Guerrilla .NET (UK) Training

Guerrilla .NET provides a deep exploration of .NET design philosophy and practical advice. You learn a myriad of patterns and best practices, and you get hands-on experience developing applications using Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8. Learn to write code using new .NET class libraries like Entity Framework 5, MVC 4, and even the new Windows Runtime (WinRT).

You'll get answers to these questions:

• What's new in C# 4.0?
• How do I develop network services with Windows Communication Foundation?
• How do I develop cutting-edge UIs with Silverlight 4.0?
• How do I take advantage of the latest innovations in web development?
• What does Entity Framework do for me and how can I use it effectively?
• Why did Microsoft create PFx and what can it do that .NET 3.5 couldn't?
• How can I reduce the number of bugs that make it into production?
• How can I make sure people use my libraries correctly?
• How can I build web applications and services that use claims based authorization?

Come and learn to build robust .NET applications using the latest technologies! Register now.

The Guerrilla experience means total immersion in social coding. Multiple instructors keep you engaged throughout the entire learning process, while you work with new friends, collaborating, competing, and coding.

• Async in the language: using C# 5.0 to simplify asynchronous programming
• How do I build Windows 8 applications for tablet aspect of Windows 8 and how do I publish my applications to the Windows Marketplace?
• Best practice with Entity Framework 5 and the repository pattern
• Server side async programming with C# 5.0?
• Simplifying async and event based applications with the Reactive Framework
• Using TDD to build robust maintainable applications
• Building networked applications with WCF
• Taking the REST approach with ASP.NET Web API?
• The principles behind XAML based applications (WPF, Silverlight and Metro); the main building blocks and how XAML works
• Best practice with XAML based applications: data binding and MVVM?
• Understand the core concepts of PFx and how to write parallelised code effectively
• Making applications work and scale with multi-threading and thread safety
• How the GC really works and what’s new in .NET 4.5
• Debugging: learn to build robust .NET applications including tools and techniques for monitoring and debugging applications in a production environment.
• Build modern web applications and services using JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, REST, ASP.NET MVC, and more.
• Use powerful OO design patterns and techniques to build loosely-coupled, testable, and maintainable applications including Dependency Injection (DI), Inversion of Control (IoC), and how to test these with Mocking
• Create extensible business processing with workflow 4.5
• Create orchestrated services with workflow 4.5 and Windows Server AppFabric

Day 1

Deep Dive Language Mechanics
In the early days of C# there was virtually a 1-1 mapping between C# and IL. Much has changed since C# 1, the developer is encouraged to simply describe their intent and the compiler builds the appropriate code. This module will dive under the hood and show how various C# features like iterator methods, anonymous methods, extension methods,LINQ and dynamic all result in code gen by the C# compiler. These layers of abstractions initially make us more productive, but sometimes they hide those hard to find bugs, and can add a deluge of performance implications that once we understand how the mechanics of the features work we can quickly fix.

Entity Framework 5 Introduction
The Entity Framework is an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) layer released in .NET 3.5 SP1. The module looks at the ideas behind ORM and shows how you can remove data access code from your codebase by working with objects that the ORM translates into database queries. Along the way we will look at how LINQ can be used to query and manipulate this data

WPF Basics
WPF is Microsoft’s UI technology for building smart client applications. In this module we look at the WPF architecture and how user interfaces are designed using a markup language called XAML. XAML is at the heart of all of Microsoft’s frameworks for building rich user interfaces: WPF, Silverlight and Windows 8 App Store applications.

Unit Testing
Using unit testing comprehensively within software development is a growing movement. Unit testing allows refactoring and maintenance with the confidence that existing functionality is not broken. In this module we will look at techniques for writing good unit tests and integrating them into testing frameworks to automate the unit tests. However, code is not automatically unit testable – it has to be designed to be so. We will look at how Test Driven Development leads to inherently testable code by using dependency injection and how Inversion of Control (IoC) containers can make dependency injection manageable. Once we have dependency injection we can then use mocking frameworks to simplify the job of making unit tests truly test only a single unit.

Day 2

Entity Framework 5 and the Repository Pattern
Prior to Entity Framework 4.0 EF relied on generating entity classes that were tightly coupled to EF. 4.0 introduces the idea of POCO classes – bringing your own classes to EF. This module shows how POCO support works and how you can use the repository pattern to keep your application code and the data access layer cleanly separated and testable.

ASP.NET MVC
Since .NET 1.0, ASP.NET has used server sided controls to build “web forms”. However, there is now a new approach with leverages the Model/View/Controller design pattern that has worked so well in frameworks such as Ruby on Rails. This new approach is called ASP.NET MVC and creates code that is much easier to unit test than web forms and so lends itself well to Test Driven Development. This module focuses on the latest release of Asp.NET MVC including the new Razor view engine.

