I’m on my way back from the Norwegian Developer’s Conference in Oslo this past week.  I had a fantastic time meeting some new people, hanging out with friends, interacting with a couple heroes, and seeing a little bit of Norway.  Special thanks to Anders Norås for inviting me to NDC.  I had a blast with the Bergen gang:  Mark Nijhof, John St Clair, and Jon Arild Tørresdal.  I got to put a face to Andreas Öhlund who is developing the StructureMap integration with WCF and nServiceBus. 

I think all the talks were recorded and are going to be posted to the NDC website for download.  I’ll blog the links as soon as they go up.  I gave 8 talks in 4 days across 2 cities.  I’m not sure I want to be one of those professional speakers that do that a couple dozen times a year.  I had an awesome crowd for my “Design and Testability” talk that I appreciated.  I had a comparatively small crowd for my “Conventions over Configuration” talk, but I had a lot of good questions afterwards that probably made that my favorite session of the week.  Most importantly, I presented some preliminary design patterns work on the “Screen Activation Lifecycle” from my book and I thought it went over pretty well (you can see a little preview of it on Ward Bell’s blog here). 

I got even more book ideas from Jonas Follesø’s talk.  <bias>Apparently there are some crazy people out there who think it’s not entirely insane to do “View First” navigation.  I need to cover that pattern in the book and pretend it’s not a nutso thing to do.</bias> 

Lastly, I gave my “Lessons Learned from StructureMap” talk one more time.  I think I’m going to retire this one permanently, so I might try to blog it out over the next 2 months. 

Upon reflection, I think my favorite thing about NDC was that there was a lot of more or less ALT.NET-ish content (and the older speakers from the bigger software world that we admire), but we weren’t in special camps or the “Agile gutter” track like in the DevTeach’s I went to a couple years ago.  I love that the tee shirts for the conference said “Legalize Unit Testing.”  I don’t ever see ALT.NET becoming completely the mainstream, but it’d be nice to stop being this strangely alternative stuff on the fringe.

I got ambushed by Hanselman and recorded for Channel 9 spouting off on 3 hours sleep about “Executable Requirements”, StoryTeller, apologizing for using angle brackets, and explaining why I’m not using Oslo/MGrammar for creating external DSL’s for testing (hint:  I’m very unenthusiastic about the phrase “you just have to parse the AST”).  There’s several other impromptu recordings from the speaker’s area here.

All in all, I had a great time and I’d be happy to recommend NDC next year for those of you in that part of the world.