Polyglotting

LLBLGen Presentation

The presentations went well.  I think they are definitely something that you have to do to get better.  So now I need to find ways to do more talks.  I enjoyed the chance to get to meet people and discuss technology with people I normally wouldn't. 

The audience for the two presentations I gave were very different.  For the lunch crowd a simple direction was best.  The time was much more crunched and the environment lent itself to more distraction and less interaction.  For the evening you only have 10 people and more time.  So a more in depth presentation would most likely be beneficial for them. 

Other than that I thought that the presentation went well.  It's a large subject that I will get better at presenting when I show to other developers at MTM and present other topics.  I also won something for the first time ever, a book that started out with this quote.

... the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by a few elements, but by the highest complexity.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Goethe; or, the Writer"

That's a good quote, but I think that the development circle I'm following more and more lately tries to do these Simple Complex things as simply as possible.  I know a lot of developers still like their complexity, hopefully every day I'm less and less like that.

P.S. The presentation material will be posted here very soon.

The Pair Programming TDD Game

Came across The Pair Programming TDD Game today when checking up on CodeBetter reading a post by Palermo.  It looks like it may be a good way to get some interaction going with pair programming. 

A lot of times when we try pair programming only one person has the keyboard making it easy for the other person to get bored.  The other benefit as mentioned is that the tests are more likely to be kept at a manageable size.

Looming Presentation

Well I am going to be giving a couple of presentations for the OKC .NET user group this month.  I'll be discussing LLBLGen, a great ORMapper from Solutions Design in the Netherlands.  It is the only reason that many of our projects have been successful.  That's great and worthy of enthusiasm, but getting in front of 40+ developers and explaining why this is so great is somewhat intimidating.  What if they don't think so, what if they say "so, I already do something better"?

Along these lines I've been interested in learning about NHibernate more and more lately.  I've been reading and attempting to practice a more Test Driven & Domain Driven style and many of these people use NHibernate.  What if I get up and everyone goes that's great, but NHibernate does this better.  Well I'm pretty comfortable so far with my arguments that LLBLGen deserves a shot and with some groups will be much better than many other systems.

There seems to be two subtle, but important differences between the camps.  Domain Driven people want to think of the domain as an isolated system free of dependencies to the database.  They may not have the ability to change the database and must work around a schema that doesn't match their desired application well.  They need something that can map these two disparate systems and many are happy with how NHibernate does this for them.

The feeling I have is that with LLBLGen along with the ability to control the database completely was able to save many many hours of development by planning the DB for the application.  Many of the tables are used to map directly to objects.  New features have been introduced that help this type of design be a little more flexible now.  Inheritance allows us to define tables as base types and have subtypes that inherit fields from these base tables.  Projections have been added recently that will take entity objects that were fetched from the DB and map them to any object.

My job now becomes come up with a way to present LLBLGen that makes it look like it does it's job well.  I'll have to make sure that people understand the views of the software creators.  How they think a database should be built and the rewards that you can reap if you follow their pattern.  I know it has been very rewarding, now I need to let everyone else know.