Oh, DevTeach! How I love thee! Let me count the ways! Thank you to everyone for another awesome DevTeach in Montreal at the beginning of this month. The agile track was well-received and included some of the old guard as well as some fresh new faces. I had wonderful time hanging with many friends, whom I only see in person at conferences. If you’re looking for slidedecks and code from my sessions, you can find them here:

Taming Software Dependencies with DI and IoC – Slides (PPTX) and Code (SVN)

Achieving Persistence Ignorance with NHibernate – Slides (PPTX) and Code (SVN)

I would like to thank everyone who participated in the Agile Q&A with James Kovacs and Friends. The session was originally proposed and was going to be led by David Laribee, but he fell ill at the last moment and unfortunately missed DevTeach. David has done a marvellous job leading these sessions in the past with more panache and style than I was able to muster, but I hope that participants found value in the discussion. My friend, Kathleen Dollard, put together a nice summary of some of the high points and Oren has some commentary on one of the more contentious points that he made here.

If you missed DevTeach Montreal, we are currently planning DevTeach Vancouver, which will take place June 8 to 12, 2009 at the Vancouver Four Seasons Hotel. I have again accepted the position of Tech Chair for the Agile Track and we are looking for speakers. If you’re interested in speaking, abstracts are due by February 10, 2009 and you can find all the details here. Please take heed of the submission tips! I would encourage you to submit more than four (4) sessions as it is highly unlikely that we’ll be able to use all of your submitted sessions. (If you’re a local speaker – no hotel or travel expenses – then you only need one session accepted.) In the past, accepted speakers have submitted 8 to 12 sessions and had 3 or 4 accepted. (N.B. For DevTeach Vancouver, non-local speakers will be required to present 4 sessions.) I would also encourage you to submit sessions predominantly to one track with a few extras in other tracks. When deciding on sessions, it is easier for one Tech Chair to accept four of your sessions than to have four different Tech Chairs each want one of your sessions. If you have three strong sessions in one track, it is fairly easy to find a single slot for you in another track – hence the extra sessions in other tracks. I have had the unenviable position as agile track chair of wanting a really interesting session from a particular speaker, but the speaker’s remaining sessions are “Introduction to Unit Testing”, “Getting Started with CI and CruiseControl.NET”, and “Using Mock Objects to Simplify Testing”. Those are all great sessions, but when Roy Osherove (who was writing a book on unit testing), Owen Rogers (one of the maintainers of CruiseControl.NET), and Oren Eini (creator of RhinoMocks) submit sessions too, guess who I’m going to have to pick? So hedge your bets. Submit 8 to 12 sessions mostly in one track on topics that you’re excited and knowledgeable about. Thank you in advance for your submissions.

I will be delivering a pre-con at DevTeach Vancouver. So if you’re interested in a full-day session on how to turbo-charge your development process while still creating maintainable applications, then you’ll want to attend Agile Development with IoC and ORM. The cost is $399 CAD (or $339.15 USD) per attendee. (N.B. You get a discount if you attend a pre-con, the conference, and a post-con.)

Agile Development with IoC and ORM

As developers we now have powerful tools in our toolbox, such inversion of control containers and object-relational mappers. But how can we use these tools to rapidly build maintainable and flexible applications? In this pre-con, we will look at advanced techniques such as convention-over-configuration in IoC containers and automapping ORMs to quickly build applications that can evolve over time. We will use test-driven development (TDD) to design and evolve a complete working application with supporting infrastructure during this one-day workshop.