Interesting find today.  It is possible to create a WCF Service Contract that has overloaded methods on it.  The compiler doesn't complain at all. You can even attribute both as [OperationContract] and the compiler still won't complain.  If you go to use that Service Contract though, it will blow up and thrown an error about duplicate naming.  While this is frustrating you can get around it.  Options include, changing the name of one of the Operation Contracts or setting the name parameter on the Operation Contract attribute (i.e. [OperationContract(Name="SomeUniqueName")]).

Right after the completion of DevTeach in Toronto, I hopped a plane to India to present at the inaugural Great Indian Developer Summit being put on by Saltmarch Media.  First let's say that the flight duration from North America to India just flat out sucks.  It's an aweful long time to spend in a sealed aluminium tube.  In hindsight, the trip was worth every second of re-breathed air I had to inhale.

Dilip Thomas and his group from Saltmarch Media put on a polished and invigorating conference.  The organization wasn't without flaw, but each flaw that I saw was noted and addressed before the start of the next day.  Not once did I run into the same problem twice.  The most notable of the situations that I ran into (and this will tell you how trivial the problems really were) was that my power adapter wasn't working properly and I was having to run off of battery during my sessions.  The helpers at the conference scrambled in attempts to make the hardware that I had work while sending someone off to find a replacement adapter/powerbar.  That happened on the first day.  On the second day there were power adapters provided in every room for the speakers.

The other thing that I noticed was the amount of advertising and banner work that was present at the event.  There was no question that the Great Indian Developer Summit was being held at the Indian Institute of Science when you drove by it.  Once you drove into the grounds it was pretty clear that this thing was going to be big.  Registration was setup to accept a fairly large number of people at one time.  Lunch provided a wonderfully complete and sizeable buffet that was easily accessed by all.  Probably the only thing that was lacking was seating for attendees to use while having their lunch.

During the sessions the attendees (or delegates as they were being called) took a little bit of time to get warmed up and interacting with you.  Once they did get comfortable with the idea of a dialog instead of a pontification during the presentation, their passion, concerns and technical skill bubbled to the surface.  Presenting to this group was an exceptionally positive experience (more to come in a future post).  For those that attended my sessions and don't want to wait for the CD/DVD to arrive, you can download the Powerpoint files here.

Thanks to Dilip for inviting me to the Great Indian Developer Summit, to Usha for her work to make the trip as painless as possible, and to the delegates for their energy.  If given the chance, I'll be back again.

As always DevTeach was a blast this time around.  It was good to catch up with some of the people that I haven't seen for a while.  This was my first time at the conference where I had a full slate of presentations to do.  All of the seemed to go fairly well and the conversation continued in the hallways after the sessions had wrapped up.  The material for all three presentations can be found here (Take CCNet and nAnt to the Next Level, Techniques for Starting on Brownfield Projects, Introduction to Behaviour Based Testing).

One of the things that I learned at DevTeach was to watch the naming of my sessions going forward.  This year DevTeach had a lot of sessions focusing on BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) which led to some confusion with my Intro to Behaviour Based Testing session.  The mistake I made was to use the overloaded term 'Behaviour' instead of the term 'Interaction'.  While both are applicable for the session title, I probably should have cleared that up before the first slide in my session.

Other than that one mistake, the conference went fairly well for me.  A few of us went out to the CBC to watch a taping of The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos.  We hung out in the lobby until all hours and Jeff Palermo held his infamous Party with Palermo.  Good times all around.  Hope to see some of you at DevTeach Montreal in December.

This has been sitting on my desk for a while and I feel like I've been ignoring a good thing.  JetBrains has setup a site that they're calling the JetBrains Development Academy.  The whole purpose of it is to provide information and knowledge to developers in many different areas.  The content on the .Net side is a little thin right now, but we will continue to flush that out as we work in the Academy.  I'd recommend taking a little bit of time and looking through the sections that have been setup already.  There's some good information on different techniques, practices and tools.  Drop by and take a look.  Shoot me an email (donald-dot-belcham-at-gmail-dot-com) if you have any questions, thoughts or ideas about the content. Just to preclude one set of questions...No I don't know when ReSharper 4 is going to RTM.

I do have to thank the folks over at JetBrains for writing some awesome profiles for the Academy Members and Board Members.  mmmm......smooth like scotch.....