Although I really enjoyed the course and am glad I took it, it seems wrong to just give a blanket endorsement of the course.

I just don’t think that any training course can or should even try to be well suited for every type of person.

With that in mind, I tried to come up with a few helpful criteria to help someone who is thinking of taking the course make their decision.

You may want to take the course if…

1. You are somewhat comfortable with 3.5 .NET syntax, but really want to geek out on Predicates, Actions, Funcs, and the angle bracket cesspool where they intersect with Generics.
2. You like using natural language API’s like Fluent NHibernate and are curious about how to construct an internal DSL of your own.
3. You are a Test Driven Development fanboy, but are looking for cleaner and more innovative ways of writing maintainable tests.
4. You think design patterns are just swell and wouldn’t dream of writing a Hello World app without at least a dozen classes, but would like to see these principals in practice by someone who really knows his stuff.
5. You prefer a code-centric approach to learning and want to spend most of your time either coding or watching someone else code rather than simply listening to concept-laden lectures.
6. You wouldn’t mind a little motivational kick in the butt.

You may want to run away screaming from the course if…

1. You don’t due well with sleep deprivation.
2. You are deeply cynical and motivational tangents cause you physical pain.
3. You view design as hopelessly subjective and are fast to dismiss any additional layers of indirection as over-engineering.
4. Although you might be interested in learning how to use MVC Frameworks and IoC Containers, the thought of creating your own implementations as a learning exercise seems downright ludicrous to you.
5. You are NOT someone who is ‘convention promiscuous’ and the thought of doing things like naming_methods_with_underscores immediately sends you into Rain Man mode.
6. You get frustrated easily whenever you don’t immediately understand what is going on. JP is of the ‘push yourself past your limits’ and ‘learn by immersion’ school of thought when it comes to teaching. Unless you are in the top 5-10% of programmers, you’re probably going to feel pretty lost at various points of the course. If you are someone who can’t deal well with that feeling, then this course is probably not be for you.

Great Big Fat Disclaimer – I get the feeling that the content of JP’s courses tends to change pretty dramatically from month to month. This is a testament to his own talent and discipline when it comes to being a continual learner. However, it also means that you should probably take characterizations of the course (like this one) with a grain of salt.

Some Essential Preparation Tips For Those Crazy Enough to Take It- For those of you that have decided to take the plunge and sign up for a future Nothin But .NET course, I highly recommend that you take the course preparation seriously. At the very least, you should do the following:

1. Watch all of his DNR TV design videos – JP demonstrates design principals continually throughout the course, but doesn’t really take the time to explain them up front. It is helpful if you have a good grounding in these to begin with.
2. Learn and Practice R# short-cuts – JP is a true ReSharper Jedi and therefore his coding demonstrations can be hard to keep up with if your brain isn’t already used to taking the mental shortcuts that R# allows you to take.
3. Practice using his BDD Library Extensions – I feel pretty comfortable with TDD and am used to BDD-style naming conventions, but the fluent interface style BDD library that JP wrote and uses in the course through me for a loop at first. I wish I would have taken the time to get used to it more before the course.
4. Sleep extra the week before the course and consider staying in the hotel even if you are local – In the words of a good friend of mine, “No amount of Starbucks makes you smart at 2:00 am”, at least not after 17 straight hours of intense training. It didn’t help that I only got a few hours of sleep the first night because of a sick baby at home, but I definitely would have been better off if I had tried to get extra sleep the week before.

That’s my two cents.

Any alumni out there want to offer a dissenting opinion?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Here’s some thoughts about the second day of the course (yesterday).

