CodeCampSA 2009 – Day 2

Presentation notes

Nigel Spencer – WPF in 2010

• Easing functions – affect animation velocity
• Behaviours
• Demo of customising Visual Studio home page – XAML-based
• Model View ViewModel – templates

Greg Low – Spatial SQL

• sys.spatial_reference_systems

Dave Glover – Windows 7 APIs

• Windows 7 Training Kit

Omar Besiso

• Sync Framework (seemed strangely familiar!)

Jason Stangroome – PowerShell and build automation

• Join-Path
• Use pipeline if possible
  • % { } (same as foreach)
• Example of using netstat to confirm that build service is listening on specified port
• Recommend reading - Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael Nygard.

Jason Schluter – Silverlighter

• XHTML to Silverlight converter

James Chapman-Smith – Model View ViewModel and Unit Testing

• ViewModel handles
  • UI logic
  • input validation
• Thought while observing Jame's code – could you have INotifyPropertyChanged take a lamba expression instead of a string? – Apparently yes!

Peter Cornish – AdWords

CodeCampSA 2009 – Day 1

Presentation notes

David Gardiner – Generating Unit Tests with Pex

• Fantastic
• Inspirational
• I wish I could present like this guy
• :-)

Anthony Borten – TFS 2010

• Always try to install TFS, SharePoint and Build on separate servers if possible
• Make sure you launch config tool immediately from the installer
• Note the 'test' buttons to check your server names
• Team Foundation Administration Console
• Branching – better in 2010
• Team Build
  • Build controller
  • Build agent
  • Gated checkins

Allan Baird – UniSA

• Industry partnerships – opportunities to have students work for 6 or 12 month placements.

Rob Farley – The problem with BEGIN and END in T-SQL functions

• Useful tool - "fences" – hides desktop icons
• Generally modularisation in T-SQL is good
• Funny joke about COUNT(dracula)
• Compare two queries – one using a user-defined function, the other just has SQL
  • function query appears to run faster according to query plans
  • BUT, using SQL Profiler, it is actually much less efficient
  • SQL sees BEGIN/END and can't inline the function

Liam McLennan – MVC is better than WebForms

• WebForms is to imperial as MVC is to metric

Tatham Oddie – WebForms are better than MVC

• Used WebForms for graysonline
• Used application/xml mimetype to validate XHTML content with Firefox during testing
• XHTML 1.1 templates for Visual Studio
• Tool to convert bad HTML to valid XHTML
• .NET 4.0 – Can disable page-level ViewState, but enable it on specific controls

Scott Barnes – Silverlight

• Was a Flash developer before joining Microsoft
• 400 million downloads of Silverlight
• Biggest competitor - HTML+JS!

Anthony Borton – VSTS 2010

• Eliminating no-repro bugs
• Virtual Lab Management
• Test Case Management
  • Record against real application
  • Fast forward through test steps
• Microsoft Test and Lab Manager
• Replay – re-run test including launching application under test
• Coded UI Test
  • Test builder – records UI actions

Paul Turner – SharePoint branding tips and tricks

• Start with minimal master page
• Enable debugging
• Position tool pane
• Standard delegates (My Site etc)
• Site actions
• Digest (MAC)
• Understand CSS
  • Add custom CSS with CssRegistration
• Don't put JS in master page
• Async JS with defer

Bringing Developers and Designers closer together (eventually, sort of)

When Microsoft released their Expression suite of products, the marketing claim was that they could be used to edit the very same source files that the developers were working on.

BUT, while Visual Studio 2005 included TFS, the obvious integration with any of the Expression products was missing. So the marketing claim was a bit hollow. Yes, you technically "could" work on the same files, but it was going to be a clunky experience.

So it is ironic that yet again, a version 3 product finally appears to get it right. Note this announcement refers to Expression Blend, and it isn't clear whether Expression Web has similar capabilities.