Monthly Archives: October 2007

Heartland Developer Conference – Day 2

Leave a reply

Day 2 of the HDC is over and I’m back in Des Moines after two days worth of cramming my brain with a load of technical info. It was a whirlwind of material, and I’m sure half of it has already fallen out of my head; I’m just glad I took a lot of notes.

Day Two started out pretty good. Scott Guthrie graced us with his presence today with a boatload of information over the latest technologies coming out of Microsoft. His keynote this morning was over Silverlight and he did a good job with demos showing the differences between versions 1.0 and 1.1. He then spent about 2.5 hours in the afternoon covering the new features in Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”, and… I mean…. wow!…. It makes me want to dump the VS 2005 IDE by the curb – it is that tastey.

Otherwise, I sat in on one other good presentation from an IT leader at Farm Credit Services of America and her company’s leap to agility (specifically Scrum) two years ago and what they learned along the way. It seemed like very 101-level material from an agile aspect, but it offered a great testimony from a good-sized company who had successfully made the transition from a Waterfall to Agile software methodology.

Now, it is time to rest and recover…

Heartland Developers Conference – Day 1

1 Reply

The first day of the HDC is over, and it started out awesome! I got in Wednesday afternoon and was invited out to dinner with a few really talented individuals. I had a great chat with Mike Benkovich over his recent MSDN Events in Des Moines, my interest in Microsoft’s Team System, and the recent Bears vs. Vikings game.

The first day of sessions did not disappoint. Ron Jacobs started off with a great keynote over using TDD jointly with the MVP pattern to make both testable and loosely-coupled solutions. I then sat in on sessions over practical TDD usage; an overview of Visual Studio Team System; an introduction to the movement that is ALT.NET; and some practical tips on effectively refactoring database schemas.

I will admit I’m impress with how much more focus is being put on agile development and TDD in particular this year. I think almost every session I attended today had some mention or discussion on writing unit tests for your code. Last year, there was only one session over TDD and it was extremely 101-type material. I’m glad to see more presenters mentioning TDD and agility in their talks.

Oh, how times are a-changin’.