Wednesday, March 25, 2009

TestDriven Dojo

Now that I’m back from Las Vegas it is time to organize next months Perth ALT.NET meeting. Last time we had some great discussion about running a Coding Dojo to follow on from the most recent Perth .NET CoP meeting.

A Coding Dojo is a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge. It is a great way to learn from your peers and to improve your skills. This dojo will focus on Test Driven Design.

The basic idea is this: You will show up and at some time during the night you will have contributed some tests and production code to a project in some .NET technology. I need to confirm some of the people who said they’d be willing to help facilitate this but thus far it looks like we have WinForms and SharePoint covered.

Rhys Campbell covered WinForms in his most recent Perth .NET CoP presentation and if you want a preview of what to expect from the SharePoint session you might like to check out the new Evening Developer-Only SharePoint sessions. The first one is tonight and it’s Jeremy Thake on SharePoint Developer Testing!

If you are interesting in facilitating a Dojo along the lines of TDD (I’m thinking WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET are all not covered yet) then please let me know ASAP. All you need to do is provide a basic application and guide some people through adding some functionality Test-First.

The session will be at 5:30pm on Wednesday 8th April. To help us with venue we ask that you register your intent to come at this eventbrite page http://perthaltnet0904.eventbrite.com/

Any comments or feedback please drop me an email.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Perth ALT.NET Meeting #2

Wow that happened fast. The 2nd meeting of the Perth ALT.NET group is this Wednesday from 5:30pm until we are done (about 8ish as people have homes to get back to). As with last time we'll be meeting in the function room at 43below. Beer of the month is Fat Yak and is apparently quite nice :)

We'll be voting on a topic (or two) on the night so if there's something you really want to talk about then get there on time and throw your vote in. Before the vote we'll have a quick discussion of some news items so if you've seen anything cool this month or have something cool to show off then flick me an email michael.minutillo@gmail.com and we'll get it in.

One other thing I'd like to get from the night is a quick list of topics that people would like to talk about in the future so I'll probably pass a piece of paper around for people to add their vote to. I'll use this as a guideline going forward.

Entry to the event is free and we welcome anyone with an opinion on the state of .NET Development (or anyone who just wants to hear other peoples opinions).

Hope to see you there.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Virtual ALT.NET Oz Meeting tonight!

The international ALT.NET community have Virtual ALT.NET meetings (VANs). They basically come together on LiveMeeting for a discussion about whatever is on their minds at the time. Unfortunately for us in Australia these are usually not at a good time.

Well, a while back it was suggested on the OzALT.NET mailing list that we should host our own VANs. The first one is tonight at 9:30pm Eastern (which makes it 7:30pm local). If you are interested in attending head over to http://tinyurl.com/virtualozaltnet in a couple of hours.