Sessions Snapshot

Working with Data is core to what we do as developers. Relational databases have made it possible to build line of business applications that enable businesses to be successful in today’s fiercely competitive market by providing the information needed to make smart business decisions. Increasingly the need to access and work with this data has gone mobile and the challenge is how to connect these platforms. In this session we explore cloud storage options and how to create services that can be leveraged across devices and platforms.

Functional programming has been around for a while, however, it has sharply raised to prominence on the JVM with the emergence of languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and JRuby. Programming in functional style is not about picking a set of syntax, it is thinking in a particular idiomatic style and programming using a set of constructs. One of the better way to learn this is by doing it. In this workshop, we will take different tasks, discuss how to do them with the all-too-familiar imperative style and then how to program it using functional style. We will then implement our design for each task using a language that provides functional style of programming on the JVM.

Abstract Awaited

The popularity of agile software development processes and methodologies is imminent and fast growing. Many organizations and projects turn towards agile to help solve the problems of traditional software development. Scrum, extreme programming, test driven development, and lean are no longer the new kids on the block. However, with the rising popularity of agile, mainly due to lack of experience, or management over-expecting results, the coming years many agile projects will fail miserably. Agile is not the silver bullet.

In his enthusiastic style speaker Sander Hoogendoorn, global agile thought leader at Capgemini and involved in agile projects since the mid-nineties, will demonstrate the differences in traditional and agile projects, and show why agile projects will fail – independent of the process used. Sander will elaborate on a series of agile anti-patterns that people will recognize immediately. Think of the Scrumdamentalist, Agile-In-Name-Only, the Pseudo-Iteration, Guesstimation, the Bob-the-Builder Syndrome, Parkinson’s Law, the Agile Project Manager, and Student Syndrome. Of course with many embarrassing examples and anecdotes from real-life projects.

The Windows Azure platform is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted through Microsoft data centers. The platform includes the Windows Azure operating system and a set of rich developer services. Come to this eye opening session that will reveal some of the spanking new features in Windows Azure that we bet you did not know existed.

JavaScript is one of those very powerful languages that is often misunderstood and underutilized. It is quite popular, yet there is so much more we can do with it. In this presentation we will deep dive into the capabilities and strengths of this prominent language of the web.

Abstract Awaited

Functional Programming has been around for a while, but it is gaining popularity, especially due to direct support in languages on the JVM and the CLR. Writing code in functional style is not about syntax. It is a paradigm shift. In this presentation, using examples from F# and C#, you will learn how to write code in functional style. We will start out discussing the elements of functional programming and then look at examples of some common operations and how you can implement those in functional style.

Use cases have been around for many years describing the requirements of software development projects. From a developer’s point of view, use cases are often seen as too abstract and too complex to develop code from. Until now, that is.

During this interactive talk, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn will demonstrate how to model, generate (using model driven development) and build smart use cases. This great technique allows you to model use cases at a much more pragmatic, low-granular level, enabling to be implemented simply and directly into applications built in ASP.NET or Silverlight for example. Thus smart use cases fit well in your layered software architecture, implementing the task pattern and delivering great traceability between requirements, design, coding and testing.

Using many real-life code examples and demos, the speaker will introduce both the positive impact that smart use cases have on your layered software architecture, as well as the design patterns required to implement them. Furthermore, the speaker will demonstrate how smart use cases can be unit tested as well, thus achieving great code coverage and allow to do regression testing automatically.

Scala is a statically typed, fully OO, hybrid functional language that provides highly expressive syntax on the JVM. It is great for pattern matching, concurrency, and simply writing concise code for everyday tasks. If you are a Java programmer intrigued by this language and are interested in exploring further, this section is for you. We will go through a rapid overview of the language, look at its key strengths and capabilities, and see how you can use this language for your day-to-day programming. This session will be coding intensive, so be ready for some serious Scala syntax and idioms.

