New Talks Available

If you're in need of a speaker for your user group or conference, I'm now offering a more extensive list of talks including some oldies that have been recently updated as well as new content.

How to Be a Six Figure Developer

Microsoft .NET developers are in extremely high demand and rates continue to climb, but many developers have not yet realized their potential. In this talk we lay out some simple and proven ways to make yourself a more valuable employee and build your personal brand.

Going Solo - Independent Consulting for Jedis

Leaving a perm position to go independent is a huge decision. We'll discuss whether consulting is right for you, what to watch out for and things you can do to help ensure success.

Introduction to Model-View-Controller (MVC4)

The move from ASP.NET to MVC can be quite daunting. In this talk we discuss the core concepts, why they will make your life easier, and present some best practices to ensure the move to MVC is as painless as possible.

Build a MVC eCommerce Site in Under 5 Minutes

Did you know that you can launch a fully functional MVC eCommerce storefront in mere minutes? Not only does nopCommerce offer extensive functionality for free, but it's a great way to become more familiar with MVC, WPF, Entity Framework and LINQ.

Customizing nopCommerce with Plugins and Themes

This talk picks up where we left off with Building MVC eCommerce Sites and shows how nopCommerce can be easily customized using plugins and themes without having to modify the original source code. This approach allows for quick and easy upgrades as new versions of nopCommerce are released.

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Building E-commerce Sites with MVC

For those of us who have spent most of our careers building business applications, the prospect of creating an e-commerce storefront can be quite daunting. Not only do you have to deal with calculating tax, estimating shipping and accepting payments, but employees need a way to manage products, discounts and marketing content. Thankfully, there's an open source e-commerce solution written in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC named nopCommerce that provides all this functionality and much more.

I was so impressed by both the functionality and the underlying architecture that I've created a presentation which I believe will serve as a great introduction to MVC as well as a tutorial on developing custom storefronts using nopCommerce.

We start off with a brief overview of basic MVC concepts accompanied by examples within the nopCommerce code. This includes strongly typed Razor views, HTML helpers, jQuery ajax calls, and fluent validation.

Once everyone understands how the website works, we dive into the infrastructure by introducing WCF services, using a generic repository with Entity Framework (EF4) and LINQ, as well as Dependency Injection (DI) with Automapper.

If you'd like to schedule this talk for your local user group, either request me through INETA or contact me directly.

UPDATE 7/13/2013
Thanks to the CodeStock crew and everyone who packed the room for my talk. Y'all had some excellent questions and I invite anyone with additional questions to comment below or contact me directly. Also, don't forget to provide feedback so I can improve the talk for next time.

Click here to view the presentation slides.

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Testing the Untestable with VS2012 Fakes

One of the new features included with Visual Studio 2012 is the Fakes Framework which offers the ability to detour code at runtime and isolate functionality for true unit testing, regardless of whether the code was written with testing in mind.

I began speaking on Fakes back when it was a beta product from Microsoft Research called Moles. While the core functionality remains the same, Microsoft has streamlined the implementation and now calls the detour mechanism a shim rather than a mole.

If you have attended this or another of my talks at a user group or conference, please take a moment to share your feedback on SpeakerRate.

The PowerPoint is available on SlideShare and below are links to the code demonstrated in the presentation.

Demos
Y2K Checker (simple introduction)
DateTime Audit (avoiding non-deterministic tests)
File Reader (shimming file system access)
Repository (stubbing interfaces)

Resources
Visual Studio 2011
Fakes MSDN Documentation

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Microsoft PEX and Moles

Microsoft Research is currently beta testing a couple new frameworks that can make unit testing your code a breeze. Pex is a testing tool that analyzes code and generates unit tests. Moles is a framework that isolates code with dependencies on other application layers or frameworks. With just a few mouse clicks, you can generate suites of tests against code that previously may have been difficult or impossible to test.

Tonight I'll be giving a presentation on these technologies at the Nashville .NET User Group. For anyone who can't make it you can watch and discuss it in my Google Hangout. I'm hoping to post a video of the presentation to this blog within the next couple weeks. I'll also be giving a similar presentation and Code PaLOUsa on March 17th. Below are links to the demo solutions and Prezi used in the presentation.

Presentation on Prezi
Using Moles to Mock DateTime (Y2KBug.zip)
Using Moles to Stub Interfaces (MolesDemo.zip)
Using PEX to Generate Parameterized Unit Tests (PEXDemo.zip, PEXDemo-Result.zip)

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HTML5 Mobile Development

I received an email this morning with the master schedule for Code PaLOUsa and it looks like I'll be speaking on HTML5 Mobile Development. I'd love feedback on the session topic/description.

One of the biggest hurdles for mobile development is bridging the gap between incompatible platforms. From the very beginning HTML has been the only true cross platform solution and, with the introduction of HTML5, developers are now able to create rich applications. Microsoft has even begun shifting away from Silverlight and stated at PDC that HTML5 is the future. This session will provide the tools and techniques you need to get started developing mobile applications using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

Also, here's what I came up with for a speaker bio. I'm sure it could use some tweaking and would appreciate input.

Gaines Kergosien is a .NET Solutions Consultant for TEKsystems and is currently working with HCA Physician Services. Gaines founded the Nashville Web Developer Group and serves as a board member for the Nashville .NET User Group. With over 12 years in solutions development using Microsoft technologies, his work includes consulting for such companies as Lexis Nexis, Gibson Guitars, and Cardinal Healthcare.

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