Sydney's ALT.NET Group

January Meeting - Kinect and Improv

2012-01-26T11:05:00.000+11:00

It's a New Year and it's time to fulfil that New Year's resolution you made about getting to more community events. What better way to do that than getting along to this months meeting where we're looking at something new and trying something new.

Our two sessions this month are as follows:

The Technology behind Microsoft Kinect - Lewis Benge
This session will spend some time looking at how the popular Microsoft Kinect actually works, its limitations, and competitors. We’ll discuss the various libraries that are available for use, and the pros and cons of each – as well as getting in to some code around getting up and running using this unique technology.
What we’ll cover:

Introduction to TOF sensors.
How Kinect differs between other hardware.
Overview of Kinect for Windows, Kinect for Xbox 360, OpenNI/NITE, and Omek platforms
Getting started with the KfW SDK using a Kinect sensor.

Improv Session - Various Artists
Yes, this session one is an experiment! It could be really successful, hilarious and fun or it could be a complete, utter and abject failure. You'll just have to show up to find out which it will be.

The idea here is that someone volunteers to talk for 5 minutes or less on potentially any topic at all. The audience then suggests a topic at random. The volunteer/victim then talks on it.

When the 5 minutes is up, we go to the next volunteer and try it again.

As per usual RSVP on the site for catering purposes, spread the word and we'll see you on the night.

November Meeting: 3 Pack

2011-11-21T14:47:00.001+11:00

For November, we have 3 interesting short talks:

John Bristowe (@JohnBristowe) - The Life and Times of a Developer Evangelist
The role of a Developer Evangelist is certainly an interesting one. From the vantage point of where John Bristowe has sat for the past number of years, he’s seen a lot – having worked as a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft for the past six years and now with Telerik APAC. In this session, John will share with you some of his more memorable experiences over the past decade and provide insights into the state of the tech industry today as it pertains to software development.

Joshua Roth - How To Write Less Comments
Uncle Bob Martin's book Clean Code opened my eyes to the beauty and importance writing of clean code. The good news is that writing clean code is much easier than you might think. I'll be sharing a few a simple techniques that you can easily apply to your daily coding that will help turn your code into a thing of beauty. At the very least, future maintainers of your code will curse your name a few less times due to your contributions to the code base.

Aaron Powell (@slace) - Lightweight Editors
VS is our standard editor but when you're not using .NET what should you go for? Or how about the crazy idea of ditching VS for .NET dev too

This will be the last meeting for the year, so you don't want to miss it :-)

And as always, please RSVP via the poll on the site.

October: Windows 8 Install-fest and Hack Night

2011-10-10T11:08:00.000+11:00

Following the "Practice, Don't Preach" motto this month, we're running a Windows 8 Install-fest and Hack night. The idea is simple:

1. No Windows? No Problem! Want to install Windows 8 into a VM, bootable VHD or some other device and you just haven't had the time to download or install it yet? Bring your gear along and we'll sort that out for you. Just sign that insurance waiver first! :-D

2. Got Windows? Great! It's time to understand how Metro apps work in more detail. What better way than to set aside some specific time and do some exploring and learning with others! Come along and poke Windows hard in the gut! You can try and build something awesome in one night if you want (and we hope you do), but far more importantly we want you to learn something and share what you learned with others.

For the record, we don't care if you want to use HTML/JS/CSS, C# or C++, heck we'll even let you use VB.NET if you really, really want to. Whatever the case, come for the fun, the learning and the pizza!

See you there!

And as always, RSVP via the poll on the site.

September Presentation Slides

2011-09-28T10:12:00.003+10:00

Nick has kindly shared his slide deck on "Moving from SQL Server to MongoDB" from yesterday's presentation. You can find it here:

http://www.slideshare.net/nickhac/moving-from-sql-server-to-mongodb

September Talks

2011-09-19T11:03:00.000+10:00

This month we have two talks as follows:

Nick Holmes a Court (@nickhac) - Moving From SQL Server to MongoDB

The problems faced at BuzzNumbers related to monitoring Social Media posts

Why choose NoSQL over SQL Server/MySQL

Why we chose Mongo over other NoSQL solutions

How to design a NoSQL schema if you are used to relational databases

How BuzzNumbers designed a solution thatallows infinite scaleability using low cost commodity hardware and.NET

Why we still use .NET as a primary development/hosting environment and how we also leverage Open Source where optimal

Lessons Learned.

