together a deeper presentation for Code Camps etc.
Also, I was not kidding about the free presentation/ training at your company. Totally free, no creepy sales people will call afterwards either – it will keep my hand in while taking a few months out from real work and with luck one of them might lead to my next gig (which will use MVC). So if you have at three or more devs drop me a line via the ‘Email Me’ page on this blog – don’t worry if you are a small or large shop, I just want to spread the word and try to ensure there are a selection of MVC Contracts out there when I get bored of goofing off 
For my slides and NAnt + Cruise Control config files click here.
DDD6 was the 6th UK ‘code camp’ and I was luckily enough for my session to be voted in. Many people missed out attending because there were ~450 registrations in 24 hours!! Everyone I met was incredibly bright – most of the tough questions I asked in my Continuous Integration session were immediately answered, by sometimes what seemed half the room!
Comparison to with US Code Camps is pretty easy. The UK version is was excellent too. Classic cultural differences were there: a little less pizazz, and the average attendee weighing 20->30 lbs less. Note the cycle racks outside reception in the photos below, if US gas were $9/gallon I think we’d be slimmer too.
It pleases me greatly to report TDD/ Automated Testing is certainly gaining traction with the .Net community here. Many people told me Mike Hadlow did an excellent talk on using Inversion of Control (IoC) with TDD. Speaker of the day must go to Ben Hall who gave an overview of xUnit tools, including MBUnit which he contributes to. Apparently Ben is a fairly recent grad and this was his first presentation – watch this guy he will do well!
Ben, Mike, Richard Fennell and Michael Foord blogged this event. Barry Dorrans shares some photos. Update: even more was said about the day here, here, here, here, here, here and here!
Ben Hall – future tech superstar (no, not the back of his head, he is the guy speaking)
Microsoft UK at 7am in Winter- brrr!
Just before I left the speakers’ lounge to meet some smart people
This was in the halls, along with life size Halo characters!
Presenting involves elements of luck, I think we can rely less on luck…
After a series of extremely well received talks for the Atlanta .Net group I almost bombed last time. Not a total disaster and luckily few were present to witness it. I had given the presentation very successfully twice before, so what happened?
The Excuses
Late notice: I stepped in very late to fill the slot and did little preparation
Lack of Preparation: The only preparation was testing the demos and skim reading slides
Lack of enthusiasm: Lariam still affects me slightly, that was one of those weeks
Bad Luck
No crowd interaction: Advertising talks well in advance gets the word out and brings in people really interested in the subject – just one eager audience member can spur interest for others
Bored Blank faces: Need to learn how to handle this
Problems with my Old Style
Need short 10/15 minutes segments: The Cruise Control .Net talk was pretty technical, each section building on the last. If I lost an audience member they stayed lost. If one demo fails it could destroy every subsequent demo.
Relying on audience interaction: Good interaction makes for killer presentations – everyone learns and everyone has fun. I was relying on it, don’t!
Deja Vu: When giving the same presentation several times it feels insincere, especially when repeating jokes. This must be an experience thing, Comedy School could help too.
== UPDATE: Registration is full. It took just a few days!! ==
Registration is now live, these free conferences always fill up fast so register right now!
It is on a Saturday at Microsoft’s office in Reading and there are some great looking sessions – some good ones are bound to overlap with my slot 
See you there… Developers, Developers, Developers!
This should be fun a night, I will kick off with a light hearted look at Cruise Control – it is amazing how many projects still do not use Continuous Integration. My plan is take demos and a few slides – knowing the Architect Group the audience will soon be talking more than me 
Next I will give a more formal presentation on Software Estimation – it will be a little dry, but I expect people in the room will liven it up with amusing tales from the field. We all have tales to tell of estimates which went awry.
The Architects group is really meant for Architects and CTOs with 10+ years experience. Even are you not an Architect (yet!) come along this month and enjoy these basic topics. Be aware that most regulars will call out any BS from presenters, I fully expect to be challenged and hope to learn a lot from other attendees.
