The complete, working application for my .NET TDD Kickstart sessions can be found here.

Unzip the files into a solution folder and open the Demo.sln solution in a version of Visual Studio 2010 that has Unit Testing capability (Professional, Premium or Ultimate).  Immediately, you should be able to compile the whole solution, and successfully execute the tests in the Bss.QueueMonitor.Test and Bss.Timing.Test libraries.

To get the tests in the other two test libraries (Bss.QueueMonitor.Data.EF.Test & Bss.QueueMonitor.IntegrationTest) to pass, you will need to create the database used to store the monitored data in the data-tier and integration tests, and enable MSMQ on your system so that a queue to be monitored can be created for the Integration test.

The solution is configured to use a SQLExpress database called TDDDemo.  You can use any name or SQL implementation you like, you’ll just need to update the configuration of all of the test libraries to use the new connection.  The script to execute in the new database to create the table needed to run the tests can be found in the Bss.QueueMonitor.Data.EF library and is called QueueDepthModel.edmx.sql.

You can install Message Queuing on computers running Windows 7 by using Programs and Features in the Control Panel.  You do not need to create any specific queue because the integration test creates a queue for each test individually, then deletes the queue when the test is complete.

If you have any questions or comments about this sample, please start a conversation on Twitter or Contact Me.

I head out to Fullerton tomorrow for the start of my .NET TDD Kickstart world tour

In this session, the speaker and the audience will "pair up" for a coding session which will serve as an introduction to Test Driven Development in an Agile environment. We will use C#, Visual Studio and Rhino Mocks to unit test code to be built both with and without dependencies. We will also highlight some of the common issues encountered during TDD and discuss strategies for overcoming them.

I will be presenting this session at numerous venues around the country this year, including, so far:

• Southern California Code Camp – Fullerton in January
• South Florida Code Camp – Ft. Lauderdale in February
• New Mexico .NET User’s Group – Albuquerque in March
• Twin Cities Code Camp – Minneapolis in April

If you are interested in having me present this or another session at your event, please contact me.

There is much more than an hour’s worth of material to be presented, so instead of trying to rush through everything I want to talk about during this time, I’ve instead taken some questions from this presentation and posted them below.  Please contact me if you have any additional questions, need clarification, or if you have an suggestions or additions to these lists.

Update: I have moved the FAQ list here to allow it to be maintained separately from this post.

I previously posted the slides for my Building Enterprise Apps using Entity Framework 4 talk here.  I can now post the source code for the completed demo application.  That code, created for use in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, is available in zip format below.  This is the same code that was demonstrated at Desert Code Camp 2011.1 and SoCalCodeCamp 2011 as well as the New Mexico .NET User’s Group (NMUG).

EF4EnterpriseDemoCode.zip

For the 2nd time in the last 3 years, I was lucky enough to be able to attend the South Florida Code Camp.  Code Camps are free, community driven technical conferences that take place during off-hours, usually weekends, so I try to make it to as many of them as I can.  I have attended most of our local (Arizona) Desert Code Camp events, and will be speaking at the upcoming Desert Code Camp in April 2011, but I also try to attend other code camps whenever possible to get the broadest range of speakers and experiences.  If you haven’t been to the local code camp in your area, you are missing out on a lot of great technical content and opportunities to chat with some awesome technologists.

I was able to attend a session in each of the 6 time slots for South Florida Code Camp 2011.  I’d like to thank the speakers for all of the sessions as each was useful and worth attending:

1. Zachary Gramana - Custom Tooling Using a VS Add-In and T4 Templates

2. Colin Blakey – Building OData/WCF Data Service Providers

3. Bayer White - Hosting Workflows as WCF Services Through Windows Server AppFabric

4. Olec Sych – ASP.Net Dynamic Data

5. Woody Pewitt – Technical Debt

6. Chris Eargle – Code Like a Ninja: Enhance Productivity with Visual Studio and Just Code

Three of these sessions deserve some special mention. The OData/WCF session was probably the most useful from a technical perspective as the demos gave specific examples of exactly what I’d need to do to implement the technology.  The session on technical debt was the most useful overall, Woody from ComponentOne, who is always a fantastic speaker, gave some specific tools to use to calculate the costs of carrying technical debt. In fact, I was fortunate enough to come-away from the raffle with a license to ComponentOne’s Studio Enterprise product.  I’m especially looking forward to trying out the Silverlight controls. Finally, in the last session of the day, which turned into a free-form Visual Studio tips session, Chris did a great job of going with the flow and giving the already rowdy crowd, exactly what they wanted, including demos of some of the coolest features of Just Code.

All of the speakers and organizers did a fantastic job and it was a great event.  Hopefully I will be able to make it back for next year’s event.

I would once again like to thank the organizers, presenters and sponsors of Desert Code Camp for giving of their time, effort and funding to support such an outstanding community resource.  Desert Code Camp IV, held yesterday, May 31st at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, AZ featured well over 40 sessions on topics such as Agile & TDD, ASP.NET, Flash, Silverlight, iPhone SDK, XAML, Apache, Ruby and much more.  I was fortunate enough to attend 4 of these sessions, all of which were well worth my time in attending.

