Cave Markings 

While I was in Orlando for TechEd developers earlier this month, I participated in competition called Speaker Idol hosted by Carl Franklin. Contestants had to give a five minute presentation on a topic of their choice. I chose to explain Test-Driven Development (TDD). I also made the decision not to give a demo in such a short time.

I made it to the finals where I came in as the runner-up and won a BlackJack II Windows Mobile phone. Eric Shupps won a speaking slot at next year's TechEd with an excellent talk that included a well executed demo.

I have embedded a clip of my talk below. You can download the clip here, or watch the entire Speaker Idol finals here.

Cheers,

++Alan

As part of the TechEd Developers conference this week in Orlando, Fl, I'll be facilitating a discussion of the pros and cons of eXtreme Programming and other agile development practices. We'll be discussing what has worked for us, and what hasn't.

BOF857 Agile Development, Tenets of XP: eXtreme Programming

Wednesday, June 4 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM, N330 D

Using various tenets of XP can provide the impetus to make your development process more agile. Agile is a discussion point: what do you do or want to try to do to add Agility to your development process? We throw around a few ideas regarding processes such as SCRUM, Continuous Integration, Pair Programming, regression testing/tracking metrics, code generation, Team System, and others. Everyone can share whatever has worked and what they are working on. This is a forum to exchange workable solutions to faster development with near perfect execution on fast development cycles.

Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions are interactive discussions rather than presenter-focused lectures. This is perfect for me because I am not an agile development expert. I am an imperfect practitioner of agile practices. I'll be moderating the discussion, but I fully expect there to be smarter, more experienced people in the room to enlighten the rest of us.

If you'll be at TechEd Developers this week, please join me on Wednesday evening at 6:30 for what I hope will be a lively discussion.

++Alan

It's time for TechEd 2008. This year the conference has been split into separate weeks for IT Pros and developers. I will be attending the developer edition next week in Orlando. This is my fourth consecutive TechEd conference, and the first I've paid for personally. That's right, this conference is so valuable, I'm willing to pay out of my own pocket to attend.

This will be the first time I've been to a large conference since joining Twitter. Twitter has been a great tool at smaller events for meeting up with people and spontaneously organizing outings to restaurants, bars etc.

Hunter French created a Twitter group on the TechEd Connect site. If you will be attending either week of TechEd, I encourage you to join the Twitter group so other tweeple at the event can keep up with you during the conference.

In the group, I have created a Tweetup (Twitter Meetup) event for Wednesday, June 4 at noon in the dining area. Everyone interested should join us. I'll print up some signage, but if you just look for the people obsessively typing on their phones, you'll find us. Use this link to add the event to your calendar.

Here are the people that I follow on Twitter that are planning on attending TechEd Developers. If you are attending and I didn't list you, please add a comment with your twitter handle.

@wbm @bencarey @jfollas @dcampbell @pandamonial @jmcwherter @mhouston @lespaulrob @aaronlerch @keithelder @arcanecode @gblock @dougt @glengordon @jeffreypalermo @joefeser @ardalis @saraford @darcy_lussier @OdeToCode @MobilityMatters @shanselman @jjulian @careypayette @scottcreynolds @laurelatoreilly

I look forward to meeting the people behind the 48x48 pixel avatars. See you in Orlando!

++Alan