Floridians beware! The Hillbilly descends on your fair state in the next few weeks:

FlaDotNet - West Palm Beach, January 22, 2008   6:30pm

Introducing MVC in .NET
OnLoad, OnPreRender, OnRender, OnInit. Traditional web forms development makes it sound like you're some crazed Santa Claus born from the imagination of Tim Burton. But it doesn't have to be that way.

In this session, Kyle will free you from the shackles of the ASP.NET event model and show you a shiny, happy world. A world where web developers write application code, not plumbing. A world where "ViewState" is the eighth word you can't say on television.

Such a world does exist. And Kyle can take you there with the help of Microsoft's shiny, new implementation of Model-View-Controller. And you will see a place where the air is clean, easily maintained, and testable.

 

South Florida Code Camp - Miramar, February 2, 2008    7:30am - 5:45pm

Not one, not two, but THREE doses of the Hillbilly:

Introduction to TDD, Mocking, and Dependency Injection
I know, I know, why would we need TDD? It’s not like requirements ever change, right? Users are always crystal clear when describing them and once they’re written down, everyone *knows* they’re set in stone.

So this session will be more of an academic exercise for those purely hypothetical situations where, say, your client claims he “forgot” about a key feature one week before delivery and that it “absolutely has to” be in the application and, wouldn’t you know it, it’s going to touch every single layer of the application.

Crazy talk, maybe. But indulge a budding theorist and join me for a demonstration of TDD in action and how it allows you to wholesale replace entire sections of your application with confidence. Along the way, we’ll discuss how you can test components entirely in isolation from each other through the power of mocking and dependency injection.

ASP.NET MVC and AJAX
No abstract for this one because I was originally going to re-hash my Introducing MVC in .NET presentation before David Hayden decided he wanted me to work for my money. But unlike Justice Gray, I'm folding like a new shirt and tweaking my presentation.

Brownfield Software Development: Inheriting Code
What a mess this code is! If only the mucky-mucks would let me rewrite it from scratch. (I’d *never* make the same mistakes the previous team did.)

But alas, I’m stuck adding features and making bug fixes to this convoluted codebase that has no unit tests, has no CI process, and is not even completely in the source code repository. And I’m scared to make changes because the first time I tried, some users couldn’t log in, the app crashed for others, and for one unfortunate person, a big gaping hole opened up under his desk when he tried to enter an order.

In this session, we’ll take an existing application and move it to a state where we can make changes with confidence. We’ll implement a continuous integration process and start you on the addictive road to refactoring. And once you get your first hit, you’ll never start a greenfield application from scratch again.

 

I'm rather excited about the last one even if it seems the least sexy of the topics. I think it has the most potential to help people in the NOW instead of some hypothetical future.

Kyle the Re-presented