I know it may be kinda lame to self promote like this, but I thought I would put out a list of the upcoming speaking sessions I have over the next few months, plus it is my blog so there…:)

• Groking the MVC Framework 
  – Rockford .Net UG – April 28th
  The MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern has been around for quite some time, and is widely considered the best way to develop a web application.  With the release of ASP.Net MVC framework this pattern has moved to the head of class in the ASP world.  We will take a look at how the MVC pattern is used within Asp.Net MVC and learn how this framework makes developing web applications easier, more maintainable and more extendable
  
• Learning how to utilize Dependency Inversion to loosely couple your code
  -- Triangle .Net UG (Raleigh NC) – May 13th
  – Lake County .Net UG – May 28th
  It is no secret that highly coupled code causes developers pain and suffering every day.  Highly coupled code is hard to maintain, painful to read and darn near impossible to test with any degree of confidence.  Yet knowing these facts developers still insist on writing highly couple code.

In this session we will take a look examples of highly coupled code and lean how we can utilize the Dependency Inversion principle (part of the SOLID principles) to help free your code from these dependencies.  We will do this by evolving an existing codebase which is highly coupled to one which is very loosely coupled.  By the end of this session you will be armed with the ability to spot tightly couple code from a mile away along with the knowledge on how to start breaking free from the shackles of coupled code.

• Taking your tests to the next level by using an Isolation Framework (RhinoMocks)
  -- Chicago Code Camp – May 30th
  -- Enterprise Developers Guild (Charlotte) – June 23rd
  This session will walk through the progression of testing with an Isolation framework. In the session we will learn how testing in isolation will help remove dependencies which are out of our scope so we are able to create cleaner, simpler and more manageable tests.

During this session we will starts off our journey with a review of testing using NUnit. We will then continue on by creating tests which do not isolate their dependencies in order to understand how highly coupled test can cause random failures during test runs. Finally we will end our journey by learning how to use an isolation framework (RhinoMocks) to decrease the coupling in our tests and increase test reliability.

• Guarding your code with Code Contracts
  -- Chicago Code Camp – May 30th
  It is a common practice to put checks into our code to help ensure quality. Historically these checks have come in the form of if/then statements where you were attempting to guard against data out of range data. Although the if/then method works reasonably well, it only solves half our problem. These checks guard against only data coming into a method, not the data coming out of a method. Fortunately for us, there is a project coming out of Microsoft, named Code Contracts, which will help to solve this problem. Code Contracts provides a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. In this session we will take a look at how you can utilize Code Contracts within your codebase to take your code quality to the next level.

If you are in the area for any of the following and you want to waste perfectly good produce swing buy and give it a hurl.

Till next time,