Steve Sanderson’s blog

Readers in or near south west UK will be interested to hear that the brand-new DDD South West website has just been opened to the public. DDD SW is a free one-day conference for .NET developers, with sessions covering the new and the great in .NET and related technologies, plus an alternative track containing debates, discussions, workshops, and a ‘planning poker’ simulation. See the full agenda for more details.

DDD SW will be held at Queens College, Taunton on Saturday 23rd May. In the fine tradition of DDD events, there’ll be free food and no doubt plenty of swag to take home. Registration opens on Tuesday 3rd March. Note that the previous DDD 7 event was “sold out” within a few hours of registration opening, so you’ll have to sign up quick.

Me too!

If you read the agenda closely, you might notice that I’ll be presenting the following session:

You too!

If you’re interested in speaking at DDD SW, the call for first-time speakers has just opened, too. This is a chance for anyone who’s never presented at a major event (this means TechEd, DevWeek, any previous DDD event, etc.) to give it a shot. Why not submit a session proposal? It could be your big moment!

If you’re new to ASP.NET MVC and are wondering what it’s all about, or if you have colleagues who don’t yet get it, then I hope this video might help. It’s a recording of a talk that I gave at the DDD7 conference in November 2008, covering the following:

• Why ASP.NET MVC is worth caring about [first 10 minutes with Powerpoint]
• What ASP.NET MVC is like to use [remaining 42 minutes of pure coding]

In the talk, I build a sample file-hosting application that demonstrates ASP.NET MVC’s approach to tidy code structure, clean URLs, full control over HTML markup, and simple Ajax. Here goes:

Sorry that the code is difficult to read at various points - hopefully the verbal description should explain adequately what’s going on.

With thanks to Liam Westley for physically mailing me the DVD, and to the DDD7 team and Microsoft UK for running and hosting such an excellent event and for filming the talks.

It’s kind of weird to watch myself! Hopefully though I can learn from my mistakes and deliver a slicker presentation next time…

Download the code used in this talk - you can get the completed source code for the “file host demo” that I built in this session here. Please note that this code is intended to work with the Beta version of ASP.NET MVC. It should be compatible with newer versions of ASP.NET MVC with some modifications, but I haven’t attempted it myself.