Disclaimer:  I don’t work for Mindsharp or Combined Knowledge, but I do guest teach the developer course.

Had a great week attending Combined Knowledge’s first public beta of the SharePoint 2010 developer course,  in fact it was the first running of this course anywhere in the world!

The course was held in what I think is a great venue,  the board room in Ullesthorpe – I really like teaching here as this is a permanent setup so you know you have everything you need including lots of white boards << these are essential.  This week was slightly different on the food front as they were into the December Xmas menu,  no longer did we get the famous ‘Rice and Chips’ that Todd Bleeker is so keen on – instead we got a full choice from the bar menu,  I recommend the chicken and warm bacon salad starter.

Back to the course; you might be asking  ‘Why this course and not the Ignite Training?’ 

I have to say I am very impressed with Microsoft in the amount of information and training being provided this early in the delivery cycle,  if you compare this to what we had for 2007 and even worse what we didn’t have in 2003 you will know that they have really put the effort in.

So why did I not do the Ignite Training?  – Simple answer could be I missed the boat; and this is not untrue (double negative to make it sound better :S), but the real answer is that I am planning to guest teach this course for Combined Knowledge and it is a great way for me to feedback on what does/doesn’t work from an attendee’s perspective and help shape the course that people will get over the coming years  (the 2003 course is still being taught, so anything fixed now has a long time to live).

The course was being taught by Gary Yeoman,  long time trainer with Combined Knowledge and real world consultant when not training.  Attending the course were myself,  James Fisk, Adrian, David, Ian, Stephan (from Switzerland), Rehan and Ruth – plus we had the honour of having Todd Bleeker (the course author) taking a very active role throughout the week.

Big Topic or Lots of Topics

SharePoint in 2007 was a big product,  sure Windows SharePoint Services (WSS V3) wasn’t quite as big as MOSS but from a developers perspective there was a lot to cover.  Things in 2010 just get bigger.   To quote Todd  (and it may not have been word for word)

Custom Field types were probably the hardest thing you had to do in SharePoint 2007.  In 2010 there are lots of things that are more complicated.  however the great tools in Visual Studio 2010 help here a lot!

What I’m trying to say is we had a lot to cover and Gary was adopting a JIT based approach to some of the slides

If you skip the sleeping!

There are 24hours in a day (8 for work, 8 for sleep and 8 for yourself).  Based on this schedule there really is no way that there would be a beta SharePoint 2010 developer course with the depth of information and labs that people expect of a Combined Knowledge course for people to attend.   So how was this solved?

Well if your Todd Bleeker you make the call that you can adopt the following pattern 6 x 1/2 hour sleep and 21 hours work (per day, everyday)!   Yes Todd has been doing the Uberman sleep pattern (a form of polyphasic sleep) for the past 17 weeks – and he is amazingly still sane and took a very active role during the week.  Although on one occasion we returned after a break to see a pair of feet sticking out from under a desk which were attached to Todd fitting in one of his 1/2 hour sleeps! 

It was suggested at the start of the course that every student should also adopt this if they were to be able to get through the content we wanted to cover,  thankfully other attendees like to have some ‘down’ time to recuperate. 

‘Down’ time == ‘SharePint’ 

The Course

Being a beta course, and the first real proper teach ever, and based on the Beta 2 release that only dropped a few weeks ago it was expected that the labs would be a little rough and ready.   This couldn’t have been more wrong! The new format adopted with microlabs,improved consistency and the result of many hour of hard work has paid off in droves.  

We were all experienced SharePoint 2007 developers so we could skip any of the usual ‘What’s an SPWeb’ type discussion and head straight into some deep dives.

The course covered a lot of detail including

• - Powershell and how to extend it
• - A tour of VS2010 and the new SharePoint tools
• - Extending VS2010
• - Event Models – with focus on what’s new and improved
• - Deployment scenarios
• - Sandboxed and Farm Solutions
• - Workflow
• - SharePoint Designer <<   YES SharePoint Designer is really a useful dev tool in 2010
• - Developer Dashboard
• - and many many more

What stood out?

In truth SharePoint 2010 was the real star, including the great new tools in VS2010 (although the very poor story around Unit Testing is tainting my views here).

What I did get at the end of the course was a feeling that I just want to get out and start teaching it,  to start sharing the great new things that caused me so many long days in the past.  

I am looking forward to when I can run my first class and spend time working through your ideas, problems and solutions.

I’m excited about developing for SharePoint 2010. 

If I can offer one tip for now,   ‘always start with a Sandboxed solution first’

Along the way almost everyone I talked to understands the basic idea that the earlier in the cycle you find a defect the cheaper and easier it is to fix, and from this most (if not all) agree that Unit Testing is one of the most cost effective ways to catch these defects. The problem is, it appears, developers are lazy; they understand they should do it they just never get around to it – ‘perhaps on the next project’.

As part of my own development I like to work with, be trained by or just hang with people that I see as having reached a higher level of knowledge and skill than me in a particular field. You could say a greater Mastery of the subject. One area that I am very passionate about, many may have seen some great interviews on the subject, is Test Driven Development (TDD). TDD is more than just doing Unit Testing; it is a technique that once you understand and are willing to invest time in helps you to become a better developer.

I have been doing TDD, although not on every project (sadly), for about 2 years and have shared the knowledge I have gained through white papers, blogs and talking at conferences. In trying to lead the way in my area of expertise, SharePoint, I felt that I was missing something. I had yet to reach a place where I felt that I had mastered the art, where I had moved into the phase of challenging myself to do more than just the practice of TDD.

As part of my work with Typemock, the only solution of working with SharePoint’s sealed API, I found that these guys really did get it, they had the battle scars and were practicing what they preached, and they were challenging themselves to do it different, better. Roy Osherove is the Chief Architect at Typemock and I have seen him speak at conferences in a way that was engaging and thought provoking. The opportunity therefore to be able to spend 5 days with Roy doing a TDD Master Class was one that I could not miss.

I’m not going to do the, on day 1 we did this, on day two we did this, as I think that Sara (fellow attendee) has covered this quite well in her post. Instead I will talk about how the course was much more than a lesson in Test Driven Development; we paired up to cover all of the practices looking at the basics of unit testing frameworks (Nunit, MSTest), understanding isolation frameworks (Moq, Rhino Mocks, Typemock Isolator) and how they all look to solve the same issues whilst using slightly different syntax. We looked at how the techniques around TDD have evolved over time, and the how the tools have really moved on significantly in recent years making the barrier to entry and the ability to create readable and maintainable code possible. We looked at techniques, like the daily Kata, that will help perfect the practices, and discussed the ideas of Shu -Ha -Ri where the student moves from the fundamental techniques, to finding new ways and challenging tradition and then onto surpass the teacher and ultimate mastery.

I liked the way Roy questioned the idea that the lazy coder was in fact the one looking to do it as easily as possible, the one who knew all of the keyboard short cuts, the one with all the Live Templates in ReSharper. The Lazy code is really the one who gets the job done well, with the least amount of effort – unlike the average developer, who I initially thought of as lazy, who just doesn’t see development as a craft but more a way to pay the bills.

My view that learning from someone, who is at a higher level of knowledge and understanding has been reaffirmed. The same principles should apply to you, when you look at training and work, ensure that the person teaching you is someone you admire, someone who you feel has the level of knowledge and experience that you aspire to.

Having attended Roy’s TDD Master Class I can say that my knowledge has been enhanced, the core values have been reaffirmed and I am now in a much better place with regards my own capability, but more importantly my own ability to help others.

So the question is should you attend Roy’s TDD Master Class?

If you want to really Master the Art of Test Driven Development then definitely.