Followup: TechDays 2009 in Calgary
Yesterday I was at TechDays 2009 in Calgary for the day (well, the morning really). I wasn't there as an attendee, but as a speaker. Thanks to everybody who came out to my two talks, the first one on an Introduction to ASP.NET MVC and the second one on SOLIDifying your ASP.NET MVC Application. There were a few hiccups along the way: as usual, I fell victim to the Technical Presentation Time Dilation Syndrome (i.e. ran out of time) on both talks. I guess I'm just to long-winded for my own good. As well, because I was running a EAP of Resharper 5, I had some Visual Studio 2008 issues - namely VS2008 would hang on me from time to time. Note to self: maybe don't use the bleeding edge tools in a talk. And I really should break myself of wanting to type all the code - using snippets would really save me time.
Two things that suprised me:
- That there was still that much interest in ASP.NET MVC intro talks. I just figured that everybody knew/knows about it. Or maybe I just spend to much time with guys who have drunk the ASP.NET MVC Flavor Aid. Either way, I think that there were some in the crowd that will convert from WebForms to ASP.NET MVC.
- I asked how many people wrote unit tests or developing their software using Test Driven Development was the number of people who didn't raise their hands. While I didn't expect the majority of the crowd, I did expect a lot more people than I saw. Maybe it was a quiet crowd, and people didn't feel like saying they wrote unit tests. Maybe I live in a bubble, and my perception of what is actually going on in the .NET world is skewed (that is to say, perhaps writing tests is the exception rather than the rule). It did kind of make me a bit concerned, as I truly believe that TDD does help one write better software overall.