It’s That Time Of Year Already

November’s meeting is the last Sydney alt.net get together for the year so this month we’re going to have an alt.net beers evening with the excuse of it being an early Christmas party – yes it’s that time of year already.

We’ll be gathering at the Brooklyn (cnr Gorsvenor and George St’s) at the usual time, chatting about alt.net topics, telling war stories, talking about whatever comes out of PDC, and generally being social and having a good ol’ time.

No need to RSVP this month – just come along!

October Meeting – Selenium and Mass Transit

This month we’re going to have 2 short presentations as follows:

First up, Jodie Miners (@jodiem) will be presenting a slightly longer version of the lightning talk she prepared for Tech.Ed (which didn’t quite happen) on automated functional testing with Selenium.

In the other mini-talk David Keaveny will be talking about Mass Transit and how it’s being used in a large, real world environment and some of the lesson’s learned.

Both talks should be great, plus we’ll have room in the schedule for more of the conversation that made last months meeting so much fun, so why don’t you put October 27th in your diaries and we’ll see you there.

Oh, if you could RSVP via the poll on the right as per usual we’d appreciate it. Thanks!

September Meeting

Next week is our September meeting and in the spirit of “try a lot of things and keep what works” we’re going to try an unstructured open discussion evening.  Think of it a little like lightning talks, only more random and spontaneous :-)

Here’s the way it’ll work:

• Everyone turns up and consumes beer and pizza
• We start to talk about something
• We see where the conversation goes from there
• As soon as the conversation slows we switch to another topic

To make this actually useful and not just a case of sitting around and staring at each other, it would be great if you could think of a few things you’d like to talk about before hand and brings those ideas with you on the night.  Either something you want to share or an idea you want to explore and understand further.  (Feel free to leave a comment if you have a goldfish like attention span and will probably forget your great idea by the time Tuesday rolls around).

Whatever happens we’ll do our best to make the night as amusing and informative as we can so that the time you take out of your evening to attend is well worthwhile.

P.S. There’s a few topics I have in mind as backups so don’t panic if you can’t think of anything.

RSVP via the poll on the site as per usual and we’ll you there!

August Lightning Talks – Subjects

I mentioned a little while back that this month we’re doing another round of lightning talks.  Well, I’m glad to say that we now have a list of volunteers ready to bedazzle us with their rapid presentations of 10 minutes or less, packed with dollops of content, a dash of humour and maybe even just a sprinkle of awesomeness!

Come along this month for the fun! You won’t want to miss out!

Here’s the session list:

Damian Maclennan (@damianm): Making ASP.NET MVC web apps simple using Fluent NHibernate and StructureMap.  Maybe a little PSake thrown in for good measure.

Angus McDonald (@Falkayn) or Neil Hougton (@nizmow): DDD-inspired architecture in the real world.

Josh Roth: Experiences dealing with a tightly coupled code base.

Dave Newman (@whatupdave):  One of the following:

1. Package management with horn
2. Writing maintainable javascript with jQuery plugins
3. Integration test coding patters with Watin
4. Getting started with Rake

James Crisp: Securing your ASP.NET MVC site against code injection and x-site scripting

Omar Besiso (@omarbesiso) : Sync your data across the world in 10 minutes. A Sync Framework showdown

Let us know you’re coming by responding to the poll on the site.

August Lightning Talks

After a good, thought provoking night last night with the talk on M and Oslo and DSL goodness (thanks Justin) we’re changing things around for the next meeting and doing another round of lightning talks.

We had a lot of fun doing this last time and saw a wide range of subjects covered as well as getting some people through their first public presentations.

So, I need some presenters - if that’s you then drop me a line with your session idea. (if you don’t have my email address subscribe to the ozalt.net mailing list and reply to the thread in there)

A few rules

1. Duration: 10 minutes or less.
2. Subject: Anything as long as it’s interesting (and probably dev related)
3. Experience: No previous presentation experience required
4. Attitude: Have fun! Grumpy bastards not allowed

I’ll finalise the list in a few weeks so that people have time to prep.

July Meeting – Oslo

Want to know what the plan is for this month’s alt.net meeting?  We’re going to have Justin King (@JustinKing) give us a run through of Oslo.

Here’s the abstract for you:

”Oslo” is the codename for Microsoft’s forthcoming modelling platform. Modelling is used across a wide range of domains and allows more people to participate in application design and allows developers to write applications at a much higher level of abstraction. i.e Model Driven Development

“Oslo” consists of:

* A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner

* A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models

* A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components

Justin King will show the different parts of Oslo including the modelling language M, Repository and the tools to build an application and textural DSL's.

Given that a critical element of DDD is building a model (or multiple models) of the domain and keeping it current, tools like Oslo may be quite useful. I think this will be quite an interesting session, so register your intent to attend via the poll on the site and we’ll see you there.

F# Presentation - Slides and Code Now Available

Slides and code from Mark Needham’s presentation on F# last night are now available from his blog - http://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2009/06/30/f-what-ive-learnt-so-far/

Thanks again to Mark for presenting!