November Meeting - Recorded for your pleasure

For those who couldn't make it on the night, we have the recording available from Livestream and embedded here for your ease:

Watch live streaming video from rbanks54 at livestream.com

Many thanks again to Udi for coming to speak with us.  Enjoy!

November - Udi Dahan

It’s the last meeting of the year for us, and Udi Dahan of NServiceBus fame who is in town for his mind-bending systems design course has kindly accepted an invitation to talk at our group this month.

RSVP via the poll as per usual, tell you friends about it, and we’ll see you on the night!

October – Homebrew Development for the iPhone and WP 7

So you want to have a bit of fun and write apps for mobile phones. Make a million dollars.  Retire to a beach on a tropical island and have drinks with little umbrellas in them.  For a while now the iPhone has been the obvious choice but a .Net developer maybe getting into Objective-C has always seemed a little too much effort?

Well, maybe it's not so hard. Craig Dunn is going to run us through application development for the iPhone using MonoTouch, and he should know something about it since he helped write the book! He’ll also likely have a few copies as giveaways on the night as well.

And then there’s the new and shiny Windows Phone 7 which is almost here and being talked up heavily at the moment.  For us .NET developers it makes an obvious choice as a target platform but is it worth bothering with?  What do we need for development on that platform? How do we get apps into the app store? How do we make sexeh gamez for it? And so on. For the answers to that we’ll have Luke Drumm.

This should make for an interesting night and might just get those creative juices flowing so you can go write apps to generate a little extra cash in the pocket, which you can then use to buy other gadgets to play with :-)  What more could you want?!

RSVP if you’re coming (as per usual), bring your friends and we’ll see you on the night!

September – TDD and OOO (Over-Enthusiastic OO)

Dave, Tchepak perhaps best unknown for being anonymous (thanks Richard :)), will demonstrate a style of TDD/BDD that can be used to help with problem decomposition and driving very loosely coupled OO designs. We'll tackle a simple example and over-enthusiastically apply OO principles like SRP to produce a ludicrously over-OO'd solution, with the aim of finding some techniques we can apply more pragmatically to more realistic problems.

P.S. Dave will be using NSubstitute so you’ll also see how to use that mocking framework in more detail.  It’s also assumed that you know what TDD is all about, even if you don’t practice it.

Let us know you’re coming via the poll on the site as per usual.

August Coding Dojo

Apologies for the late notice! Tech.Ed Australia got in the way for me.  Anyway, as discussed at the end of the last meeting, this month we’re doing another code dojo.

The last one was fantastic and had a great energy to it, so come along, bring your laptop (or pair up with someone when you get there), try something different and don’t miss out!

RSVP in the usual manner (i.e. via the poll on the site) and we’ll see you there.

July - NoSQL, MongoDB and Unscripted

This month we're going to have a presentation by Michelle D'Souza (@michdsouza) on NoSQL databases and MongoDB.

Here a quick blurb about session:

 

The talk starts with a brief introduction to the NoSql movement, what it encompasses and an overview of the different types of NoSql databases out there. I then dive into MongoDB and highlight some of its simple & advanced features. I also hope to share some of my experience in introducing & setting up Mongo in one of my previous projects.

And a little about Michelle:

 

I am a developer / consultant with ThoughtWorks and recently moved from Canada to Sydney. I'm really looking forward to being involved in more user / community groups in the area.

This will lead nicely into the next Unscripted section where we launch into discussion on NoSQL, the latest in ASP.NET tooling (eg, Razor view engine), BDD etc.

As usual there will be food and drink provided, so please RSVP using the poll on the right.

Lightning Talks Wrap Up

We had a great set of lightning talks last night with lots of people presenting, including some first-timers which is great to see! A big thank you to everyone who stepped up and gave a talk.   You made the night a lot of fun! :-) Below are a list of resources from the presenters (I’ll update the list with more links as they come in): Wiryadi Adidharma – C# 4.0 Dynamic & Expando

• Blog

Miguel Santos – VSTO & Office 2007

• EgggHead Cafe Article

Colin Scott – Fluent API’s

• http://github.com/ColinScott/AbstractState

Miguel Madero – Blend is like… Nick Gunn – Concurrency Runtime

• http://monadnomad.com/blog/post/CCR-Lighting-Talk.aspx

Anthony Egerton – NSubstitute

• NSubstitute Announcement
• http://nsubstitute.github.com/

Joshua Roth – Being a Developer in a Non-Ideal Company

• http://unfoundedexception.blogspot.com/2010/07/tips-on-how-to-survive-as-developer-at.html

Richard Banks – Small Basic

• Small Basic
• TeachingKidsProgramming.com

Lightning Talks for June

This month we’re having another lightning talks round.  These nights are always good fun and great opportunity for people who’ve never done a presentation before to have a go.

All you need do is suggest a topic that you can talk about for a measly 10 minutes, either via the comments on this post or by contacting Richard on twitter (@rbanks54).

We need you to make this night work, so think of something and send in a topic suggestion, and we’ll see you on the night!

OpenSpaces Conference

As mentioned in the news section of the main OzAlt.Net site an Australian Alt.Net open spaces conference is in the early stages of being organised.

If you're interested in going and want to avoid travelling then you'd better get on to the conference organising site and indicate your preference that it be held in Sydney!  Go to http://ozopenspace.pbworks.com/expressions-of-interest and let everyone know where and when you want it to happen.

