New England Code Camp IV

Last weekend I attended the New England Code Camp IV hosted by Microsoft in Waltham, MA. This is the second NE Code Camp I've attended and just like last time this camp was a good learning experience. I picked up a few new things as well as got some more insight into the upcoming Visual Studio 2005. Here's a small list of highlighted sessions.

One of my favorite presentations was the Effective Development Practices in .NET hosted by Chris Bowen of Monster.com. The reason I liked this session is because it is not a presentation but more an open discussion about really anything. Chris offers up some popular topics but the discussion is left to the audience. This session the main topic was around Agile Development Practices, mainly unit testing. A lot of people are not doing unit tests out there and should be. NUnit is the choice for most developers when it comes to unit testing in .NET. But of course if you are using NUnit you should also be using TestDriven .NET (aka: NUnit add-in) to give you the ability to run your unit tests from within visual studio. Of course this discussion led into Continuous Integration discussions and how to integrate the execution of Unit Tests in your build process. Instead of going in to the details of this here I'll point everyone to a great white paper on Continuous Integration with .NET Of course Visual Studio 2005 Team System is going to include a lot of these features, but until we get there or even when we are working with 1.x apps we should rely on these tools as best practices.

Another session that was really good was the Security Tools for the .NET Developer session by Robert Hurlbut. His slides are not yet posted to the CC4 site yet see below) but here is a recap of some of the tools mentioned during the talk. Other than Robert being a pretty paranoid guy he really does know his stuff around security. He is a firm believer in running windows as a least privileged account (which if any of you have tried this it can be a real pain in the A$$). He uses a number of tools to accomplish this. These include things like runas, MakeMeAdmin (from Aaron Margosis), PrivBar (also rom Aaron Margosis), and personal scripts. Also another article that might be helpful is Developing Software in Visual Studio .NET with Non-Administrative Privleges. Check out Robert’s slides for more details.

One of he last sessions I caught was the Extending a SharePoint Team Site with Simple Workflow, Custom Event Handlers, and Custom Web Parts session by Chris Felknor.  Chris is currently working on an open source project developing SharePoint site for student project work at MIT. A tool that I took away from this presentation was the InstallAssemblies program from Blue Dog Limited, it can be found in their Web Part Toolkit. His presentation contains some not so good (to put it nicely) recommendations, but since I’m a little new to working with SharePoint I enjoyed his session. He also provided all his source code to date for his project.

If you are interested in going to a Code Camp in your area check your local .NET User Groups and see if here is one coming up. Most people are following the NE Code Camp model and I promise it should be a learning experience. I also won the Code Complete second edition book during one session so all in all not too bad for a free conference. J

You can find Robert Hurlbut’s files here and the rest of the Code Camp session materials here.