Austin CodeCamp 2007

The Austin CodeCamp was held this last Saturday in Austin. Here are a few of the highlights:

Rick Garibay gave a talk on Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) which abstracts SOAP web services, .net remoting, and other communications into a single api with lots of configuration files. Rick mentioned any application can host a web service now. You don't need to configure iis to create a virtual directory and stuff. Now you can easily deploy all your 'bots to clients using .net. Rick mentioned the .Net Web Service Studio from GotDotNet as a great tool.

Anil Desai gave a great presentation on SQL server tuning.

The author of WATIR, Bret Pettichord, gave a good overview of the GUI testing tool. We used the IE Developer Toolbar to query web pages for widgets to control. After executing "gem install watir" we executed the following lab, test.rb, to control ie.

ie = Watir::IE.start 'http://google.com' 
ie.text_field(:name, 'q').set 'ADNUG' 
ie.button(:name, 'btnI').click 

Bret recommended installing "rspec" and "ruby_breakpoint". More details at "http://wtr.rubyforge.org/.



Cody Powell gave an encouraging talk about the new functional programming constructs in c# 3.0 which will support natively maps and reducers.

Scott Bellware also talked about new features in c# 3.0 including being able to attach methods to classes. Using NUnit.Spec he wrote an interesting test line,

total.ShouldEqual(90m);
//instead of
Assert.AreEqual(total,90m);