One More Reason to Attend TechDays – The Developer Practices and Architecture Track

We’ve revealed the keynotes, the Windows Client and Phone Track, the Developer Tools, Languages and Framework track, and the Cloud Computing and Online Services track, now I’d like to introduce you to a track that applies to cloud, windows, mobile, and web developers, C#, and VB programmers alike!

Sometimes as developers we need to take a step back and look at the big picture. Are there ways we can improve our application development process? Should we try Agile? Are we implementing Agile correctly? We need to go beyond just the syntax of our code and think about best practices in our coding. We need to make sure we are getting the most out of the tools we have in front of us: Are there better ways to code? debug? test? That big picture thinking is the reason we have the Developer Practices and Architecture Track at TechDays. It’s a chance for you to see how others have improved their overall application development. Learn from the experts, then apply what you learn and bring your coding to the next level.

If you don’t believe me, ask John Bristowe he’s convinced, and if that’s not enough, keep reading to discover some of the sessions you can check out this year at TechDays.

ARC350 The Agile Buffet

Agile, maybe you are living it, or maybe you are thinking about it. There are different agile methodologies to choose from: XP, Scrum, Kanban. Do you have to follow these methodologies to the letter to be agile? Is it possible to take the best of each and create your own custom agile methodology?  Maybe you have implemented Scrum, but tweaked the agile methodology to make it fit better within your organization. Is that okay? It may sound cliche but can you be agile with agile? The answer of course is it depends. When you modify the methodology are you still keeping to the goals of agile and the agile manifesto? Join a dynamic session and figure out how you can adopt agile methodologies while still staying true to the Agile Manifesto and reaping the benefits of agile.

ARC360 Yes, we Kanban!

Imported from Japan, Kanban is an agile methodology gaining a lot of traction. Kanban, the Japanese for signal card, is a process that focuses on transparency and limiting the work in progress. By utilizing Kanban, you can easily pinpoint bottlenecks and address them. In this session, you’ll learn what Kanban is, how it evolved from its roots in the Toyota production system to software development, Kanban’s benefits, and how best to implement a Kanban system. We’ll also discuss when not to use Kanban and how to modify other agile methodologies, such as Scrum, to be used in conjunction with Kanban.

ARC303 Addressing Non-Functional Requirements with Agile Practices

A common challenge with agile software development is how to address non-functional requirements. A non-functional requirement specifies "how well" the "what" must behave. Also known as "technical requirements", “quality attributes” or "quality of service requirements", they focus on characteristics that typically cut across functional requirements such as usability, correctness, reliability, maintainability, availability, performance, portability, testability and many others. Improperly dealing with non-functional requirements leads to source code that is difficult to evolve or software with an unpleasant execution quality. During this session, you will learn the agile practices to transform these recurring concerns into self-contained quality targets that can be satisfied iteration after iteration, in a finite period of time. Overall, you will acquire a different perspective on how to connect requirements and architecture using agile practices.

ARC375 Demystifying Debugging with Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate and IntelliTrace

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate provides a wealth of functionality for figuring out what is happening with your application or even being able to debug what happened up to that point with IntelliTrace. But for most developers pressing F5, adding the odd breakpoint and stepping through the application is about as far as they get when debugging. Come to this session and learn more about how to use the debugger and IntelliTrace to track down those hard to spot errors fast, so you can spend less time debugging and more time coding.

ARC301 Design by Contract and Code Contracts in Visual Studio 2010

The central idea of Design by Contract is a metaphor on how elements of a software system collaborate with each other, on the basis of mutual obligations and benefits. The contract is the formalization of those obligations and benefits. You can summarize design by contract with three questions the designer must repeatedly ask: What does it expect? What does it guarantee? What does it maintain?
This presentation will oversee how Visual Studio 2010 and the new Code Contracts feature allows you to use this defensive style of programming. Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs. The contracts take the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation.

ARC306 Entity Framework Tips & Tricks

In this session, We'll open up a bag of Entity Framework tricks. We'll look at several performance optimizations and concerns when using Entity Framework. We'll look at tricks for concurrency, row-level security, building dynamic queries, working with large models, stored procedures, functions, data validation, auditing and other concerns that developers typically face in building robust database applications. Get the most and the best out of the Entity Framework!

ARC304 Building a Security Skeleton for your ASP.NET Application

This session will cover creating a template you can re-use in your applications. It covers the security vulnerabilities and attacks most common to ASP.NET, and the techniques to test them. The session will allow you to use the template to safeguard your applications with ease. We will cover one click attacks, canonicalization attacks, sql injection, xss, syn floods, Denial of Service, Session hijack and many more. This is not a security session, it is a pure ASP.Net session where we will explore code to help thwart attacks and while doing so we shall explain what is going on. The goal of the session is to enable you to create a template project which guards against some of the security risks.

Two days of fantastic content to help you do your job more effectively! Come to TechDays, listen, ask questions, learn from the experts! Register today and join us in Toronto October 25,26th, Vancouver November 15,16th, or Montreal November 29,30th. If you register now you can take advantage of the EarlyBird discounts (early bird pricing deadlines Oct 11th 2011 – Toronto, Vancouver Oct 25th 2011, Montreal Nov 8th 2011)

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2011
  DevTeach Ottawa (Nov. 2-4) is sponsor by TechDays Canada. You will find many of the sessions in our Agile track. www.DevTeach.com