Its been a week now, but I finally have some time to gather my thoughts on the Portland Code Camp.
I got a late start on Saturday so I missed Scott Hanselman's PowerShell - A New Shell for a New Century talk.
William Howell - End to End Automated Build Process
The subject tends to be one that people are either interested in or not, but I really find the whole automated build cycle pretty interesting - so I thought the subject was great.
William did a great job of walking us through a build cycle he had designed and gave us a good overview and detial as to the desisions he had made along the way. So all in all the talk was well worth going to.
Here are some of the notes I took during his discussion:
4 parts of the automated build cycle:
- Initial Project Setup (one time only)
- Development Cycle
- Test Cycle
- Deployment Cycle
Last three are a cycle: Dev -> Test -> Deploy -> Dev ...
Always push from source control NOT staging to production.
Build steps are visible to everyone
Automated build server
- Automates the build
- Provides a clean environment
- Overrides config settings for coverage
- Provides configuration settings for coverage threshold test settings etc.
- Provides packaging services (zips, etc.)
- Process Notification
- Labels Source Control
His slides and other information can be found at
http://webwaredesigns.com/techevents/portland/codecamp/2006/index.htm Things that could be improved on in the presentation:
Only thing I would say is to increase the font size of what you are showing on the screen, otherwise - great job and great content!
Rick Strahl - Dealing with Long Running Requests in ASP.Net
The second talk (first after a great lunch), was an interesting topic that mostly everyone comes across sooner or later, but you don't really see anyone presenting.
I read Rick's blog so I know he knows his stuff, but he also did a great job at presenting it.
Rich gave some practical and useful advice wrapped into 3 different scenarios (might have been 4 but I only have 3 in my notes).
Here are some of the notes I took durring his discussion:
First thing you have to do is decide what is a long time for you app. Usually it is around 15 - 20 seconds.
Scenario #1 - UI techniques to display the application is busy
Scenario #2 - Asynchronous Programming
Scenario #3 - Raw Threads - run and forget scenarios
His slides can be found at : http://www.west-wind.com/files/conferences/pdxCC_LongRunning.zip
Things that could be improved on in the presentation:
Rick presented this material so well there really isn't anything I could think of that could be improved.
Stuart Celarier - Understanding Subversion
I didn't know it at the time, but I also read Stuart's blog
Since starting my new gig almost a month ago, I have branched out in my source control tools and have realized there is more to life than Visual Source Safe :) So a beginner presentation on Subversion was right up my ally. Stuart is a very good presenter and covered some of the key parts of subversion (or what I see as the key parts anyways)
My notes for this presentation a too long for me to type :) I'll try to get a link to his presentation for you and update this entry if Stuart makes the ppt available.
It was a great presentation about an up-to-date source control system and some of the pro-and-cons of today's development needs versus source control needs.
His slides and other information can be found at: ... waiting to hear back ... Things that could be improved on in the presentation:
There really was nothing wrong with this presentation, really good. The only improvement I could think of would be crowd control and keeping the out of context questions from taking too much time (which is usually pretty hard to do).
To be continued ....