DevWeek 2013: Overview

You can use this post either as an index of upcoming posts or an incredibly brief summary of the things I found interesting over the week.

For my colleagues, my full notes are in TFS in: "M:\TFS\C++\MooD\Docs\Misc\DevWeek 2013"

There's also a memory stick with all the slides on if anyone is really interested.

Monday

SharePoint 2013

• Code runs under full trust.
• 50% faster than predecessor (with 24Gb of RAM)
• Farm / App / Sandbox solutions.  Should try and use Apps
• Powershell is worth learning and useful for SharePoint development

Tuesday

Welcome to DevWeek

• A question of craftsmanship (funny lecture + some links to interesting material)
• Advances in the cloud computing platform (an advert for Azure)

Design patterns in the real world

• Various patterns demonstrated using "Game of Life" example
• Each class can contribute to many design patterns, not just one.

From the user to the unit test - how to start using tests

• A description of SCRUM
• Using Gherkin to specify scenarios
• Arrange -> Act -> Assert
• Selenium to test web

Light-weight architectures for everyone with the ASPNET WebAPI

• WebAPI allows HTTP protocols without needing IIS / ASP.NET

Wednesday

Modern JavaScript

• Encapsulation via Closures
• Self invoking functions
• Module pattern / revealing module pattern.
• Confirmed that Sam's later work was using the right pattern.

Living happily with the GC

• Using PerfMon to keep track of Gen0/1/2 collections
• How to reduce frequency of slow collections
• Why destructors are evil in C#

Evolution of the Entity Framework

• Can auto migrate databases up/down versions
• Code first POCO style development (plain old C# object)

Writing code that others can read.  A survival guide (for others)

• Use Resharper
• Commenting / consistency / clarity
• Single responsibility principal
• Function bigger than a screen is an alert to refactor

Thursday

Design for testing

• Red, green refactoring
• Use IoC / Dependency Injection
• Confirmation that we're kind of doing it right (in some bits of the code base!)

How to asses user experience

• Checklists of things to look for
• "Feng GUI" is a good website which simulates eye tracking
• Overlay a grid on your dialog to see how messy it is.

Emergent Design

• Justifications for using TDD
• Do things at the "Last Responsive Moment"
• Try not to over engineer.  Rather respond to change as it happens.

Applied NoSQL in .net

• MongoDB allows JSON objects stored against a primary key
• Means that less JOINs happen
• Very fast, depending on your data requirements.