Living in the Tech Avalanche Generation

The inaugural “doing .NET days” is filling up fast but there are a few spots left. If you are interested in learning more about LINQ and it’s different flavours and getting an introductory look at nServiceBus (a mighty powerful Framework for Distributed Systems development), then please grab one of the few remaining spots before they disappear.

You can find more details about the event here and here.

An interesting circumstance cropped up recently during some practical sessions with work colleagues. Let me set the scene first. I was instructing on TDD and DDD in  the context of an internal company project, there are four developers (including myself), which meant pair programming had now become quad programming. The thing that was interesting (to me) about this project (with respect to DDD), was that we were effectively modelling a business domain where the domain was itself was a database! Strange indeed. Let me explain further.

In this particular industry, there exists a well know database schema that is used commonly to shuttle data to and from a DMS and this often requires a full ETL workflow. The application we are currently working on is targeting a “Transformation” process and hence our model is to a large degree dependent on this ‘little’ schema, which by the way finds it’s way into the physical world as an Access Database(s). Therefore some of the entities in our model were modelled against this database and when you think about DDD this sounds a bit strange since one of the common tasks in that process is to model entities to business concepts and then map those entities to a database. It became even more interesting when we interviewed the business stakeholders and asked them questions about what language and common expressions they use when they describe this database, it’s tables and rows and what they do with it all.

It quickly became apparent that the ubiquitous language in this case was to a large degree describing a database. Strange. At least I thought so.

Something that has been on my mind for some time now has been an urge to do some local community  work through my council community centre and “Doing .NET Days” is the expression of that urge. What is “Doing .NET Days”? The idea is that once a month I will be offering free (gold coin donation) whirlwind introductory level training on a variety of subjects, approximately three subjects per .NET Day!

The venue for “Doing .NET Days” will be static for the time being and the event be conducted at the Point Cook Community Centre in Point Cook Melbourne Australia. The number of seats for the event is limited (size of the room) and for the moment it caters to 10 seats (each with a PC supplied) so if you want to be involved you will need to be in the first 10 to register. if you want to be introduced to something new that you might not have had the time to check out till now.

Doing .NET Days – Day #1 Agenda

To kick things off were going to take a look at the following:

• An introductory look at messaging with NServiceBus.
• An introductory look at LINQ and it’s flavour of providers (LINQ To Objects, XML, SQL and Entity Framework)

To start off with I am holding 5 seats for graduates yet to find their first developer role in the workforce. I remember what it’s like trying to break in and get that first gig and I would have appreciated the help back then! If the graduate positions are not taken up within the next two weeks, I will open those seats up as well. Here are the rest of the event details:

• Saturday 22th August 2009
• Location – Point Community Centre
• 10:00 AM – 4:00PM
• Lunch is BYO or there are a number of cafes and restaurants in the town centre.
• To register email me your details and I will contact you with further details.

I will post a comment on this post every time a position is taken up so people can tell how many positions remain open.