Christopher Bennage : Presentations

Alabama Code Camp in Mobile

Christopher Bennage — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:24:00 GMT

I’ll be at the Alabama Code Camp this weekend in Mobile, AL, along our very own Alan Northam. Like all code camps, this is a free event. If you are anywhere in the area I recommend attending. The schedule is posted on the site and there are a lot of great sessions.

I’m doing two presentations: one on source control concepts that I did at the Jacksonville and Tallahassee code camps. The other is a brand new presentation about the basics of game development, with a primer for XNA and how to port the source to Silverlight using SilverSprite.

You can also follow the event on Twitter with the hashtag #ALCC.

Hope to see you there.

Things I’d Like To Present

Christopher Bennage — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:32:00 GMT

In case you are not familiar with MIX, it is a conference from Microsoft focusing on the collaboration of design and development. Admittedly, the sessions tend to favor the developer, but there is always excellent design and UX content.

There was an open call for presentations this year and the community gets to choose which of the proposals will be selected. There are a number of excellent proposals and I encourage you to go check out the list and vote for the sessions that you are genuinely interested in. (Even if you won’t be attending, the sessions will be broadcast.)

Here are some sessions that I proposed for MIX10:

Cross Compiling Games for Silverlight & XNA

Our friend and Silverlight MVP, Bill Reiss, has created an incredible library that enables you to cross compile XNA games for Silverlight. The library is called SilverSprite and we feature it on Silver Arcade. (Wow, that’s a lot of ‘silvers’ in one paragraph.)

In this session, we’d write a simple game for XNA (discussing some of the basic of game dev along the way) and then port the game over to Silverlight.

This is an area where I wish I could spend more time. I love game development, but it’s always taking a back burner to other projects.
[vote for this]

LinqToSQL and EntityFramework Profilers: Case Study

If you aren’t already familiar with the UberProf suite of ORM profilers, you can read tales of the development on Ayende’s blog. Rob and I built the UI side of the application, and we learned a lot in the process. I’d like to do a talk were we discuss the challenges of the project, how we solved them, and what we did wrong.

Yes, NHProf will be included too. (I submitted a case study for it last year, and it didn’t get picked. I have to sneak it in).

A few interesting aspects:

we built this using MVVM, but well before Caliburn reached maturity.
the four separate apps (NHProf, EFProf, L2SProf, HProf) all use a single code base.
we’re about to port the project from WPF to Silverlight.

[vote for this]

Silver Arcade: Case Study

This is a presentation that Rob and I have made a couple of times. Most recently at the Orlando .NET Users Group. We walk through the actual code for Silver Arcade explaining the philosophy, design choices and mistakes we made along the way.

For MIX, we would focus more design and UX choices, such as the separation of the behaviors from the views. However, we like to have a lot of audience interaction and tend to follow where ever the questions led (especially those leading questions that Scott Densmore tends to ask).

Silver Arcade is also interesting because we deliberately used a number of newer hipper technologies; including Azure, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, MEF, NHibernate and so on.
[vote for this]

Thanks!

Source Control Presentation

Christopher Bennage — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:33:00 GMT

I want to thank everyone that came out to my session at the Jacksonville Code Camp. I had a great time and it was definitely worth the drive.

Here are my slides from the presentation. They are really only useful with the accompanying notes, with are available on the slideshare site. You have to select to “Notes on slide X” tab underneath the presentation to see them. (I wish there was an option to embed the notes, but I didn’t see it.)

I want to acknowledge Joe Kuemerle whose Get Rid of VSS presentation was helpful. Also, Eric Sink whose blog influenced a great deal of the content.

As always, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Tally UG Follow-up - Silverlight Game Dev

Christopher Bennage — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:19:00 GMT

I appreciate everyone who came out for my session on game development in Silverlight.

Here is the code we wrote during the session. It's not pretty, and if you weren't at the present, I expect it will be hard to follow. I hope to have a cleaner version published soon. (So much to do!)

Some resources that might be useful for your game development efforts:

Blue Rose Games - a blog about Silverlight game development in general
Andy Beaulieu on collision detection. Be sure to check out the rest of his blog, as there is lots more on Silverlight game dev.

You'll see the influence of both of those blogs in the code from the session.

Also, for the Flash crossover guys who were present,

Shine Draw does regular comparisons of Flash and Silverlight.
Project Rosetta is a set of Silverlight tutorials design for Flash guys.