May – Iron Python & Iron Ruby

Python has been around for a while now and Ruby on Rails has certainly brought the Ruby language to the fore in recent years.  So what is it with all this dynamic language stuff that’s been going on in the industry lately, and why should you care?  More importantly, why is Microsoft bothering to release projects that allow Ruby and Python to run on the .NET stack?  And what tools would you need to use to do your own development work using one of these languages?

The answers to all these questions and more can be asked of none other than Nick Hodge (@nickhodge) at this months meeting as we get a run down on the DLR, the languages themselves and the tools you need to develop with them.

If you’re coming, let us know via the poll on the site so we can make sure there’s enough Pizza to go around :-)

We look forward to seeing you there!

April – It’s DDD Time

This month we’ll have Jak Charlton (@JakCharlton) of Devlicio.us, the JetBrains academy fame doing an informal, interactive DDD talk.

Plenty of opportunity for you to ask questions and get a better grasp on how this DDD stuff might apply for you.

Here’s the basic outline of the session:

 

Practical Domain Driven Design, Message Based Architectures and CQRS

The original book on Domain Driven Design was subtitled "Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software", and even where a system does not merit "full on" DDD, many of the practices and principles can massively reduce the complexity of software, especially when combined with messaging and events.

This informal talk and Q&A will cover concepts including the Ubiquitous Language, Domain Experts, Aggregate Roots, and touch on more esoteric ideas including Message Based Architecture and Command Query Responsibility Separation

Here’s Jak’s bio for those who are interested:

 

 

Jak Charlton, is now based in Sydney, Australia, and working as a Senior Consultant for Readify (http://readify.net/). Jak is a well known community figure in the Microsoft and .NET worlds with a reputation for a passionate view of development.

With primary interests around Domain Driven Design, software architecture, and putting the world to rights one debate at a time, he is a strong believer in principles and practices, allowing developers to concentrate on delivering business value.

 

If you’re coming, let us know via the poll on the right hand side of the site and don’t forget to invite your friends.

We’ll have some JetBrains and TekPub giveaways for those who are there on the night. All the more reason for you to come along!

March Coding Dojo Summary

Last night was our groups first Coding Dojo and it went really well and I think everyone got something out of it.

For the curious people were given a choice of one of the following Katas to do:

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataPotter

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataMinesweeper

http://codingdojo.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?KataBankOCR

We then grouped everyone into kata clusters based on their choices so that people working on the same kata were in the same room and could talk about design and implementation issues together.

The clusters then tackled their katas via two 40 minute sessions with a pizza break in between and time at the end to talk about what they learned.

What was great to see was that almost everyone elected to work in a pair (or a trio) and that people were trying to use techniques and approaches that they hadn’t tried before.  We even had one pair attempt the Minesweeper kata using F# (with tests in C#) even though they had never written a line of F# code before! Sweet!

The camaraderie on display was excellent, as was the joking and fun, and the when the kata clusters talked with each other about how they went it was great seeing such openness from people about what they screwed up and what they learned.

For everyone who came – thank you for making it such a great and enjoyable night!!

JetBrains Support

Many thanks go to Thoughtworks for supporting our group by allowing us to use their premises and drink their beer on Tuesday nights.  It's very appreciated.
And now we can start saying thank you to JetBrains as well, since they are providing copies of ReSharper or DotTrace as give aways for meetings.  We need to have around 30 people along to be able to do the giveaway, so bring some friends to the code dojo this month and see if you can land yourself a free license :-)

See you there!

March Meeting – Coding Dojo

This month we’re going to be running a coding dojo.  For those who don’t know what one of these are here’s a definition from the CodingDojo wiki:

A Coding Dojo is a meeting where a bunch of coders get together to work on a programming challenge. They are there have fun and to engage in DeliberatePractice in order to improve their skills.

We’re going to pick something simple for the challenge so that you don’t have to think about the subject domain too much letting you focus more on the techniques you use.  So if you’re still learning TDD, or you want to try MSpec, or you want to practice pairing with someone and see how that works, or you want to try solving a problem using F#, or you just want to come and geek out with some code then this is for you.

And when you come, remember to bring not only a willingness to learn and try something new, but also a willingness to help others out.  These things work best when everyone is willing to help everyone else.

Oh, don’t forget, bring your laptop if you have one, and if you don’t have one, then don’t worry! We’ll get you paired up with someone else on the night. :-)

Finally, don’t forget to RSVP (on the right) so we can sort out catering as well.  See you there!

Automated Build and Deploy slides & links

Following on from last Tuesday's meeting, here are some links and slides for those wanting to look further into Rake builds and PowerShell deployments.

nRake on GitHub
nRake slides from last meeting

psDeploy on GitHub
psDeploy slides from last meeting

February Meeting – Automated Build and Deploy

Sure, many people do automated builds, but how many do automated deployments?  And if they do, how do they actually do it?

This month Romain Prieto and James Crisp will be talking about various automated build and deployment options with a number of tools being talked about, including nRake (Rake builds for .NET), TFS Deployer and PowerShell.  If you’ve got something of your own you’d like to show off then come along prepared to talk about it :-)

We’ll also chat about the latest happenings and toss around some ideas for coding dojos so come along and be a part of the community.  We’d love to see you there!