TrainingDay Jan 2012

TrainingDay 2012

It was an early rise for some, but the day had a promise of geek-coding-walhalla: a development session covering subjects like NHibernate, Entity Framework, Windows Phone 7, ASP.NET MVC 3, WCF and Azure. In short, everything the trendy kids are talking about these days.

After it became clear Stefan had forgotten our promised breakfast (which only seemed to be a problem for Tim), Stefan started out with a brief overview of Azure.

Then Dwight continued with an introduction to ASP.NET MVC3. This meant getting into the MV* patterns: MVC, MVP and MVVM. Finally, we saw a good explanation of ORMs, NHibernate and Entity Framework.

By now, we had seen quite some theory, and had some interesting discussions. We decided to cut the overview of WP7 in half so we could start coding.

The application to develop was a Pub Billing System: take orders, add details, calculate totals. Quick and small, but it touched quite a lot of subjects. We developed it in ASP.NET MVC3, using SQL Server to store our data, and Entity Framework as ORM. We briefly touched on the subject of Dependency Injection and used Moq to showcase it in our unit-tests.

After a short break, the Pub Billing System was ready to be deployed in the cloud! Getting connected to Azure gave some of us a little trouble (not in the least yours truly). While setting it all up and configuring everything, it was clear there is still a lot of work to do for the Azure team. But they've definitely done a good job, and updates are coming at a fast pace.

Finally, each of us could upload their version of the application to Azure, and we were happily testing it (and using the company's credit card

Too bad we didn't have time for WCF and WP7, but then that might have made us look too cool. It was a fun and learning experience. Everyone learnt at least a few new things, be it general principles like DI, MVVM, MVC, etc. or technologies like EF, Moq, Azure, etc.