LDNUG August 2022 with April Edwards and Martin Thwaites

Save the date, folks - London .NET is back! After a long hiatus during COVID, we're delighted to be organising in-person events again, kicking off at FundApps in Shoreditch on August 11th.

For our first meetup, we've got two amazing speakers lined up for you:

April Edwards: End-to-End DevOps

DevOps requires transformation in an organisations people, process and tooling. Hear how we can enable our teams to do more. We will go through a full ended to scenario, from code to delivery, that will start with the automation of our code using Infrastructure as Code. We'll review our delivery practices and leverage Microsoft's toolset that includes GitHub CodeSpaces and GitHub Actions to deliver our Azure Static Web App.

April Edwards (@TheAprilEdwards) is a senior cloud developer advocate and the DevOps practice lead at Microsoft, specializing in application transformation and DevOps ways of working. Her focus is working on Microsoft Azure to take customers of a journey from legacy technology, to serverless and containers, where code comes first, while enabling them to take full advantage of DevOps. April was previously a cloud consultant and solution architect for various partners in the UK and brings her years of experience in helping customers plan their journey.

Martin Thwaites: Building Operable Software with TDD (but not the way you think)

Building operable software is becoming more important with the adoption of Microservice based systems becoming more common. Developers are increasingly relying on building long-running "integration" tests in deployed environments because it's the only way to gain confidence to deploy their applications. There is a better way, which is to focus on "outside-in" testing that focuses on testing the boundaries of your service.

In this talk, we'll go through some of the pitfalls of relying on unit testing to give you confidence in an application. We'll then go through how you can use TDD as a workflow to build tests in a "Contract First" way and how much more flexible your testing becomes. We'll talk about the benefits over Unit testing focus, and how it can aid in understanding service boundaries. Finally, we'll show you can correlate all this up with Tracing tools like Honeycomb to see the performance of your tests and how internal code interacts.

This talk will be focusing on the WebApplicationFactory in .NET to provide the scaffold, and Honeycomb to provide the visibility, however, the concepts will likely apply to other languages.

Martin Thwaites (@MartinDotNet) is a Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, o11y enthusiast, and a delivery-focused Developer from the UK. With over 20 years experience in development in the .NET ecosystem, he’s worked with many companies on scaling up engineering teams and products. The past few years have been spent working on solving complex problems with some of the UK’s big names, including e-commerce retailers and credit lenders.