Another Developer Day has been and gone, with mixed success for me.

This time around I took part in two sessions, Colin Mackay's recruitment session and one of my own on WCF.

The recruitment session was fun, it’s always amused to appear beside Sarah, who refused to wear the fetching green polo shirt, despite having one in just her size (for those keep note we’ve had white, black, blue and magenta, never let it be said we’re not on the cutting edge of fashion). Questions were taken from the audience (and indeed some attendees appear to have come along expecting me to fight the recruitment consultant to the ground as my views on the are pretty well known. The session took place in the style of Question Time, with audience follow ups to our responses. I think the panel agreed on the basics, it was just the details I suggested that were rebutted by everyone else. We covered coding on the white boards (with Sarah coming up with an interesting alternative to the typical tests and announced to the audience she only had "little lungs", to great amusement). I’ve always wondered about the pass rate on the coding tests we use at work, but when others gave a ratio of 1 in 20 passing his tests I’m beginning to believe I’m not as mean as I thought I was.

Then there was my session on WCF. I thought this time I’d try something new, a short set of slides and coding live. Both myself and the audience soon learnt I can’t type under pressure. At all. 20 minutes of failing to get even the simplest of WCF hosted services up and running and, well, the round of applause when it eventually came up in the browser was the loudest I’ve ever received. To those who attended I can only apologise (and hide from for the rest of my life). You can download the PowerPoint deck now; I’m going to attempt to follow up with a few blog posts which will document what should have happened, and hopefully point you in the right direction to replacing remoting with WCF. Lessons learnt; never code live. If you do, don’t choose namespaces and class names that are easily misspelled. It’s rather fun to be called brave by one attendee, although stupid might be the word I’d use...

flickr has some photographs from the day.