Prairie Dev Con - Calgary Edition

Conferences

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Look at all those hard-working developers!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my intro to MVC yesterday, and to the Dojo today.  I had a great time in the 2.5 hour Dojo session building the app with everyone who was able to attend.  We got to explore MVC, scaffolding, Models, Entity Framework + Code First, Controllers, Actions, jQuery, a bit of routing, partial views, packages in NuGet, HtmlHelpers and touched quickly on ActionFilters and even a bit of Areas.  Whew!

Lessons Learned

A big thanks goes out to the 30+ devs that came to the Dojo today…I certainly didn’t anticipate the number of participants. With the myriad of OSes, Visual Studio editions and service pack levels, SQL Server configs and more, it was great to be able to work as a group through the things that came up and make the most of things, regardless of how well your tooling worked out.  For those who were unable to code through the exercises, I hope you took enough away from today to try some of these things on your own.

Here’s some of my observations:

  • I promise that if I am going to use someone else’s jQuery plugin I won’t go months without reviewing the syntax and configuration options!
  • I am moving this talk to MVC4 as we’ve now got a go-live licence. I will make this the requirement for the Dojo session and also will recommend VS2010 Ultimate, even the trial version, so that we’re all working off the same kit.
  • For those that aren’t able to get the software before the session (it is posted in the abstract!) I will make sure I download the full tools (and not just the downloader…#FAIL).
  • I will make sure we have the connection strings handy for a couple alternate SQL Server configs.
  • I will try to get a second projector in play – this will allow me to help work through issues that others might be having while still leaving the exercises up on the screen for those who wish to continue along.

Again, thanks to all who helped to work through the things that came up…great teamwork!

Next Steps

Don’t stop now! Here’s some things you can do to hone your skills and practice some of what we covered today:

  • Grab a copy of Visual Studio 2010 (the Ultimate trial if you don’t have it already)
  • Download a copy of the MovieFu project from GitHub
  • Get in touch! Easiest is to reach me on Twitter
  • Start writing code! I know that you got more out of the Dojo than you did out of the intro (if you attended that) because you wrote code.  You don’t need me there to do that! Cut a few projects and try to solve some simple scenarios, explore EF, areas or whatever interests you.

Good luck, and happy coding!