After an extended summer break the SPA Cambridge talks are back. A change of venue to Anglia Ruskin University has now happened which is much better due to close vicinity to many pubs which was a problem with the Microsoft Research venue. Thee events are organised by Mark Dalgarno and you can read his blog here.
This month's talk was about Test Driven Development by Ivan Moore. It was an interactive session requiring a laptop and Eclipse. Unfortunately I discovered I must have the only copy of Eclipse in existence not set up for Java development (I have used it for Python and C/C++) a bit too late to rectify that.
The exercise was to solve a blocks world problem with test driven development. We used Java and JMock for this. I also got to show my Java ineptitude since I haven't used it for 7 years properly, so I was learning on the fly. To be honest now I go back to Java it is a lot more inelegant than I remember. At least after all that I managed to get the tests to pass...
The interactive sessions are a bit more fun when you are sharing a computer, especially when all three of us huddled around it have very little practical Java experience.
The next talk will be from Ian Griffiths about WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) on the 14th November.
