I’ve not blogged much recently, for the simple reason that I’m not doing much development in my new job. I’ve done a couple of weeks of new development using C'# 3.0 in the last six months, but mostly I seem to be supporting legacy apps, planning and carrying out deployments and analysing data.
I don’t mind this at the moment, but I have to say I was very pleased when Amazon finally sent me a copy of Steve Sanderson’s “Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework”. I needed a developer fix, and I’m getting it here.
I’ve always found ASP.NET very heavyweight as a web framework and completely removed from what’s actually going on with HTTP and HTML. I suppose it’s OK if you want your web development to seem like WinForms, but the fact is that it’s NOT WinForms, and never will be.
I’m 200 pages into the book now and it’s come as a breath of fresh air. Apps built with ASP.NET MVC are testable, (relatively) easy to understand, use clean HTML and better reflect the stateless nature of HTTP.
The model binding is clean and reminds me of the M-V-VM pattern in WPF, of which I’m a big fan.
I hope to use MVC for some private projects in the near future, so I’ll be blogging about how I get along.
Last Saturday (the 23rd of May), I had the privilege of attending DDD South West at Queen’s College in lovely Taunton.
The venue was beautiful, the presentations educational and fun, the company convivial and the food plentiful and delicious. I only wish I’d had more sleep and less beer the night before.
I had wondered if the presentations would contain a lot of material from DDD7, but as far as I could tell there was no overlap. I attended sessions on the DLR and dynamic languages, jQuery, refactoring, WCF and C# 4.0 and learned new stuff from all of them.
All in all it was a cracking day and a real credit to the organisers. I’m sure the event will be back next year, and you’ll need to get in quick to get a place!