Vinay Ahuja : C#

Tallahassee Code Camp - Session Resources

vinay.ahuja — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:27:00 GMT

I enjoyed presenting in Tallahassee Code Camp last weekend on September 22nd, 2007. I presented 3 sessions on C# 3.0, Design Patterns, and Scrum. Here are the details on the sessions and the resources.

Overview of C# 3.0
This session will introduce you to the various new features of C# 3.0 – Automatically implemented properties, Object and type initializers, Lambda expressions, type inference, and LINQ queries.

Presentation
Source Code [for complete solution, last state]
Visual Studio Settings File for Code Snippets in Toolbox [Use Tools --> Import Export Settings to import this settings file in your environment, once import is successful you'll see the code snippets I was using in Toolbox]

I was using Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite VPC for my demos. You can download it from here.

Other Resources on C# 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008
Visual C# Developer Center
Visual Studio Developer Center
Overview of Visual Studio 2008 - A Whitepaper
Overview of C# 3.0
C# 3.0 Unified Language Specification

The Art of Design using Design Patterns in .NET
Have you worked on a design problem and thought if there was a standard solution to that? Have you thought of enhancing your design vocabulary to add factories, facades, proxies, decorators, visitors, mediators, and bridges etc? Come to this session to learn about design patterns. A Design Pattern is an elegant, tested, well documented, and reusable solution to standardized software design problem. This session will look at some of the standard Gang of Four (GoF) Patterns. GoF patterns are divided broadly into creational, structural, and behavioral categories. We'll discuss when, why, and how to use them with real world scenarios. The demos would be in C#.

Presentation
Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page
C# Code Examples
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

You would need NUnit to run the unit tests from the project.

Agile Development using Scrum
Welcome to the world of pigs and chickens, scrum lords, stand up meetings, product backlog, burn down graphs, and much more. We’ll introduce you to Scrum, an agile software development process. I’ll be explaining my experience from a current project to discuss what it takes to scrumify an existing/new project. This would be an interactive session and audience participation would be highly encouraged. Come prepared to learn and share best practices in agile development.

Presentation

Resources on Scrum
http://www.controlchaos.com
http://www.implementingscrum.com
Scrum Podcast - HanselMinutes - Podcast #23

Please refer to the presentation slides for more resources. I prepared a 3 page sheet on various resources. If you need a copy, please send me an email.

The attendance in all my sessions was really good - from 20-35 people.Thanks to everyone who attended my sessions. I would love to hear your feedback. Please contact me with any comments/questions. I was very pleased with how the audience responded to all my talks. The turnout in this year's code camp was much better compared to last year. According to Steve Lane (Primary organizer along with Jose Fuentes), there were 160+ people who attended the code camp. It was good to see Shawn Weisfeld, Joe Healy, Jeff Barnes, Russ Fustino, Wes Dumey, Bayer White, Mike Mollenhour, Keith Rowe, Kelvin McDaniel, Jacob Sanford, and John Dunagan

As I was presenting a session on Scrum, I decided to listen to Rob Eisenberg's and Christopher Bennage's sessions on Agile Development. I must say those sessions were very insightful. I learnt a lot from those sessions. Those were only the sessions that I could attend, beyond presenting my own 3 sessions.

Another notable mention was Jacob Sanford's book celebration in the after party. Jacob has written an excellent book on ASP.NET Design. Congratulations to him.

Overall it was a very well organized event. Thanks and kudos to all the organizers.

Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Power Tips for Orcas IDE for C# - July 14th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:44:00 GMT

Here are the resources for my Power Tips for Visual Studio 2008 (Orcas) IDE for C# session from Tampa Code Camp. I had some problems with the Orcas VPC and could not show my Linq examples. Ryan Morgan was very helpful and let me use his laptop that had Orcas installed. We did lose some time in this changeover. However, I am satisfied that I was able to show some very cool tips for Visual Studio IDE for C#.

Presentation Slides – Power Tips for Visual Studio Orcas IDE for C#

Currently, I am working on a reference sheet for all the tips and would be posting it in few days. I’ll also be posting a list of resources for C# IDE Tips and Tricks.

- Vinay

Tampa Code Camp – Resources – Design Patterns - July 14th, 2007

vinay.ahuja — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:26:00 GMT

Tampa Code Camp was a very well attended event. I presented couple of sessions. One of them was on Design Patterns. I talked about some of the Gang of Four patterns. It was in one of the first slots in the morning. There were about 50 people in the room, some of them standing too. Honestly, I did not expect so many people to show up. Thanks to everyone who came to this session. I hope you liked the session. I tried to get feedback from people who had used Design Patterns in their projects. Thanks to those who shared their experiences and scenarios. It’s always good to learn from others’ experiences.

Both my sessions had logistical challenges too. I was standing in the back of the room, near the control panel and laptop. The projector was in the front. I was not able to look at the participants for more than half the time. For this talk, Shawn Weisfeld helped me with progressing my slides. Thanks Shawn. I feel the presentation went really well. This time I did not know whether there will be session evaluations, so I had printed my own session feedback forms. The dozen forms that I receieved had encouraging feedback. Many people pointed out that there was too much content. I knew that was going to happen, however it is a hard problem to deal with when you're assuming that the attendees know the basics and have just 1 hour to get through. My main objective was to create an awareness around patterns, and I think I achieved that. I did emphasize that one should not over-engineer using patterns, considering today's agile world and other reasons.

Here are the presentation slides and demo source code:

Resources
Presentation Slides – The Art of Design using Design Patterns in C#
Head First Design Patterns - Book Home Page
C# Code Examples
C# Code Examples with Class Diagrams in VS 2005

You would need NUnit to run the unit tests from the project.
There were couple of questions that came up during the talk. I’ll be posting the answers in a separate blog entry.

- Using Composition over Inheritance
- Singleton Design Pattern in Distributed Scenarios

Thanks once again for attending this session. Please feel free to contact me for any questions.

Vinay

All about Generics - Resources

vinay.ahuja — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 04:19:00 GMT

Generics is a new feature of .NET 2.0 that allows you to define data structures without committing to actual data types. Here is a comprehensive list of annotated resources to get started:

Articles
This one is a detailed article on Generics by Juval Lowy.
An Introduction to C# Generics - Juval Lowy

All you wanted to ask about Generics.
Generics FAQ: Fundamentals

These two articles are brief and to the point and cover most of the generics concepts.
MSDN - Introducing Generics in the CLR – Jason Clark
More on Generics in the CLR – Jason Clark

If you want to know how generics was designed, what decisions were made and why, look at this.
Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime, Microsoft Research Cambridge UK

Looking for ideas to use generics in your applications. Look at articles on Codeproject.com.
Generics Articles on Codeproject.com

.NET Rocks Shows
Need something interactive to listen to, download and play in your car.
.NET Rocks Show - Juval Lowy on Generics
.NET Rocks Show - Kathleen Dollard Talks Generic

Reference
MSDN - Generics Home

Webcasts on Generics
MSDN Webcast: Live from PDC: Generics in Visual Basic (Level 200), September 14th 2005
MSDN Webcast- Geek Speak- Generics- Why do you care- (Level 200), May 4th 2005

Books
Professional .NET 2.0 Generics (Programmer to Programmer) by Tod Golding
Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition – Juval Lowy, O’Reilly Publications

Any more resources, please feel free to add.
Happy Generic Programming!