DDD5 Day 2 – The Main Event

Saturday started with a leisurely breakfast before we took our taxi to Microsoft UK at Thames Valley Park, the venue for DDD5. As the allegedly 25 minute only took 10 minutes we arrived a tad early, still this enabled us to watch other attendees running through the downpour as we enjoyed the free tea and coffee.

DDD5 started with yet more tea and coffee, but this time accompanied by some breakfast rolls. We briefly chatted to a surprisingly calm Craig Murphy, perhaps this was due to it being his fifth DDD event, or maybe its because all of his speakers had arrived?

So onto the sessions themselves, the first was a simple choice for me, Colin Mackay with ‘his presentation ‘An Introduction to Unit Testing with Mock Objects’, the first session I’d selected during voting as I’ve recently started to experiment with Test Driven Design. I’d not seen Colin talk yet, but as a member of Toastmasters International who was running a Grok talk on presentations my expectations were high. I regret to say that I left a little disappointed, I think this was partly due to it being his first LARGE audience and partly due to the silences during his code demonstrations (more on this later). However, when all’s said and done I know more now than I did when I sat down and that’s the main thing.

For session two I was back in Chicago 1, for the ‘Bluffers guide to C# 3.0′ the first half of a double presentation (a first for DDD I believe) by Ian Cooper and Oliver Sturm. I’ll be honest the abstract for this presentation, won me over big time. As for the presentation Ian did the the talky PowerPoint bits, while Oliver ran the code examples. A very slick presentation, of which I pretty much managed to follow, neither speaker was troubled when things didn’t work as planned, in fact if anything they seemed to thrive on problems!

Session three was the second part of the double presentation by Ian and Oliver, ’10 Cool Things to do with C# 3.0′. An added twist was that they’d decided to take five each and had managed to rope Zi Makki into a compare role, with each competing for points. Now when you are in a room of developers and the presenters tell you that you won’t take everything in, I get scared! Cunningly they started off at two and a half minutes(ish) for each cool thing, this isn’t too bad I think. Hmm five minutes per cool thing, yeah okay… ten minutes! Oh dear, this is going to hurt… that said it was a lot of fun although Oliver seemed to have the display equipment gods on his side, as Ian battled through a series of minor glitches.

Lunchtime, where did the time go? I grabbed a lunch bag, vegetarian as all the meat ones had already been snaffled… and up the stairs to the Grok talks, my they’re popular! First up were the three students from erm I’ve no idea! with their overview of the Imagine Cup. An interesting presentation with their project aimed at introducing children in the 7-11 age group to programming.

Next up was Gary Short, with his ’10 Tools in 10 Minutes’. Starters orders and we’re off! Gary rattled through his Grok talk, covering his free Microsoft development stack in his allotted time and even managed to leave time free to answer questions, luckily enough people had a few! At this point I left the Grok talk area and went in search of the ice cream and some fresh air, before session four started.

Session four, and a move into Chicago 2 for Gary’s presentation on ‘Agile Methods for ISV’s’. A change here as this was a pure presentation where Gary introduced the Agile guidelines and how easy or hard they were to implement in both the Enterprise and ISV environments. He managed to include a fair amount of humour, which was a good thing following on from lunch, however, this dried up for a while around the half hour mark before returning towards the end of the session. Though as he said, he did manage to bore the projector at one point! Twas actually the AV tech trying to adjust the screen, but non-the-less funny!

My last session was Ian’s on ‘Next Generation Data Access with LINQ’, chosen on the basis of I had no clear favourite and I was advised that this would be worth going to… so I did! Now this wasn’t too daunting as some of the material had showed up in a slightly different guise during sessions two and three and with a little on TDD it turned out to be right up my street.

So then it was time to leave, the taxis were waiting outside and after we’d avoided a manically reversing Z4 we returned to our hotel, to freshen up for the Geek Dinner. We decided to walk as it wasn’t too far, however, as the rain started we began to question this decision. Thankfully my navigation was good and a lynching thus avoided! 42 geek’s in a large gazebo on the bank of the Thames in a monsoon! Still everyone seemed to have fun, the food was good and the drinks flowed. We (eXtreme Tayside) as well as a few other were interviewed by Craig for as part of a series of podcasts, who knows how I’ll sound… Still all too soon it was time to go and as we’d discovered that Oliver, Craig and a few other were in the Novatel next door to us in the IBIS we returned there for a few extra drinks.

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