The legendary Guy Kawasaki will be giving a keynote at MIX 08 in March 2008. Guy Kawasaki is a world class speaker. I saw him give his "Rules For Revolutionaries" presentation at a Borland conference in the US 10 or so years ago and his presentation was flawless. Absolutely perfect. Even if you’re not going to MIX 08 (and assuming the keynotes will be available online) I would recommend you take some time out to watch his keynote just for the joy of watching someone being so good at what they do. And I say this as someone who really doesn’t like motivational speakers normally.

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, MIX, MIX 08, Rules For Revolutionaries

As many of you know I have been giving a presentation on Astoria a fair number of times over the last 8 weeks and it has been very interesting talking to everyone about the pros and cons of this client-side data access story for AJAX, Silverlight, XBAP and PopFly (etc.) applications. The good news is that at TechEd Developers Europe earlier this month Pablo Castro took time out to chat to me about some of the more architectural issues surrounding Astoria. You can download the 28 minute podcast here. Though the podcast should be useful for anyone it isn’t aimed at providing an introduction to Astoria. The assumption is that you have already gained some knowledge of this subject. For further background see the Astoria site and/or my slide deck.

The December CTP should be coming out, well, in December and this moves us away from the proof of concept and much closer to an actual product. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Astoria, Pablo Castro, TechEd Developers Europe, AJAX

Craig Murphy (Scottish Developers co-organiser, DDD founder, Scrum Master, MVP, author, speaker, project manager and developer) is coming to The .NET Developer Network on Tuesday 22nd January 2008 to deliver two sessions:-

• Automating your build process using FinalBuilder
  For non-trivial applications, having a managed build process is essential. However, if that build process is irksome to use and requires a series of fiddly steps in order to complete it, developers/build folks will not been too keen to run it frequently. This is a shame because a repeatable, fast and easy to use build process increases confidence and product quality.
  
  Thankfully there are tools available to help us automate the build process, FinalBuilder is one such tool. Automating the build involves scripting every action that you need in order to compile, test, deploy and re-test your application. Everything from pressing F5-Compile through to creating a setup.exe (MSI, installer, etc.), copying into a [clean] virtual machine, setting up database connections, sending e-mail, creating images, posting blog entries, burning CDs, starting/stopping IIS, version control integration...they are all part of the automation process.
  
  Over the course of this session Craig will explain the need for automating the build process and will demonstrate VSoft’s FinalBuilder tool (and Automise if time permits). Craig does not have any formal connection with VSoft, he is just evangelical about their product!


• An Introduction to Test-Driven Development
  With Test-Driven Development (TDD) now entering the mainstream via such tools as NUnit and more recently xUnit.net, it is becoming an important tool to have in your developer tool chest. If you are wondering how to "get more" from TDD, code coverage could well be part of the answer. I believe that we can improve the quality of our application by using a combination of TDD and code coverage.
  
  Code coverage, whereby we "track" how much of our code is covered during testing, is not new. Indeed, we can practice code coverage and TDD in isolation. However, applying what we know about code coverage against our unit tests allows us to move our applications to the next "quality" level: no longer is it acceptable to have unit tests on their own, we must know how well written the unit tests are, how much of the classes under test are really being tested?
  
  Over the course of 60-75 minutes Craig will introduce the benefits of code coverage using both manual methods and automated tools. He will briefly introduce TDD and will go on to demonstrate the benefits of using code coverage tools against your unit tests, i.e. how well do your tests exercise your classes/application?
  
  Craig will be using Visual Studio 2005 and C# - his demonstrations are available for Visual Basic.NET and Borland compilers too.

Craig lives and breathes this stuff so everyone can be sure to get some solid, in-depth coverage of these subjects. For details go here.

Technorati Tags: Craig Murphy, DotNetDevNet, FinalBuilder, Test Driven Development, TDD