NorDev 2 Review: Simon Elliston Ball: Glimpse & Phil Nash: Is it really worth TDDing iOS apps?

Seventeen people came to hear Simon Elliston Ball and Phil Nash at Norfolk Developers tonight. When you consider that it’s very warm and it’s July, so lots of people are on holiday and SyncNorwich’s first birthday party is tomorrow night, that’s not too bad.

Simon Elliston Ball from Redgate gave us a very enthusiastic introduction to the Glimpse tool. Glimpse is an open source tool for monitoring applications. The original developers are now working for Redgate and Redgate is looking for other people to contribute to the project. There weren’t so many .Net developers in the audience, so Simon kept his presentation to just the slides, which generated plenty of questions from the engaged audience.

Phil Nash is usually softly spoken, but his inability to hear this evening, due to an ear infection, meant we could all hear him clearly! He started off with a 5 minute introduction to Objective C for those in the audience who haven’t done any. I was surprised to hear it was inspired by SmallTalk! Phil went on to explain how TD gives us well factored code and a regression test suite before highlighting the problems with singletons and some alternatives to them. Then it was on to the code!

Next event: Choosing an appropriate language & Killing pigs and telling people about it

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Paul Grenyer

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