Yes, I suppose The Real WTF™ is a conference named St. Louis Days of .NET, but like most curiosities there's a good reason. What used to be a single day (and an aptly named) event turned into three days of sessions, networking, and all sorts of other exciting things for  .NET developers. And it's at a casino, which means I'll be raking it in with my Perch Roulette Strategy, in addition to doing a talk or two.

Speaking of which, here's the talks I'll be giving…

Ugly Code: Beauty is in The Eye of the Beholder

It's said that without evil there can be no good and that without darkness, there can be no light. Is the same true of ugly and beautiful code? Maybe... but that's certainly not a question I'll be answering in this talk. Instead, we'll talk about ugly code, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and how to rid your codebase of it. And of course, I'll share some of my favorite anti-examples from The Daily WTF.

NuGet for the Enterprise

NuGet -- the open-source library package manager for .NET -- has exploded in popularity over the past two years with well over 5,000 available packages and support from major contributors such as Microsoft, NUnit, Castle, and JQuery. It’s an incredibly easy-to-use and very powerful tool that helps developers escape "dependency hell" while discovering new third-party libraries.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and what works in the open source-world doesn't always translate to enterprise development. There are a whole lot of things to consider with NuGet in the enterprise, from quality assurance to open-source license compliance, and we'll cover most of these in this talk. We'll also do some hands-on with NuGet to get a feel for both creating and consuming library packages.

The main take-aways will be:

  • package and dependency management with NuGet
  • how to set-up and manage your own NuGet package repository
  • best practices for NuGet in enterprise development environments

The TDWTF Discount + Bonus!

How about a $35 discount? If you register before July 27, it will only cost you $215 (instead of $250) using discount code DODNTDWTF at checkout. Not only that, but you'll also get one of the elusive The Daily WTF mugs.

15oz of Awesomeness

About St. Louis Days of Dot Net

It's a 3-day event filled with knowledge and networking opportunities. This is the fifth year and should be the biggest and best one yet!

The main conference event will start bright and early Friday and continue through Saturday, with great sessions on the technology that makes you an effective and productive part of your software development team. But there's an optional Pre-compiler day on Thursday, August 2nd where attendees can bring their laptops and spend several hours with a speaker on a particular topic. And considering it's a full-day of hands-on and deep coverage, it's a pretty cheap upgrade at $75. The list of pre-compilers is now posted so make your decisions early as seating is limited in each session.

This could also be the perfect excuse for a weekend away with the misses – there are some activities for your spouse to enjoy while you are in sessions. Oh, and did I mention it's at a casino?

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