Bill Blogs in C#

GANG User Group Meeting Review

Last night, GANG members were treated to an excellent session from Dustin Campbell.

His talk title was "Coding: Get Back to the Basics".

Now, here's the problem:  That title doesn't do the talk justice. It sounds boring, it sounds dry as dust, and it just doesn't make people say "I've got to get me some of that".

Thankfully, nothing could be further from the truth.  Dustin did a fantastic job of making the material entertaining.  And, let's face it, writing better code is going to make you a better developer.  Yes, knowing more about the .NET 3.0, the newest W*F technology, or SOA, or some other new product release is cool, and will have the full support of the corporate marketing engine. That's cool too.  But, when you get down to the bottom of it, you find code.  You find algorithms. You find low-level design decisions.  If you've been to Dustin's talk, you'll find quality.

Dustin talked about cohesion, coupling, and how that affects code quality (you know, did you write that method: "ReadAllRecordsFromTheDataBaseFilterTheListAnd\
PrintTheReportWhileDeletingTheRecordsYouDidntReallyNeedAnyway"

Bad Coder.

Did you refactor that (maybe for days) into differnet methods that each have one simple purpose?

Good Coder.

He also discussed some neat tricks you can do with generics, how delegates lead to lamdbas, and a few nifty tricks you can do with extension methods.

I'm not showing the examples, yet, because he's giving the same talk in Dayton on December 13th.  If you're in the neighborhood, go.