For all DevReach fans and future fans I have sweet news: DevReach speakers will make free half-day online session on 9 September 2010. Anyone could register for free at the DevReach Web site: http://www.devreach.com/Event/devreach-online.aspx.

The content include the following topics:

• TPL and PLINQ; speaker: Tiberiu Covaci
• HTML 5; speaker; Daron Yondem
• The six fundamental principles of software development; speaker: Steven Smith
• Web Load Testing with VS2010; speaker: Richard Campbell

I hope most developers will like this free online event and will join.

Posted by nakov as .net, news, blog at 3:31 PM EEST

Comments Off

The premier conference for Microsoft developers DevReach ‘2010 is coming again in Sofia on October 18 and 19 for the fifth time. This is the most amazing technical event for software engineers in Bulgaria and the region with over 60 lectures in 5 parallel tracks, the only place in the region to meet the world’s distinguished speakers in the .NET world. DevReach is strengthening its position as leading .NET conference, such as Microsoft PDC (www.microsoftpdc.com) and Tech Ed (www.msteched.com).

The Speakers

This year the developers can attend lectures from top quality speakers like (but not only):

• Beth Massi – http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/
• Richard Campbell – http://www.campbellassociates.ca/blog/
• Stephen Forte – http://www.stephenforte.net/
• Todd Anglin – http://weblogs.asp.net/toddanglin/
• Miguel Castro – http://www.dotnetdude.com/
• Sahil Malik – http://blah.winsmarts.com/
• Andrew Brust – http://www.brustblog.com/
• Lino Tadros – http://www.linotadros.com/
• … and many others

Hot Topics

DevReach speakers will talk about the upcoming products and technologies not only from Microsoft but also in general abut the software engineering and new trends. Sessions will cover all of Microsoft’s latest technologies including ASP.NET 4 and Silverlight 4, Windows Workflow, SharePoint 2010, HTML 5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure and WPF. Some of the hot topics include:

• HTML 5 in ASP.NET
• HTML 5 and CSS3
• jQuery, Visual Studio and ASP.NET
• Advanced ASP.NET Tricks
• etc.

More Information

DevReach is organized by Telerik Corp. (www.telerik.com), a leading vendor of developer productivity, team productivity and automated testing tools for .NET developers, and Martin Kulov, the Microsoft Regional Director for Bulgaria. The event is supported by Microsoft and the International .NET Association – INETA (www.ineta.org).

Registration and Discounts

All participants who register by September 15th on the official web site (www.devreach.com) will get a 20% discount.

Members of the Bulgarian Association of Software Developers (BASD) will get additional discounts. If you are some of them please contact the organizers by email: info@devreach.com.

I have no patience to meet the DevReach speakers and their sessions in Sofia this autumn.

Posted by nakov as .net, news, blog at 5:28 PM EEST

Comments Off

I was a speaker at the Summer Research Workshop for High School Students, organized by the Students Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, which was held in Varna in July 2010.

I had few talks and demonstrations about high-quality programming code, refactoring of bad source code and unit testing. All interested students can download the presentations and demonstrations from the links below.

High-Quality Programming Code Construction

• Nakov-High-Quality-Code-Presentation – Short Version.pptx
• Nakov-High-Quality-Code-Presentation – Full Version.pptx

Unit Testing

• Nakov-Unit-Testing-with-Visual-Studio-Team-Test.pptx
• Unit-Testing-Demos.rar

Source Code Refactoring

• Nakov-Code-Refactoring - Presentation.pptx
• Refactoring - Demos.zip

Software Engineering Fundamentals

• Software-Engineering-Fundamentals-Svetlin-Nakov.pptx
• Software-Engineering-Fundamentals-Examples.zip

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 4:43 PM EEST

Comments Off

I am happy to announce that Telerik Corp. will award the top-performing students from the courses “High-Quality Programming Code” and “Web Applications Development with .NET Framework and ASP.NET” held in the last semester at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”. The top 10% of the students listed below are the best performers in the courses who show extraordinary results in the examinations and especially in the practical projects.

In the course High-Quality Programming Code we had 185 students who sit for the exams and the best of them win at least 90 of 100 score:

In the course Web Applications Development with .NET Framework and ASP.NET we had 192 students than 55 of 60 score:

The awarding ceremony will be held in the office of Telerik in Sofia at 20 July 2010. Students will be given a certificate signed by the course lecturers team.

Congratulations to the awarded students!

