What is the Nothin&apos but .NET Developer Boot Camp

The Destination Is The Journey

The above tagline may sound like the catchphrase from a really cheesy movie, but I think it sums up quite nicely the plan that I had in my mind for where I wanted this course offering to go. In a development world where we seem to be caught up in learning tools vs solid practices, Nothin But .NET is about getting back to basics, building a solid core, and having the foundation with which to be able to evaluate and leverage new technologies, toolset, practices very quickly. Helping devs to chart the course for the rest of their development career, and not feel so overwhelmed at the rate of change that is currently prevalent in the industry.

Let me state clearly that I am first and foremost a developer, honing my craft daily by working on projects using pragmatic agile practices that I have morphed to work best to my development style.

It would better be described as a week of heads down, crazy mentoring. I show up with no powerpoint, the skeleton of a web UI done (which serves as our stories generator) with no code behind. Over the course of the week, I teach people how to apply domain driven design, behaviour driven development, solid OO principles and design patterns to incrementally build up the functionality of the web application.

The reason the class is called Nothin But .NET, is that I feel the need to help people understand at a fundamentally core level, the patterns and practices underpinning a lot of the frameworks that they may choose to utilize in the future. By giving them the knowledge to use these frameworks will intelligence, they are much better prepared to know how to fix/work around the frameworks when they do not work for them. More importantly, they get to see how tdd plays out over the course of the week to build the application under question. They also get to see how building an app in a loosely coupled way allows easy transition if they decide to suddenly move the mapping layer to something like NHibernate, or the dependency container to something like Castle.

Each iteration of the course has been a wildly different experience. The code that comes out of each iteration is remarkably different from the prior iteration. I have to say that I think I have as much fun, if not more, than the people that attend. The days can be pretty long though, but the collaborative atmosphere will make you wonder how the week flew by so fast.