Michael Fransen

This past Saturday I attended the second Twin Cities Code Camp with a few members on my team.   I was very impressed with this event and best of all, it was free.  Some presentations were better than others and some were more useful than others.  I am very excited for Code Camp III.  Hopefully there will be one.  I took the following sessions.

• Web Developers Guide to IIS 7
• There Must be 50 Ways to Write Unit Tests
• If Darwin Could Write Code
• Developing for Windows Vista using Visual Studio 2005
• Simple Data Access with Subsonic

Robert Boedigheimer gave the Web Developers Guide to IIS 7 presentation and I must say it was way more informative and beneficial than what I thought it would be.  I ended up with four pages of notes.  Microsoft spent a lot of time working on security in IIS 6 and in IIS 7 they spent a lot more time in the features department.  I am very excited regarding the modular architecture, extensibility and .NET integration.  As Robert gave his demo all I could think about were where this could have been used in previous projects.  I also like that Microsoft got rid of the metabase and started using XML configuration(applicationhost.config).  I hope to develop some small bits to apply what I learned in this class very soon.

Jon Stonecash gave the Unit Test presentation.  It was nice because he gave examples using NUnit, MbUnit and MSTest.  His presentation demonstrated Row Tests and Combinatorial Tests.  I thought this was sweet, than he had to go on to mention that MSTests does not support these.  :(  Bummer.  Hopefully the next version will be up to speed.  He also showed how to test internal methods which was pretty cool.  I wanted to share something that Jon had on a slide:

A Unit Test is not a Unit Test if:

1. It talks to the database.

2. It communicates across the network

3. It touches the file system

4. if you can't run any other unit test at the same time

5. You have to do special things to your environment (configuration) to run it.

Jacob Good gave one of the most intriguing presentations of the day.  It was titled, "If Darwin Could Write Code."  It was about genetic algorithms.  He showed some code in Ruby.  He was going to show an example of C#, but there were technical difficulties.  He posted it on his blog though.  He also has given me some ideas and resources so I can continue my venture into genetic algorithms.  I think this is going to be my next "home" project.

Not only did the Twin Cities Code Camp have excellent sessions, they had breakfast, lunch, afternoon snacks, xbox's, zunes and much more.  I totally recommend this if they do it again.

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