It’s this time of the year again: on Saturday & Sunday October 8 + 9, Silicon Valley CodeCamp is taking place at Foothill College in Los Altos Hill. There are currently over 200 sessions listed, and 2000 people signed up already. I am expecting lots of fun - again.

I’ll be giving 3 talks this year:

• Sat, 11:45 - Beginning TDD for C# Developers.
• Sun, 1:15: For Those About to Mock.
• Sun, 2:45: An excursion in F#

Hope to see you there, and also that I will have some energy left to attend some of the other talks!

More information about my talks here.

Thanks to all of you who attended my sessions on Mocking and on TDD at Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010; I had a great time presenting, in large part because you were awesome and asked great questions!

I uploaded the slides and code for the session on Mocks here. There wasn’t much “written” material for the TDD session, so I didn’t upload it. If someone wants it, let me know in the comments and I’ll add it, too.

Feel free to let me know if there are things I could have done better in the comments below, and don’t forget to fill in your evaluations on the Code Camp website. It’s very helpful for speakers, and… you can win an iPad, courtesy of Dice.com!

On a side note, hats off to Peter Kellner and the whole crew of volunteers. Silicon Valley Code Camp gets bigger every year, and yet, the organization was flawless, and the whole event very fun. Congratulations!

I am very honored that the East Bay chapter of the Bay Area .Net user group will have me as a speaker this upcoming Wednesday. I’ll be talking “For Those About to Mock”, about Mocks and Stubs in .Net, after a presentation of the unit testing features of Visual Studio by Deborah Kurata – an apt opening topic, if you ask me.

You can find more information about this event here; Hope to see you on Wednesday!

I have grown a bit frustrated by the difficulty to gather information about local .Net development community events. Of all people, I am one of the best-positioned to hear about these events, because of my involvement with the San Francisco .Net user group, and yet, I routinely discover that I missed an event, because there is no clear place to go to get that information and I never heard about it.

So here we go – ladies and gentlemen, introducing NorCalWeekly.Net, your weekly serving of .Net events in north California! My goal will be to provide in one place, on a weekly basis, announcements for all upcoming .Net events in the area – so if you know of anything relevant taking place, please let me know! The design and features are somewhat minimalist for the moment, I’ll improve it over time.

I will be presenting “For Those About to Mock” on Tuesday, January 19th at the North Bay .Net user group in Sebastopol – and I am very excited about it, because it is my first time in this user group, and because I really enjoy the topic. As a long-time fan of TDD, I came across mocking a long time ago, but it took me a while to incorporate it in my daily code, not really because it’s complicated, but rather, because I didn’t quite understand what issue mocking frameworks were solving. Also, explanations on the topic are often fairly intimidating.

My goal will be to spare you the misunderstandings I went through, so that you understand where mocking can help you, and how to use frameworks like Rhino.Mocks and Moq in your own code. Hope to see you there, and if you have specific requests or questions you would want me to address, please let me know in the comments!

Event info here.