Speaker

Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor

Husband, father, Microsoft MVP, Progress/Telerik Dev Expert, and software dev with a passion for .Net, and doing software right. It's all about Right'in Code

Richard L. Taylor Jr. is a 25 year software development and technology professional living in Huntersville, NC. His experience includes the design and development of small to enterprise class applications. He currently serves as Vice President of Platform and Cloud Engineering at SentryOne.

Richard is a believer of using the right tools for the job and has leveraged ASP.NET (Web API, MVC), SQL Server/MongoDB, Angular, Bootstrap, JavaScript/NodeJS, KendoUI, and Xamarin (just to name a few) to deliver solutions. He has a great deal of experience but likes to explore new technologies, tools, and techniques to help create better software.

Richard has a passion for the software development community. He serves as one of the organizers of the Modern Devs Charlotte meetup group and is the founding organizer of the Charlotte Xamarin Developers meetup group. Both groups try to create environments where developers of all skill levels can come together and learn about the latest technologies, tools, and techniques to create software. These groups also provide a venue to network with fellow developers in the community. In addition to serving the local software development community via meetup groups, Richard also speaks at regional, national, and international technology users groups and conferences. His speaking schedule can be found here: http://www.rightincode.com/page/speaking-schedule

As a result of his technical community work, Richard has received the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in the Visual Studio and Development Technologies category. MVPs make up a global community of over 4,000 technical experts and community leaders across 90 countries and are driven by their passion, community spirit, and quest for knowledge. Richard has also received the Progress (Telerik) Developer Expert designation. DE’s are highly skilled, visible, and elite industry leaders who write, speak, help, and code using Progress (Telerik) products. There are 44 DE’s in 13 different countries who are ambassadors for Progress Products to the tech community.

When not developing software, Richard is focused on spending time with his lovely wife Shondrecca (she gives the best hugs!!) and their five children (Richard III, Ayanna, David, Jonathan, and Stephen).

Cross Platform Mobile Application Development using Xamarin and Azure

In the circles of web development, “Mobile First”, developing for mobile clients before considering desktop clients, has become an accepted approach to delivering solutions. It is the recognition that many application users are using their mobile device as the primary tool for utilizing software. In some scenarios, the mobile web experience falls short of the user experience expected. As a result there is a large demand for native mobile applications.

With combining the features of Xamarin and Azure, software providers can deliver cross platform, globally scalable, and secure native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms. Utilizing existing skills, developers can significantly reduce time to market and capitalize on the growing trend of mobile devices as a primary tool to use software and consume data.

In this talk, we will explore how Xamarin can be used to leverage your existing skills to deliver fully native mobile applications for the most popular mobile platforms. In addition, we will add Azure Mobile Apps to our solution to provide the backend data store for data synchronization, user authentication, and support push notifications.

Architectural Guidance for Building Mobile Apps Using Xamarin Forms

If you are a C# developer and need to build a line of business cross platform mobile application, Xamarin and Xamarin Forms should be your tools of choice. But if this is your first time, how do you know if you have made solid choices in your application architecture? In this session, you will receive guidance on creating an application architecture that will support not only the delivery of your application but future application maintenance and feature additions. Topics discussed: Dependency Injection, Component Communications, Validation, Navigation, Accessing Remote Data, Security, Configuration Management, and integrating 3rd party UI components.

Raising the Value of Your Unit Tests

For any non-trivial application created today, software engineers must not only deliver on application features but also include associated unit tests to improve efficiency, to reduce risk when making code changes, and to improve quality by identifying bugs as early as possible. One may think having unit tests to increase code coverage is the goal but that is missing the mark. Software engineers should be focused on delivering unit tests that have meaningful value to support current and future software development. In this session, you will learn several unit test styles, how identify weaknesses in unit tests, and how increase the value of the unit tests you create.

Refactoring to Testable Code

Most developers have the responsibility of working with an existing codebase. In many circumstances, the existing code was not designed with testing in mind. This does not allow leveraging of automated testing to reduce risk and improve quality. To realize the value of automated testing, this existing code must be refactored which is not always easy to accomplish. By attending this session, you will learn several techniques to refactoring code that was not designed to be testable. In addition, unit test will be added to the newly refactored code and executed as a part of an automated test suite.

I’m a Developer not a DBA, I Don’t Know Why the Query is Slow!

Developers today have the tall task of writing code for the entire software stack which includes front-end, back-end, and data layer (SQL) code. While most seasoned developers have a certain comfort level in writing efficient code for both front-end and back-end layers of an application, the data layer (SQL) code tends to fall short. If Microsoft SQL Server is your database platform and you are not an expert at SQL, this session is for you. We will explore Plan Explorer, a free tool from SentryOne, and use it to improve the performance of slow executing queries on Microsoft SQL Server.

Creating a Solid Web Application Architecture Using Angular and ASP.NET Core Web API

Modern web applications built today typically consist of various technologies used to deliver the final solution. Over the last several of months, there have been significant new developments both in front-end frameworks for building single page applications as well as back-end frameworks designed for applications hosted in the cloud. In this session, we will explore using ASP.NET Core to host a Web API that provides services to an Angular single page application. As a developer, you will take away from this session a solid understanding of how to design a modern web application using these technologies.

Richard Taylor

Husband, father, Microsoft MVP, Progress/Telerik Dev Expert, and software dev with a passion for .Net, and doing software right. It's all about Right'in Code