Yesterday evening myself and a colleague drove up to Dundee University to see a presentation by the North East Scotland .NET User Group on the Web Client Software Factory by Gary Short.
I have to admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect. The WCSF was one of those things that I’d vaguely heard of but hadn’t paid much attention to because I don’t do much web development. What I saw surprised and delighted me.
Gary has a slide deck for his presentation but we only saw one slide because he told us we weren’t really interested in the slides and he jumped straight into coding for the rest of the session. Now, I have to say that watching someone code for 90 minutes is generally not my idea of fun, but Gary’s presentation skills are such that he keeps you entertained during the slow parts (such as when the code was compiling and so on) and his explanations are pitched at just the right level so that you understand what’s going on without over explaining anything and ensuring that everyone is keeping up.
However, there were parts where some improvement could be made. For example the first few minutes were spent watching Gary write some SQL Code. Since there was nothing new there for us it could easily have been a pre-existing file that was opened and executed with a cursory description about the table, data and stored procedures. (I hope you don’t mind me saying that, Gary, because it was other wise very interesting).
Now about the WCSF itself. It comes with some plug ins for Visual Studio which help you quite a bit by generating the project and organising, the code stubs and other bits and pieces. There is even the ability of creating complex workflow through your website by integrating with Windows Workflow.
I cannot do justice to the description and detail that Gary gave so I’ve invited him to present to Scottish Developers sometime early next year. We just have to get a date sorted out, so watch out for the event going up on the Scottish Developers website. In the meantime I’m going to be trying it out for myself.
Gary is also presenting at DDD6 (24-Nov-2007) on his favourite patterns.
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wcsf gary short dundee university north east scotland .net user group web client software factory scottish developers ddd6
The Blog of Colin Mackay 
Hello Colin,Thanks for the feedback, and of course I don’t mind you saying the opening SQL coding didn’t add anything; in fact I agree with you! 🙂 Its early days for this particular talk and what I was trying to show here was that not only is the WCSF a great tool for creating enterprise scale solutions, but it also rivals the likes of Ruby on Rails for rapid application development.Although I think I did demonstrate that fact, I now believe that I could also have shown that just as well by having a pre-prepared SQL script and I future, I’ll take your advice, and just run a script. Which means the talk should be even better when I deliver it to Scottish Developers Glasgow 🙂
Just to let you all know, Gary will be doing this talk at Developer Day Scotland. The delegate registration is currently open if you want to see it.
Web Client Software Factory