Spring 2011 UK Trip Roundup
By · CommentsDDD Scotland
It was a real pleasure to be selected to speak at a UK community event through the votes of the community. The event was well run, and as is the tradition in the UK was sold out with a waiting list. If you’re in the UK (or can easily get there) you really should check out the community events up there – see the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper site for the scoop on what’s coming up.
There were a number of great sessions – you can see slides and follow up from several of them online.
I’m thrilled at the feedback I got (which you can read here). I was worried many of my examples and illustrations in my session wouldn’t work in the UK but it seems to have done well enough.
I really felt the missing 10 minutes compared to a typical Code Camp presentation in the United States; you could tell I was just short on time.
User Group Presentations
Outside of the large DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event I was honored to be invited to present at several user groups:
Each of these groups (independently, spooky..) selected a new presentation I’ve been working up entitled the Natural Laws of Software Performance. The big change for this round of presentations was the addition of a number of code samples.
The code samples were both great and problematic. What I didn’t realize was how incredibly sensitive they were to how Visual Studio was being used and the state of my laptop. For example, if the laptop was on battery I got one set of numbers, A/C with the big brick adapter got me another and if I was using my slim travel adapter, well.. just awful results. That’s what I get for building the demo on my desktop workstation. Additionally, for the folks at DotNetDevNet and NEBytes, a bug in the demo caused it to report too-good-to-be-true results for later tests. That’s addressed now, sorry for the confusion.
I was genuinely impressed with the user groups – everyone was fabulously welcoming which made the whole experience much easier. Each group had a different feel, which made it all the better. If you have a change to make a trip to the UK, don’t just hang around London – there’s some great variety and nice people all over the country.
If you’re near any of the groups above I’d encourage you to check them out. Some are free, some charge a nominal membership fee, but they’re a great way to connect with professionals doing real things with technology.
Finally, it as great to meet up with some of our customers along the way. I know some of you drove quite a distance to make it to an event or made time in your schedules when I was in town and I really appreciate it. We’ll be incorporating your input into our product roadmaps to ensure we’re always getting better at the things that matter to you.
Natural Laws of Software Performance at DotNetDevNet
By · CommentsHad a great time presenting at DotNetDevNet in Bristol last night – thanks to everyone for coming out from all over southern England.
You can see the slides below and Download the Parallel Processing Demo.
The Gibraltar team was there in force for Philly.NET Code Camp 2011.1. Since it’s right in our backyard we brought more of the team and had a booth set up. We were just thrilled at how many people stopped by to talk – not just to check out Gibraltar and VistaDB (but that’s always great!) but also to talk about past presentations we’ve done.
Kendall Miller presented a new talk at this Code Camp – Easy Application Scaling with Microsoft AppFabric and AOP. You can read the slides below as well as download the source code for the demos. This is an extended version of the webinar we did a few months ago, with a lot more code samples.
The key idea is that AppFabric cache creates a number of opportunities for high performance, highly scalable applications but you’ll want to do some up-front work to make it easy to use in your application. The code samples walk through how to do it all by hand, then show how to use PostSharp to inject the code at compile time and make it a whole lot easier. You can Download the Code to see for yourself
Philly .NET was very well run as usual – all the food set up and ready to go, good places to network, lots of tracks and sessions to attend. This year they also added an open spaces area for folks to hotly debate common challenges in a semi-moderated forum. It was a fun place to sit and listen to the passionate, divergent opinions on the range of software construction topics. Of course we were happy to see our friends from DevExpress there as well as the rest of the community.
Southern Maryland Give Camp – What a Blast!
By · CommentsLast weekend I was at the Southern Maryland Give Camp which really was an event not to be missed. In one weekend we designed and built a system to track and report on all of the services provided by the Tri-County Youth Services Bureau (TCYSB), an organization that provides important help to youth and families in Maryland. Their key goal was to automate the reporting they needed to do to the various state agencies and grant providers that otherwise took about a man year of effort to assemble by hand.
Held in the really beautiful St. Mary’s College of Maryland (a state school – who knew!) we set about building system to track all of the people TCYSB provides services to, all of the services that were provided, and then provide the data back out to satisfy the various reporting requirements. To get a feel for the complexity of the system, here’s the entity model:
When you have less than two days, it really focuses you on what’s important. For the most part we stuck with technologies we either knew or were willing to risk everything figuring out. We built the system using Entity Framework 4 (Model First), ASP.NET WebForms, and DevExpress Reporting. This was my first time using EF4 on a complete application, and it worked out amazingly well. Frankly, compared to the prototypes I did on EF1 they have really come a long way. Naturally we used DevExpress reporting not just because I know it (I know SSRS as well) but because ease of deployment is a big concern when you’re handing off a bunch of files to a customer with just this side of no IT support. Like a few vendors, DevExpress offered free licenses to the non profit organizations for solutions developed at the Give Camp.
Another thing that acquitted itself well was TFS – we had everyone on the team using our TFS server (since it was readily accessible and everyone had the client installed) and despite the high odds of merge hell it all came off without a hitch. Frankly, no one was more surprised than me.
At high noon on Sunday, 41 hours after the kickoff, we backed away from the source code, did a final check in and went into the group room for wrap up. Every team demonstrated what they built for their non-profit which was something to see. The results ranged from redesigned web sites to real line of business applications like what we did. Technologies spanned the range as well, with Microsoft pretty well represented as well as some interesting uses for Google Docs and Google Calendar.
That's right Rachel - enough Pizza for everyone to take whatever they wanted
What made it all work was behind the scenes – for me the biggest piece were the outstanding requirements documents we got prepared by Ann Scharpf before we got there. Combined with round-the-clock access to both the TCYSB staff and Ann we never had to guess at what we were trying to deliver. Frankly, I’ve never worked with a better BA than her and it made all of the difference.
Everything we might ask for was right there – more food than could be eaten, more caffeinated drinks than could be drunk, and roving specialists in design and technologies (a big shout out to Steve Michelotti for helping me with EF questions).
Are you done yet? Well get on it!
Finally, we had Jim Pendarvis doing his best impression of R Lee Ermey. When he says coding is over at high noon, coding is over at high noon! I can’t imagine how much work he personally had to put into making this happen.
If you have the chance, I really encourage you to check out a Give Camp near you. It’s a great experience to build something completely in a weekend that will make a huge difference for people. Regardless of your level of tech skill or even if you’re a designer, analyst or even (gasp) a program manager you can make a difference. Give it a shot!