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 2:55 PM EEST

Comments Off

The course I teach along with my colleagues from Telerik Corp. in High-Quality Programming Code Construction finished successfully. The results were great: more than 150 computer science students learned how to write high-quality software and how to refactor existing low-quality code, and how to write effective unit tests with high code coverage. I am happy that 80% of the students wrote and defended really well their course projects which consisted of refactoring pretty bad code and writing unit tests for it. Best students will be awarded by our sponsor – Telerik.

I feel satisfied because my mission to raise the quality of work of the Bulgarian software development community reached its first goal. Next year I will teach the same course so all interested developers could join it.

More information is available of the Web site of the course: http://codecourse.telerik.com.

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 8:18 PM EEST

Comments Off

After few months of procedural delays I got my PhD diploma from the Supreme Attestation Commission to the Council of Ministers of Republic of Bulgaria:

  Now I am finally a certified Philosophy Doctor (PhD) in computer science.

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 8:08 PM EEST

Comments Off

Finally we managed to take some photos of the Telerik Academy (http://academy.telerik.com) where I constantly train young software engineers in computer programming, .NET Framework technology stack and team working:

Currently I have a group of 20 students who successfully passed in 2 months the “C# Fundamentals” courses (Part 1 and 2) and passed all required exams. Currently I teach them in .NET Framework Essentails course which takes 3 months (4-8 hours/day) and covers the .NET Framework class libraries, XML, databases and SQL, LINQ, LINQ-to-SQL and SQL Server, Web services and WCF, design patterns, software engineering, SCRUM, unit testing, source control systems and build systems. The course introduces briefly desktop applications and Windows Forms, Web technologies and Web development with ASP.NET and AJAX, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.

It is really nice to explain the programming concepts and best practices to highly motivated students eager to learn more and more.

Telerik Academy have excellent training lab equipped with 20 machines and we are happy to keep it full of smart young people.

Posted by nakov as .net, news, blog at 12:57 PM EEST

Comments Off

The video from the seminar about Java 7 organized by the Bulgarian Java User Group (BGJUG) on 20.05.2010 in the Technical University of Sofia is finally published (thanks to Yordan Yovkov for the video processing):

• http://www.archive.org/details/Java_7_New_Features_2
• http://www.archive.org/details/Java_7_New_Features_3

At the seminar (and also in the recorded videos) I and Mihail Stoynov explained in details the following topics:

• Java 7 – Introduction and Chronology
• Dynamic Languages in JVM
• Java Modularity – Project Jigsaw
• Language Enhancements (Project Coin)
• Closures for Java (lambda functions, extension methods, etc.)
• JSR 203: NIO 2
• Other new features: Compressed 64-bit oops, Garbage-First GC, Upgraded Class-Loaders, URLClassLoader. close(), Unicode 5.1, SCTP and SDP

I had the same talk in Varna, at the Varna Free University Chernorizets Hrabar, invited by the developer community on 29.05.2010.

I already published the presentation and downloads.

Posted by nakov as news, java, blog at 12:17 AM EEST

Comments Off

Today we did the final test for the students as part of the requirements to graduate the “High-Quality Programming Code” course (http://codecourse.telerik.com) in Sofia University, at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI). There were about 130 students in two groups and I am happy of their high achievements. Most of the students answered correctly to more than 85% of the questions.

The exam results are published at the Web site of Telerik Academy in the section “University Courses”, at the “High-Quality Programming Code” course’s official site (http://codecourse.telerik.com).

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 8:21 PM EEST

Comments Off

The final round of the Bulgarian IT Olympiad for school students was held on 29-30 May 2010 in Varna. I was invited to be part of the judge team in the category “Software Applications”. The reglament of the Olympiad says that students develop software at home and presents the results at the Olympiad. The most interesting and well done projects were a 3D-Studio like modeling engine, a coding and collaboration platform, universal remote control software and embedded device and platform for measuring motions and accelerations. Nice contest and nice students, very tallanted.

High-Quality Code Lecture

One of the criteria for the judge was the quality of code of the source code of the presented software. Some people could be amazed but half of the projects were written really in “coding horror” style and had variables like TextBox4 and Button2_Click. To reduce this percentage I had a talk in “High-quality programming code”.

Download the presentation here: High-Quality-Code-Presentation-Short.pptx.

Telerik Academy Presentation

I had a talk about Telerik Academy and the free training for .NET software engineers that we do.

Download the presentation: Telerik-Academy-Presentation.pptx.

Posted by nakov as news, blog at 2:20 PM EEST

Comments Off