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.

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.

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.

News for Feb Meeting

I figured the meetings would be a good place to talk about what was happening in ALT.NET world. I had a bunch of stuff that I intended to share with people to get some conversation going last night but I didn't need it. Here it is:

Local

CodeCampOz 2009 is coming up (4th & 5th of April) and they are calling for speakers. They even have an ALT.NET track so get those abstracts in.

On the local mailing list we have been discussing a number of things including:

Mentoring Schemes - Would they work and how can we implement them?

What is wrong with the university courses and can we fix it?

International

I won't try to cover the whole of the international ALT.NET mailing list but the conversation around just what IS wrong with the Entity Framework was interesting.

The Oredev 2008 conference that was held in Malmo, Sweden late last year has released a bunch of it's sessions up as videos. You can see stuff from the Java, .NET, Agile Ways and DDD tracks. There's hopefully still a lot of content to come but what is there is very good.

Daniel Cazzulino is building an Inversion of Control container called Funq using Test Driven Development and is recording the whole thing as 30 minute videos on Viddler.

Jeff and Joel had a conversation about software quality on their StackOverflow podcast that received an awful lot of attention. Enough that Uncle Bob responded and has agreed to appear on the podcast to discuss some of the points made.

That's all I have for the moment but if you do see something interesting in the next month, let me know and I'll bring it up at the next meeting.

Oh and I just saw these and laughed. I wonder if I can put some up at work.

Resources for the aspiring ALT.NETite

UPDATE 13/02/2009 - Added home for international VAN. Thanks to Richard Banks for the info

ALT.NET is a big topic and there are loads of resources out there for those that interested. Here is a quick sample of a few. Add yours into the comments:

International

• http://altdotnet.com/ - The official home of ALT.NET. The site itself is only really a couple of pages that act as a springboard off to other resources.
• http://altnetpedia.com/ - The ALT.NET Wiki. This is the best launching pad for learning about ALT.NET. From here you will find definitions, articles, videos, tools, etc.
• The ALT.NET Mailing List - A yahoo mailing list where the conversations take place. This list gives you access to many of the brightest guys in the industry and a lot of very interesting conversation. It can get a little heated at times but persevere.
• Virtual ALT.NET Meetings (VANs) - These virtual meetings are frequently had over LiveMeeting and are often recorded for viewing them later. I normally find out about them on Twitter but they have a mailing list as well.
• ALT.NET Podcast - Started by Mike Moore and now run by James Avery. So far there have been discussions around Ruby, Object Databases, Domain Driven Design, jQuery, and more.

National

• http://ozalt.net/ - The home of the Australian ALT.NET community. Acts as an aggregation point for Aussie ALT.NET group activity and maintains several feeds for local community member blogs.
• OzALT.NET Mailing List - Local mailing list for ALT.NET discussion
• OzVANs? - There has been some discussion around running Australian Virtual ALT.NET Meetings. If anyone is keen, let me know. This could seriously help with the timezone issue

Local

• http://perth.ozalt.net/ - This site. Your one stop shop for ALT.NET action in Perth. OK not quite but you will hear about the meetings here.
• The meetings themselves - Thus far we have had one. We meet on the second Wednesday of every month at 5:30pm. In case you are from the future reading this I suggesting checking the homepage for details of the next meeting.

First meeting a success

Last night we had the very first meeting of the Perth ALT.NET user group. There were just over 15 people there (I didn't actually count but that's the number that people gave me) and quite a few that messaged me to say they couldn't come but they're keen for the next one.

I had planned 2 basic sessions but the amount of conversation around what ALT.NET is and what we want to do was enough to keep us going to last call. I find that very encouraging.

To start with we ran quickly through what it is to be ALT.NET after which everyone agreed that it was a noble goal to aspire to. Here is a link to the original article that coined the phrase if you are interested: http://laribee.com/blog/2007/04/10/altnet/

We then went on a rambling conversation about a whole bunch of topics including:

• Being aware of the total cost of ownership for software and ensuring that our clients and our employers are educated about this
• Reducing the amount of friction that we get from our toolset (making tools work the way we do not vice versa) and understanding that our clients should be allowed to expect the same
• Being passionate and delivering technical excellence and balancing those against pragmatism and providing customer value (The most architecturally perfect framework solves nothing if it doesn't help you client improve their process)
• Our responsibility as a community to influence our peers and our vendors. We cannot sit back and just nod when someone else is making sense. Raise your voice and be heard

It was a very "Spiderman" conversation. With great power comes great responsibility. If you were there and I missed anything important drop a comment on this post and I'll update it.

We also talked about a number of different session types for future sessions including:

• Classroom-style presentation
• Structured Discussion
• We all vote on the night (Open Spaces like)
• Coding Dojo (RandoriKata)
• Lots of quick sessions (Lightning Talks)
• Formal Debates

Thanks to MS-Press Australia I was able to give away a door-prize. A copy of CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter went to Mitch Wheat. Apologies for those that had to leave early. In future I need to figure out when and how to draw door prizes.

I did have a whole heap of news-like stuff that I had found interesting recently but I never got around to telling anyone about any of it so I'll put it all in it's own post. If you have any news that you think may be of interest to the rest of the group, let me know and I'll add it to the agenda for next time.

Speaking of next time, I have booked the 43 Below function room from 5:30pm on the 11th March. A lot of people seemed very enthusiastic about voting for topics on the night so I think we'll do that. If you have a particular theme that you'd like to talk about please let me know.

Thanks again to everyone that came along and I hope to see you next time.

Meeting tonight

Whoa, today has really run away from me.

Don't forget that our first meeting is tonight from 5:30pm at 43below, underground off of the Barrack/Hay Street intersection.

See you there.