The first session I attended was "Scrum 101" presented by Dan Weinmann (who I think works for Desert Code Camp sponsor Neudesic but I am not sure because it is not listed in Dan's extremely minimalist bio on the Code Camp website).  Dan spent the first part of the session explaining general Agile concepts which is appropriate for a "101" class, and his explanation was quite solid.  What I was looking for however came in the remainder of the discussion where Dan gave specific examples of how his organization has utilized Scrum as an effective project management methodology.  I found especially interesting the parts where Dan explained how they use Scrum "under the covers" when working with a client who, for whatever reason, will not use Scrum.  I found this similar in a number of ways to how my team currently functions and came-away with several ideas of how we might be able to improve on our current processes.

The next session I attended was "Silverlight Zero to Hero" given by Simon Allardice of Interface Technical Training and gets my vote for the mythical "session of the day" award. This session gets my vote not for the abundant humor, which had the room in stitches and led me to refer to Simon on Twitter as "..the Eddie Izzard of the tech world, without the dress...".  No, this was the best session I attended because of the unique perspective he gave to the topic.  That is, he didn't waste our time by giving us the same overview of Silverlight that we could get in any 10k foot video from the Mix conference.  Instead, we were taken step-by-step through Simon's unique metaphors detailing how we can use the generalized feature-set of Silverlight as well as how it could be used to create Rich Internet Applications that are truly effective in communicating  with the user.  The next time I am looking to take a class, I hope Simon is teaching it. In addition, if anyone is looking to become an instructor, I hope they sit-in on some of Simon's sessions which couldn't help but improve anyone's teaching technique.

My third session was "integrating Data with Silverlight 2.0 Applications" presented by Simon's colleague at Interface, Dan Wahlin. Dan, who described himself as "...not funny like Simon...", certainly had his moments, especially when he (unintentionally?) made a comment about some of his demo data to the effect of "...there are Johns in the room...nothing wrong with Johns."  Dan's wife was videotaping at the time, I hope that clip ends up on YouTube.    Regardless of the humor factor, this presentation as well was full of useful specifics on binding Silverlight 2.0 apps to data services including both SOAP and RESTful services.

Finally, I attended a preview by Scott Cate of MyKB of his TechEd presentation next month called "C# 3.5 Compiler Tricks".  This session provided me with some fascinating insights into the workings of the C# compiler, including several situations where the compiler uses "syntactical sugar" to provide constructs that compile to .NET 2.0 IL code and have no dependencies on .NET 3.0 or 3.5 libraries.  In these cases, it is possible to use these constructs in Visual Studio 2008 (or more specifically, when using the C# 3.5 compiler) even when targeting the .NET 2.0 framework.  I was also fortunate enough to be able to spend some very enjoyable time with Scott after the session, discussing his most recent project, EasyDB.com.  Scott set me up with access to the service beta and I spent the rest of the afternoon working with this fantastic "SQL in the Cloud".  I will be blogging about this application and my experiences with it much more in the near future.

Again thanks to everyone who helped to make this event happen.  Sponsors that I haven't mentioned yet who also deserve props for their support include Infusionsoft and JumpBox.

I was expecting more of a "Best Practices for Data-Store Independance" type of session. This turned out to be more of a "Creating Web-Sites that Work Similarly Across Scripting Engines" thing.

Overall, I (fully) attended 7 sessions and garnered quite a bit of useful information (especially what should be on my reading material list). I consider the Desert Code Camp a tremendous success and look forward to the next one. A big thank-you to the organizers and presenters.

Despite the title (smirk), this session was actually interesting and valuable. Tim Heuer, who gave us many ways to contact him, is a Microsoft guy who definately likes the capability of AJAX using the Atlas framework. There was simply too much information to try and summarize it here, but suffice it to say that, when used in the proper way, Atlas appears to be a strong model for UI development that is consistant with the way we currently do development. It may even help to extend the boundaries of where and why it is appropriate to use client-side JavaScript.

Some links Tim showed us were:

http://atlas.asp.net

http://atlas.asp.net/atlastoolkit

http://forums.asp.net

In this excellent session, Rob Bagby gave a warp-1 overview of much of the .NET Enterprise Library (Application Blocks). Some key points of the talk were:

• Config files for all blocks are now unified
• Crypto block provides Hashing & Encryption functionality
• Logging block provides a number of canned sinks including EventLog, DB, Text, MSMQ, Email and WMI
• A good resource on the Caching block is at http://www.ronjacobs.com

Of course, there were many other interesting items which I am unable to document here due to my mild case of brain disfunctionality, but again, I will post links to the slide-decks as I get them.

The first session I attended was T-SQL 2005 Enhancements, Tricks and Tips. David Lundell was the instructor and did a nice job.

Some key points were:

• Common Table Expression (CTE) - A way to alias a query for use within another query. This can also be used to execute queries recursively.
• nTile - Allows a resultset to be "partitioned" into segments. i.e. 100 segments make it a percentile, 4 segments is a quartile, etc.
• Rank - Similar to nTile except the values are ranked in order. If two or more items tie for a rank, subsequent ranks are skipped. That is, if two items are tied for first, the next item would have a rank of 3.
• Dense_Rank - Same as Rank only no ranks are skipped, regardless of ties
• Row_Number - Same as Dense_Rank only with no duplicates, just lists the items in order from 1..n. Ties are arbitrarily broken and consistant order by broken ties is not guaranteed.
• Pivot - Allows the creation of Pivot Tables but in my opinion, won't be very useful until we can set the columns dynamically. Currently in SQL 2005 the Pivot columns have to be explicitly defined.