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Last night I had a lot of fun presenting at the Wellington .net User Group on Behaviour Driven Development.

Below are the slides from the talk.

Day 2 seems a bit thinner on the ground for dev talks.

Challenging the role of Software Architect by Kevin Fancis Not so much challenging as saying we need them more, which I disagree with, had personal disagreements with the content of the talk and for the first time at TechEd I felt compelled to leave the talk.

take aways: I'm a very different professional to Kevin

The "everything developers need to know about security" talk by Michael Howard

really amazingly engaging talk. Michael gave some great tips on how to approach the problem of security for developers, and working out where threats can come from.

take aways: Sell privacy not security<

Architectural considerations for creating Silverlight applications

TBC..

Well day one is coming to a close, so before I forget I need to get my thought's down on paper.... well virtual paper..

keynote

I really think MS need to rethink inviting politicians to TechEd, it really adds very little value for people in the audience, in the end it's a gathering of IT professionals and so a minister trying to describe their policies is always going to come across as missing some essential or other to delegates. Ministers are not experts, that's what they have public servants for, and really I felt the whole presentation left the room feeling quite dead by the end of his talk. Chris' talk was a little more engaging and interesting talking about the current economic climate and how they see the future progressing, there are few companies that can quickly signal the global pulse of the IT economy like MS. Interesting to see the Azure release date announcement (although I have to agree with my colleague Ross that the pricing scheme for Azure is not that attractive for small start ups that would really be keen to try out a tech like azure) and a couple of interesting demo's but no wow factor this year at all, all in all the keynote felt a little dull.

Session 1: Security in .net 4.0 by Corneliu Tusnea

To be honest this presentation failed to have much impact on me. The demos seemed a bit garbled and the presenter seemed to have trouble keeping the presentation coherent.

Take away: Security is made easier to configure in 4.0 is about all I took away.

Session 2: How to build a small software enterprise from zero by Joseph Albahari

This was a great presentation for a non technical subject matter, was really engaging and the presenter interspersed a lot of humour.

Take away: enjoy start up's

Session 3: Deep-Dive in the new Parallels with .Net 4 and how to scale your code from one thread to 32 cores. by Corneliu Tusnea

Way to change my opinion of a presenter in one session. Really engaging this time, perhaps he felt a bit more in tune with his presentation but his demos were interesting and the subject matter was really involving.

Take away: Plinq and Parallel.for is the best way to try and achieve multi-threading from now on, no more self coding locking.

Session 4: An Overview of the Azure Services Platform by Chris Auld

A lighter touch session on Azure, a really nice platform for quick elastic availability computing, but the cost benefit ratio is minimal for my own personal use.

Take aways: pay attention to application design so Azure can be used later on.

Session 5: Optimising Client-Side Performance to Build Faster Web Sites

So I can't possibly give an unbiased review of Craig's talk, but he seemed confident as ever and in control

Take aways: Xero is Awesome. But so is Aptimize