Monthly Afternoon Workshops – topics, please (free Headspring events)

10 June 2009

This post is an example of free afternoon workshops that we are putting on from Headspring Systems.  This is example of how we find it valuable to give back to the local community here in Austin, TX.

My plans for the free afternoon workshops are to hold one per month.  Philip Wheat, from Microsoft, has been extremely supportive.  He is helping us book the classroom at the Microsoft office so that these can continue on a regular basis.  These events are completely free, and all 4 hours will be used for teaching the topic.  No sales pitches, just learning.

We have scheduled two of these workshops on the topic of ASP.NET MVC.  What I need to find out from you folks, who live in or are willing to travel to Austin, is what topics should be on the calendar.  For instance, ASP.NET MVC is hot, and we have specific expertise on the topic.  As the CTO of Headspring, I am tapping into many of the consultants to provide the topics that are most relevant. 

Some of the topics that have been requested are:

  • ASP.NET MVC
  • NHibernate
  • Inversion of Control (IoC)
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Domain-Driven Design
  • Automated Builds

I need some help from you.  Are any of these topics interesting?  Are there other topics that would be good workshop topics?  Should the workshops be confined to programming topics or should we move into software management topics?  Please leave a comment telling me what you think.  This is one avenue where we are giving back to the community, and I want to ensure it has the biggest impact possible.

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Comments

Nagarajan said on 6.11.2009 at 2:43 AM

Hi, Is it possible to record the session and publish?

Tom La Zelle said on 6.11.2009 at 8:47 AM

Big Delivery vs Small Delivery

prioritizing for profit (backlog priority)

Being Agile with Marketing and Sales

Web Site Usability

agile roles (developer, product owner, product manager, project manager [scrum master])

Big upfront design vs Just in time design

project flow control (batch vs single)

Eric said on 6.11.2009 at 11:09 AM

FWIW, I'd vote for TDD and DDD.

BTW, I enjoyed the ASP MVC workshop in Feb. Thanks for taking the time to put these events together!

Christopher Painter said on 6.13.2009 at 5:16 PM

DDD - Deployment Driven Development. Planning for operations from the beginning.

Justin Pope said on 6.14.2009 at 8:31 PM

I'm in San Anotion, so it can be hard to take off work early for a 1pm workshop this week, but I anticipate I'll be able to attend at least a few in the future. I'd personally love to hear a presentation from you on NHibernate and/or DDD. I've been working with MVC for several months and feel comfortable hacking together a site from scratch. I haven't seen much out there on the net dealing with the best practices for DDD/DAL/etc that go along with MVC.

A later on topic you might not want to do right away but I'd find interesting and again haven't seen too much on the net about would be a semi-in-depth comparison of .NET MVC framework (and related C# improvements with LINQ, etc) with Ruby on Rails. Prior to .NET MVC from my research I found comparing .NET WebForms to Rails a bit of an apple and orange comparison. Since .NET MVC was released (well, actually since months before it's release) I've focused most of my research on learning the ASP MVC framework, it's strengths/weaknesses to WebForms, etc, and not really had the time or background to truly compare and contrast it with Rails. I think any presentation to the effect of "Why Headspring has an ASP MVC foundation instead of Ruby on Rails" would be terrific. (Also, I think we've all heard the arguments of Microsoft vs. open source, etc, and I'd hope a presentation on the differences would avoid some of the more argumentative/subjective issue like that, and approach it from a very objective stance; features, functionality, etc,)

Thanks, look forward to hearing both you and Eric talk again!

-Justin

Peter from Houston said on 6.17.2009 at 11:32 AM

* Automated web testing w/ WATIN or whatever else is free

* (Goes with the above) Wholistic Testing - discussion of what to test, discussion of test helpers (route testing?) working through unit tests to integration tests to automated web tests (assumes ASP.NET MVC)

* Database migrations

larry foulkrod said on 7.07.2009 at 1:37 PM

Continous integration and domain driven design are two topics that I'd be interested in learning more about.