First, a fast paced and code-heavy journey towards understanding IOC.  This free event features about 20 minutes of slides and another hour of live coding.  We talk basics but quickly dive into advanced techniques.  We had a packed house last time, so please register early.

Free Inversion of Control Workshop
Tuesday, January 19 2:00 pm to 4:30 pm
at the Microsoft offices in Austin, Texas

Also, I’m working another Headspring Agile Bootcamp class this month.  It’s three intense days of TDD and object oriented design.  If you have any specific questions about this course, check the info page on the Headspring site, leave a comment or shoot me an email.

Headspring Agile Bootcamp
January 20 to January 22
Austin, Texas
Call Headspring to Enroll: (877) 459-2260

This next bit is going to read like some phony sales pitch or something but it’s legitimate:

I got the award because I work at a great company that nurtures community involvement, encourages open source contribution and gives me the opportunity to develop and deliver high quality courseware for programmers.  I also work every day in the IDE and whiteboard trenches with an incredibly talented team of developers who foster a real culture of continuous improvement.

• 9:00 AM Git for people by Joe Ocampo. 
  I just want to see someone fly through using this so I can upgrade my understanding from novice to .. post-novice. Hopefully some msysgit tricks for the Windows crowd. Can someone record this?
• 10:00 AM Eric Hexter‘s talk on Project Automation – Learn about Build and Deployment Automation
  Eric is a master on the subject and I’d love to glean some tidbits from his repertoire.
• 11:00 AM A Handful of Things You Can Do In Ruby That Scares the Pants Off of C# Developers by Scott Bellware
  I’m at least wary of dynamic languages (in the large), and I’m sure Scott will challenge my (mis)understandings.  Also hoping for a recording.
• 12:45 PM Enterprise Architecture Patterns: Presentation, Business Logic, and Persistence by Chad Myers and John Teague
  I will make it to this session, at least in part.. I know enough to know that there’s so much I don’t know.  This one will be all about information literacy.
• 2:45 PM Test Driven JavaScript by John Teague
  I hope John shows me a better way.. because mine is not frictionless.

The first is called Take It For A Test Drive – clearly a failed attempt at a witty name for a hands-on-keyboard workshop where participants will design and implement a new feature for CodeCampServer, an open source ASP.NET MVC project.  We’ll get our hands on NHibernate, TDD, Rhino Mocks, Resharper.. and maybe some ASP.NET MVC (although I’m hoping that we touch the UI as little as possible since that stuff tends to slow workshops like this).

Here’s the abstract:

Conception, design, tasking, testing, construction. We’ll do it all by building a new feature into a .NET open source enterprise software application. We’ll design as a team, test-drive the implementation, and use the tools that enable us to move fast. This is a hands-on, no holds barred opportunity to get down and dirty with TDD. Bring your laptop with required software installed: Visual Studio .NET 2008, TestDriven.NET, TortoiseSVN, Resharper 4.5, SQL Server 2005 Express with mixed mode authentication

It’s really important that participants bring their laptops with all the software installed.  If you can build Code Camp Server locally and load the solution in Visual Studio, you’re golden.  This isn’t a presentation, it’s a workshop.

So here’s how it will go down:

• A 15-20 minute warm-up that involves checking out the source code and building it locally.
• I’ll do a quick (very quick) rundown of the project and demo some Resharper stuff.
• I’ll do another very quick intro to TDD if necessary.
• Then I’ll present the specifications for the new feature and the participants will hash out the requirements with me as I role-play a product owner.
• As a team we’ll use pseudo-UML and sequence diagrams to figure out exactly what we’ll be doing and we’ll task it out step by step.
• Then we’ll go heads down and implement the feature.  I’ll speak up and code on a projector at reasonable intervals.

It’s a commitment to attend this one – you’ll dedicate most of the morning to a workshop.  But if you are where I was a couple years ago – familiar with C# and most of the tools but needing help getting started with TDD and other techniques, I think you’ll like this session.

In the afternoon I’ll present my Practical IOC talk.  This one is a presentation.

Here’s the abstract:

From the basics to interesting, more advanced usage scenarios, we’ll discover how inversion of control can give life to object oriented principles and enable higher quality and faster delivery.

I’d say it’s intermediate level subject matter.  I have modified it a little since I presented it last.  This one is a few (awesome!) slides and then me coding through usage scenarios.

Hope to see you there!

I tried to focus on the practices of using IOC tools, because there’s a lot of abstract jibber-jabber about principles.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the principles and the theory.  I just think talking about the practices creates a more powerful pedagogical vector through which a comprehension of the principles can “sneak” in.

If I do this talk again I’ll scrap the open generics tidbit.  I think it’s really neat, and that’s why I included it.  But if one hasn’t run into that pain, solving it isn’t so cool, and it adds unnecessary complexity to the demonstration.  I’ll have to come up with something better to replace it.

Here’s an archive of the slides, notes and demo code.

And here’s a thing, if you just want to browse a slightly mangled view of the slides: