On Saturday we had our first DDD Adelaide conference, and I came away feeling very satisfied that I’d heard some great presentations and high hopes that this event can grow bigger and better next year.

Sessions

There were nine presentations squeezed into the day…

Introduction to iPhone/iPad development using Objective-C. Lama Chandrasena gave an overview of creating apps for iOS devices. Looking at the Objective-C samples made me glad I get to write WP7 apps in C# 😀

Creating Windows Phone apps with the Caliburn Micro framework. Some guy talking about WP7 development..

Cross Mono, cross platform for a Windows .Net developer. Cristian Prieto gave a good overview of the features and benefits of the Mono toolset and libraries. Even if you aren’t wanting to do cross-platform .NET applications, there are still some useful bits of Mono that you can use for your Windows deployments too.

Case Study: Design Patterns for a Row Versioned Data Warehouse in SQL 2008 R2. Jeremy Huppatz gave an interesting presentation on some of the challenges he faced in developing a data warehouse for one of his clients.

Easy Web Deployment – Begin the Enjoyment. Despite his laptop not being very obliging, Malcolm Sheridan spoke about the various tools available to ease deployment of web applications and SQL databases. I’ve used a lot of these myself, so could identify with many of the points Malcolm made.

Kinect. This talk didn’t even have an abstract when it was up for selection, and yet just the title was enough for people to vote it into the conference. Lewis Benge gave a thought-provoking talk and demonstration of using the just-released Kinect for Windows SDK.

Video of Lewis Benge and Kinect

This is the only video I took of the day. The funny bit at the end is when the stick figure ‘explodes’, as Lewis walks out of the view of the Kinect sensor 😀

Looking behind the curtain of jQuery. Jared Wyles knows his JavaScript and jQuery inside out. By the end of Jared’s talk I was left in no doubt of this! Some good tips on improving your JavaScript performance too.

Beyond Branding. Paul Turner spoke about branding SharePoint sites. I didn’t realise you could use PowerPoint to create a theme for SharePoint 2010. Would have been nice if Paul could have been around for longer than just his talk.

Joins, SARGability and the Evils of Residualiciousness. If you want someone to wrap up a conference with what can sometimes be the most difficult slot of the day (eg. the last one), then look no further than Rob Farley. What Jared is to JavaScript, Rob is to T-SQL. Some great pointers on understanding SQL Server query execution plans and realising that sometimes there’s more than meets the eye to an execution plan that on the surface may appear to be optimal.

A few of us headed over to Marcellina’s for a nice pizza and good conversation to finish off the evening.

Thanks

Thanks to Peter Griffith for organisation, Lewis Benge for the free lanyards, laptop covers and magazines, and other interstate speakers for their support.

Looking forward

I was really pleased with the turnout. I’d have to check with Peter but I think the attendance was one of (if not) the best we’ve had for these kinds of events. We’re smaller compared to Sydney or Melbourne but I’d love to see this build up so that we can run at least two tracks next year. That would be pretty tricky to do all on our own, but if we can work with the other state’s DDD events then I think it will be possible for us to benefit from things being organised at a more national level.

DDD?

And in case you’re wondering, ‘DDD’ is short for ‘Developer! Developer! Developer!’ and comes from a speech Steve Ballmer (Microsoft CEO) made at a software developer conference a number of years ago.