TDD Firestarter in Tampa

Christopher Bennage — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:12:10 GMT

The new year has already gotten away from me and it's only 7 days old. (Come back, Baby Happy!)

In less than 2 weeks from now, we're going to a have full day of TDD in Tampa, FL. The event is designed so that everyone will find value, whether you are merely curious about methodology or a veteran practitioner.

We're starting off the day with introductory and intermediate session on TDD and following it up with some very focused sessions in the afternoon. (I'm going to be talking about doing TDD with WPF and I'll be using a little bit o' Caliburn as well.)

Saturday, January 17, 2009

9:00 AM–5:00PM

Click here to register or call (877) 673-8368 with event ID 1032397083.

Speakers include Cory Foy, Scott C. Reynolds, Sean Chambers, and Rob Eisenberg.

Please come out and join us! Did I mention it's free?

More information here...

MSDN DevCon Reflections

Christopher Bennage — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 17:17:52 GMT

I had a great time at the conference yesterday. I really appreciate everyone who attended our sessions as well as all the positive feedback. For those of you in other cities,Orlando was just the 2nd conference. The rest are still to come.

For anyone interested in the materials from our sessions:

MapDotNet (from the keynote) Don't forget this is free.
jQuery
WPF ToolKit

Why You Should Go

Yes, there are lots of presentations and great speakers, but in retrospect I really think these are secondary reasons. The highlight of the event is the under-advertised Community Courtyard.

Community Courtyard is an Open Spaces-ish gathering facilitated by "Doc" List. No one seemed to know about this portion of the conference, but thankfully Joe Healy herded some of us into the courtyard for a tweetup. (I think the tweetup was just an excuse to get us into the courtyard.)

The result was great conversation. We talked about many things ranging from dealing with conflict to functional programming. These sorts of environments are where I have had the biggest gains in my craft. I can't encourage you enough to check this aspect of the conference.

post scriptum
For those of you twitterati who have asked me to get Rob Eisenberg on Twitter, his name was apparently revealed at this tweetup.

Tampa Code Camp/WPF Presentation

Christopher Bennage — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:17:41 GMT

I had a couple of requests for my slide deck. It's short and mostly pictures, but here it is.

Additionally, the xaml-only font viewer is here. (You might want to do a right-click, save as). The binding example (old way vs. wpf way) is here.

I want to thank everyone that came to my presentation. You were responsive and interactive, and I was energized by the session. I also want to thank the DevFish for pushing me to get more involved in these events.

Some additional personal highlights from the event:

Bill Reiss of Blue Rose Games did a session on developing games with XNA. Specifically, he demonstrated publishing the game to his Zune. Very cool. His Dr. Popper game will be among the community games on Xbox Live soon. It should be pretty cheap as well. (Support indie game developers!)

Meeting passionate people who are excited about their craft is always the best part of these events. I'm always looking for the cross pollination of good ideas. It's also great to discover what's going on in neighboring communities.

I got chat to Los Techie ninja Sean Chambers, a fellow agilist and BDD/TDD practioner . We're doing a TDD firestarter in Tampa next month. I'm really excited about the event.

I also meet Jay Kimble and had some good conversation about the controversies of ALT.NET and related practices. Jay's also one of the forces behind the Tampa UX group; a user group for developers focused on usability, UX, and general UI issues. I'm fascinated by this as those topics are increasingly my focus.

If you are in Florida, don't forget to come the the MSDN Developer Conference in Orlando this week. Rob and I will be there showing off some of our recent work for the Tallahassee-based MapDotNet.

Talks in December

Christopher Bennage — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:47:43 GMT

12.06 @ Tampa Code Code

Expect lots of good content at this code camp. My session description is...

An Introduction to WPF - A session for those who would like to know what WPF is all about. We’ll cover the basic concepts of WPF, discuss where the technology is useful, and follow it up with a handful of code examples. If you are interested to know if WPF can benefit your team, this is a session for you.

This a free event, but you should register.

(This is the same presentation I gave at the Tallahassee Code Camp 2008.)

12.11 @ MSDN Developer Conference (Orlando)

This event is for everyone who (like myself) wasn't able to make it out to PDC this year. Just in case you've watched all the sessions online and think that you will see nothing new, we are planning on mixing it up a little bit.

The cost is $99. Check the out the site for registration and agenda.

Cool Stuff in January

I am also looking forward to a Game Development in Silverlight talk in Tallahassee, and a TDD Firestarter in Tampa (along with a couple of other guys you might know.)