Jeremy Miller is the author of StructureMap. The first DI container I was exposed to. Nowadays I have to use Unity but that's all fine as a DI container is just a vehicle not the purpose.

Anyways, in this presentation Jeremy talks about setting up your solution in a modularized way and how he did it with his Storyteller project (a fitnesse replacement for .Net). He speaks a bit about injecting view, using Presenters and of course the Event Aggregator.All this is very similar to the PRISM or Caliburn framework.

All was fairly interesting, but I think that without some context on these frameworks you'd be lost soon.

Now, I have been working on these concepts for a while now and I fully believe this is the way forward. If you are new to this I would recommend first to have a look at PRISM. There are some very good screencasts available on channel 9.

Next to that you probably also want to have a look at the MVVM geekspeak talk hosted a while ago (june 2009) at MSDN, and read a bit at MSDN.

Watch the screencast here

I never heard of Astoria before. I did hear about ADO.NET DataService, but as there's ADO in the name it had to be evil. Luckily Astoria is not about ADO.NET, it's about exposing data using JSON & REST.

Basically the idea is very simple. You create a website project, add a class that will act as your data source. This can be anything, be it Linq to Sql, Entity or NHibernate. You can even use a stub to temporarily make some data available. The only important thing to keep in mind is that it needs to implement IQueryable for select operations.

Then add a new item - ADO.NET Data Services item.

Go to the newly created cs file and implement the DataServices generic base class.

That's all there is to it. You can now reference the WCF Data Service and query it like you would query any IEnumerable<T>.

Very cool stuff.

Some links for Astoria:

Team blog Astoria
Learning Astoria
MSDN Reference
API Documentation
Help forum and info
Whitepaper on using Astoria

Watch the screencast here.

Robert Martin is the author of CleanCode. Great stuff in this presentation. I have read most of his books and this talk felt a bit like a reread.

Some of the notes I took while watching the video:

Write small methods, then write them smaller
In an if statement, call a function
In the predicate, call a function
Extract your logic into small methods and objects. Not only to separate concerns but also to document and name your code.
If you feel troubled coming up with a name for a method; it's probably doing too much (and it's probably also too big)
If there's much data sharing between methods in a class; you're probably better off extracting that logic into another class
Etc etc.

On our current project we have done something similar. First we started by naming our methods in a more expressive manner. We then applied cutting off large chunks of code into smaller methods. One obvious downside to this is that you end up with quite steeps objects graphs and lot's of small methods.

We found that as long as you name them properly and stop caring about the inner details some method deep down you'll be fine. But letting go the habit to examine every bit of code to understand what something is doing is quite a steep learning curve.

Watch the screencast here.

Rather than giving a presentation from PowerPoint, Ayende asks the audience what they would like to discuss and then starts rambling off.

He talk is 100% around NHibernate. I increased the playback speed in windows media player (available when you go to full screen). Even though there really wasn't that much coherent info it's still fun to observe someone speaking passionate about something they care for.

Watch the screencast here.

This week the NDC conference made available many of it's talks. In contrast to the typical .Net focussed conventions this one is more or less targeted at the alt.net population.  Uncle Bob is there, Micheal Feathers, Jeremy Miller, Scott Hanselman etc etc.

I have been watching some of the video's available and they are generally speaking very good. I'll post short reviews on them shortly. For an overview of the agenda and screencasts see here.