Scoville Units Unite

I attended the Developer Day Scotland for the second time at the weekend (I had to miss first one, can’t remember why). My sessions did vary a bit from what I had originally intended.

Firstly I had forgotten to pick up the directions so couldn’t remember exactly what building it was in. I bumped into someone I recognised from the TechDay event in Edinburgh and having walked further passed the wrong directions I had been given we found the building. There was a slight confusion over badge as one of the many other Alan Grahams had registered too. Got a wee goodie bag which included a DevExpress t-shirt. There is a competition to win a Sony Flipcam for anyone wearing the t-shirt in a funny or unusal pose and tweeting it using #DDDScotPic. So far Gavin has the only entry so he’s a shoe in.

Session 1 HTML5 : The Language of the Cloud?

Craig Nicol gave a talk about HTML5. The takeaway for me was basically to wait until things have settled down a bit. All browsers implement different things so I would be driven mad doing anything yet in my spare time. The video demos were very cool though.

Session 2 T4 and how it can be used for code generation in Visual Studio 2008 / 2010

I was looking forward to this. We have a small number of classes using this in one of the projects at work but I haven’t even looked at it yet. The area I was interested in using it was generating enums from a database and this is pretty much what Rob Blackmore promoted it as being good at.

Session 3 Web standards are broken, and it’s getting worse

I went to this session by Sebastien Lambla to find it had turned in to a talk about OpenRasta. If I had known in advance I might have popped to Defensive Programming. As I was in second row and the largest room had a dozen (at most) people I decided to stay. Having not known anything about it beforehand I didn’t really take too much in and the small bit at the end about OpenWrap probably got me more interested.

Grok Talks

A really good grab bag of stuff. Colin MacKay on SQL Injection. Someone on Code Dojos. A talk on ways to learn. Seb on his OpenWrap promo. I can’t remember the other one. Something about loving users maybe?

Session 4 Get Started with Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using Cucumber

This was a really thought provoking talk by Steve Sanderson on Behaviour Driven Development. He gave a bit of background on some of the problems with TDD and what BDD set out to solve. His demonstration of writing specs then tests to pass them was really interesting. We are using SWEA at work but it is so fragile and such a hassle to work with we had been thinking of switching to Selenium. Having seen this I want to play around a bit with SpecFlow. I think it might be more suitable.

Session 5 Enforcing Code ‘Beauty’ With StyleCop

Or as Guy Smith-Ferrier referred to it How to start a fight. I felt slightly out of place as when he asked who had used it one other person had for 6months. I said it was from before it was called StyleCop. I did get a TekPub 30 day trial for making some comments/questions during the session. It was an intro to but I managed to pick up some tips on working with Legacy code and had a further spur to dig out StyleCop happy templates for new files.

Afterwards I popped to Bar Republic to get an amazing pizza then grabbed the train home. Really enjoyable day. The only session I didn’t get what I had wanted was the one which had changed and if it had been as intended it was my preferred session of the day – so I look forward to seeing it next year! Having seen everyone tweeting all day I dug out my tablet but couldn’t get it to log into Twitter. That was a bit dissapointing so I’ll need to investigate what’s up with it.