DevTeach : The .NET place to be

Just came back from DevTeach day 2. Wow! So much great speakers. A year ago, I would never had tough that Montreal was a place for such a great event. I’m pretty proud to’ve been a part of it.

Now! Enough for the flattering.

First I attended Claudio Lassada’s Tips & Tricks to boost up productivity session. He presented a couple of tools to speed up things (slickrun, jot, sysinternals). But I still think the key is only to go mousless, everything else will follow (And I think launchy is a lot better then slickrun). Among other things he promoted dual screens, weekly brown bag meeting, in which you share tricks you’ve learned, and CodeRush (I prefer ReSharper). Still it was really entertaining and a great start for the day.

Then I jumped to the Agile room where I stayed all day. Scott Bellware kicked it off with a talk on Behaviour-Driven-Design. The whole session was about refactoring a real world example using a TDD approach. He then presented BDD as a way to make test code more english-like and self documenting. It was a great presentation and a real convincing one. He talked about RSpec and NUnit.Spec but not as much as I would have expected. He sure looks like a bright guy (read: he’s bald). During that same presentation Jeremy Miller had some noticeable comments:

If its hard to test change it!

Yeah testability is one important thing when you don’t have the flexibility of a dynamic language.

After that was Oren Eini on Rhino Mocks. Even tough it was hard to understand what he was saying at first (strong Israel accent I guess) it was worth the effort. He made pretty obvious all the powers of Rhino Mocks. One other amazing things was how fast he was coding. I first tough it was a recorded video played with boosted speed. Not! He’s a true ReSharper jedi! He ended on a thoughtful note:

watch out for test paralysis

In other words: keep your tests flexible so they don’t break all the time.

Lunch was filet de porc in some brown sauce. Vegetables? Yes! Great I was hungry! Dessert was strange tough: looked like ice cream but was really a cake with strawberry toping inside. Still it was okay plus I had some great talks. Finished my coffee and I was up and running.

During lunch, in another room (yeah, really while lunch was served!!!) there was a talk about pair programming by two girls from Oxygen Media. Great talk, too bad I came too late (I was hungry!) I missed the rabbit story, what was that about ?

Then was Udi Dahan on What to Test and When. Udi is such a great speaker, so much energy when he talks, he sounded like Anthony Robbins on software testing. He focused on the importance of testing every aspect of the software on each iteration, specially the risky parts: performance, security, complex business logic and external interfaces.

Finally, Oren Eini finished it up with a MonoRail tribute. I don’t know if the crowd cough the brilliance of MonoRail, only 2 people, including I, had used Ruby on Rails! I tough Oren approach for a first dive into MonoRail was brilliant. He started with a browser and pointed to http://localhost/home/index.devteach then followed the exception messages for adding a controller, an action and a template. Talk about descriptive error messages!
The funniest quote of the day is definitely when he pointed out some recent comment on brail’s template, made by developers on an earlier talk:

This is Perl, I’m not doing Perl!

funny!