DDD

DDD 8 - 30th Jan 2010

Jon Skeet

Jon Skeet is a C# expert and community leader, although he has spent most of his career alternating between Java and .NET according to employers' whims. He's currently working in Java at Google's London office, but his preferred language is still C#. His 20% projects at Google include porting Protocol Buffers and the Google Wave Robot API to .NET. He enjoys writing about coding almost as much as the coding itself, and he's currently working on the second edition of "C# in Depth" (Manning, 2008) to incorporate the new features of C# 4. At the moment, Jon is probably best known for his contributions to Stack Overflow, the Q&A site for developers. Jon has been awarded as a Microsoft C# MVP (Most Valuable Professional) since 2003.

Sessions Submitted

C# 4

C# 4 doesn't have as many new features as C# 3 did, but they're handy nonetheless... and pretty fundamental, when it comes to making a statically typed language selectively dynamic.

In this session I'll cover (briefly!) all the new features of C# 4:

- Default parameters
- Named arguments
- Better COM interop (named indexers, linked PIAs, simplified ref)
- Generic variance for interfaces and delegates (prepare to have a headache)
- Dynamic typing
 

Getting answers to your technical questions - and giving them

There is an art to asking questions - and answering them. Two people asking for help on the same programming problem can get radically different results, based on how they ask their questions.

Likewise answering questions as helpfully as possible takes more than just knowledge: it requires empathy, communication skills, patience and intuition.

In this session I'll explain how I approach asking and answering questions in online forums such as Stack Overflow. I will come with a "problem" in mind, but if any members of the audience bring ones they need solving, we can work through those instead... framing the question as well as possible, and then considering how we'd answer it.

This session will be technology-neutral; although I will give a few hints about Java and .NET questions, the same techniques apply to any language and platform.
 

Save the day (or hour, or minute, or month...) with Noda Time!

Handling date and time information in .NET is a pain: the built-in APIs simply aren't rich enough for the complex requirements of the real world. In this session you'll learn about Noda Time, an open source effort to rectify this situation.

In this session I'll talk about why I started the project, the benefits it brings over the standard date and time APIs, and what we've been learning about open source .NET projects in general.

Latest News

Photos