Firstly a big thanks to the .NET Developer Network team and sponsors for making it happen and giving us lots of free food.
This is the first time I have been to DDD SW and only ever been to one other DDD event, DDD9. The location of DDD SW is great personally as it is my (old) university and only 40 minutes travel which makes it super cheap to attend, my total costs for the day was £5.60, my train ticket!
The food (which was free!) was spot on and having the 20/20 talks whilst eating your lunch was entertaining. Gary Short presented an algorithm math (thingy) talk which was an eye opener (ok, I admit it, I didn't get most of it), Ross Scott did a talk on how he made the DDD SW HTML5 app which was interesting and the only other one (sorry to the other guys) I remember was Mark Rendle's Kaizen talk which gave me the idea to finally start learning F# which I have been putting off for a while.
Oh I won some swag! A 30 day TekPub subscription which I plan to give to a friend who I've been talking to about their awesome videos and being a student, he is poor ;)
Getting down to the actual thoughts.
The repeat track was excellent (I actually attended 3/5 sessions on this track!) and I managed to see all the sessions I wanted apart from poor Nathan Gloyn's Kanban session, sorry!
The missing link - pushing through the pain of TDD by Richard Dalton
I was very interested to attend this session as I've felt the guilt of not doing "pure" TDD (as Paul Stack calls it) and wanted to get some tips from someone else who has pushed through the pain of it. A few nice points raised and finally learnt the difference between stubs and mocks! (Stubs are stooges, Mocks are ninjas).
I've not seen Richard Dalton speak before and was very impressed with his style and ability to take questions/hints from the audience in his stride.
SpecFlow functional testing made easy by Paul Stack
This was a session I went completely blind into, not knowing anything about BDD (BDD means something totally different at my new work) and what the heck SpecFlow was but Paul did a slick presentation which inspired me to look at using watiN for my one projects and a talking point with my boss on Monday (who was actually there and saw it too!).
Its a shame I didn't get to try one of Paul's missus muffins, @Plip tweeted something that made them sound heavenly ;)
Minimalist software development by Mark Rendle
I hadn't read up on what the actual talk was on but when I saw Web Matrix my heart sank. My ideas about Web Matrix aren't that nice but Mark put a very strong (and now I accept) case the Web Matrix and other "all in one page" style approaches are valid for small/quick projects. The presentation was good and with the usual Mark humour which helps when doing a quick presentation. The 2nd implementation using Nancy and Simple.Data was interesting and something I defiantly want to play with on a few small projects for family/friends rather than going the whole MVC stack with SQL Server as its overkill. As Mark says, your not getting paid to make it ;)
Building seriously scalable websites with ASP.NET and without Windows by Chris Hay
I was interested in this session mainly from the title, "without Windows". I was slightly confused by all the different techs used to demonstrate the presenters points but on reflection Crhis was defiantly right to use say Node.JS rather than a full IIS site to demo HAProxy as it would have taken more time to setup in a presentation environment.
The talk has certainly inspired me to take a look at Reddis and HAProxy, particularly Reddis as I'm guilty of just using the default session state provided. The points raised about static and dynamic files was an eye opener but I'm unsure how to apply that knowledge to a few small sites I maintain where a CDN or second server isn't possible.
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