I’ve had a good time presenting at DevLink 2009, in Nashville, TN. Got to get together with old buddies, and met several new ones. I’ve presented three sessions there:

• Beyond the Core Concepts of OOP (SOLID)
• Design Patterns
• Building a Composite WPF Application

All sessions went smoothly, and I got lots of compliments from the attendees, so I’m always glad to hear when people find my talks useful. There were several attendees who have come to each one of my sessions. I appreciate it.

All my presentation material (slides and source code) can be downloaded here.

Hopefully I’ll be “seeing” some of you at the Virtual Brown Bag Meetings in the future.  🙂

I’ve uploaded my material presented at the LA C# and SoCal user groups here and here, respectively. I’d like to thank everybody who showed up. There were lots of good questions and participation from attendees.

I’ve had some weird things happening to my machine at the SoCal meeting. In the last several days I’ve noticed that is seems like there’s a Windows Update available almost every day. I normally apply the updates and they seem harmless. When I was shutting down my machine before heading to the SoCal meeting, I noticed there was an update “ready to be installed”, so I just trigger the install. I found it odd that it took about 20 minutes for the updated to finish installing.

Things looked normal as I was doing the presentation, but when I got to the point where I was going to dive into test projects, I noticed that the project was being listed, but I couldn’t see any files underneath. Eventually I decided to just recreated the test project from scratch, but Visual Studio gave me an error that essentially told me all my VS project templates were gone.

I went ahead and ran “devenv /installvstemplates” to recover the templates (which takes a couple of minutes), and when I’m finally back inside Visual Studio, the machine is running *really* slow. I’ve had to reboot everything and start all over, and it took me a lot of time to be able to get back into VS and continue on with the coding part of the presentation. I’ve tried to fill in the time by taking questions from the audience, so I hope they didn’t get too annoyed by these technical difficulties.

I usually never make changes to my machine before doing a presentation, and the one time I do, all hell breaks loose. Oh well…

Tomorrow morning I’m flying out to L.A. for two presentations at user groups through INETA. I’m certainly looking forward to it. Since the two user groups are 25 miles apart from each other, we’ve figured I could present topics that compliment each other, hoping that the local folks could attend to both meetings.  🙂

8/4/2009, Tuesday,  6:30 pm for LA C# at Manhattan Beach library (info)

Topic:  Intro to Test-Driven Development

Even though the name suggests that Test-Driven Development (or TDD) is all about testing code, it is actually more about designing the code. By following TDD, a developer writes code that is well designed, tested, and documented, and therefore, the quality of what is produced is much higher then that of a code-and-fix approach.

8/5/2009, Wednesday,  6:30 pm for SoCalDotNet at Buena Park (info)

Topic:  Isolating Dependencies in Unit Tests Using Mocks and Stubs

Soon after getting used to writing "unit" tests, developers tend to realize that those tests weren’t really testing "units"; they were testing way more than that. In order to write real unit tests, it’s necessary to use test doubles such as mocks and stubs. This session covers how to create and use those, and how to use Rhino Mocks to simplify things further. As we learn about those things, we’ll also learn about the importance of thinking through how we write our code, putting thought into the dependencies that a class may have, and how things should be split up.