In today’s competitive marketplace, products that are truly “usable” have an edge. Satisfying the user’s goals can pay dividends in the form of better software and increased loyalty to your brand. This session will help you understand what usability can do for you and introduce some ways to build usability methods into your product development cycle.

Domain Driven Design (DDD) has steadily become more visible to the broader software development community, and offers some unique approaches to developing complex business applications. This session will introduce you to the basic concepts of DDD, as well as some updated thoughts by the author of “Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in Software”, Eric Evans. This session will focus only on DDD concepts.  A roadmap of additional resources and examples will be provided.

Testing and planning development just got a lot easier with the Cucumber testing framework. Here's the outline of my talk, written using Cucumber:

Feature: Intro to Cucumber
 As a Cucumber user
I want to introduce Cucumber to others at TCCC7
So that I can show them how easy it is to write plain-text stories to drive development and test their apps using a real web browser.

Scenario: Explaining the basics of Cucumber
Given you make web applications
  And you come to my talk
Then I will show you how Cucumber works
  And I will explain its basic concepts
Then I will write a story to test a web site
 And I will then write custom matchers to run the story
When I run the story
Then I should see my browser open
 And the browser will navigate to the site
 And it will fill in the forms
 And it will click the buttons
When I am finished
Then you will be able to go home and do this yourself.

Intrigued? Come find out more! While Cucumber may be written in Ruby, you can use it to test any web-based application!

We have several years of collective experience both driving adoption of Agile development practices into several local software organizations but also using these same practices to excel at the use of distributed development teams.  We'll present the information and findings in the context of "lean" - how we introduced the new practices, identified the process bottlenecks, and adjusted the organizational and operating model until we found a pattern that balances the needs of the teams in all geographies.  With these techniques we are confident that we can achieve comparable productivities and quality levels to local teams but do so with cost leverage that allows for larger teams or lower burn rates.
 

The talk will begin be challenging the typical assumptions people have regarding the best way to use remote resources, then we'll cover two different case studies from two different organizations, and then conclude with an analysis that will help you determine if this approach is right for your organization, what you can expect as the end state, and a prescription for how to get there.

Silverlight is maturing rapidly as a platform for building compelling Rich Internet applications and delivering high definition content. A maintainable Silverlight 3 application requires the same care and design as any other enterprise application and the available tools and patterns are changing quickly. In this talk, we’ll build up a sample application using Presentation Layer patterns, loosely coupled smart client software techniques with Prism and Unity, service consumption with RIA services, and making your applications compose able with the Managed Extensibility Framework.

Microsoft has embraced the popular jQuery open source JavaScript library, which is already used by many major web sites.  jQuery provides a very productive enivornment for client side programming in JavaScript.  It takes advantage of existing knowledge of CSS selector syntax to offer a powerful and efficient alternative to the DOM.  The use of operation chaining and implicit iteration lead to a very compact and productive syntax.  The library is very lean at a mere 15K, yet provides a strong base and a great extensibility model which has led to a large number of plugin extensions to simplify web development.  The session will review how to use the library for very useful features such as watermarks, avoiding browser inconsistencies, and making AJAX calls to the server.  Several plug ins will be demonstrated which provide stunning client experiences with as little as 1 line of code!  We will also study how to extend the library with our own custom utility funcitons and plug ins.   Learn how Jquery and the Microsoft AJAX Library JavaScript libraries greatly simplify client side development, and which to use for particular scenarios.

Microsoft’s new shell scripting tool, Windows PowerShell is a huge leap forward from its predecessors. You may already know Perl/Python/VBscript and ask “Why another scripting tool?” PowerShell is really a very powerful OS and application management environment, not just another command-line scripting tool. Intended for both system administrators and application developers, PowerShell brings together the power of the .NET framework, active directory / group policy, COM, and WMI. Hundreds of Cmdlets are currently available for Exchange Server, SQL server, SCOM and Microsoft has pledged at all future applications and OSs will have an exposed PowerShell interface. Other industry leaders are also getting behind PowerShell: VMware ESX and IBM WebSphere and F5 Networks to name a few. This presentation will give you an introduction to some of these powerful new capabilities, show you how to set up PowerShell, take advantage of existing cmdlets and providers, write programs to do “real work”, and customize/manage your environment.

Pex is a tool that, at first glance, looks like it's all about testing your code in ways you never dreamed of. However, there's a lot more to Pex than that. In this session, we'll cover the testing capabilities of Pex along with exploring the advanced technologies that come with Pex, such as Stubs/Moles and Z3.

Ruby seems to be all the rage these days, let me so you why!  In this code centric presentation, we'll cover the basics of this dynamic, fully object-orientated language and then dive right in and develop a program or two.

The Ruby on Rails framework is going through some radical changes. Not only are we on the cusp of Rails 3, but new technologies like InheritedResources and Formtastic allow us to do things we never could have dreamed of before. Have you seen Ryan Bates' tutorial on building a blog in 15 minutes in Rails? Let's cut that down to five.

Together, we'll take a look at some of the new gems and plugins that have been released, along with some of the upcoming changes with Rails 3 to see how this technology can make your development experience even easier.

Where do I start?

Rails is fantastic for building a full web application with Ruby quickly but sometimes it's not lean enough or classy enough. Meet Sinatra (http://www.sinatrarb.com) - the lean Ruby web-framework offering developers both convenience and control. In this talk, you'll meet Sinatra and see how he compliments and collaborates with Rails.

Are you thinking about mobile development?  With more than 4 billion mobile devices sold and counting, you should.  Come learn the basics of iPhone development. We will review the development tools, coding process, and the guidelines Apple asks you follow to submit your application to the app store. During the session we will build a functional Twitter reader, today's "hello world" program, for the MSDN feed.