I got some good news this weekend. Three of my proposed talks for the VSLive! conference were accepted. I landed two talks in the C#Live track and one in the VBITS track. As usual the speaker roster is full of interesting people so it should be a lot of fun.
I love software developer conferences. Don't you? There is alway a lot happening at these events, kind of a full throttle, information overload geek festival. There is plenty of new gadgets to look at, new software releases to play with and bags and bags full of dorky give-away stuff (commonly known as SWAG). Mostly though I like going to meet new people and seeing what other developers are doing in their world. After a few days at the conference my head is spinning with new ideas and I can't wait to get working on new features for my applications.
What can make the conference even better? Being invited to speak at a conference of course. True, the fact that the conference is paying me to speak is a nice bonus but that is not the main reason I like doing sessions at conferences. I genuinely like public speaking. The bigger the audience the better. In case you haven't noticed the audiences are much larger at national conferences compared to most local user groups. Don't get me wrong. I like talking to local groups too. But the really big audiences only come to the big national conferences .
This year I've been more active in proposing sessions and I been very fortunate that the conference chairs have liked my proposals. Anyway I've booked my first conference in 2005. Here are the abstracts for my talks.
[Note: I have two .NET 2.0 smart client talks. VSLive is only giving me one hour for this topic so I'm going to have to pick the best bits of part I and part II and write a new abstract. I'll post the revised abstract later.]
Unit Testing your .Net Application
Everyone realizes the need to test their code. But the tests often get postponed to the end of the product cycle. Test Driven Development is gaining ground in the .NET community. Isn't it about time you learned what all the buzz is about? Unit testing is a developer testing discipline, which proposes that you write your test cases first – before coding your application. Further it recommends that an automated test environment be used. Can .NET development benefit from this unit test or programmer test approach? The answer is a resounding yes. We will see how to integrate unit tests into Visual Studio.NET and review a number of unit testing application including NUnit. Learn what parts of your NET application will benefit from unit testing and what parts shouldn’t be included. We will see the difficulties encountered when attempting to test the user interface portion of your application and look at ways to successfully implement a solid test plan.
Smart Clients 2.0 — What's new in Visual Studio 2005 Forms? Parts I
Arguably the most visible set of new features to be added to .NET Framework 2.0 will be the enhanced support for Rich Client applications. As enhancements to the Base Class Libraries (BCL) in the WinForms namespace, dozens of new controls and features have been added to support dynamic layout, more powerful data binding, richer editing and formatting, and more support for enhancing the overall User Experience in your own applications.
In this first of two sessions, we'll start by focusing on the new layout controls (FlowLayout, SplitContainer, TableLayout) then examine the new managed WebBrowser, MaskedEdit, SoundPlayer controls. You'll learn how existing controls have been improved (e.g., the menu control supports icons) and learn about rafting, margins, auto-size and auto-relocate and more. We'll dig into the latest user control test harness discovering how it can simplify control development. Finally, we'll wrap up with the enhancements to the Visual Studio Forms designer, and its many improvements that will sweeten your daily coding chores (Outline View, Class Diagram View, layout guides, Snaplines and SmartTags). By the time we finish, you'll see why rich client applications will be even more powerful with the Framework 2.0 release.
Smart Clients 2.0 — What's new in Visual Studio 2005 Forms? Parts II
In this second of two sessions we will examine several new and UI toys (ToolStrip, MainMenuStrip, StatusBarStrip) that should have been provided in Framework 1.0 but weren't completed in time. We will investigate the new BackgroundWorker and SerialPort components and see how to utilize the new auto-complete functionality available for comboboxes and other text entry controls. Next, a tour of the Form class improvements including AutoValidate and enhanced DoubleBuffering properties and then you'll see how easy it is to create Windows-themed applications. Lastly we will discuss the major improvements made in two areas that are critical to professional application development: resource management and application/user configuration.
Creating User Controls - The Basics
The .Net Windows Forms engine provides a rich and varied collection of built-in controls. But as powerful as these built-in controls are some developers will want to create their own UI controls. .NET provides an attractive framework on which to build custom controls. You will learn the basics of building custom controls and hooking up events. Find out how to interact with the control host and influence the Visual Studio design time environment. We will discuss the design decisions that clarify whether to use control inheritance or create a composite controls. Finally we will look at using GDI+ to create custom drawn controls.