Jay Harris is Cpt. LoadTest

« Dev Basics: ASP.NET Page Life Cycle... | Home | Dev Basics: ASP.NET Page Life Cycle... »

Speaking Engagements

Filed under: Events | Speaking

I enjoy being a speaker. I have learned a lot through my mentors, colleagues, and through other community speakers, and standing before a group of my peers and sharing my knowledge is one way that I can give back to the development community. By linking together my speaking and my blog, I can provide a central repository for the slide decks and demo code for my sessions and make these things available to the audience for further review. Here, you will find all of my slides and code for all past presentations, as well as information about all my past and future talks. This post will also be linked through my top navigation so that it can be easily found, and will also be regularly updated with any new schedules and slide decks.

Thank you to everyone who as attended any of my sessions, and as always, I encourage you to give me any feedback you have via SpeakerRate.

Upcoming Talks

I would love to speak at your user group or developer's conference; please feel free to contact me if you are interested.

CodepaLOUsa, March 2012

I will be presenting two sessions at CodepaLOUsa, a developer's conference in Louisville, Kentucky. On March 16, I will be presenting "Bullets Kill People: A Presenter's Guide to Better Slides." On March 17, I will be presenting "Going for Speed: Testing Against Performance Expectations." | Event Site

Presentations

ASP.NET MVC: A (Microsoft) Web Coder's Salvation

There was a time when everything was moving towards the desktop. This Internet thing was new and cool, but there was no way it would ever last. And no one knew how to code for the web, at least not anything beyond animated lava lamps and cute "Under Construction" images. So, to make coding for the web easier, they made ASP.NET to be just like coding for a desktop, using the same patterns, the same event-based model, and the same stateful approach. But the web isn't stateful, its only events are GET and POST, and is nothing like a desktop, so we tortured ourselves for years forcing a square peg through a round hole. The time has come for redemption, and its name is ASP.NET MVC. Spend an hour discovering how coding for the web is supposed to be--how it is today--and end your misery. Salvation awaits.
Slides | Code Walkthrough

Previous Sessions

Grand Rapids, Michigan | GRDevDay developer's conference | November 2011

Dev Basics: The ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

When a request occurs for an ASP.Net page, the response is processed through a series of events before being sent to the client browser. These events, known as the Page Life Cycle, are a complicated headache when used improperly, manifesting as odd exceptions, incorrect data, performance issues, and general confusion. It seems simple when reading yet-another-book-on-ASP.NET, but never when applied in the real world. In this session, we decompose this mess, and turn the Life Cycle into an effective and productive tool. No ASP.NET MVC, no Dynamic Data, no MonoRail, no technologies of tomorrow, just the basics of ASP.NET, using the tools we have available in the office, today.
Slides | Code

Previous Sessions

Bullets Kill People: A Presenter's Guide to Better Slides

Everybody has been there: a presentation where you spend so much time reading the content from a slide that you ignore the content from the speaker. Perhaps it was a presentation where the deck was full of animated transitions right out of a 1970's made-for-TV movie. Maybe it was the slideshow that was there simply because the presenter felt obligated to have one. The quality of a slide deck can have as much impact on a presentation as the quality of the speaker. It can destroy. It can invigorate. It can shape the mood of your audience and bend it at will. Harness that power; use it to your advantage to tell your story and leave your audience inspired.

Previous Sessions

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset

Does your team spend days integrating code at the end of a project? Continuous Integration can help. Using Continuous Integration will eliminate that end-of-project integration stress, and at the same time will make your development process easier. But Continuous Integration is more than just a tool like CruiseControl.Net or TeamCity; it is a full development process designed to bring you closer to your mainline, increase visibility of project status throughout your team, and to streamline deployments to QA or to your client. Find out what Continuous Integration is all about, and what it can do for you.
Slides

Previous Sessions

The Geek's Guide to SEO

So, you have a web site. Your own soapbox to the world. As a developer, it seems easy for us to claim a spot on the world wide web, set up shop, customize the look and feel, and throw up some content. The hard part is attracting people to your new little flag in the sand. Hey, we majored in Computer Science, not Marketing. But there is hope: one hour of tips, tricks, and general how-to about promoting your site using programming, power toys, and other technical prowess. Our discussion will include ways to attract and appeal to search engine spiders using better tools that are freely available and better code that doesn't include learning new languages or frameworks.

Previous Sessions

Toledo, Ohio | North West Ohio .NET User Group | October 2011

Going for Speed: Testing against Performance Expectations

Unit Testing has settled into the mainstream. As developers, we write code that checks code, ensuring that the outcome matches some expected result. But, are we really? As end-users (which includes each one of us from time to time), when we ask a question, we don't just expect our answer to be right, we expect it to be right now. So as developers, why are we only validating for accuracy? Why aren't we going for speed? During this session we'll discuss meeting the performance needs of an application, including developing a performance specification, measuring application performance from stand-alone testing through unit testing, using tools ranging from Team Foundation Server to the command line, and asserting on these measurements to ensure that all expectations are met. Your application does "right." Let's focus on "right now."

Previous Sessions

Grand Rapids, Michigan | West Michigan .NET Users Group | September 2011 | Event Site

XCopy is Dead: .NET Deployment Strategies that Work

Back in 1995, when we first started deploying web sites, the copy command was enough. Our web sites only consisted of a static HTML file and a few graphics of animated lava lamps. But our systems are more complex now; instead of a dozen files being uploaded through FTP to a single web server, we have hundreds of files spread across multiple load-balanced web servers, dozens of applications interwoven in a tiered server architecture, and an expectation that it can be deployed error-free without impacting our stringent SLAs. When a tool is no longer sufficient to perform the task at hand, it is time to find a better tool. XCopy is dead; it is time for strategies that work.

Previous Sessions

Chattanooga, Tennessee | DevLink 2011 Technical Conference | August 2011 | Event Site

Your Spark Razored my NHaml: A Comparison of Popular ASP.NET MVC View Engines

By now, if you've worked with ASP.NET MVC, you've worked with the default WebFormsViewEngine that may feel like a step back 10 years into Classic ASP 3.0. But there are other options available. ASP.NET MVC was designed to use other View Engines, allowing you to to keep the same Model and Controller while using code in your Views that doesn't bring back scary memories of COM. Spark, Razor, and NHaml are all popular View Engines that have each made a statement in ASP.NET MVC circles. Let's see what they are all about, how they compare, and how they stack up to the default engine.