This week I’m at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles. I’m giving two talks and would love to get some feedback from attendees on them. Naturally you can use Comment to add your evaluation (and I hope you will do so, unless you’re one of those cruel all 1s people), but if you have anything constructive to say, I’d love it if you’d post comments here or contact me directly. It’s a challenge to present topics in such a way that you please everyone in the room, and usually the biggest issue has to do with the level of the content. Most of the time, at least 10% of the people say it’s too technical and at least 10% say it’s not technical enough. The best I can strive to do is to be very clear in my abstract as to what level I’m targeting, and then to do my best to split the difference as evenly as possible.

Anyway, my two sessions are:

WUX314 – SOLIDify Your Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC) Applications
Wednesday 13 May 2008 4:30pm
Room 153

This session takes a look at a simple ASP.NET MVC application that has not been written following Uncle Bob Martin’s SOLID principles of OOP. The talk goes through the SOLID principles (and a few others) and applies them to the application, demonstrating the advantages of these refactorings in terms of maintainability and testability. One of the main points of this talk is that it is certainly possible to write ASP.NET MVC applications the wrong way, and that just because MVC enables better-factored designs, doesn’t mean you get that for free. You still need to be follow certain principles to ensure you get the most out of the MVC pattern.

DTL335 – Model View Controller on Azure : Getting Development Done
Thursday 14 May 2008 4:30pm
Room 409

This session demonstrates how to build Windows Azure applications using ASP.NET MVC. It turns out that since Windows Azure works pretty much seamlessly with ASP.NET, integrating ASP.NET MVC is pretty trivial to accomplish with Azure. The talk covers some of the basics of Azure, and some of the basics of MVC, and explains why MVC is very much an appropriate framework to use with the kinds of applications that Azure is best-suited to addressing. Writing enterprise applications that require scalability means writing applications that are well-factored, and which are able to process work asynchronously and across multiple nodes. MVC promotes this kind of design, with small classes, each with a single responsibility, collaborating together. Combining Azure and MVC just makes a lot of sense.

Oh, and there’s also a contest, Race Condition, going on this week at TechEd for prizes to be given away at the Jam on IT party on Thursday night. If you’re looking for me but can’t find me, the URL you need from me is: http://tr.im/theregion_41. Good luck!