Windows Communication Foundation Architecture
The shift from object oriented development to component oriented development made it possible to build more loosely coupled and flexible systems where individual components evolved independently without impacting the overall system. The Windows Communication Foundation continues those practices by providing a model which is based on interfaces and contracts. This talk will introduce you to the WCF model and how to utilize it to build service-oriented and distributed applications.

WPF, DataBinding and MVVM
Moving data between the UI and underlying objects can be a laborious task. Databinding is a technology that hugely simplifies this process. But more than that, in WPF databinding is a fundamental skill for creating rich user interfaces with minimal code. Databinding is the core technology that enables the use of the Model-View-ViewModel presentation layer pattern which we also introduce in this module.

Day 3

PFx: Task - a Unified Threading API
When the Parallel Framework Extensions (PFx) were first announced it looked as though it was going to target a narrow set of requirements around parallelizing processor intensive code. However, over time the scope of the library has grown significantly such that it will become the main model for building asynchronous code. The pivotal type enabling this transition is the Task class. This is a functionally very rich type allowing the creation of both short and long lived asynchronous work; Tasks can have dependencies on one another and support cancellation. In this, the first of the PFx modules we look specifically how this class gives us a unified framework for building multithreaded code.

Thread Safety, Concurrent Data Structures
Asynchronous programming requires careful attention to detail since most objects are not designed with multithreaded access in mind. This module introduces the importance of Interlocked and Monitor-based synchronization.  However, on their own these primitives do not provide support for more complex synchronization situations and so people have had to use them as building blocks to build things like efficient Semaphores. PFx finally brings to the library a set of richer primitives such as lazy initialization, a lightweight semaphore and a countdown event. But more than this, it also introduces a set of high performance concurrent data structures that allow you to use them without you having to provide your own synchronization logic around them. This module looks at this new set of tools in your synchronization toolbox.

PFx: Parallelizing CPU Intensive Algorithms
The original goal of PFx was to provide support for splitting computationally intensive jobs across multiple processor cores. Even though the scope of the library has expanded, this is still an important part of this infrastructure. In this talk we look at the tools PFx gives you to aid parallelizing algorithms but we also shows that without care PFx isn't necessarily the free lunch it appears.

C#5 5 Async/Await
C# 5 builds on the Task API introducing async and awaits keywords which bring asynchronous execution as a first class concept in the C# language. These new keywords create a very elegant model for all sorts of async work and this module explains not only how to use them but also how they work under the covers.

Day 4

Building Services with Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5
Some problems in the distributed systems world are hard to manage: scalability, availability, manageability, state management. Windows Workflow Foundation provides a framework where these features can come out-of-the-box. This module introduces the workflow model and shows how the declarative nature of WF allows us to compose business logic and external services into a long running business process exposed as a WCF service.

Building REST-based Services
Service Orientation and SOAP are often seen as going hand-in-hand. However, there is another architectural style for building services - that or REpresentational State Transfer, or REST. REST uses the design principles that have made the web so hugely scalable: resources are identified by URI, operations defined by HTTP verbs, links used to move to the next stage of processing. In this module we look at how we use the .NET platform to deliver REST-based systems.

Inside the Garbage Collector
The garbage collector has been part of .NET since its inception. However, exactly how the GC works is often shrouded in mystery. Also the fact that memory management is automated doesn't release the developer from caring about memory issues - it's just those memory issues appear in a different guise. In this module we take the lid of the GC, look at how it works and is optimized and then assess what this means for you when you are writing your code: things you do that can help the GC and things that cause it problems.

Power Debugging with WinDBG
For many developers debugging tools start and end with Visual Studio. However, there are a large number of problems that Visual Studio provides very little support - particularly threading and memory management issues. WinDBG and the plugin SOS.DLL bring a new set of tools to .NET developers that can provide insights that help you solve bugs that you see during testing but also allow you to diagnose issues occurring in production systems where the only data you can get is a crash dump file.

Day 5

Introducing the Reactive Framework (Rx)
Reactive Framework is a new library that uses the .NET 4.0 IObservable interface and LINQ to create a compelling new programming model that allows you to build "event" based code with declarative LINQ statements. This module introduces the Reactive Framework and shows how it can greatly simplify your code.

Roslyn: Compiler as a Service
Microsoft is planning to expose the guts of the compiler, through the Roslyn project currently available as a CTP. The new compiler is written in managed code and provides APIs which allow you to get access to the various parts of the compiler pipeline (such as the parser), allowing access to syntax trees to build your own refactorings, code generation enabling meta programming. Roslyn will lower the barrier of entry for developing such tools, hopefully enabling a host of customer-specific tooling that previously was too costly to consider. This talk will explore what Roslyn has to offer and showcase some uses of this new service.

Building Windows 8 Applications with Metro
Windows 8 introduces a new type of application to the Windows world - immersive Metro applications. In this module we look at how they differ from traditional applications and how you can build them using Visual Studio 11.

Upcoming Dates & Locations