Last Saturday, Steve and I attended Philly.NET Code Camp 2009.2. There were about 475 attendees and 12 separate tracks, each with 5 sessions. Here is the list of tracks that I attended:

8:30 AM – Len Smith, “Test Driven Development and Dependency Injection”

10:00 AM – Jess Chadwick, “What’s New and Hot in .NET 4.0”

12:30 PM – Al Katawazi, “Enterprise ASP.NET MVC Application Development”

2:00 PM – Steve Bohlen, “Refactoring to a S.O.L.I.D. Foundation”

3:30 PM – Sara Chipps, “Making Your Personal Projects a Reality”

Overall, the tracks were great. I felt like I was able to get something out of each one. My interests were split, attending two new and upcoming topics and two craftsmanship* topics.

On the topic of all things new and exciting, here are some .NET 4.0 points of interest:

• DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime)
• Lazy (lazy instantiation of the generic type)
• Code Contracts, with Runtime and Compile time checking
• Covariance and Contravariance
  • IEnumerable b = new IEnumerable();
  • DoSomething(Action func); DoSomething(Base b => b.Value);
• Named & Optional Parameters
  • A(B b, int i = 0); A(i: 5, b: new B());
• PLINQ
  • Parallel.ForEach, parallelizes a task across a collection
• MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)
  • Provides Extensibility, and Dependency Management
  • Similar to IoC, but not quite there.

Enterprise ASP.NET MVC was interesting because it demonstrated true reuse of components in an MVC application. I was particularly interested in how he set up the MVC application, separating it into several projects. Each project had an extremely specific task:

• Demo
• Communication
• QA
• Security
• Static Content

The presenter, Al Katawazi also mentioned referencing a separate project for all Static Content. He referenced a post by Nick Berardi about the Google App Engine that I found very interesting.

More bloggy goodness to come…