Abstract Awaited

C#, the prominent language on the CLR, started out as a marginally better language than its counterpart on the JVM. After a few years of simply mimicking Java, C# has taken a sharp turn for the better. It is one of the languages that has evolved quite significantly and has departed from its roots, in a nice way. In this presentation we will take a look at where this language started and how it has evolved over the years.

When it comes to Microsoft .NET-connected development, more and more frameworks are entering the market, both from Microsoft and from open source. Think of ASP.NET MVC, Castle, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), Entity Framework, Unity, Linq2SQL, ADO.NET Data Services, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), nHibernate, Spring.NET, CSLA, NUnit, Enterprise Library, MEF or ADF.

Once you apply one or more frameworks to a project, the trouble begins. What if you require features that aren’t implemented in the framework? What if you decide that another framework would have been better and want to switch halfway through your project? What if the author of your favorite open source framework suddenly stops developing? What if the framework contains bugs or omissions? And what if a new version of the framework is released that is implemented differently? These and many more everyday problems can bring your project a halt, or at least require serious refactoring.

During this highly interactive talk, Sander Hoogendoorn, chief architect of Capgemini’s agile Accelerated Delivery Platform and member of Microsoft’s Partner Advisory Council .NET, demonstrates pragmatic architectures and patterns that will help your projects avoid framework issues and to keep code independent of framework choices. Sander presents models of layered architectures, and looks at applying bridge patterns, managers-providers, dependency injection, descriptors and layer super-types, accompanied by lots of demos and (bad) code examples using blocks from Microsoft’s Enterprise Library, NHibernate, Log4Net, and the Entity Framework.

Join this interactive discussion to share your experience of improving the structure and quality of your software architecture and code, and to discuss how to avoid common pitfalls of applying frameworks to .NET software development.

Java has come a long way, and yet there is so much that is happening in this space. In this presentation we will take a look at the exciting additions and changes in the most recent version of Java. We will look at performance improvement measures, new language features, dynamic invoke capability, and new APIs.

Abstract Awaited

It is the syntax that most of us observe when introduced to a language. However, we ought to move quickly beyond that to leverage its powers. The real strength comes from its styles and idioms. Learning a different style does not simply change how we write code, it fundamentally changes how we think and how we solve problems. In this keynote, award winning author and mentor, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will explore the idioms and style of prominent JVM languages, and help refactor your language portfolio.

Use cases have been around for many years describing the requirements of software development projects. From a developer’s point of view, use cases are often seen as too abstract and too complex to develop code from. Until now, that is.

During this interactive talk, speaker Sander Hoogendoorn will demonstrate how to model, generate (using model driven development) and build smart use cases. This great technique allows you to model use cases at a much more pragmatic, low-granular level, enabling to be implemented simply and directly into applications built in ASP.NET or Silverlight for example. Thus smart use cases fit well in your layered software architecture, implementing the task pattern and delivering great traceability between requirements, design, coding and testing.

Using many real-life code examples and demos, the speaker will introduce both the positive impact that smart use cases have on your layered software architecture, as well as the design patterns required to implement them. Furthermore, the speaker will demonstrate how smart use cases can be unit tested as well, thus achieving great code coverage and allow to do regression testing automatically.

Programmers often complain that it is hard to automate unit and acceptance tests for JavaScript. Testability is a design issue and with some discipline and careful design we can realize good automated tests. In this presentation we will learn how to automate the testing of JavaScript using both TDD and BDD tools.

Unit testing is easy when your code has no dependencies. Sure a good design reduces dependency, however it is not practical to entirely remove dependencies. We mock out these dependencies often to carry out unit testing. Some dependencies tend to be more intricate than others. For example, static method and sealed methods often pose more challenges than other methods when it comes to mocking. In this presentation we will start with a general discussion about mocking and quickly dive into approaches we can take to deal with intricate dependencies.

Programming concurrency has turned into a herculean task. I call the traditional approach as the synchronized and suffer model. Fortunately, there are other approaches to concurrency and you can reach out to those directly from your Java code. In this presentation we will discuss the actor based concurrency and also the software transaction memory. We will then develop examples using AKKA and compare the power of these approaches in contrast to the traditional approach.