I'll be speaking at Microsoft DevDays in Belgium taking place March 7-8.

I hope to see you there!

 

The sessions I'll be doing are:

 

Best Practices: Designing for Testability: Putting quality first in the real world

March 8, 2006 - 16:15 - 17:30

Unit Testing and Agile Methodologies seem to be the latest buzz in the software industry these days, but many people who actually try to Unit Test their application (whether new code or 'legacy' code) find out quickly that doing a thorough job can be tough if some thought about the code's design for testability is not considered. In this talk we'll discuss various methods of designing your APIs so that they are easy to test, how design patterns help, what 'evolving a design' really means in the context of Test Driven Development, and several techniques for approaching the task of unit testing "legacy code". We'll try to squeeze in some discussion about the build life cycle and how continuous integration fits into the mix.

 

Partially-Connected Smart Clients: Challenges and solutions for Offline Data Synchronization and Caching

March 8, 2006 - 10:45 - 12:00

(Note: This talk is adapted from a highly rated talk given by Brian Noyes at TechEd Europe)

One of the challenges of Smart Client development and operations is supporting disconnected operations. As soon as you allow your application to be used offline, a whole host of new considerations need to be addressed in your design. This session explores what those challenges are, what the available choices are to address them, and what the best choices are for a variety of situations. Some of the options explored include the use of client side DataSet caching, DataSet and business object caching through SQL Express, Queued Components, Web services, and the Offline Application Block. The session includes demos for different options and shows what modifications are required to an application's architecture to support the different options discussed.