The Atlanta IASA website is http://www.iasahome.org/web/atlanta.
We meet at Matrix in Dunwoody:
May 9 – 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Matrix (on the top floor)
115 Perimeter Center Place NE
Suite 250
Atlanta, GA 30346
The office is secure so if you are late knock on the window to the left of the door and someone will let you in.
This post was to be titled Alabama Code Camp, but after yesterday’s success there are plans in the pipeline for at least one more Code Camp in Alabama. Who would have guessed the Code Camp idea would have become so successful? If you have not attended one you work with .Net then you really should keep an eye on the Code Camp master list.
Props to Virgina College who permitted us to take over their classrooms for the day. Unfortunately the building lacked any large rooms so when en-mass we were outside, still I hope they allow us back next year:
Virginia College permitted about 140 unknown geeks into their building – Thanks guys!
Everyone I met was friendly and I very much enjoyed talking to these chaps at the pub club. From the sounds of it I am pretty darn sure they will be attending next year
Even Mark Dunn gave a presentation – can you believe these days are free too? I attended one of Mark’s sessions both to hear his content, and to pick up steal tips from a very experienced presenter. My own presentation was terrible (see the next post) due to a projector issue flustering me beyond belief. You can see here that Mark had a similar problem as me; the left of his screen is cropped – evidently he knew exactly what to do and carried on presenting commenting on it only once.
Is this a UN Food Drop or Free Books?
Turns out is was free books and games. Joe is seen here enforcing the 30 seconds to choose rule
The End – A Microsoft employee doing some physical labor. Would you ever see a Sun/ Oracle or Apple employee do this? Microsoft hires some great people and appears to filter out the elite snobs – I believe this is why we now hear much less of the ‘M$ is evil’ talk from the Linux/ Java guys.
So personally? Well my presentation really sucked. Aside from the Mobility Group kick-off presentation last year when Lariam kicked in this was my worst 60 minutes by a long way. It was good experience to fail though as it is a lesson learned. I was flustered by the projector cutting off large sections of my screen and kept blanking on details + mixed up a few acronyms while trying to code in a tiny screen area making sure it could also be seen on the overhead. On a very bright side it finally looks like Lariam has worn off – a year ago a panic attack would have rapidly built up and I would have wanted to escape the room asap (if you go to ever Africa think very hard before taking Lariam to prevent Malaria – side effects of drugs do hit some people and Lariam defines the term ‘living hell’).
The speakers were the best I have seen at a Code Camp since Florida’s in Ft Lauderdale. Being a speaker it is always a toss up between hanging out in the speakers lounge (good networking) or attending presentations (learning opp + I pick up presentation techniques). This time I saw as many presentation as possible but still met lots of stars including Wally and David. Talking of stars many of the developers I met really know their .Net - I wish I had the memory to list all their names here. I look forward to meeting them again next year.
There is so much more I would love to write about the day, but very few people read long posts so I will end now with a final thanks to Bruce Thomas who put a lot of effort in to organizing and planning this day – our conversion was cut short at the pub club, but I was hoping he would tell me all about working in Japan which must be fascinating.
There are still spaces left for Alabama’s code camp which happens on Saturday 29th October. If you missed Atlanta’s then why not try this one – we know the price is right. The Agenda is interesting; there are an unbelievable NINE tracks: http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/AlAgenda.aspx You can sign up here: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032280737&Culture=en-US If you fancy a ride there in a swanky BMW then just email and I’ll let you know my travel plans. Ok it is only a stripper 325i but I love the car, although it will be traded for a ’99 Miata soon so I’ll be able to afford to race what I drive – the BMW had two warranty issues that followed my driving school so it has not hit the track again. The dealership is always great but I don’t want to abuse the warranty, I have already had a full set of new rotors and pads + the rear diff fixed which I know were all due to my driving. Now should I NOS the Miata…. Yes I am a law abiding 35 year old UMIST grad with a white collar job; sometimes no one would guess While I am talking cars here are two pictures of my humble steed in two different situations. The second one is ultra-cool and will be explained in a future post. In a post after I explain how to obtain a Realtor license and just how much cash it will save you when moving house (I said that I would do that how long ago?):
DIY on the house this week - good job I have a (folding) trailer
Plugging into ODB-II, who needs the dealership?
