James Kovacs' Weblog

A few weeks ago Richard and Carl invited me to appear on .NET Rocks again and I jumped at the chance. I had a great time talking to them about doing more with less (writing less, but smarter code) and how convention-over-configuration changes the way that we develop software for the better. Check it out .NET Rocks #475 featuring yours truly!

Thanks to everyone who came out to my presentation last night at the Calgary .NET User Group. I enjoyed talking using convention-over-configuration techniques for doing more with less code. I demonstrated how frameworks like Fluent NHibernate, AutoMapper, Castle Windsor, ASP.NET MVC, and jQuery support this style of development. (Links below.) I only scratched the surface though. Other frameworks like StructureMap and FubuMVC also are heavily convention-based. With a bit of creative thinking, you can use these techniques in your own code to reduce duplication and increase flexibility.

• Fluent NHibernate
• NHForge
• AutoMapper
• Castle Windsor
• ASP.NET MVC
• jQuery & jQuery UI

For those of you who attended, you’ll realize why Darth Vader accompanies this post. For everyone else, you’ll have to check out the slidedeck and code:

PPTX | Code

I’ll be presenting at the Calgary .NET User Group next week. Come out for a fun discussion and lively discussion on improving your application development using convention-over-configuration techniques.

Abstract

As developers, we spend an inordinate amount of time writing “glue code”. We write code to transform database rows to domain objects… domain objects to view-models or DTOs… We write code to configure inversion of control containers and wire dependencies together. We write code to style our UIs and respond to UI events. Wouldn’t it be nice if this could happen automagically for us? This session will look at using convention-based approaches using Fluent NHibernate, AutoMapper, Castle Windsor, and jQuery to reduce the amount of repetitive code and accelerate application development.