It’s that time of the year again: Silicon Valley Code Camp is coming up on October 3rd and 4th, at Foothill College. If you live in the Bay Area and like to talk code, this is an event you don’t want to miss. The previous editions rocked, and this year looks like it’s going to rock even harder, with well over 100 sessions and close to 1,000 registered! Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

This year again, I will give an introduction to Test-Driven Development for .NET developers. It’s a topic which is dear to my heart; in his book on TDD, Kent Beck says that it “is a way of managing fear during programming”, and I have to say that my life as a developer got significantly more peaceful after reading it. I can’t guarantee that you will feel the same, but I’ll do my best to share the goods!

The session is targeted for beginners. My goal is to get you quick-started so that you are ready to use it when you leave the room. I will write some code live, to show the methodology in action, using only tools you can get for free. This year, I think I will focus mostly on NUnit and keep it to a minimum on the tools provided in Visual Studio, unless there is strong popular demand; hopefully this will give me enough time to squeeze in a few minutes on mocks. I also just ordered Roy Osherove’s “The Art of Unit Testing”, which looks very promising, and may push me to modify my plan a bit.

I hope to see you there – and if you have questions or suggestions, let me know in the comments section!

I have been slammed with work lately, and couldn’t find the time to do this, even though I have wanted to for a while. Well, it’s done – this blog now runs on BlogEngine.Net 1.5.1.14! One of the reasons I wanted to give it a try is the multiple-widget zone feature, which is unfortunately not yet in the 1.5 “official” release, so I went the adventurous route, and here we are! I still need to do some minor polishing on the styling in the next few days, but so far, everything looks like it’s running smoothly.

Since the longest time, I have been a member of Bay.Net, the San Francisco Bay Area .NET user group. It’s one of the largest user groups in the country (north of 4,000 members), very active, with four chapters in the Bay – and first and foremost, it’s a fantastic way to keep up with what is going on in the ever-changing .NET world, and meet fellow developers and fun people.

I initially came to attend the meetings, started to get more involved and volunteering in organizing events (if you are interested in volunteering, drop me a line!) – and I was very honored to be offered to co-chair the San Francisco chapter. The current chair, Kim Greenlee, has been doing an amazing job at lining up great speaker after another, and making the meetings fun to attend, but she wants to dedicate her energy to another Bay.Net related project, and can’t be full-time chair anymore, so… the pressure is on – I’ll do my best to keep it up!

Update: here is the event page.

Microsoft is hosting a Windows Live Messenger Hackathon on the 27th May 2009 at Microsoft's offices on 835 Market St in San Francisco. The event starts at 5:30, there will be a discussion on social media, how to use the Windows Live API in your website, a coding contest, prizes, free beer and pizza… Sounds like fun!

After much postponing, I finally cleaned up the layout of Clear Lines. I had cobbled together the previous design over a few days when I started, and, because it's not a crucial aspect of my activities, I left it at that until now. I like my new design better (I hope you do, too!), it feels much cleaner than the previous one. The main motivation was not the looks, though, but rather flexibility. I will add a few pages soon, and need to easily integrate them into the site navigation, so I finally replaced my hard-coded links by an ASP.NET menu. And while I was at it, I got inspired by Peter Kellner's beautiful menu for the Silicon Valley Code Camp site, and started looking into Css Friendly Control Adapters.

I like the fact that the whole menu layout is pure css, instead of tables, but I struggled quite a bit with getting css to play nice. Not the adapter's fault, rather my own limitations with css... In the end, I managed to get roughly the look I was after. That being said, if you open the page in IE7, it will render differently than in any other browser I tried: for some reason, I couldn't get IE to change the background color of the menu links on hover, or to render properly a border-bottom. If anyone has an idea what's wrong with my css, I would love to hear it!

Next step: upgrade the blog to BlogEngine 1.5, and probably add a sub-menu to the pages, similar to the Code Camp site.