Norwegian Developer Conference – Day 2

I’m impressed… I’ve attended two different .NET debugging sessions today with Ingo Rammer. I kid you not – he is coding faster than Ayende himself. I don’t know the average amount of characters he was able to punch during a given timeframe but it was probably twice my own and I’m not exactly a slow writer. It was impressive – just like his sessions of debugging. I’ve got to know a load of features I had no idea existed in both Visual Studio and WinDbg. How do you debug a Windows Service which fails during startup? I know now… It includes using the geekiest tools available to you from Microsoft but it CAN be done.

I also attended two sessions with Jon Skeet. Today he shared with us his thoughts and wishes for C# 5 and how he would like the language to evolve. I can’t say I agree on much of it but he had some good thoughts about reducing boilerplate code when creating new instances of objects in various situations. But having polymorphic method overload in interfaces? I think not…

I’ve been a fan of DDD for quite some time (not ever succeeding with it on a project but even though you suck at football you can still be a fan, right?). I went to see Eric Evans about a talk reflecting upon his experiences and learnings after he wrote his much famous DDD book. Not the best performance but it was interesting to hear about i.e. domain events and their importance for a successful DDD experience if you take them into account and use them wisely. And I know a lot more about the .NET Service Bus and how it is the most important invention since Windows NT back in 1993. Don’t take my word for it – I believe Judal Lowy’s word weights a lot more than mine. He believes in it too so you should definately go for him instead of me  :o)

I’m off again – there’s a geek party planned about 9pm which is some 20 minutes from now. We’re leaving tomorrow so this is probably the last post for this week. I’ll recap the conference in a few days – see you then  :o)

Norwegian Developer Conference – Day 1

I’m attending the NDC 2010 and wow… The fatigue is settling by now after a nice dinner at a pizza-shop. I dare you: Have either of you ever paid 180 Norwegian Kroner ~ 28 US Dollars for a pizza without beverages? I knew that Norway was bloody expensive but I honestly didn’t see that one coming.

I attended seven sessions today Wednesday including the keynote kicking off the conference. I think I gave three or four green cards and two yellows… No red cards yet.   Sadly the two F# sessions this morning were cancelled so I watched Kevlin Henney at first talking about architecture and then Steve Strong walking us through the new features in .NET 4 System.Treading namespace. Quite interesting – I have a feeling that the usage of System.Threading is limited considering the day-to-day problems we face back at work but it’s good to know about the new stuff Microsoft has made available to us.

After that it was time for probably the best session for me today which was Scott Allen doing a talk about Modern Javascript. I know so little about the strengths and possibilities in Javascript so it was packed with information about features and core concepts that I had no clue existed. As a C# programmer hearing things like “functions as constructors” and “replacing the ‘this’ keyword with another object" rocked the boat quite a bit… I have decided to get to know Javascript better because my ignorance towards dynamic languages comes part from ignorance and part from the fear of the unknown, I guess. The only lasting solution to that problem is to take a deep dive into it and I was impressed even though I have to spend some time getting familiar with the concepts.

The session by Jon Skeet about Noda was interesting. I don’t think I share his passion for dates and times and I’ll probably sleep like a baby tonight despite that… I for one don’t really get a kick out  of a bug found in the New Zealand way of handling timezone restrictions but he managed to convince me that programming dates and times into an application is just as complicated as anything else which is the feeling I’ve had earlier. Earlier I almost felt a bit ashamed to not be able to figure out “simple” things with dates and times but the thing is: Dates and times in software development is hard, period. Jon says so, I’ve felt it on my own body – talk to the hand!

Until tomorrow…

Norwegian Developer Conference 2010

I’m currently sitting in my hotelroom watching Brazil scoring an insane 1-0 goal against North Korea – I’ve spent the last 15 minutes planning the day tomorrow where I’ll be attending NDC 2010. I’ve never been to the conference before but a collegue of mine were here last year and I was a little envious when I learned the speakers attending the conference last year… This year it seems to be more focused on upcoming Microsoft-related technologies such as Windows Azure, F# and a bunch of C# stuff but there’s also plenty of room for i.e. MonoRails and lots of other stuff built outside of Seattle.

I have decided to plan a bit ahead. The other conferences I’ve attended earlier I wen to without much planning ahead and afterwards I had a sensation that I should have been elsewhere instead of attending sessions which I ought to have known couldn’t teach me very much. What’s the idea of attending a TDD 1-1 session when you’ve reached past that stage years ago? So tomorrow I’ll be switching tracks a bit. One of the worst things about such a conference is all the stuff you DON’T get to see live… There are podcasts and webcasts afterwards but it doesn’t beat the sensation of being there yourself of course. I’ll be following two sessions of F#, delving into Javascript with Scott Allen and I’m looking forward to seeing Jon Skeet presenting a ported version of a Java DateTime framework… I decided to go to his session for three reasons: Jon Skeet is there, I never questioned the System.DateTime namespace in .NET and Jon Skeet is there… I haven’t got the faintest clue how another framework could attack issues regarding date-time stuff so it’ll probably be either an eyeopener or time wasted I guess.

…and now Brazil is leading 2 against 0… I’ll bet that if North Korea against all odds gets away with one or even three points the national TV-station will broadcast the North Korean goals in a loop 24-7 the next five years or so   :o)