Cleveland Day of .NET Recap

Today was the Cleveland Day of .NET conference and I had a wonderful
time hanging out with other .NET geeks in Northeast Ohio. The event took
place at the Hilton Cleveland East Beachwood Hotel. The conference
consisted four tracks, and each track had seven sessions covering topics
ranging from ASP.NET MVC to WCF security. While everything is still
fresh in my memory I wanted to jot down my impressions of my favorite
sessions. Out of the seven sessions I attended, there were three that
really stood out as being my favorites.

• Test-Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC - This session was
  conducted by Alan Stevens was nice concise introduction to the
  magic of TDD and how the ASP.NET MVC framework helps to make
  doing TDD with web application development easier. I was already
  familiar with TDD, but I enjoyed seeing an introduction to the MVC
  framework and how it has been designed with testing in mind. Plus,
  Alan was an excellent presenter. I was also intrigued by how similar
  the MVC framework is to Ruby on Rails.
• Designing for Change: Inversion of Control and Dependency
  Injection - The presenter for this session was Nate Kohari, a
  fellow resident of Akron. His presentation introduced the how and
  why of using a dependency injection framework and featured Nate’s
  own DI project, Ninject. Being a BizTalk developer, I do not get
  many chances to work with something like DI, but I feel like I have
  a better grasp on what DI is and when I would choose to use it.
  Despite Nate’s claim of being a rookie presenter and a small glitch
  with the projector, this was another excellent session.
• Project Astoria and the Semantic Web - This was my favorite
  session of the day. The presenter was Chris Woodruff, and he
  discussed what Project Astoria (aka. ADO.NET Data Services) is
  and what can be done with this new data services framework. In a
  nutshell, Astoria is used to wrap and expose a data source as a web
  service. From a systems integration standpoint, this framework looks
  very promising as a way of quickly exposing legacy data sources as
  web services. From there it should be a fairly simple matter to then
  consume those services inside of a BizTalk application. I really
  want to setup a testing VMware image to try out this idea.

So once again, I had a fabulous time at Cleveland Day of .NET, and I
hope they put it on again next year. I want to send out a big “Thank
You!” to all of the people who worked to organize, present and sponsor
this event. Who knows, maybe next year I will submit a topic and do a
presentation myself.