DDD South West Preview

If you're attending DDD South West then this is a chance to increase the number of sessions you can see by getting an early preview of two of them. If you're not attending, here's a chance to see a couple of the sessions which will be presented on the day:

Functional Alchemy - 10 tricks to keep your C# DRY

Mark Rendle

C# 3.0 and LINQ have made anonymous delegates and closures a hot topic. C# 4.0 improves on them. But these "functional" features have applications beyond messing about with IEnumerable. In this session I'll present 10 simple and not-so-simple uses of first-class functions to help cut down on repeated code and improve maintainability; hopefully you'll discover a new and exciting way of approaching coding problems.

Mark is currently employed as a Senior Software Architect by Dot Net Solutions Ltd, creating all manner of software on the Microsoft stack, including ASP.NET MVC, WPF and Silverlight.

His career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember. C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line. Those were the days. You kids today, with your IntelliSense and your ReSharpers, don’t know you’re born...

Things vying for his attention lately include functional programming, internet-centric applications, the Azure cloud platform and NoSQL data stores.

Windows Phone 7: Why you should care and how to get started

Matt Lacey

Microsoft have just launched Windows Phone 7. But what does this mean for you? Why should you care if you've never developed applications for phones before? And how do you get started when you do want to develop for a Windows Phone?
This session will attempt to convince you that understanding mobile development is useful for all developers and then demonstrate how to create an application for a Windows Phone 7 device.

Matt has been paid to develop software for the last twelve years. In that time he has worked with multiple languages, platforms and companies. He currently works for a company specialising in mobile and digital content solutions. He is particularly interested in developer productivity, mobile computing and providing excellent user experiences.
Matt also organises the DevEvening user group.