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.

As the CRIneta president for 2008 I'm lucky to be joined by other developers on the leadership team who care about our community.  After a great meeting last night with guest speaker Jason Bock a few of us went out for some drinks.  While we were discussing topics and ideas for the future we realized we need to better understand our membership in order to plan speakers/topics.  We have developers who work in large shops, some in small.  Some developers work solely for the web while others only in windows.  Some developers are working in the 1.1 framework while others are pushing the envelope with 3.5 and the MVC Framework.

With all the different types of developers, we thought it would be beneficial to learn about our membership in hopes to provide relevant content to our users.  Using SurveyMonkey.com we've put together a short survey that asks the members questions in hopes to find out the following basic information

• How long you've been developing in .Net?
• What language(s) you use?
• Which frameworks you develop on?
• Do you use source control? If so which one?
• Do you use a build server?  If so which one?
• Do you unit test?
• Do you mock?
• What software methodology do you use?

See any topics we've missed?

Has your user group ever done something like this?  Did it provide the results you were hoping it would?

The way I look at it, even if the results are all over the board and don't help us narrow down topics/speakers, it will be good to get a handle on where the group is at.  For that, I'm excited.

Yesterday I attended the first ever Iowa Code Camp in Iowa City, Iowa.  This was the first code camp I had ever attended and that fact withstanding, I don't know how the event could have gone any better, it was absolutely flawless.  There were well over 125 attendees and waiting list to boot.

I attended sessions on Java/Hibernate, Inversion of Control, Mocking and .NET Performance Tuning. I enjoyed Derik Whittaker's talk on mocking as it's something I've been into for the last few months.

Talking to other attendees it was very obvious that others enjoyed themselves as well.  The feeling was that the materials presented were things we can take into work tomorrow.  And that is what a code camp is all about.

Thanks to Chris, Javier, Greg S. Greg W and the many others who helped make yesterday a success, you guys set up a wonderful event!

While much of the political discussion last week surrounded Iowa and it's first in the nation caucus there was a small, yet important election that was rarely covered.  As the CNNs and Fox News shows and other non-stop cable news channels have since packed their vans and are now focusing on "Super Tuesday" and whether Barack can bet Hillary, there was a much (much) smaller battle that recently took place in the frozen corn fields of Iowa that barely received any coverage.

This last Monday, after many campaign promises, debates, town hall meetings, and baby kissing, Iowa voted their conscience electing me to serve as the new Cedar Rapids Ineta president for 2008, proving once again that negative campaigning and accepting money from lobbyists does not resonate with the ethical voters of Iowa.

To those of you who voted for me and supported me during this tough campaign season, thank you.  To my wife who has been at my side during the arduous process, the late night strategy sessions, and the countless debate preparations, thank you.  To my loyal volunteers who stood in battle with me for a cause that we truly believe in, thank you.

It is truly an honor to server you in 2008 and I look forward to it.

Tim Barcz

CRIneta President