“Best practices.” Two magic words we all try to make part of our work every day. A lot of information can be found online claiming to be the best practices for this or the best practices for that, but it can be difficult to determine whether the information is reliable or not.

If you’re interested in getting some timely information you can count on from some of the top developers in this part of the country, you should plan to attend the Build Your Skills: Best Practices for .NET Developers event that will be help in St. Louis at the Microsoft offices on March 24, 2009. This full day event will introduces developers to a range  of the best practices that developers can use to create better applications in a shorter amount of time.  Presented by independent developers with a proven track record of having “been there, done that”, each session will provide insight into what it takes to write applications that run faster, are easier to maintain, and are of the highest possible quality.  During the day, you will be introduced to important information and concepts in these areas:

The Fine Art of Profiling (Go Faster) presented by Scott Colestock
There are a set of tools that should be "closer to the top" of your toolbox - in particular, a good profiler.  We'll talk about the tools that you already have at your disposal, and a few others that deserve a close look.  We'll talk about how to get the most out of your time invested, and where profiling should fit in your development lifecycle.

Building Loosely Coupled Applications presented by Shannon Braun
As enterprise software development has evolved we have identified patterns and practices that help us write more extensible and maintainable applications. Patterns with the names of Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control and Composite View have emerged to simplify the reuse of existing components and aide us in wiring together disparate components. Frameworks have been built to support these patterns.  This presentation will explain the patterns, cover the frameworks and talk about the practices required to be successful in building loosely coupled applications.

Exceptional Development: Dealing With Exceptions in .NET presented by Jason Bock
NET provides a rich mechanism for creating and handling errors in software. Yet it can be (and has been) abused and manipulated, sometimes in very subtle ways, in the name of "reliable code." In this session we'll cover exceptions: how they are created, when should they be handled, and some best practices to follow.

Introduction to Unit Testing presented by Kirstin Juhl
This session will introduce attendees to the art and practice of Unit Testing. We will cover the basic fundamentals of what units are and why and how they should be used.  The presentation will cover common tools used in unit testing and contain a brief discussion of Unit Testing within the Test-Driven-Development context. We explore the tools and write some basic unit tests, and watch them run, fail, and pass. A question and answer session will conclude this presentation.

Advanced Unit Testing with Raymond Lewallen
In the Advanced Unit Testing session, we will look at Inversion of Control - Dependency Injection, services, repositories, mocking, behavior driven development, MSpec, aggregates, distributors and the tools behind these such as Castle.Windsor, RhinoMocks, Machine.Specifications, NHibernate, Castle Transacations Manager, NServiceBus and a few more if we have time.  And of course, we all revolves around writing unit tests and letting those tests drive the outcome of our code.

Each session will provide you with skills you can use right away and a foundation to expand your knowledge in each area as you become more proficient. Space is limited so Register Today! 

Event Date:  March 24, 2009
Event Time: 9:00 AM-4:30 PM<
Location:  Microsoft Office - St Louis
                  3 City Place Drive, Suite 1100
                  St. Louis, MO  63141   Map 
Register Online: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/InviteOnly.aspx?EventID=C0-4A-DF-AC-89-28-E0-FE-5B-62-67-0F-FC-C2-FB-85&Culture=en-US