I spent most of the three days at DevTeach attending the agile track. I thought I would take advantage of attending sessions that would otherwise not be given at typical user group meetings. I have limited experience with technologies outside of Microsoft. I've made use of NUnit and Rhino Mocks but had no experience with NHibernate, Castle, Tarantino or DBDeploy.NET to name a few.
I was especially pleased to meet and talk with Oren Eini, a member and contributor to many open source projects including NHibernate, Castle and Rhino Mocks. He was gracious enough to help me with a Rhino Mocks problem I was having where I was calling Expect.Call(mIDBConnection.Open()). This line of VB.NET code was causing the IDE to crash and my only option was to exit and restart the IDE. It turns out that there is a bug with the VB.NET compiler and he encouraged me to log the bug with Microsoft. In addition he mentioned that Expect.Call should only be called for methods that return values, that is, in C# non void methods and in VB.NET functions.
I also had the opportunity to talk with James Kovacs and shared university stories, specifically, the pranks I participated in. His presentations on NHibernate and Inversion of Control Containers were excellent. It was great to see a fellow Edmontonian, Donald Belcham. Ok, I only spent one year in Edmonton but I persevered the cold winters and that should be enough to qualify me as an Edmontonian. Donald was also presenting in the agile track. I especially enjoyed his interaction based testing session.
It was a great 3 days at DevTeach. Don forgot DevTeach will return to Toronto in November 2009.
Guess the movie
Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I
believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.