The Summer Tour of Timbo

The summer speaking tour is about to get underway, fresh off the heels of my successful spring tour. (Successful after the QSI Tech Night unit-test-a-palooza fun.)

We'll be kicking off the summer tour in Cincinnati next Tuesday (6/24) at the June CINNUG meeting. I'll be presenting on the ASP.Net MVC framework, why it's cool, why you should be using it now, and how it will do simple household chores for you - walking the dog, doing the laundry, and cleaning the bathroom. (It doesn't do windows, though.)

Fresh off the evening in Cincinnati, I'll be heading to Dayton the very next evening to present the same riveting and engaging presentation to the good people of the Dayton .Net Developers Group. Fellow Quickie Jim Holmes helps run the Dayton bunch, so I expect heckling in Dayton.

Following the quick bang-bang trip across south western Ohio, I'm off for a few weeks before I head below the Mason-Dixon line to speak to the Memphis .Net User Group on July 24. "Memphis?!?!" you saying. Jeff introduced me to Colin Neller, president of MNUG, when I was in Vegas for Mix, and he invited me down after I expressed a little interest in getting out to do some speaking. My topic in Memphis is as yet undecided. Colin has a poll up in the MNUG forums for either an MVC deep dive or my Evangelizing the Pragmatic Programmer talk. Can't wait to see the results. It's 50/50 at the moment, so if you're in the Memphis area get your vote in...you could be the deciding vote!

That ends my scheduled trips at the moment, who knows what I'll rope myself into as August comes along.

Tech Night - Getting Started with MVC

First of all, thanks to all those who attended TechNight this past week at QSI HQ. That was by far the largest crowd I'd seen gather for TechNight, much bigger than the 10 people that came in September when I presented on ASP.Net AJAX. With Quick having the much larger training center now, I hope this trend continues.

The Snag

During post-presentation discussions, I finally arrived at why the test failed. Short version: I'm an idiot.

Long version: I went with the whole TDD approach to the presentation to show how MVC was more testable. It is a great way to show some of the advantages of MVC. It is if you continue to run those tests as you refactor your code.

What I did was stop at red, green, refactor. I didn't try for more green following an additional refactoring. I had written and passed my product controller tests, where the big test failure happened in the presentation, before I had added my model code to the product controller. That's a pretty big change, and clearly the tests caught that change...in front of an audience, rather than in the comfort of my own home.

So, my protests of, "These passed at home!" were correct, because I only ran them once. Like I said, idiocy.

In the end we got it working for purposes of the demo, and I owe Mel, Steve, Steve, Kris and many others who shouted advice a big thanks for helping me over the hurdle. However, the demo ended up testing what I didn't need or want to test: That LINQ was doing what it said. I had wanted to add one more test prior to the demo that hit an in memory collection of products, that would have solved my problem with the connection string and been a much better test of the controller code.

Here is a link to the code and slides: Getting Started With MVC

That resisdes in a SVN repository on Google Code (thanks Steve), and will get updated as I update the presentation. Clearly I have a couple of tests to add, some data issues to clear up, and will probalby change the slides some as it progresses. Keep an eye on it in the near future for updates, CODoDN will be here before I know it.