Yesterday I held a talk at a cornerstone event titled Pimp My Code at Hard Rock Café in Göteborg. The talk was about convention over configuration. I began by quickly describing the design philosophy and it's origins (in for example ruby on rails) and after that it was all code demo.

The code demo was a walkthrough of an application I had written (with some bits requiring live coding) that showcased a bunch of conventions. The application uses a lot of frameworks, for example Fluent NHibernate, StructureMap and AutoMapper. My point was not to dig deep into these frameworks but show show how they provide support for conventions and how that can be utilized in your application architecture. Among other things I showed how a Command/Query WCF service with automatic handler lookup could be achieved.

The frontend part of the application was taken from Rob Eisenberg MVVM mix talk. I modified it a bit and connected it to a real backend system. This application is treasure trove of brilliant ideas. Ideas that later materialized in the excellent Caliburn Micro framework.

Links

• The code and powerpoint is at github: http://github.com/torkelo/pimpmycode
• Rob Eisenberg MVVM talk from Mix: Build Your Own MVVM Framework
• Caliburn Micro: http://caliburnmicro.codeplex.com/
• AutoMapper: http://automapper.codeplex.com/
• MSDN Article Design For Convention Over Configuration (by Jeremy Miller)
• Fluent NHibernate: http://fluentnhibernate.org/

I will be doing the same presentation in Stockholm on december 6th at Debaser Medis. It is fully booked, so for those that have managed to get tickets, see you there!

I have been doing more and more talks lately. I am not a natural speaker I usually need to practice a few times before in order to talk more fluently. But practice has made me more comfortable with it and I feel that I am getting better at it. Two days ago I held a long (3.5 hour) talk on ASP.NET MVC which was both my longest talk and my most successful, at least considering the positive response a got, which was very encouraging.

The talk was mostly a long code demo. One thing that can often kill code demos are that they can slow down the tempo of a presentation when there is too much typing of unimportant text/code. Like creating a new class, constructor, etc and then later getting to the really important part of a particular function.

In this MVC code demo I tried to have as much prepared as possible. I started with a standard MVC template project, but had hidden (excluded from the project) controllers and views which I included as the code demo progressed. These controllers/views included some existing functionality which I then expanded upon. That way I did not need to type class definitions defining simple controller actions and views before getting to the interesting bits.

I did the same with many other parts of the presentation, for example when explaining how to unit test controller actions I already had an almost empty test method already written, and only needed to show how to unit test the controller actions and how to assert on the result.

I also had code snippets in the toolbox for some of the tricky parts of the code demo that I could use if something did not work or I felt that it took to long to write. Never let a problem in the code demo completely halt the presentation, have a backup plan or just move a long if you cannot fix the problem on the first 2 tries.

I feel that I still have much to work on when it comes to presentation technique. I often talk a little to fast, need to focus on keeping calm and talking in a slow and articulate manner.  It doesn’t matter how nice your powerpoint or code demo is if the audience can’t hear what you are saying!

Next up is trying keynote, nice to see how it compares to powerpoint.

Developer Summit is a great developer conference held in Stockholm each year. This time it is being held in April spread over 3 days with two conference days between 15-16 April and one workshop day on the 17th. I am going to have talk about Dependency Inversion (the pattern/principle) and how this pattern can help you create more loosely coupled applications. The talk will also be about what Inversion of Control containers are good for and how to use them effectively.

I will also host a workshop about test driven development with ASP.NET MVC. A workshop that will be focusing on the testability aspects of ASP.NET MVC. Lab assignments could for example start with an empty controller test. I will go into scenarios where you need to use mocking/stubbing and scenarios where the MVC framework cleverly avoids mocking (by passing FormCollection to the action for example). There is also going to be lab assignments and examples that show how to use WatiN for integration testing.

Other interesting talks:

• Good Test, Better Code by Scott Bellware
• A Technical Drilldown into “All Things M” by Brian Loesgen
• RESTful Enterprise Integration with Atom and AtomPub by Ian Robinson

There are many more interesting talks, so be sure the sign up if you can.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to a presentation by Scott Ambler on "Scaling Agile Software Development: Strategies for Applying Agile in Complex Situations", it was an interesting talk. He showed a lot of diagrams and stats from a 2008 Agile Adoption rate survey, you can find the info here. The survey results are for example agile adoption rates, success rates, increase / decrease in code quality and costs. The problem with the survey is that it does not include any definition of what qualifies as agile. There are many different definitions on what makes software development agile, and many definitions like the manifesto (if you can even call that a definition) are very vague. I am not saying there is anything wrong with the manifesto or that agile needs to be better defined, what I am saying is that because agile can mean a lot of things to different people, and that many think they are doing agile while others might heartedly disagree, makes agile surveys like this very hard to interpret.

