I'm back to my day job after an incredible week last week with a great bunch of students who took part in what I (and they) found to be a phenomenal learning experience.

I definitely learned some valuable lesson from this course that will allow me to fine tune my delivery for future iterations of this course. I also realize that I need to refine (aka - completely rewrite) the prerequisites for this course. This is the fourth time I have led the course, and each time has been a completely different experience.

One of the most important aspects of the course (in my opinion) is seeing how involved it can be to start down the Domain Driven Design style of development. This course shows practical application of DDD, BDD, and OO principles and patterns. Each one of those topics in and of themselves is huge, tackling all three topics in a week is definitely maybe a little too aggressive.

Once again, several people walked away with the realization that what they thought was Object Oriented programming, was nothing more than procedural code using objects. Having an opportunity to create a rich domain model which was then later mapped from a database was a definite paradigm shift from the way that they typically develop.

Along the way people got practical exposure to design patterns, unit testing, behavior driven development, and good, clean object models.

I expect that future iterations of this course will continue to improve as I fine tune the delivery aspects!! I am going to be posting some of the comments so that people who are curious about what this course has to provide (future potential attendees) can read comments straight from the source.

In the meantime here are some recaps from people who attended who also have blog entries that talk about the course:

Donald Belcham

• A week with JP Boodhoo
• My latest continuous integration experience

Dave Woods

• Until The Next Plateau

Shane Courtrille

• And that's all she wrote...
• The JP Experience

Jonas Avellana

• JP Boodhoo's Nothin But .Net Bootcamp

I will be posting all evaluations (for people who were willing to share) so that people who are interested in future iterations of this course can read about all of the information the attendees had to share (positive and negative).

Thanks again to DevStudios (special thanks to Shane and Christy) for hosting the course and providing the computers. And thanks to all of the attendees for allowing me the opportunity to start you down a new path of development!!

In an earlier post, I had mentioned that a friend of mine (Terry Thibodeau) would be creating a series that detailed streamlining your OS installation process. I just finished watching part 1 of his series and the information is awesome.

If you are interested at all in saving time for yourself when you need to install an OS from scratch, you need to watch this series.

Check out Part 1 here.

Thanks again to everyone who attended my talks last Saturday. The following are the links to the source code (and slides) that were produced during the presentations. Enjoy.

• Applied Patterns Of Enterprise Application Architecture - A Primer
• Generics