Now that we’ve entered August, we’re just three short weeks away from St. Louis Day of .NET (taking place August 20-21).  Last year I gave two talks (Rhino Mocks and beginner’s guide to unit testing).  This year I’ve been lucky enough to selected to be speaking again on two topics:

• Building and Creating a High Performance Team - This session will give you strategies to turbo charge your team. It will deal with everything from how to build trust within a team to talking to management to process/methodology. This talk will use real-world examples from my recent experiences with my team at J&P Cycles and will include perspectives from both the development side as well as the managerial side.
• Website Usability 101 - Do you want to create a more intuitive website? Want to make your customers happier? Website Usability is a very hot topic right now. I'll discuss several tools you can use to test your website and resources you can turn to if you're getting started in usability. First we'll define what it is and why you want it and then we'll walk through a series of tools and resources you can use. Attendees will see real-world examples throughout and will leave understanding how easy and quick testing can be.

This conference is one of the best in the Midwest bringing in great speakers and content with a great venue (Ameristar).  This year there are already over 500 people registered for the event with numbers likely to go even higher as the date nears!!  It’s a great chance to learn some new technical content to improve your .NET mastery as well as network with several other .NET professionals in the area.

(My dirty little conference secret: I like session content, St. Louis has some great content, but for me, it’s the discussion that take place outside of and between the sessions.  Breakfast with developers and geek out sessions over a pint of beer. St. Louis Day of .NET provided some of the best conversations of the year last year.)

If you’re planning on going let me know would love to connect in person…also I have two discount codes that I can offer that will get $75 off registration.

After two successful iterations of the Iowa Code Camp it only seems fitting to have a third.  This third version will held May 2nd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at Kirkwood Community College continuing the trend that Iowa Code Camp will move to serve its constituents all over the state.  I'd like to thank my former employer Geonetric for coming through in the clutch and helping out with securing/sponsoring a great location.

I want to echo the call for speakers that fellow coordinator Greg Wilson recently put out:

NOTE:  I do apologize that due to logistical issues with securing the location and date this call for speakers is coming much later than normal.  We, as leaders, have been working since early January on several possible locations/dates and just received confirmation on the final facility yesterday.  Please help us in getting the word out to as many potential speakers as possible as fast as possible.

Topic ideas:

We are looking for 4 basic types of sessions:

1)  We are welcoming non-.NET centric topics.  Hopefully, we can have another full track of "alternative" stuff.  Java, 'nix, Mac, Drupal, open source, etc.

2)  Beginning 100-level sessions targeted towards students and/or developers from another technology.  Things like:  LAMP Programming 101, Getting started in the .NET world, What college doesn't teach you, Developing Java with Eclipse 101, User Interfaces 101

3)  Nice, meaty .NET sessions - The core of any code camp

4)  Audience driven sessions.  We are planning to have various format sessions of experts that the community can ask questions to.   We need volunteers to be in the sessions as "experts".  We have various discussion groups (fishbowl, open topics, etc.) and may try some 1 on 1 help-them-with-their-code type of stuff.

I (greg@solidDONTSPAMMErockstable.com) need to know as soon as reasonable who is interested in speaking.  Please let me know if you are definite or tentative, and what you intend to speak on.  (Title/Description/Bio)  I will be making the final schedule of speakers and tracks in mid-April.  we already have more than 10 speakers committed, so please respond soon.  If we have more speakers than sessions, we will work (per topic) on a first come/first served basis.

Like most code camps this camp will be free to attendees.  It is through generous sponsorship from companies and vendors that make these code camps possible. If you are interested in sponsoring an aspect of the code camp please let me know ASAP and we can see what can be worked out.

If you are within a few hours drive, I encourage you to attend. It should be a great day of learning and exploring together. I hope to meet some of the readers of this blog at the camp.  Enough talk, go register now before all the spots fill up.

I want to invite any of you who are within a few hours of Des Moines, Iowa to attend the second Iowa Code Camp on November 8th.  The first Iowa Code Camp back in May was a huge success. From Derik's write-up:

Yesterdays event was awesome.  They had about 125-150 people show up for the first ever Code Camp in Iowa.  The venue could not have been any nicer and setup any better.

I will be giving one presentation on using RhinoMocks and one workshop on TDD.  Below are the abstracts.  If you have the chance, take part, and register today.

TDD: A Workshop in Driving Your Design with Tests

If you've heard about Test Driven Development (TDD) and wondered what it was or how to do it, then this workshop is for you.  We'll take a practical, introductory approach to getting started with TDD.  We'll introduce fundamental object-oriented design principles including separation of concerns, dependency injection/inversion, and more.  This will be a hands on lab, so bring your laptops and a copy of Visual Studio 2008 and expect to learn.

Easing your Testing With RhinoMocks

When learning about testing you'll see trivial examples illustrating how to write tests. However most production code is non-trivial, making calls to configuration files or to a database which makes testing in isolation hard.  The use of mock objects allows you to isolate code you want to test by providing fake objects to your methods, allowing you to set up complex scenarios to test specific conditions.  In this session we'll first dig into some code that is not very testable and refactor it to make it more testable.  After the refactoring we'll use and explore RhinoMocks to see how we can test different scenarios in our code and verify our code is working as it should.