Yesterday, I presented at the first annual Cleveland Day of .NET in Beachwood, and it was a fantastic experience. I was able to meet some brilliant people — although at times it was a little surreal, since I already “knew” them from Twitter and it was like I was meeting them all over again. The presentations that I attended were all excellent, and the conversations in the hallways and at lunch and dinner were even better.

Off the top of my head, it was great to meet: Dan Hounshell, Alan Stevens, Joe Fiorini, Mike Eaton, Leon Gersing, Sarah Dutkiewicz, John Stockton, Corey Haines, and Brian Prince. I know that I’ve forgotten some people from this list, and I’m sorry… the day was really a whirlwind, and my memory is horrible. If I’ve forgotten you, please post a comment or send me a tweet and I’ll make it right! Thanks very much to everyone involved in organizing, sponsoring, and attending the event.

For my first time presenting in front of a larger audience, I felt like it went pretty well. I was admittedly a little intimidated — although very excited — when it ended up being standing-room-only during my presentation. Thanks to everyone that came to watch me speak, and I hope you found it useful! Thanks also for the kind words and great feedback afterwards, and a special thanks to Alan Stevens for “refactoring” the projector when it decided to overheat halfway through. :D

Here are my slides, and you can also download them below:

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As promised, a more complex code sample that illustrates some of the principles I discussed in the talk is available to download here. The code sample illustrates some of the more advanced uses of Ninject — stuff that I never could fit on a Keynote slide. I encourage you to tear it apart and get your hands dirty. The best way to learn the value of IoC is definitely to try it for yourself.

Slides (Keynote): designing-for-change.key.zip
Slides (PDF): designing-for-change.pdf.zip
Sample project: wargame.zip

Justin Etheredge gave a great presentation on dependency injection and inversion of control last week at the Richmond Code Camp. It gives a very good introduction to DI, which is something that I’m going to try to tackle at the Cleveland Day of .NET in a few weeks. Plus, he uses Ninject in the examples and was kind enough to quote me in the presentation, so it’s got to be good, right? :)

Seriously, though, if you weren’t able to see the presentation, Justin’s posted the slides and related code samples on his blog. I highly recommend you check them out if you’re interested in learning more about dependency injection!

I will be speaking at the Cleveland Day of .NET on May 17th. If you’ve heard of this inversion of control and/or dependency injection stuff and would like to hear more, by all means come on up to sunny Cleveland! Here’s the abstract for my talk:

The old adage states that the only thing that remains constant is change, and nowhere is this more true than in software development. In this presentation, Nate Kohari describes how to apply the principles of inversion of control and dependency injection to create software that can adapt to changing requirements. Learn to break your monolithic app into loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive pieces… then glue them back together with an inversion of control container to create ultra-flexible code that you can bend to your will.

If you’ve never used dependency injection, this talk should prove to be a good introduction, and I’ll be happy to answer any and all questions. Or, if you’re already experienced with dependency injection, come see how Ninject can free you from the pain of XML!

Also, I’m still relatively new to public speaking, so there’s always the chance that I’ll completely choke and you can throw tomatoes. What’s more fun than that?