The SDN – Software Development Network – is a special interest group for dutch developers. Four times a year they organise an event where people present and talk about their passion.

As a member of the SDN you are aware of the latest developments. You are part of a network of professional developers who assist each other in word and deed. This means there is a technical helpdesk at your fingertips so you can book considerable time savings in solving problems.
sdn.nl with Google translate

Here are the talks I attended.

Agile, why it works

Freek talked from experience about the cycles in agile. At the end of each cycle it it moved to the next step until the cycle is accepted.

• design, designing and building the software
• feedback, show it to the customer and get feedback (fix it)
• accept, final demo, now customer must accept or accept ‘when’*

*Accept ‘when’ means accept feedback, but when that is fixed customer must accept.

Make sure to do workshops and use timebox – bugetbox.

AngularJS

Henk Jan (aka Nacho Libre) showed us how AngularJS emerged from the Google Feedback project. After a little sidestep to todomvc.com he showed us how to do it.
You need to learn the directives first, but than it is very declarative. As a special handicap he did it all on someone else’s machine (he forgot the VGA-HDMI converter) Nicely done

Microsoft Application Insights

Next up is Hassan who is a MVP and VS ALM Ranger. He talked a lot about the microsoft ALM suite and ended his talk showing Insights.

You can add Insights to web, windows phone or windows store applications. It reports about

• Availability,
• Performance,
• Usage,
• Diagnostics

All you need to do is add some code that is handed to you in the portal. See this Azure Friday video for more detail.

Hybrid app

Roland shows cordova and cordova based frameworks (phonegab, telerik appbuilder) to build cross platform apps. The key is that you build a website that is hosted in a chromeless browser inside a native app.

The paid frameworks deliver more features, but are still cordova based. This means that after the license expires you can stil use the code and build your app.

Look at phonegap build to overcome the “not having a mac” issue. Keep in mind that you still need an Apple developer certificate. It is free for one private app and unlimited open source apps.

Final thoughts

Next event is scheduled for September 9. Check the SDN site for details.
For edition 121 of the magazine I wrote about octopus deploy. Read it here (dutch, registration required).