In March of 2008, I had my first presentation I've done at a technology conference, NU Technology Day. I had the opportunity to team up with Brett Bieber from University Communications. I was first introduced to the concept of Test Driven Development in November 2007 when Brett presented the concept at a Web Applications Developer's Meeting on campus. This began to spark some thought in producing better code, code that doesn't regress, and helps enforce secure code. Since my focus at the College of Business is in e-commerce and application security, this topic became an innovation as a developer. Please note that Test Driven Development does not produce secure code, but can help retain secure code.

For now, I've posted the presentation. I hope it will spark some interest as it has done for me. I hope to post notes to the presentation in the near future.

Nu Tech Presentation - Test Driven Development

The Lincoln .NET Users Group is a new gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska of .NET developers. Once a month, the group schedules a meeting, invites speakers on various .NET topics and discusses how they are used to business application. In October, I was able to attend the Agile Sports presentation on their product called Hudl.

Hudl is a web application for sports teams to document and analyze games either by their games statistics and game video. This product increases the interactivity between the coaches and their players. It is a built from Silverlight, WCF, LINQ from the .NET 3.5 Framework. The development team also used Prototype and Scriptaculous for AJAX calls. The interesting aspect of this project was that it was designed around scalability and the presentation descibed how the technologies they chose helped them achieve that goal.

When you look at their overall project in Visual Studio, they are designing their application into a 3-tier architecture such as creating object layers like Business, Core, and Data. Much of their Data layer is LINQ to SQL. The interface that contains Silverlight and web application for markup and client side scripts is in a separate project.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is one of the major components that makes this product scalable. With the use of services, Agile Sports development team utiliized AJAX and Silverlight to process and retrieve their data. The advantages that WCF gave were higher performance, ease of development, code reuse, and services used as a commodity.

WCF can be deployed in different ways. At the College of Business, I’ve deployed WCF under IIS, but an ideal deployment maybe writing your own console that monitors the connection to the service. This can bypass the use of IIS and alleviate consuming more resources especially if your services are heavily consumed. WCF can use different protocols besides HTTP. Some other protocols to choose from are:

WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) or for the web, Silverlight, was used to annotate on top of game video. Annotations could also be made in a timeline of the video so step by step notes could be communicated as the play progressed.

The last major component was LINQ to SQL. Though there were some down sides discovered for LINQ to SQL, LINQ turned out to be of use to the application. One of the advantages to LINQ was the ability to query data right in the code. Queries could also be setup as compiled queries to help improve performance.

Some of the downsides or bugs discovered in LINQ at the moment are:

Inserts cannot be executed on tables without primary keys

Does not handle many to many relationships across tables

Joins on tables cannot occur with more than one parameter

When it comes to debugging LINQ, Agile Sports suggested that you utilize SQL Profiler.

Debugging can also be complicated between these different technologies. You would think that debugging in Visual Studio can be done at the same time. Though what Agile Sports found that your debugging process is done separately for each JavaScript, Silverlight, and ASP.NET.

The presentation by Agile Sports was very enlightening for those just getting started or in that indermediate stage in working with .NET 3.5. What Agile Sports shared definitely set the expectations needed for developers to be aware of these technologies how they are benefitual or in their case give them the edge, but also give us the amount of debugging and areas of attention needed to develop an end product.

What was more exciting was to see someone exceed with .NET in taking a business idea and making it into reality.

Lincoln .NET User Group - Hudl

 is a conference for web professionals in higher education. This year’s conference was held at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri at the Plaster Student Union. The High Ed Web conference was the first web development conference I’ve been to. As an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, I was heavily involved in SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) business competitions, and in later years, I attended the Worship Institute. What made this conference exceptional was everyone had a laptop.

As you went from session to session, everyone had their laptop open. Twitter was also used every second of the day for social networking. The most exciting part is that #HeWeb08 was ranked in the top 10 most active mentions.

One of the most inspiring sessions at the conference was the keynote message by Jeffery Veen. As we constantly work with data sets, the most crucial aspect of that data set is visualizing it. Visualizing data is nothing foreign to Jeffery Veen. Jeff worked for Google in the redesign process for their analytic products. As he spent years working on visualizations, he learned how visuals have been used in history to solve problems. Jeff shared some people in history who had revolutionized how we look at numbers or make connections to places or ideas.

. John Snow was a physician who studied cholera cases in London in 1854, a time known as the Black Death. Though much speculation was that the disease was being spread by polluted air, John proposed that the source of the disease was coming from a water source based on cases that occurred on a map and the use of statistics to prove the connection to the disease.

Following Jeff shared another example of 

. Charles studied the changes in the population of Napoleon’s army during Napoleon’s invasion campaigns. He stated,

“The aim of my carte figurative is to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation.”

Essentially, as Jeff summarized it, “Don’t make me think.” A quotation from 

 creates a further clarity in the importance of the power of visualization,

“Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning.”

Chris creates meaning with his visuals of small items to portray the bigger picture.

Though there was so much that Jeff spoke about, Jeff shared the following highlights from his experience:

Assign different visual cues to each dimension of the data

Remove everything that isn’t telling the story

Create tools to let them manipulate their data

“Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment”, Ben Fry.

“The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, Edward R. Tufte.

“Envisioning Information”, Edward R. Tufte.

“Visual Explanations”, Edward R. Tufte.

“Beautiful Evidence”, Edward R. Tufte.

“Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior”, Indi Young.

Posts

Nu Tech Presentation - Test Driven Development

Lincoln .NET User Group - Hudl

2008 HighEdWeb