My NDC 2009 Agenda

The Norwegian Developer Conference 2009 will take place in Oslo from June 17th to 19th. I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a full 3-day ticket and I’m really looking forward to this event. I attended both TechEd Barcelona in 2007 and PDC last year in LA, but I can’t help thinking that NDC 2009 has got an even more impressive speaker lineup than both of those – at least if you’re in to agile practices and software craftsmanship.

If you’re thinking pure technology NDC might not be that impressive, but I personally believe that  the quality of a conference is a lot more about the quality of the speakers and how they present their thoughts and ideas, and less about the technological content. I’d rather spend an hour reading some good articles and try out some new technology hands on, than spending an hour on a bad chair in a room that always seem to lack oxygen listening to a mediocre speaker reading out loud every word on his/her powerpoint slides.

Going to conferences is about getting inspired. It’s about getting that tickling feeling of neurons going amok and new ideas swirl around in your head. It’s about triggering activity in your anterior superior temporal gyrus. And it’s all about the speakers. Skilled speakers with a lot of experience and confidence on stage giving a talk on a topic dear and near to their heart can really make a difference. And with a speaker lineup with names like Feathers, Rahien, Hanselman, Bolognese, Miller, Haack, Dahan, Osherove, Block, Provost, Bustamente, C. Martin, Lhotka… It’s just no way that this is going to be a mediocre event. It’s destined for success!

The worst part of this conference will actually be to pick which sessions to attend. It’s just impossible to not miss a great session, but hopefully they will all be videotaped and available online shortly after the conference. But the sessions are always best live, and one got to choose something. As it looks right now I believe this will be my agenda;

 

DAY 1
Ayende Rahien	Building Multi Tenant Apps	Haven’t had a chance to see Rahien live yet, but I’ve read and used some of his works
Michael Feathers	Working Effectively with the Legacy Code: Taming the Wild Code Base	I’ve seen some videos of Feathers up on InfoQ and I highly recommend his sessions
Juval Löwy	Productive Windows Communication Foundation	Don’t know much about Löwy to be honest, but getting productive with WCF is never bad.
Rockford Lhotka	Implementing Permission-based Authorization in a Role-based World	Got to have some technical sessions to, and though I’ve never used Rocky’s CSLA framework, I’ve listen to a couple of the DotNetRocks episodes he has attended. Besides; the content suits the project I’m currently working on perfectly :)
Udi Dahan	Intentions and Interfaces - Making Patterns Complete	Yet another one of those gurus you just read and hear a lot about.
Michael Feathers	Design Sense Deep Lessons in Software Design	Feathers again; he’s just that good.

 

DAY 2
Jeremy D. Miller	Convention over Configuration applied to .NET	Been following his blog for some time and I like his involvement with the Alt.Net community. Great interview with him on the Alt.Net podcast. And besides; CoC is facinating.
Roy Osherove	Unit Testing Best Practises	Went to Osherove’s sessions at TechEd in 2007 and it was well worth it. Hope he brings his guitar :)
Ted Neward	Extend the Customization Possibilities of your .NET App with Script	Ted is a great speaker and the scripting possibilities is something I’d really like to look more into.
Robert C. Martin	Clean Code: Functions	One of the most energetic speakers out there and Clean Code will be read in the upcoming weeks.
Rafal Lukawiecki	Architectual use of Business Intelligence in Application Design	BI has always been one of those fields that were interesting, but never had the time to really dig into. And from what I’ve heard Rafal was one of the top rated speakers at TechEd 2007 (or was it 2008?).
Jimmy Nilsson	Entity Framework + Domain-Driven Design = true?	I’ve read Nilsson’s book on DDD and seen his session at Øredev last year. I’m currently working on a project were we try to follow the guidelines of DDD, and so it will be interesting to see his take on EF + DDD.
Richard Campbell Carl Franklin	.NET Rocks! Live	I’ve followed the .NET Rocks podcast for quite some time and the live recordings are never dull. Will be interesting to see who they gather at their panel this time.

 

DAY 3
Scott Bellware	Full Day Tutorial: Good Test, Better Code	I’m a strong believer in TDD and Bellware is certainly one of the gurus in this field.

As you might have noticed from my list of speakers I try to spread my sessions to cover as many different as possible. That way I know which one I can spend time with when the videos come online.

And a little tip if you’re going to NDC (or any other conference); do not hesitate to leave a session that you find boring or uninteresting. It’s your time and you’d better spend it right!