Next Session

In order that we can all prepare for the next session (Wednesday 10th June) we need a topic for discussion. I have 3 idea at the moment.

1) Domain Driven Design (DDD): I get this request a bit and I’m reading the Big Blue Book at the moment.

2) Behaviour Driven Design (DDD): As I’ve been working on a BDD tool recently I’d be keen to discuss people’s opinions and ideas about BDD.

3) S.O.L.I.D. Principles: a set of 5 principles that you can use to guide your OO design toward some desirable properties (high-cohesion, low coupling, etc.).

If you want one of these then say so. If you want something else then propose it.

I’ll see you all on the 10th.

P.S. Don’t forget the OzVAN session is happening tomorrow evening (around 7:30pm local time). I probably won’t make it as I’ll be celebrating my 30th!

Tools and resources

There is a session next week, I've just been very slack about blogging about it. A few people have expressed sorrow over the fact that the idea for the original Perth ALT.NET session (sharing the tools that make us happy) never came to pass. With that in mind (and considering Hanselmans list hasn't been updated for a year or more):

What: Open Toolbox Show and Tell

When: Wednesday 13th May, 5:30pm - ???

Where: 43 Below, Cnr Barrack & Hay St, Perth

Bring a laptop (or a thumbstick) with your favorite tools on them and be prepared to show them off. 

Also, I keep forgetting that the official Virtual ALT.NET group is now live. They have a schedule of sessions and a repository of previous sessions for you to check out. Remember that the OzVAN sessions run every 2nd Monday and the next one is this Monday (the 11th). This one is about Powershell. Go and check it out!

TestDriven Dojo a-go-go

Well the bad news is that I forgot to book the 43below function room for the dojo until tonight and the room is taken by the Young Engineers. The good news it that they're going to put us in the restaurant and there is plenty of room (and beer) for both of us.

The event is Wednesday, 8th April starting at 6ish. Beer of the Month is still listed as Fat Yak on the website but as it's April 1st you never know.

Thus far it looks to be shaping up as a good event with:

Jeremy Thake - SharePoint and TypeMock

Rhys Campbell - WinForms

Stephen Price - Silverlight

Tiang Cheng - ASP.NET with WatiN

I don't have a link for Tiang but he sent me this:

Tiang Cheng is a Software Developer at Westnet. He works primarily in .NET 2.0 and 3.5, coding in both Visual Basic and C#. In his free time he codes Ruby on Rails web applications and Device Communcations technology (RFID and Rally Timing). He has a strong interest in Continuous integration, Testing techniques, and Software Quality and Measurement.  

Don't forget to bring your Coding Ninja outfit (I refuse to call it a Gi) and be prepared to jump in at a moments notice. Also, just two last things. 1) If you are coming please register at http://perthaltnet0904.eventbrite.com/ 2) Tell your friends (or if you think TDD is stupid tell your enemies). That is all. See you there.

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.