My first StyleCop presentation

On the 24th March 2011, I gave what I am considering to be my first “proper” community presentation at the Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group (#ADNUG). When the user group first started, I also did a presentation entitled “Visual Studio 2010 – An Introduction”, but I regarded this as a demonstration of Visual Studio 2010, and the great tooling support that had been added to this release, rather than a full talk on a subject.

Enter “StyleCop – Breaking down the barriers to entry”.

I have been a long time advocate of StyleCop, and I was responsible for helping set this up within the development team that I am currently working in. In addition, I have been “toying” with the idea of getting into doing community speaking, and StyleCop seemed like a good entry point for this.

This talk was very much inspired by the excellent talk that I saw by Guy Smith-Ferrier when I was at DDD9 in January. However, I tried to take it a little bit further and explain the real world hurdles that stands in the way of a development team implementing StyleCop in their applications, drawing on the problems that I had personally faced in implementing StyleCop in my team.

On the night, I am happy to say that I think the talk went down really well, although there were a couple fumbles as I tried to remember the order that my slides were in, and the demo where I tried to debug a custom StyleCop rule using two instances of Visual Studio didn’t want to work. If you attended the talk, I would be very interested to hear any feedback that you have, good and bad. This is the only way in which I can get better.

I am also happy to say that this was the first night where I was able to give away lots of swag to the User Group members, and this will continue for the foreseeable future, with hopefully more prizes being added as we go.

A big thanks has to go to Emma for the lend of her hat for drawing the names for the prizes! I am going to have to sort out a proper way of doing this for the next meeting (but just in case, if you could bring your hat again, that would be great!!). If anyone has any novel ideas about how we can auction off these prizes, then feel free to let me know.

If you are interested in seeing the slides from the talk, you can find them displayed below, and also they are available as a download by clicking through to the slideshare site.