DDD Melbourne

A few months ago, I decided to head over to Australia and get to a 'Developer Developer Developer' conference. I would've liked to get to both Melbourne and Sydney, but unfortunately I only had the budget to attend one, and since Melbourne was the first to publicly announce dates, venues, etc... I plumped for Melbourne.

Now, as far as I can tell, there's only one thing better than attending a software conference, and that's presenting at a software conference, so I threw my hat into the ring to give a talk. I put up a XAML talk (well, obviously!) and waited for the public votes to be collated... Fortunately for me, I got selected and I spoke about 'Frameworks for XAML apps - a lightning review'

Although I wasn't 100% pleased with the way the session went, I learnt some things along the way, and I am keeping my fingers crossed that this talk gets selected for Tech Ed NZ, because it'll be a better talk for the experience.

Lesson 1. Don't try and cram too much into a 50-minute talk.

I spoke about some core features of WPF and tried to do a review of MvvmLight, PRISM and Caliburn.Micro. In hindsight, this was too broad, and didn't give me the opportunity to go particularly deeply into any of the frameworks...

Lesson 2. Know your audience.

My expectation was that the fine folks of Melbourne turning up to a XAML frameworks talk would be XAML devs, and this just goes to show that assumption is the futher of all muck-ups. Unfortunately, around 2/3 of the room raised their hands to the 'who isn't a XAML dev question, so I spent more time on the 'cool bits about WPF' section than I'd planned.

Lesson 3 Only talk about stuff you really know.

I know this seems obvious, and whilst I do know enough about PRISM to be dangerous, I found myself to be short when it came to explaining it. I also really don't like it, and I probably don't want to go around publicly dissuading other people from using PRISM when it just might suit their needs very well*

Taking all this on board, I have altered my Tech-Ed submission to only cover off MvvmLight and Caliburn.Micro. I think talking enthusiastically about technologies I enjoy will deliver a better experience for the audience, and setting the level at 300 allows me to skip the 'what is XAML' part of the talk. I hope it will make for a better session all round - Now I just have to hope it gets selected!

Here is the sample code I showed on the day

and if you really, really want to know - here's where to get started with PRISM.

* If they are architecting a massively complex UI and/or are clinically insane.