I’m into the idea of a code camp.  So many conferences and presentations I attend are chatty and abstract, it’ll be good to see Studio and Resharper and keyboard shortcuts and macros and hard core programming fly around on projectors all day. Since I’m facilitating for six hours, this is a list of sessions that [...]

I’ll facilitate two sessions at Austin Code Camp on May 30th. 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 [...]

Today at Headspring we’re pleased to have Eric Anderson on board.  Eric’s been hanging around the Austin agile software development community for a few years, and he’s been to many of the ALT.NET conferences, including the last one in Seattle.  It’s exciting to see the company grow in the right direction… welcome Eric!

SubControllers solved a big problem for us when we first started our current project.  I posted about them back in the day. The problem was isolating authorization to view sections of a page.  In other words, if you didn’t have permission X, you couldn’t see the top-left section of the screen.  If you didn’t have [...]

A few days ago Dylan Beattie wrote a nice post about value objects.  He explains the idea in a more palatable way than my attempt: If it’s not clear how to model a particular element in your model, try asking “which one?” If the question makes sense within your own scenario then you’re probably dealing [...]

Last night I presented a talk titled Practical Inversion Of Control to a packed house at the Austin .NET User Group.  It was a blast.  I’d guess there were 80 developers there, maybe more.  Interestingly, when I asked the room “Who uses an IOC tool at work,” about 10 hands went up, at the most. [...]

I’m presenting a talk titled Practical Inversion of Control at the Austin .Net User Group on Monday.  This will be a beginner to intermediate level session in which we’ll answer the “what”, “why” and “how” questions about IOC and explore both basic and more interesting usage scenarios …

Adding to a Value Object property always adds to it, never adds another instance to it.  Distinguishing Value Objects by maintaining a collection of them implies identity. It is a mistake to attempt to maintain a collection of Value Objects. Let’s take the near-canonical Address, a perfectly valid Value Object as described on page 98 [...]

SubControllers are MVC Controllers that are also parameters to your action methods.  Incorporating their use in large systems allows for composition, dependency inversion, and separation of concerns. Sometimes we want Controller actions to pass objects into SubControllers so that the SubControllers can do interesting things with them.  For example, in a Product Controller we have [...]

I should have known something was up when I caught Jeffrey Palermo (my boss at Headspring) browsing the ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 source. We’re working on a enterprise web application using ASP.NET MVC.  That week one of our tasks was to create a rather complex page full of robust components that did intricate little things [...]