The Trials And Tribulations Of Being A Fully Remote Developer

Imagine working from home full-time. Your job choices are not limited geographically. You have a nice quiet workspace in your comfortable home with limited distractions. Lunch break in your easy chair. What's a dress code? You don't have to go outside in the morning during a frigid Iowa winter. Sounds perfect. Now imagine this actually happening to you and nothing goes to plan. How do you stay motivated? How do you deal with communication breakdowns? The feelings of isolation? Of feeling like a second rate employee of the company? In this presentation, Mike will review the tips and techniques he has learned over the past several years while being a full-time remote developer. This session is geared both towards developers and managers of remote development teams.

Going The Extra Mile with Entity Framework Code First

Entity Framework Code First is a breeze to get up and running, but are you taking advantage of some of the more advanced features? Are you getting caught up by common pitfalls? In this presentation, we'll review the history of Entity Framework and the status of the project. We'll cover some core functionality concepts and asynchronous queries. Mike will show how to use StructureMap to easily maintain the lifetime of the DataContext. We'll look at how we can leverage the Projection functionality of AutoMapper to easily write optimized queries. Finally, Mike will demonstrate EF Migrations and how you can tie it into your current continuous integration environment. This presentation assumes you have some knowledge of Entity Framework so we'll try to not get caught up in the basics.

TypeScript for the .NET Developer

Are you an ASP.NET developer that's looking to embrace JavaScript but just can't get the hang of it? So was I! In this presentation I'll show you how to can start using TypeScript to keep your application easily refactorable using your familiar tools. I'll show you how you can use the DefinitelyTyped repository to utilize TypeScript with third party plugins such as Angular or Knockout. Finally, I'll show you how to use TypeLITE to help leverage reuse of your .NET models in JavaScript. All of these tools are free and they'll definitely make you feel more at home in the JavaScript world.

Password Security and You - How to Protect Yourself in a Horrible E-World

This talk would cover tips on how to keep yourself safe on the internet. It would review basic password security tips, methods to ensuring your passwords are as secure as possible, and would inform the audience on the biggest mistakes people make online (hint: you're probably making many of them).

Repository Pattern in ASP.NET

In this presentation, Mike will show you a tried-and-true data access strategy. He’ll focus on using the Entity Framework ORM with the Repository Pattern to create a powerful data access layer. He’ll use an Inversion of Control tool to decouple our data access from the rest of our application. He'll show tips and tricks on how to create highly optimized database queries.

When we’re done, you should be able to set up a simple Repository Pattern on your own, and you’ll have an example ASP.NET MVC project that you can use to try to become a data access guru!

Entity Framework Migrations

This talk would cover database migration frameworks basics, how to get started with Entity Framework Migrations, and how to use Entity Framework Migrations to achieve continuous integration without having to deal with SQL scripts.