On Saturday, Andrew and I attended the inaugural DDD Melbourne (that’s "Developer Developer Developer Melbourne") "community conference" at Docklands in Melbourne.
Big props to Alex Mackey and Malcolm Sheridan, as well as all the other organizers and sponsors, for what turned out to be a great event.
Here’s a quick rundown of the sessions we attended (after the introduction and the opening keynote from Roger Lawrence):
Getting Started With Silverlight and SharePoint 2010
Really we just tagged along to this one to get a glimpse of SharePoint 2010 in action. We don’t do any Silverlight and we’re only ‘end users’ of SharePoint, so the presentation was of little real value to us. It was interesting to see just how complex the creation and deployment of SharePoint “features” is, even in Visual Studio 2010. Nalaka ran a very slick presentation though, so all credit to him.
Design by Contract - Code Contracts in .Net 4
One of the most interesting sessions for me was Bill Tulloch’s demonstration of code contracts. Bill had managed to lose all his code snippets while doing some last-minute testing the night before, so this was very much an “on the fly” presentation. Still, he did an excellent job of demonstrating how code contracts work and the benefits of using them.
I’m not sure that I’m game to introduce them into any existing code. Seems like it’s something that would be much better suited to a “green field” project. Still, it’s powerful stuff and gives us an idea of what the future holds in terms of static analysis on code.
Developing your data access layer using ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0
Prasanna‘s demonstration of EF4 was extremely valuable for me. I’m keen to look at the Entity Framework as a direction for our data access layer (despite being stuck in .NET 3.5 SP1 for the foreseeable future). I was especially happy to see the “code first” (also known as “code only”) approach to building a model. That looked like a really nice “fluent” approach to constructing mappings without having to deal with a design surface or XML files.
Secrets to Becoming a Better Developer
Sorry, Chris. I really wanted to get to this session (and in fact I saw a few tweets describing it as the “best session of the day”), but I was engaged in conversation with a bunch of folks from the Twittersphere outside, and we didn’t even realise that the next session had started until it was already half way through. So we missed this one, but I found our conversation outside very interesting, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Building large scale LOB applications with WCF RIA Services
By this stage, late in the day after a late night and an early morning, I was really starting to struggle. My eyelids were heavy, and I actually caught myself nodding off during Sergey’s presentation. I’ll be honest: This presentation was dry. There was very little code – mostly slides – and that meant that you had to pay close attention to what Sergey was saying to follow along. Perhaps if I’d not been falling asleep I would’ve enjoyed the session more, but on the other hand, if there had been more code I might not have been falling asleep.
Non-Relational Databases
Tarn’s presentation was probably the most entertaining of the day. He did the whole thing from Ubuntu, using (I think) Vim and Monodevelop along with the command line to demonstrate his code. It was a fun look at the world of “NoSQL” with some compelling arguments.
The Wrap Up
The final “session” was a chance for the guys to give away some prizes and thank the sponsors. Wouldn’t you know that my name was the first to be drawn for a few ticket to REMIX Australia? Unfortunately I had to turn it down ‘coz I can’t make it to Melbourne when it’s on, so instead I got a cool organizer/presenter’s polo shirt which I will wear with pride to our local user group next month. :)
The best thing about events like these is the opportunity to meet face-to-face with people I consider “friends” online. I got to meet (for the first time) Paul Jenkins, Brendan Forster, Aaron Powell, Michael Kordahi and Nick Josevski, as well as catch up with some old friends that I usually only see at Code Camp Oz.
If you missed DDD Melbourne, I can recommend checking out DDD Sydney, which is scheduled for late July at this early stage. I probably won’t be able to make it all the way up there, but if it comes off as smoothly as DDD Melbourne, it should be awesome.