Archive for October, 2009

Come See Andrew’s Sessions at Desert Code Camp in Phoenix Nov 7

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Desert Code Camp is back again this year, on Saturday Nov 7th, up in Phoenix.

I’m teaching two classes there, plus there are 44 other great events, of all flavors and interests.

This is a completely free event, hosted and taught by real people who have a genuine interest in the topics.

My sessions are:

Intro to Multithreading Patterns with .NET

Every developer will sooner or later come across a time when they need to spin up multiple threads.

For many, this is a black art, best avoided for fear of race conditions, deadlocks and difficult-to-reproduce bugs.

This session will show some of the powerful but very easy-to-use threading objects and helpers in the .NET framework, like BackgroundWorker, Timer, ThreadPool, etc.

This is not an advanced and deep topic on multi-threading, but rather an introductory topic on how easily (and safely!) you can use multi-threading in many of the common cases, without ever having to know anything about semaphores, mutexes, or locks.

In this session, we’ll do several actual live coding exercises to show some of these patterns and approaches from a practical, real-world approach.

Don’t expect to learn the nitty gritty theory of multi-threading, but rather to learn how to solve some very common and typical problems.

Develop a New Love for PHP with Objects

If you’re like many of us, and have mentally relegated PHP to the bin of old and dusty procedural languages, you may want to take a second look.

PHP is growing up, and shedding many of its older bad habits, and has powerful Object Oriented support.

In this session, we’ll explore what a modern developed-from-scratch PHP app can look like, using OO, modern IDE’s, and powerful debugging techniques.

This session will be mostly practice and actual coding, with very little theory. Don’t come expecting a primer to OO, but rather how to express yourself and your love of OO design in the last of all places you’d expect: PHP.

So far there are 41 registrations for the first (.NET multithreading) session and 21 for the second (New love for PHP).

In addition, there’s a very interesting event going on the day before, called TEDx Phoenix that I’ll be attending.  It looks fascinating, and I’m going to give it a try.

If you’ll be going up to TEDx or Desert Code Camp, definitely let me know at andrew *at* dmnsys.com, we can get the Tucson folks together for a lunch during the day.

Andrew Hollamon