I worked on them all day today, and managed to get my Desert Code Camp presentations produced in video format, and uploaded to my Amazon S3 media store. I am initially making available videos in Windows Media Player format. I’m also going to produce the videos in an iPhone/iPod format, just in case anyone wants to use those. Look for those to be available tomorrow morning as I’m going to run the production process over night.

The four presentations are available below:

• Production Debugging using Debugging Tools for Windows: This presentation focused on debugging production code. I started off by talking about tracing and demonstrating trace output using DebugView, WinDbg, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. Next, I introduced the concept of a symbol store and discussed using Source Server to add version control information to PDB files that are produced by the compiler, and then storing the PDB files into the symbol store. Finally, I demonstrated using WinDbg to analyze minidumps of failed applications. I had hoped to show off using ADPlus, but there was not enough time.
• One thing that I forgot to mention in this presentation is that you also want to store your .exe and .dll files in your symbol store. I may do a follow-up screen cast showing off building and managing symbol stores.
• Debugging with Visual Studio: This presentation demonstrated some advanced concepts of debugging using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I started off by talking about using the Object Test Bench to test software components and using the debugger with Object Test Bench. I next discussed creating TracePoints and writing macros to automate the debugger and gather information from the debugging session. Finally, I demonstrated how to use the DebuggerDisplayAttribute attribute class in .NET to customize the debugger representation of a type.
• MVVM and WPF: This presentation demonstrated implementing a model, view model, and view in WPF. I demonstrated how to build each layer and tie them all together. At the end, I demonstrated the automatic data binding trick with DataTemplates in WPF.
• Developing Composite Applications: My goal in this presentation was to show off the Prism framework for building composite applications. Ideally, this should have been one of my best presentations because I’ve been using the framework for quite some time, but the session didn’t go exactly like I had hoped. Listening to this presentation, I can tell that I sound tired. This was the third of my four presentations in a row and I think that I was fighting mental fatigue at this point, right before the lunch break. I think that I’m probably going to redo the session in another screen cast. I debated whether or not I was going to put this one up, but I decided to do it because there probably is some valuable information in here, despite my issues with the EventAggregator class, although I did actually get it to work. I was just having a hard time remembering how to create an event. But feel free to watch away.

Once again, for those of you who attended Desert Code Camp and my presentations, I very much appreciate having the opportunity to present to all of you. This was my first Code Camp experience, and I look forward to doing it again. It was a great honor to give back to the community like this, and I greatly appreciate the follow-up emails that I have received yesterday and today, as well as meeting and talking with all of you.

I was pleasantly surprised at how popular my debugging sessions were. I was honestly worried that I wasn’t going to get many people for these sessions, and I was astounded at how big these sessions were, especially the Visual Studio session in the afternoon. I’ll make sure to prepare more debugging-type materials for the next code camp, do some more screen casts, write some more blogs, and see if any of the local user groups might have some time available to do some follow-up presentations.

Thank you once again. I hope that you enjoy the videos. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any further questions.