About a week and a half ago I had the pleasure of traveling down to Washington DC to deliver my Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET  talk to the Washington DC area ALT.NET User Group.  About 30-40 people showed up for the talk, held at the offices of The Motely Fool in Alexandria just over the river from Washington DC.

Matt Podwysocki, who helps to organize the group along with several other DC-area software engineers, has been after me to come down there for some time and so I eventually managed to find an open slot in my schedule to make the trip.  Since my mother still lives in Bethesda, MD just north of the District, it was relatively painless for me to make the trip down from NYC, remaining overnight at my mother’s before heading back the following day.

Still Timing Issues

There are still some timing issues with this presentation (e.g., it takes a pretty long time to crunch through the material) as detailed previously here and here.  But by making sure that I spent a bit less time expounding on each of the core DDD concepts than in past deliveries, I was able to reduce the delivery of the content to about 2.5 hours from its past deliveries of between 3 and 3.5.  We started right after pizza at about 7:00pm and wrapped up about 9:30pm after a Q+A session on the topics.

Great Engagement

The audience was really well-engaged and involved in the discussions during the delivery of the material, offering some great points, challenging some of my suggestions, and offering input into other alternate ways to approach some of the issues that the presentation focused in on.  Its really great to deliver a talk to an interactive and engaging audience since this is how I come to learn as well and I got some great feedback and input from the group this time too.

Based on the feedback I received and the comments following the talk, it seems as if the attendees got good value out of the content and enjoyed the presentation.  I had several people approach me afterwards and mention that this talk really helped crystalize for them a better understanding of DDD in a concrete and valuable way that they felt they could take back to their daily work to make good use of.

Pub Talk

After the talk, a number of us headed out to a local hotel bar for some great follow-on conversation and discussion.  One of the things I really enjoy about traveling to speak to user groups in other areas is the opportunity to interact with the attendees in informal discussions and the DC ALT.NET group didn’t fail to provide this same opportunity.  Thanks to everyone who came out for the talk and listened intently during the long delivery, asking probing and challenging questions all the while.  Thanks also to those that then came out for some conversation and accompanying hydration after the fact too .  I had a great time and hope that DC ALT.NET did as well – thanks for having me down for the talk!

Code and Slides Downloads

If you’re interested in the slides or the code samples from the talk, they can be downloaded from the following links…

• Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET – Slides
• Domain Driven Design Implementation Patterns in .NET – Code