Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Feb 09, Lightning Talks Wrap Up

Last night we ran a series of lightning talks for our regular Alt.Net get together and what a great night it turned out to be.

Lots of fun, lots of interesting topics, lots of passion in the room for the things being spoken about and an amusing sense of panic by presenters trying to stay within the 10 minutes :-)

Many thanks to the presenters who put in the time and effort to get something together on their topic of choice and to cover it in as much depth as possible with the time given them. So kudos to Justin King, Omar Besiso, Paul Theriault, Anthony Egerton, Mark Wallis and Miguel Madero! Well done!

As a follow up, the evening went so well that people have expressed a desired to see more evenings like this.  So, how often do you want to do them?  Answer the poll on the site and let us know.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

February Meeting – Lightning Talks

As promised, we have a series of lightning talks happening this month for our February meeting.  A big thank you to everyone who put there hand up to present.

So, without further ado, here’s the list of topics and presenters (and also the running order for the night):

  • Code Analysis and NDependJustin King
  • PostSharp & EntLib, Hand in HandOmar Besiso
  • OWASP.NET – Paul Theriault
  • Strict Mocks Suck – Anthony Egerton
  • Getting Started With CI in Less Than 10 MinutesMark Wallis
  • Memory Leaks in SilverlightMiguel Madero

Let us know you’re coming by RSVP’ing at http://rsvp.sydney.ozalt.net/feb09

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Call for Topics – February Lightning Talks

For something a little different this month we’re going to do a number of lightning talks.

Talks should be about 5-10 minutes in length and can be on any subject of your choosing, with the proviso that it’s .NET related. That means no speed-knitting or how-to-make-money-using-pyramid-schemes talks :-)

Ping me with your talk proposal (msn.com@rbanks54 or http://twitter.com/rbanks54) and I’ll let you know soon if you’re presenting or not.  It’ll just depend on the number of people wanting to talk and if we there is subject overlap or not.

I’d really like to give the first opportunities to people who haven’t presented before but would like to try.  Something short is a great opportunity to get a feel for what presenting is all about and see if it’s something you might enjoy.  Oh, don’t worry about stuffing up – it’s only 5-10 minutes, and you’re amongst friends!

If you want some subject ideas, how about one of the following:

  • Template engines
  • IoC mini-smackdown: Castle vs Spring vs StructureMap vs Unity
  • JQuery changes in 1.3
  • Iron Python
  • Watin
  • Logging frameworks (nlog, log4net, etc)
  • Alternate IDE’s (e.g. SharpDevelop)
  • psake and rake
  • one of the SOLID principles
  • F#
  • Something new in VS2010/.NET 4.0
  • xDD in a nutshell. (DDD, TDD, BDD, FDD, …)
  • XNA
  • Show off your pet project and some of the lessons learnt during it.

Of course, you can do anything else beyond that as well.  I’m just trying to seed some ideas here.

P.S. For those that talked to me directly after the meeting, my goldfish memory kicked in and I forgot what your subjects were.  You’ll need to let me know as well.