Jean Hibbert's Blog

Patterns & Practices Summit 2008

I will be attending the Patterns and Practices summit 2008, which starts next week.

A list of speakers
http://www.pnpsummit.com/west2008/west2008.aspx

General topics
http://www.pnpsummit.com/West2008/west2008sessions.aspx

I attended the 2005 patterns and practices summit(the year before I joined m35) and found this conference extremely informative with regards to:

1) Gaining insight into the .Net Framework, and design patterns.
2) Learning about the Enterprise Library.
3) Learning about the new Infragistics controls. (Infragistics do talks on their .Net framework controls because they are one of the sponsors).
4) Gain a stronger understanding of Design Architecture which is an art that is always evolving.

The talks I am looking forward to are:

Drowning in Complexity: What You Can Do About It - Billy Hollis

What's the biggest problem facing architects and developers today. Billy Hollis believes that it's the extreme and ever-increasing complexity of the technologies we use as platforms. In this session, Billy will look at the signs that complexity in software development is getting out of hand, and how existing practices are not up to the task of dealing with that challenge. He doesn't pull punches; some sacred cows come in for rather severe criticism. Then he'll venture some ideas on dealing with complexity today and what changes in the industry are needed long term to counter the problem.

Fundamentalist Functional Programming - Erik Meijer

In 1984, John Hughes wrote a seminal paper "Why Functional Programming Matters" in which he eloquently explained the value of pure and lazy functional programming. Due the increasing importance of the Web and the introduction of many-core machines, in the quarter century since the appearance of the paper the problems associated with effectful imperative languages have reached a point where we hit a brick wall. We argue that fundamentalist functional programming, that is radically eliminating all side-effects from our programming languages, including strict evaluation, is what it takes to conquer the concurrency and parallelism dragon. We must embrace pure lazy functional programming "all the way," with all effects apparent in the type system of the host language using monads. Only a radical paradigm shift can save us, but does that mean that we will lose all current programmers along the way? Fortunately not! By design, LINQ is based on monadic principles. The success of LINQ proves that the world does not fear the monads.

MVC & Dynamic Data - Brad Wilson

The ASP.NET MVC framework is an exciting alternative to ASP.NET WebForms. The strength of MVC is that it gives you a clear separation of concerns, with fine-grained control over the HTML and Javascript that makes writing Web 2.0 applications much more streamlined. The ASP.NET Dynamic Data framework enables you to quickly build applications that are driven by data and business logic. In this session, Brad will preview both the ASP.NET MVC framework and the Dynamic Data implementation that's currently being developed especially to run on top of ASP.NET MVC.

I will keep a daily blog detailing my experiences at the summit.

Jean