Friday, September 28, 2012

Conference Survival Guide

The fine folks running Bar Camp Nashville asked me to write a short guide to help attendees get the most out of their un-conference experience. General Tips Plan Your Schedule - Note which sessions you want to attend in advance. Choose backup sessions in case your first choice gets rescheduled or canceled. Dress Comfortably - It's hard to concentrate on the speaker if your feet are hurting. Bring a Bag - The conference might provide one, but then...

Monday, September 24, 2012

Memphis .NET User Group (MNUG)

Last week I mentioned that I'll be speaking at the NE Arkansas .NET User Group on the 27th. Since then, we've arranged for that presentation to be broadcast via Live Meeting and the Memphis .NET User Group will be joining us live. Someone local will monitor the meeting chat room and relay any questions or comments from the online participants. UPDATE: If you attended this talk and would like to provide feedback, you can do so at SpeakerRate.c...

Thursday, September 20, 2012

New Talk - Going Solo

I'm working on a new talk for Bar Camp Nashville and have never had so much fun putting together a presentation. The title of my talk is, "Going Solo - How to Train Your Wookiee" and am going with a Star Wars theme. Here's what I've got so far: Description: When you started you were but the learner, now you are the master. You can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, but you're getting tired of Greedo and Jabba demanding a cut....

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

.NET Testing Frameworks

Most of my testing experience has been with MSTest, NUnit and Selenium and I feel this is an area I need to explore in more depth, so I thought I'd put the question to my colleagues and readers: What testing frameworks do you prefer and why? Below are a few lists of some .NET oriented frameworks with some notes on what sets each of them apart from others. I welcome comments confirming, challenging or correcting these notes as well as suggestions of others I may have missed. Unit Testing MSUnit - Included with VS, Easy to implement NUnit -...

Monday, September 17, 2012

NE Arkansas .NET User Group

I'm scheduled to speak at the Northeast Arkansas .NET User Group on September 27, 2012. The topic of this talk will be Testing the Untestable with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Fakes. I've given this same talk several times at regional conferences and user groups and an overview can be found on my blog, however one great thing about speaking at local groups like this is that the audience helps direct the session and we often end up focusing on areas that are most useful to that particular group. While anyone is welcome to show up, the group leader...

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Great MVVM, WPF, SOA and EF4 Articles

I was asked to put together some links to articles that would help our IT department ramp up on some of the patterns and technologies we're using. By the time I was done with the email, I realized it might be of use to others outside our organization so part three of my MVVM with WPF series was born. There are many approaches and I highly recommend researching beyond this handful of articles, but for anyone not yet familiar with these concepts I hope they help. The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern helps to cleanly separate the business and...