Pre-Conference Workshops

NOTE
The information on this page refers to Software Architect 2009. This site will be updated with information on Software Architect 2010 closer to the event.

Tuesday 29 September 2009

The following workshops run for a full day (from 09.30 to 17.30), with a short break in the morning and afternoon, and a lunch break at 13.00.

	A Day of Enterprise Design Patterns in .NET WORKSHOP REF: SA1 Dave Wheeler & Andy Clymer Design patterns can largely be categorised as tactical, such as those documented by the Gang of Four, and strategic. These more strategic, or enterprise, patterns address the broader concerns on how you architect and design entire applications; and it is these enterprise patterns that will be the focus for the day. The day is divided into four sections. We begin with an examination of the fundamental aspects of design patterns, examining practical issues such as the use of layers and tiers; the costs of distribution (and how to mitigate them); and the use of dependency injection to facilitate test-driven development and to ease concerns over coupling of components. In the next section we delve into one of the more complex aspects of enterprise design: modelling the domain logic. We will look at the three most common approaches: Transaction Script, Domain Model and Table Module. Each has clear advantages and disadvantages, and these will be examined in detail. Overcoming the friction that exists between the object oriented world, favoured by developers, and the tabular world of the database is one of the more fascinating challenges for the designer. In this third section of the day we examine this area in some detail, providing examples that range from the pure code approach to how you can use mapping technologies such as nHibernate and Entity Framework. Our focus in the final section of the day is on user interface patterns, such as the various implementations of Model-View-Controller/Model-View-Presenter and the myriad of spin-offs that stem from these. We’ll look at how these patterns can be best implemented within ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight. This is not just a day of pure theory; this is a practical analysis of the main enterprise design patterns that all architects and developers need to know, with a focus on how they are best implemented within a .NET application.
	A Day of Unit Testing WORKSHOP REF: SA2 Simon Horrell Unit testing has become more prevalant over the last few years as more and more teams have come to realise the importance of ensuring code has some degree of test coverage. Developers are aware that code quality is an important issue and that to get high quality code they often need to refactor. Refactoring safely requires unit tests. We will spend the day looking at unit testing, how to write a unit test, how to test external resources such as databases and web services, how to work with legacy code and how to ensure that your code is designed to be tested.
	A Day of .NET 4.0 WORKSHOP REF: SA3 Richard Blewett .NET 4.0 is coming, and brings with it many new features: from declarative WCF services to support for parallelised execution, from new functionality in the Entity Framework to full support for dynamic languages. This pre-conference day takes you through all the major new elements of .NET 4.0, so that you can start planning on how this new functionality will affect your applications.
	From Developer to Architect WORKSHOP REF: SA4 Simon Brown & Kevin Seal This session is an interactive introduction to software architecture and what it means to be a software architect. It’s aimed at software developers who are looking towards their first software architect role, as well as architects that are new to the role. You will gain: • An understanding of what it means to be a software architect, and the role’s responsibilities. • An understanding of the trade-offs connected with architectural decisions. • Some experience of what it feels like to be an architect, including gathering non-functional requirements, determining the drivers for architecture, and defining an architecture. • An understanding that, as a software architect, it’s okay to do some coding. Combining presentation, group discussion and group working, throughout the day you’ll be solidifying everything you learn by defining the architecture for a small software system. The overall goal is that you can take the experience gained here and apply it to your own projects. No architecture experience is required, but software development experience is assumed.

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