C#/.Net/Programming talk [closed]

As far as I'm concerned, the biggest thing to come out of .net/C# recently is LINQ. If members of your team aren't using it, they haven't been properly introduced.

How about an introduction to functional programming? You could talk about:

• what functional programming is
• introduce F#
• show how to do functional programming in C#.

A good book in this area is Real World Functional Programming: With Examples in F# and C#. There is a good presentation about functional programming in C# on InfoQ: Functional Programming with a Mainstream Language

This question is hard to answer without knowing the skill level of you and your coworkers. The fact that nothing has came to your mind yet, may be an indicator that you should alter your idea a bit.

Instead of long monthly meetings, I would do short weekly informal talks about a topic that recently sparked the interest of you or a fellow co worker. For example, when you notice that someone has problems with exception handling, talk about proper exception handling or if a co-worker made a really cool WPF tab control, let him/her talk about it. This way the topics will be much closer to real life and therefore more interesting.

Make the sessions mandatory, but offer something as compensation (everybody hates meetings), e.g. free coffee and a breakfast buffet. This way the attendees will always have something to look forward to even if they are not interested in the topic.

Offer a reward for the person who did the presentation. For example if you did 5 presentations you will get a free tech gadget as a reward. Set a price limit and let people choose whatever they want. This way people will do it voluntary and you don’t have to force anyone.

Finally, another disadvantage of long sessions is that they are pretty time consuming. You will most likely spend a few days to find a good topic and to make a decent presentation about it that fills 30 to 60 minutes and doesn’t bore the attendees. If you have a lot of work to do, it’s hard to keep the monthly schedule while still maintaining high quality. If the quality declines, the chances will increase that people think that the whole monthly session thing is a giant waste of time.

What about dependency injection using Inversion of Control containers? We use Microsoft's Unity Container, but there are a number of them you could choose from to talk about.

I would suggest bringing up topics that not only provide your co-workers with some new found knowledge but may also improve your code base. Is there anything that is going on that you're not too keen on? Talk about a better way to do these things. Some other things:

• LINQ: As was suggested, this the "latest toy". Beyond that, it can really clean up some messy code.

• Unit Testing: However you are (or want to) test, write some unit tests covering some code. Review the tests, can anyone thing of anything you've missed? If you aren't currently writing unit tests, discuss the pros and be the flagship.

• Standards: No one likes to talk about them, but they really can improve the speed at which you skim other people's code.

We do a similar thing where I work, a monthly "developers meeting" where people are encouraged to share new things - mostly in the C#/ASP.NET field, but we also have front-end developers talking about HTML and Javascript stuff.

Anyway, here are a few tools that I have showed people in recent months. You might like to check out some of these, if you haven't seen them already, and tell people about them.

• NetSparker Web Application Security Scanner
• GhostDoc – autogenerate comment structure for C# code
• StyleCop – check your code against Microsoft’s style rules
• Atomiq – duplicate code detector
• RedGate SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare

• OOP
• C# Language
• OOP Best practices in C#

You could research and talk of the benefits of VS 2010 and maybe get you and your compatriots an upgrade. You could end up with a whole lot of thanks.

An introduction to Code Contracts, what it is good for and why, could probably be a good idea. Even if you don't use Code Contracts, it might learn your programmers to think more about what a method exactly should do. This should give you cleaner methods.

After covering Code Contracts, the next step could be Pex. Pex can create unit tests automatically, by looking at your pre-conditions and your code, and then try to match the actual output to the post conditions.

In general, the subjects doesn't have to relate directly to your current work. If someone tried some cool framework or discovered something cool while working on a pet projects, let them talk about it. It might not help you in your day-to-day work right now, but it might influence your work in the future.

The other thing I would mention is putting multiple projects into one namespace (yes thats been around a little bit) however, being able to break up a program into multiple architectures (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multitier_architecture) . I would mention LINQ but not all programmers like it because it allows you to access data from UI layer, but thats just me.

I would recommend shortening your presentation times to between 20 and 30 minutes, and aim to make it less of a lecture and more of a short presentation with a group discussion. This is a format that has worked very well at the company where I have been working for nearly 10 years now. We try and organize these seminar sessions weekly, and while they don't always happen due to either workload, or a lack of presenters prepared on the day, they happen regularly enough that they become an opportunity for the company to get together and talk about various areas of interest over a coffee and biscuits.

I'd also suggest not limiting your seminars to just C# or programming, but perhaps also things like how the company is doing, or how a law may be impacting on your business, or even a recap of your last company party complete with embarrassing photos and anecdotes. Whatever you think is going to be of interest, just to keep things mixed up a little, and to avoid the subject matter becoming too stale. Some example topics might include:

• Introducing the company to new internally used products, such as:
  • the company wiki
  • the version control system
  • the issue tracking system
• behaviour driven development using a selection of BDD APIs
• a question and answer session about a new product or technology that your company is thinking of developing

And of course the programmer's staple diet covering techniques, algorithms, tools, languages language features etc.