1. Actions, Predicates, and Funcs…Oh My - We started the day with a wrap up of all the work we did with delegates from day one. This is when the lightbulb finally went off in my head on the differences between the Actions, Predicates, and Funcs types. They are just convenience wrappers for delegates with different signatures. If you need to pass around a method that returns a bool, then you’ll want to use a Predicate (filtering & matching). If you just need to store a void method, then pick Action. Otherwise, if you’re working with a method that returns a value, then Func is what you’ll need.
2. Imitate, Assimilate, Innovate – This is a model that represents the stages of learning. I realized that I spend too much time in the imitate stage (adapting googled code) and almost no time in the innovate stage. One of the first goals I selected for myself this week is to spend more time in the innovate stage. A long term goal is to eventually launch an open source project. Kudos to Dru and Rob, two former co-workers, who took this step already.
3. JP’s BDD framework – This is a fluent interface that replaces test attributes, asserts, and obscure mocking API’s with more a fluent interface that reads more like an English sentence. It disoriented me for a while, but the syntax is starting to grow on me after a few days of using it. Check out this post for a sample of the syntax.
4. Rewriting frameworks from scratch – The first day we implemented LINQ extension methods from scratch. Yesterday we wrote the routing portion of a basic MVC Framework. Today we’ll be writing an IoC container from scratch. These sound like an inane “reinventing the wheel” tasks, but they are meant to be simple exercises to help us practice good design. Not only did it help increase my conceptual understanding of the lower level infrastructure I’ve been using, but it was also very empowering to temporarily counteract the long term trend of consuming API’s and frameworks at that are higher and higher on the abstraction stack..
5. Coding Centric Course with no Lab Manuals – Most training courses that I’ve attended or taught have provided students with detailed instruction manuals on how to complete the lab portions of the course. By contrast, JP cuts you loose with minimal direction. It was frustrating at first, but then I saw the value as soon I noticed how focused I was when he finally showed us the solution. It made so much more sense than it would have otherwise once I had some context based on first hand experience.
6. Using Delegates to Test the Untestable – Probably the most memorable technical epiphany I experienced yesterday was when JP showed us a technique for testing methods that contain static framework methods or concrete framework classes without interfaces, both of which are unmockable when using RhinoMocks. By turning the methods into delegates that are private member variables, we were able to use interaction based testing to verify that the methods were invoked and that all the correct parameters.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. Delegates are like onions: there are many layers to peel back and prolonged exposure sometimes makes you want to cry.
2. Slamming a Mountain Dew at 9:00 PM to help to make it through the last few hours of class seems like a really good idea…until you get home and try to go to sleep.
3. JP codes hella fast. I really need to make a commitment to go mouseless and dig even deeper into R#.
4. Internal DSL’s are fun to consume, but creating them is like drinking day old Folgers coffee through your nose.
5. The branching and merging story in Git is way better than it is SVN, but you’re forked if you rely on everyone in the class being able to pull from GitHub through a hotel network.
6. Goals are powerful. I think I’ve been aiming way too low lately.
7. Unlearning is sometimes more difficult than learning.
8. Training should be as much about getting inspired and having your baseline expectations blown away than about learning specific content.
9. I wish I had taken JP’s course sooner and will recommend it to everyone I know.

Time to go refill my caffeine IV before class starts.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. Saving the World via… TDD? – Steve Harman posts the best TDD code sample ever. It not only demonstrates the context/specification style specs but also clearly proves that TDD is our only hope of preventing the machines that look suspiciously like the current California Governor from taking over the world.
2. A Rant about RAID, with a Bad Metaphor about Eggs, and No Happy Ending – Dylan Beattie shares his misadventures in using SATA RAID to try to protect his dev machine from catastrophe and in the process comes up with the best analogy I’ve seen in a while:
   “SATA RAID is like carefully dividing your eggs into two really good baskets, then tying them together with six feet of wet spaghetti and hanging them off a ceiling fan.”
3. Visual Studio 2010 == Visual Studio 2008 + ReSharper - James Kovac catches an MS marketing faux-pas that proves that even the Microsoft Devs don’t like using Visual Studio without ReSharper installed.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So long VSS. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

