Cave Markings 

In 2005, I began giving talks at our local user group.  In 2006, I spoke at the Atlanta Code Camp, FoxForward and DevLink.  This year, I joined Toastmasters in anticipation of even more speaking opportunities.  I have not been disappointed.

In January, I delivered a talk on Creating Windows Services at the NashDotNet users group.  I am currently preparing six talks for three different conferences on a wide variety of topics.  Fortunately, I picked the topics.   Each of these presentations is on a topic of great interest to me.

In September, I'll be at FoxForward near Atlanta, discussing TDD and an approach to application architecture I call OGLE. In October, I'll first head to Nashville for DevLink, where I'll be talking about VSX, and the Entity Framework.  The following week I'll be in Phoenix at Southwest Fox, where I'll do a longer pre-conference session on TDD, and a regular session on extending Visual FoxPro applications with Windows Forms elements.

In addition to these great events, I've committed to speak at the Memphis Day of .NET in November.  Details are still being finalized for that event.  I'll also be giving a talk introducing the Entity Framework at ETNUG, most likely at the August meeting.  I'm hoping to add a couple more engagements before the end of the year.  I'll let you know if anything works out.

If you have ever considered giving a technical presentation at a user group, or regional event, I encourage you to act on that thought.  Sharing ideas and interacting with other members of the community at these events has been extremely rewarding for me.  If you attend any of these events, please introduce yourself.

Cheers,

++Alan

I'm totally digging Alex Miller's "Patterns I Hate" series.  So far he's taken down Singleton and Template Method.  I love to study patterns and "best practices" in general, but I realize they can do harm when slavishly copied in inappropriate contexts.

While on the topic of Patterns, I must give a shout out to my co-worker Geff Ivey.  I mentioned my liking of Design Patterns Explained as an alternative to the GoF, and Geff convinced me to finally take a look at Head First Design Patterns.  I'm sure this book isn't for everyone, but it was useful to me.  They finally helped me to wrap my head around Model View Controller.  They did it better than the Pragmatic Programmers, or Martin Fowler, although Fowler has more context on the evolution of the design.

Anyway, Alex appears to be a fan of dependency injection, which will soon be promoted by agile practitioners, as a cure for cancer, or at least cancerous code.  Alex has some excellent, thoughtful comments.  You should read them, highly recommended.

Enjoy,

++Alan