For example, the survey that covers modelling and documentation practices concludes that:

• Agile teams are more likely to model than traditional teams.
• Traditional teams are equally as likely to create deliverable documentation.
• For all the talk in the agile community about acceptance test driven development, few teams are actually doing it in practice.
• etc..

Without some minimum criteria for what qualifies as "doing agile" these surveys don't tell me that much. Even if I would disagree with the definition I think they would make surveys like this a lot more interesting.

I am not saying that the surveys are worthless, they do tell you something and they are a great resource for convincing management of agile practices so it is great that someone is taking the time to make them. 

Yesterday I held a short seminar (2 hours) on Open Source and .NET for the Systems Development team at Cybercom Sweden East. The seminar was split into three separate presentations, I will try to give a short summery of them here. At the end of the post I will post links to the powerpoints and application examples.

Open Source and .NET 

This presentation covered a short introduction to open source. I began with explaining the most common licences (GPL, LGPL, Apache) and then moved on to list a few interesting framework and development tools. But mostly it was about why I think utilizing open source is something that we as .NET developers need to be better at, and why this will be very important if the .NET platform is going to stay competitive.

I have never worked professionally as a java developer but my understanding is that tools like Eclipse and frameworks like Struts, Hibernate and Spring are used to a very a large extent (30 - 70% according to some studies). And what types of platforms do java applications run on? They usually run on an open source OS and use an open source web server (Apache) or application server. This means that the devolvement environment, tools and frameworks are largely based on open source software.

I think this fact contributes to the mindset of java developers and project managers to actively search for, and be more open to, open source solutions. I feel that many .NET developers are prone to constantly reinvent the wheel, for example by creating their own logging framework or a basic data layer tool without ever searching for existing alternatives, be that open source or commercial.

Open Source benefits

I also talked about some of the benefits I see with open source frameworks compared to Microsoft's offerings. One of the main things I mentioned here was innovation, I think that a lot of innovation in development methodologies (TDD), design, frameworks and tools are coming to large extent from the open source community. The fact that open source software starts without commercial aspirations or requirements results in software that is more focused on solving real problems and less on flashy designers.

Open Source problems

The major problem I see with open source is the lack of commercial support services. I don't see this personally as a problem but as a problem when trying to sell open source solutions to management. There are many companies that are offering training and support for open source frameworks and tools on the java side but very few for the .NET equivalents. I think this point is also one of the major reasons why .NET  is so behind java when it comes to open source adoption. The lack of commercial support is something I partly blame on Microsoft who instead of promoting and supporting open source actively compete with it.

Open Source trends

I ended the presentation by showing some statistics from the IOUG Open Source 07 Report. This report really shows how much open source software is currently being used by big enterprise companies (almost exclusive non .NET software) and that this is an increasing trend. Just between 2006 and 2007 the increase in the use of open source software was 26%. The report also showed the reasons why open source software is being used. The two main reasons were cost savings and no proprietary vendor lock-in.

Not to be misunderstood, I am not an open source fundamentalist, I just think there is a lot of value in some open source frameworks and tools and I think .NET developers in general (maybe not those who happen to read this blog) should utilize this resource more. 

Log4Net & NHibernate

I also held a presentation about Log4Net and an hour long presentation about object-relational mapping with NHibernate which included a short live coding demo. 

Here are the powerpoints (they are in Swedish):

• Open Source och .NET
• Loggning med Log4Net
• NHibernate

I also made some sample applications:

• Cybercom.Log4NetDemo.zip 
• Cybercom.NHibernateExampleSimple.zip (A very simple console application showing some NHibernate basics)
• Cybercom.NhibernateDemo.zip  (A small application showing how to use NHibernate in a web application, not to complicate things I choose not use use an IoC container or NHibernate Query Generator,  I did use a repository pattern though)

I wanted some code in this post so here is snippet from the NHibernateDemo application that shows how simple property projection is with the NHibernate Critiera API:

public IList<string> GetAllBlogOwnerNames()
{
  return Session.CreateCriteria(typeof(User))
    .Add(Expression.IsNotEmpty("Blogs"))
    .SetProjection(Projections.Property("UserName"))
    .List<string>();
}