When I joined Avanade half a year ago they provided me with a very good laptop. It's a Dell 830 with a brilliant 1920x1200 resolution. At first I thought it was a bit small but nowadays I hardly ever use my Dell 24" monitor except for the occasional Hollywood download.

The processor is reasonable fast, it has 4GB of internal memory and they even put the decent IBM 7200rpm hdd in it.

For some reason however my machines always feel sluggish after a couple of months. Rather that going for a new install again I decided to take the plunge and get myself the Intel X25 SSD.

Ordering was easy and after two days it arrived at work in the afternoon. Obviously my teams productivity dropped to 0 as we had to install the drive first and test how fast it would be.

Initial speed experience was a bit of a disappointment. Copying Windows 7 from DVD took about 8 minutes. Now I know this is due to the limiting speed of the DVD but still.  :)

Installing Windows 7 took about 15 minutes, booting as promised only 25 seconds. Installing Visual Studio 2008 was kind of a surprise. I first copied everything on the hdd, then ran the installer. Took about 4 minutes to complete! SP1 which used to take over 40 minutes now only took about 6. Quite an improvement I must say.

Most important however is day to day speed. Firing up VS2008 is fast, it's still not instantly however. Loading projects is 2-3 times faster, but there still are loading times (also because of Resharper I guess).

One of the best improvements however is that the irritation on the noise of the hdd has completely disappeared. The only thing that's audible is the soft spinning of the fan. This means more focus to what I'm doing as opposed to what my machine should be doing. You don't care about the hdd anymore as you can't hear it's activity and the little hdd icon is hardly noticeable.

Building solutions, adding references, working with the file system in general; I never get distracted by a waiting time for some stupid IO anymore and development feels just that much snappier.

All in all, bit disappointed in the fact that loading still takes a bit time but very satisfied in the overall user experience my laptop now provides.

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.