Boy am I late blogging about this one. Well it was a great day with many great speakers, info on who spoke about what is still up here: http://www.gcnug.org/Default.aspx?tabid=81
Everyone I met was very friendly including these guys I had lunch with:
The food at lunchtime was the best of any Code Camp so far, just look at the happy faces below who hung around for seconds:
Finally I attended Doug’s Indigo presentation. He is below setting up and no one owned up to taking this picture before he was ready:
It was great to meet several stars/ future stars at the Queen Anne Revenge. Some of the people I enjoyed meeting are Frank Lavigne (and wife), Lou Vega, Bill Ryan, Will Morganweck, Robin Edwards and the guy who made it all happen Chris Williams. I met loads more great people there and at the Code Camp so sorry to miss some names, but my memory is terrible and I think everyone ran out of business cards by 10am – I know that I did!
So how was it personally? Suzanne and I traveled to Charleston the evening before Code Camp and dined with the other speakers at the Queen Anne’s Revenge. I spoke at 9am and we had to close the doors to the room nearly ten minutes before starting due to having no more space! The presentation went fantastically with pretty much zero nerves – see y’all, all it needs is practice, if I can become a competent presenter then anyone can! Suzanne and I left Charleston on Sunday morning arriving back in Atlanta in time for tea. A perfect weekend
It is with great sadness that this is happening. While being involved with user groups I tried to accomplish the goal of making them a more open and inviting place for newcomers regardless of their .Net expertise. Yes the C# group is targeted towards developers/ architects with advanced knowledge, but again a core aim of mine was to prevent it being a clique of regular members.
From email feedback it appears that many people learned a great deal from my presentations. Delivering those presentations was a great help in recovering from a side effect to a Malaria vaccine called Lariam. If you are the 1 in 10,000 who gets hit by the side-effect then this is a very nasty drug and it has taken me many years to recover. No one knows how it works chemically, but the worst side effect was paralyzing fear in social situations. The technical term is fight-or-flight which translates to ‘wanting to leg it asap’ – this even happened in cubes of colleagues and at the dinner table with friends! It was quite embarrassing and at times debilitating. Anyone who saw my kick off to the mobility group was witnesses to such an episode
A post on Lariam is about to happen, hence I mentioned it above. Yes, posting about it publicly can only harm me – over the last few years a few individuals have used it against me in the work environment. Now I am really 99% recovered I see no problems with work but am aware some selfish individuals who read this post could try to use it as leverage against me. After overcoming a personal hell with the drug, I need to make a Google accessible post for new suffers to find – the first few months were utterly unbearable and if I can help any future sufferers that is worth far more than a few blows to my career.
So the reigns of the C# Group are officially handed over to the group’s ‘second in charge’ Keith Rome. Maybe later in the year I will be invited back to help the C# group out again? Even if not I am sure Keith will continue to take the group forward keeping the content very technical.
What I am doing with all the spare time? After a recent round of interviews with some of Atlanta’s best Architects my head will be down in books trying to catch up to their level. IMO it is easier to learn advanced material from books than user groups, but the groups can be great motivation to learn. Hopefully I will find time for cycling again and hang out with the great bunch of guys and gals I used to see before last year’s wreck.
Finally: a BIG thanks goes out to Doug and Kirk of Microsoft. They put up with a tremendous amount from us user group people and have the patience of saints dealing with some members. Please everyone try to appreciate what they do for us, and do not hassle them too much. They both go far beyond what their job asks of them.
