Spreading the word far and wide

On Feb. 7th, we had a onsite technical university event here at the EPDC 5 building in Dublin. I was hoping to get some good photos of the evening to post, but they don't seem to be forthcoming. The goal was to show that Microsoft does, in fact, do development outside of Redmond and hopefully speak on topics that final-year students might find interesting.

Originally, I was due to talk on AJAX, but in fifteen minutes, doing a demo of Live Local just wouldn't cut it, and diving into technical details would probably make their eyes glaze over. Plus, it's something they've all heard about in the past anyway. So I picked something that they definitely wouldn't cover in school - Micro-Pairing.

Of course, to explain Micro-Pairing, I first had to go through what Example-Driven Design (err .. Test-Driven Development) was and then show how you can build on that with a partner. It went over surprisingly well and a few people asked me more questions about it afterwards. I was particularly pleased that one professor said he's going to do a trial run in his class with some students and hopefully expand it later on.

Just for posterity, here is a link to the slide deck. The slides are almost empty, but the notes sections are full :)