Big picture thoughts on software and other topics

May 11, 2009

Workshops! Foundation Series and Scott Bellware coming to Philly!

by Brian Donahue

UPDATE: Scott has lowered the price for the workshops!  See below!

First, a reminder that the next Foundation Series session is this Wednesday, May 13th at DeVry.  The topic is Design Patterns.  If you saw ErikBroken Link: http://erikbase.blogspot.com/'s talk at code camp, this will be a chance to dig in a little deeper, ask questions, and also to take a look at how some of the new features in C# 3.0 can help make your patterns code simpler and cleaner.

Register for free here: http://foundationseries.eventbrite.com/Broken Link: http://foundationseries.eventbrite.com/

Also, through the wonders of Twitter, I was able to invite Scott Bellware to come up to Philly to offer two workshops on June 2nd and 3rd.  They will be held at IndyHallBroken Link: http://www.indyhall.com/'s training space (which used to be Indy Hall’s main space before they moved to a new, larger space earlier this month).  The first is a C# workshop on Test Driven and Behavior Driven Development (TDD/BDD).  Scott is a pioneer in this area, particularly in regards to the .NET space.  He has been speaking, writing, and teaching about BDD for several years and was a huge influence on my interest and understanding of it.  If you have been interested in learning - or struggling to learn a test-first approach to coding - I think you’ll take a huge step forward by spending a day learning from Scott.

The second workshop is on Web Application Testing using the Ruby test framework rSpec and the Javascript browser testing tool Selenium.  At first glance this may not seem relevant to .NET, but Selenium is just a browser driving tool that can run a browser against any web app written on any platform.  rSpec is used to execute the selenium tests and report results.  The result is a very effective means for writing customer focused acceptance tests that ensure your  web app is functioning as specified.  And while Scott will be using rSpec and testing a Rails web app, you will learn techniques that can easily be replicated in a .NET only environment (you can drive Selenium from any test framework, including NUnit or MSTest). 

The cost for each course is $300 $200, or $500 $300 for both!  There are only 18 seats available for each workshop, so don’t wait too long!

Register for one or both here: http://www.eventbrite.com/org/139992133?s=1192466