BB&D has published a number of posters relating to the computer industry, including a number of very good ones on Software Development. I've particularly found their C# Formatting Poster (pictured below) to be extremely valuable.

Here is the slide deck for my Developer Ignite presentation, "Simplicity Through Abstraction".

I will be speaking at the Developer Ignite event in Chandler on July 22nd.  The topic of my talk will be "Simplicity Through Abstraction" during which I will be giving a very high-level overview of using Dependency Injection as an Inversion-of-Control methodology to create simplicity in software architecture.

While putting my presentation together I have found a number of items that I wanted to include in my presentation, but simply can't due to the obvious constraints of a 5-minute presentation.  Some of these items won't even get a mention, others will be mentioned only in passing.  I include them here as a list of topics for me to discuss in future posts to this blog.  Hopefully this will occur, at least in part, prior to the ignite event so that there will be a set of resources available to those at the event who were previously unfamiliar with these techniques and wish to explore them further.

These topics include:

• IoC Containers
• Dealing with Provider-Specific requirements
• Configuration as a dependency
• Local providers for external dependencies
• Providers as application tiers
• Testing at the provider level
• Top Down Design [Added: 7/12/2009]

If you have a topic that you are particularly interested in, or have any questions about IoC, Dependency Injection, or Providers that you would like me to answer, please use the comments or contact me via twitter: @bsstahl.

I just submitted the following proposal for a talk at Developer Ignite Phoenix which will be held July 22, 2009 at Gangplank in Chandler.

Simplicity Through Abstraction

The goal of this presentation is to explore, at a very high level, one methodology for software developers and architects to create software that is simple and maintainable, and thus has a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).

Using abstraction via the provider pattern allows us to create software that is more testable, easier to map (find the piece of code that does X), and easier to understand at a component level. We can use providers to develop systems that have fewer bugs, and are more maintainable then tightly-coupled systems. As a result, these abstractions can significantly reduce costs for most systems, especially in the area of system maintenance.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Justin James at TechRepublic posts his top-10 list of skills developers will need over the next 5 years.

His list:

1. One of the “Big Three” (.NET, Java, PHP)
2. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
3. Web development
4. Web services
5. Soft skills
6. One dynamic and/or functional programming language
7. Agile methodologies
8. Domain knowledge
9. Development “hygiene”
10. Mobile development

The areas where I have concerns are 5, 6, 9 & 10. What about you?