After a very fun DDD Belfast I was debating,whether I should go to Developer Developer Developer Scotland, in the end I did and it was a good decision. I had a great day and a great night talking to other geeks.
I got there a bit late, flight+train + walk+ getting lost in the campus, however I did catch the tail of the Refactoring presentation by Gary Short I was curious as to how Refactor and other Dev Express tools look and work.
Then I went to a talk that I was quite looking forward to: Embracing a new world - dynamic languages and .NET by Ben Hall, he started of by presenting ruby and then IronRuby, then he moved on to show how you can use ruby and .Net by creating a sample wpf from the command line with very little code, then came what I think was the best part of the talk : that joke about Gary Short writing IronSmalltalk (hehe just kidding), the best part of the talk was when he showed how to use Iron Ruby and embedded it into a program, there is an article about it here, what that means is that basically you can get to use ruby syntax within you app, I find that really powerful. He also talked about rspec and Rails and how .net developers should be checking these frameworks out, I agree on this, particularly for testing, I hope to see more talks on this subject.
Then I went to Sebastien Lambla’s Asp.Net **MVC** best practises, were he talked about how to modify Asp.Net MVC default behaviour and project, to make it better with more SoC, implementing some healthy conventions,etc (I ll update this post with the slide deck when/if it becomes available) . What sticks in my mind at the moment is the way he was using a Model for each view. He was also using Windsor heavily and I think he did a fantastic job explaining what it is and how to use a container. Another thing I liked was that he refereed to a God Object, I think we all know what that means and why it should be avoided, great way to describe it tho.Kudos to Seb for bringing up the GaGoRuCo incident and added images of naked man in the slides :) . Extra bonus points for mentioning castle Monorail.
Then it was lunch time and there were some Grok talks, I was just in one of them about Sharepoint, the presenter ( i m afraid I dont know your name sorry) was showing how to use Typemock to do Sharepoint development. I m sure it helps not to have to depend on having the server in your machine, fair play.
After lunch I popped into Barry Carr’s What is Functional Programming? **really good talk, it quickly immerses you in the world of Functional Programming, How it started, the history, the principles and then some code with **Scala. Many of the concepts that are available to Scala ( and used in functional programming) are not alien, its how you use this concepts that is different, Scala is ,of course, designed for this, hence the syntax is better for it. Liked how Currying is implemented, want to look into Actors a bit more.
To finish of I went to: AOP with Castle Windsor and PostSharp by Chris Canal, Chris presented the principal concepts of AOP and then moved on to samples. First with castle and then with PostSharp. He started with the Runtime Weaving using castle (Windsor and DynamicProxy2) , then he moved on to postSharp to show compile time Weaving. All in all good intro into Aspect Oriented Programming.
Then we went on to a Geek Dinner, it was great to just talk to everyone and the food was really nice. I had a fantastic time, learned loads, met some really interesting people , so I consider the trip a complete success. Thanks to Colin, Chris and everyone organizing this event.