Skillsmatter Progressive .NET Tutorials May 12-14th 2010

This week I had the pleasure of talking at the second Progressive .NET Tutorials organised by Skillsmatter in London. I presented a four hour workshop on advanced Castle Windsor. You can watch the videos here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

You can get the code from my Google Code repository here.

To be honest, I’ve been getting quite bored of being ‘windsor-man’ in the UK alt-net community and after the last time I presented my ‘introduction to IoC’ talk, I vowed I would never do it again. But doing this workshop was a lot of fun. Having four hours to get to grips with some more advanced topics was really nice. It helped that I had a very keen audience who asked some great questions and really got involved. It was also interesting to see some of the common misconceptions and problems people have with IoC containers. It seems that most confusion comes from deciding what should come out of a container and what should not. This often manifests itself in questions about factories and how you should resolve things like domain entities, or how you should do resolution within them. The simple answer is you don’t, but it’s difficult to explain what is an appropriate ‘service’ and what is not. It’s something I’m still struggling with.

I only attended the Wednesday session. I had intended to attend on Friday as well, but my teeth decided otherwise and I spent the morning in my dentist’s chair instead. So the only other session I got to see was Robert Pickering’s introduction to F# and even though I saw him do a similar talk last year, I still found it very interesting and learnt a whole load of stuff about F# that I didn’t know before.

Wendy, Skillsmatter’s boss, took all the speakers out to dinner and I had a great evening chewing things over with Dave Laribee, Scott Cowan, Toby Henderson, Ayende and Ian Cooper. But probably the most significant revelation of the day was that I finally discovered the true identity of prolific tweeter @Daneel3001 :)