1. Windows 7 Download Frustration – Ken Sipe provides a timely rant about MSDN download sites only working on an IE browser. I downloaded several things from MSDN this last week as I prepped a brand-spanking new build\source control server and managed to string together an impressive string of obscenities every up every time I had to switch browsers just to get the download to work. Special Message to Microsoft: Ignoring the realities of cross-browser compatibility on your corporate sites is inane and does not help promote your browser in any way!  On the contrary, it simply undermines my confidence in your ability to write decent, reliable software. Fix it before IE starts dragging otherwise decent software down with it as it continues to sink into the pit of browser failure.
2. Dvorak Keyboard: Is it Really Faster? – Jaredpar discusses the pros and cons of switching from the traditional QWERTY to the Dvorak keyboard. For several years I’ve heard urban legends about the QWERTY originally being designed to slow typists down because of the limitations of the mechanical type writer and read about programmers who claim to be faster and more accurate typists after making the switch. I even considered making ‘switching to Dvorak’ one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2009. However, after reading this post I am now inclined to postpone this move indefinitely. I’m just not sure I am willing to spend three frustrating months of lower productivity while I fumble around on the keyboard as my fingers relearn the keys. Even more importantly, I really don’t want to deal with the hassles involved in interacting with other people’s computers afterwards (i.e. pairing).
3. Limiting Code Comments Increases Productivity -  This is another post that I almost didn’t read because the topic has been done to death, however Jeffrey Palermo presents the argument beautifully and even includes before and after code samples to illustrate the point. I’m glad Jeff emphasized that nobody is suggesting that you will improve readability simply by ripping out existing comments. On the other hand, carefully naming and proper method composition always trumps comments. I can’t tell you how many stale comments have actually led me down an erroneous path because they no longer matched what the code actually did.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. Give and Take in the Software Industry – This is the Secret Geek’s version of The Joel Test and The programmer’s bill of rights. I almost didn’t read it because the topic is a little old and tired, but Leon Bambrick reinvigorated it with his own humorous writing style as well as helpful step-ladder approach to each topic that serves as a good reminder that you can always progress further down the road to progress. I particularly like the following excerpt on having companies provide separate dev, QA, and Prod environments for their developers:
   “You can’t afford testers and you just want me to fix it in production, eh? That’s awesome. That’s great. Next time the dentist is drilling out a cavity in your mouth, I’m going to tell him “This is an urgent operation. Let’s not waste time on X-rays. Just start drilling, you’re bound to hit something that’s rotten. And let’s save a few dollars and cut out the anaesthetic altogether.”

   2009 Predictions, 2008 Predictions Revisited – Ted Neward judges the accuracy of his predictions from last year and provides us with a new set of forecasts for the coming year. Ted’s ability to combine insightful critical analysis with just the right amount of cynicism and humor make this a great read. My favorite is #1 of the 2009 predictions:

   “The ‘Cloud’ will become the next ‘ESB’ or ‘SOA’, in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with.”
2. Hoops & Yoyo’s Decaf Coffee Crisis – It’s about time that someone took a stand against the abomination known as decaf coffee. Here’s a hilarious Hallmark e-card that you can send to your favorite coffee addict.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

That was the resounding praise that came from Sofia, my little 9 month old hacker princess. She was reviewing BabySmash, Scott Hanselman’s Windows adaptation of the Mac game AlphaBaby.

In case you haven’t seen it, it is a game for toddlers that produces an array of smiling shapes, colorful letters, and silly laughter as your little one indiscriminately bangs upon the keyboard.

Don’t worry, it makes use of the window’s kiosk mode and various keyboard hooks so that there is no accidental formatting of the hard-drive by little fingers that accidentally stumble upon some deadly, archaic hotkey combination.

Here Sofia is brutalizing the keyboard on my home office computer and gleefully watching the results on my modest dual monitor setup (the third monitor is on indefinite hold as lobbyists make feverish pleas to the powerful Spousal Unit Committee of Ways And Means).

She particularly likes it when she inadvertently hits a key that triggers the Scooby-Doo laugh.

Best of all, after the little one goes to bed, Papa developers can head over to codeplex and download the source code for the app.

It’s one of those new-fangled WPF apps, which means that if you’re like me you will be totally lost when you first start looking at it.

Luckily, Scott has written a several posts on the various technical aspects of the app. I skipped them the first time around because I had no prospects of using WPF at work or home anytime soon, but now I’m making my way through them out of curiosity about this application.

I’m hoping that WPF includes an ‘OnDrool’ event because I think my daughter would really appreciate it if I could enhance the application in this way.

Thanks to this Jeff Atwood post, I was even inspired to make my first paypal donation ever for free software. The donation button is set up for a very modest $8.00, so it appealed both to my innate cheapness and my new-found desire to directly reward developers who create cool things.

Thanks Scott!

In summary, if you have a (pre)toddler in your life who can’t wait to get their drooly little hands on your keyboard, then go check out BabySmash.

Related posts:

1. Slinging windows with WinSplit Revolution Thanks to my new employer, I’m now happily a member...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’m getting ready for a quiet New Year’s Eve at home with the family. This will be the first one in recent memory where I may actually remember what happened the next morning.

1. Create Your Own Motivator Poster – I’m a big fan of the humorous anti-motivational posters that you can find on places like despair.com, so I was thrilled to discover a site that allowed you to design your own. I pulled the SRS example shown to the side from an elegant code post by Jarod Ferguson.
2. Ten Things to Retire in 2009 – Jimmy Bogard kicks off the retrospective post season right with his round-up of annoying developer trends from 2008 that he would like to see disappear in the new year. My personal favorite is LINQ 2 Your Mom (#5) where he bemoans some of the LINQ abominations that have recently surfaced. Mom jokes (not the nice kind) are staple where I work and I nearly spit out my coffee laughing when I read it.
3. SSL Spoofing Now Possible…. RUN FOR THE HILLS! – A great explanation of how SSL spoofing works, what can be done about it, and whether or not we should be concerned. The short answer is…probably not.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Actually, up until recently I wasn’t all that crazy about this site. We had been using it at work for the last year as a project management tool for external clients who wanted to integrate with our web services and it seemed rather limited and clunky when compared to JIRA, the most excellent issue tracking tool we use internally (there were various internal constraints that prevented us from using JIRA externally).

It wasn’t really until I started searching for an external location for my DosPecesCreation repository, the project I’ve been working on in my spare time recently, that I gained a new appreciation for Unfuddle.

Most of the free options for externally hosted repositories out there seem to be limited to open source projects, but Unfuddle offers a private plan for free that provides an unlimited number of Subversion or Git repositories along with 1 associated project for issue tracking and access for 2 people.

By moving my code from a local repository to unfuddle, I was not only able to work from multiple computers without the headaches involved in using a tool like Live Sync (formerly FolderShare) in conjunction with SVN, but I was also able to offload much of the CSS and HTML work to my wife. Before she had been sending me email approximations of the changes she wanted, but with a quick 5 minute tutorial on TortoiseSVN along with some automated scripts and shortcuts to set up her Rails environment, she was able to make the changes directly herself.

Of course from my lovely stakeholder’s perspective, that that mostly just meant that I now had more time to work on the now rather large list of programming-related feature requests that she had thought up for version 2.0 of the site.

Luckily, Unfuddle has helped with this too. It dramatically increased my ability to organize and group tasks while adding only a minimal amount of overhead. The last thing I want when I am working on a project in my free time is anything remotely heavy weight in terms of process.

While this minimalist approach might not work as well in heavily regulated corporate environments, it fits beautifully for small, agile teams and especially for small 1-2 developer projects.

Here’s a screenshot of the current tickets broken down by milestones (which we decided to base upon 2 week release cycles). As you’ll notice, I’ll be spending some nights in the near future working on caching and implementing all of YSlow’s suggestions in order to speed up the site a bit.

I had a sneaking suspicion that my nights would be busy for quite some time, but now thanks to Unfuddle I have a much clearer picture of the extent of my servitude.

Looks like I’ll have free time again sometime in the fall of 2014…Thanks unfuddle!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. IT Industry Revolutionised By Labour Saving Device – Leon Bambrick (a.k.a Secret Geek) serves up a wickedly funny post that pokes fun at SysAdmins…<excerpt>”The ‘self-clicking’ “next” button is set to revolutionize how computer users ‘Get Things Done’ — but a wave of fear is sweeping an industry facing wide spread redundancy. System Administrators are expected to be the hardest hit, with over 90% of their duties now offloaded to the clever button”</excerpt>
2. Resolution Randomizer – Thanks to this handy little SilverLight app, I don’t have to waste any effort thinking about resolutions this year. Top on my list now is to “Never again try drinking cocktails in the bathroom”.  Finally, a resolution I have a chance of keeping.
3. Work on what you use and share the rest – DHH, the Grand Poohbah of Rails, shares some surprising news that Merb will be merged into Rails 3. One of the major criticism of Rails is that it is too much of a monolithic framework, which means that it is not possible to substitute in your favorite view engine or data access frameworks like it is in Django. Merb is an alternative Ruby based MVC framework that is based on a plugin model, so this seems like a pretty smart move on the part of the Rails team.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.