Brendan Forster (@shiftkey) - Attending BUILD and Developing for Window 8

Brendan is back from the Build conference and has a shiny new tablet, Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 on it. This is a good time to play with Win8 and have an open discussion about what it all means for us moving forward and what we need to do to roll with the changes.

As per usual, let us know you are coming by RSVPing via the poll on the right of the site.

August Talks

2011-08-21T20:30:00.000+10:00

For the month of August we have two talks, as follows:

Ducas Francis (@ducas) - JQuery Mobile

Building web apps targeted at mobile platforms is becoming increasingly popular, but it can be quite difficult to get your site working on all devices. See how you can use jQuery Mobile to make your MVC apps come to life and easily build mobile experiences that work across all modern phone and tablet operating systems. That’s right… one version of your site CAN work on iPhone, iPad, Android and WP7!

Philip Laureano (@philiplaureano) - Blind Refactoring

Have you ever wondered if there was a better way to learn refactoring? Martin Fowler's Refactoring book was a great introductory book on how to clean up legacy code bases, but over the years, what I have found missing in that book is one a set of guidelines that links all the different types of refactoring techniques together into one continuous process. In this talk, I will show you how to take almost any code base, and refactor everything from the simplest nested' 'if' blocks all the way to extracting an actual domain/object model to using an IOC container framework. Using a set of repeatable steps, I will show you how easy it is to refactor almost any code base, even if you don't understand every part of the application.

We may also have a different MC than usual since Richard will be at TechEd and James may away as well. If that's the case you'll be in the hands of Brendan Forster - be kind!

As per usual, RSVP via the poll for catering and don't forget to bring a friend! It should be a great night with plenty to see.

July Meeting Talks

2011-07-22T11:57:00.004+10:00

We have a nice mix of talks this month:

Jason Stangroome (@jstangroome)
PowerShell is built on .NET and uses curly braces but that's where the relationship with C# ends. I'll demonstrate some of the intricacies of PowerShell that give the language its power and pitfalls.

Wiryadi Adidharma (@toocoolfortwitter)
High Performance Web Sites
14 Steps to Faster-Loading Web Sites, with examples for ASP.NET Web Sites.

Pawel Pabich (@PawelPabich)
Unreliable end to end integration tests can cause much more harm than good. So we will have have a look at what constitutes a valuable integration test and how to avoid common pitfalls when writing one (samples in C# Selenium Webdriver).

Please RSVP on the poll to the right.
See you on Tuesday!

July Meeting: Call for speakers!

2011-07-13T12:14:00.002+10:00

As things seem to be pretty good with the 3 X 20min short talks format, let's do it again this month. Let me know if you're up for a talk (@jtcrisp) or comment below.

Also feel free to give us the highlights of an awesome DDD talk if you think it'd suit :-)

June Meeting

2011-06-25T14:15:00.000+10:00

For this months 3x20 talks we have the following volunteers:

Daniel Bartholomew (@dbartholomew) - Continuous Delivery
Peter Gfader (@peitor) - NCrunch
Sam Saffron (@samsaffron) - Dapper

Many thanks to them for putting something together for us.

Don't forget to let us know you're coming by RSVP'ing via the poll on the site as per usual and we'll see you there!

June - Call For Presenters

2011-06-15T22:16:00.000+10:00

Last month's 3x20 session was great so we're doing it again. :-)

That means, if you're willing to give a 20 minute talk or demo then leave a comment or contact Richard (@rbanks54). If you've never presented before then this is a great way to get started, and we encourage you to do so, and if you're wanting to give a 20-minute cut down version of their DDD Sydney talks then we're happy to be your test bed :-)

May Meet - CoffeeScript, Android and NBuilder

2011-05-14T10:11:00.003+10:00

This month, we've got 3 short talks, and will have a longer social break in the middle. Our speakers are:

Thomas Johansen (@thomasjo) - CoffeeScript
CoffeeScript is the perfect language for those that love JavaScript, but feel slightly embarrassed by all the braces and semicolons. At the end of the day, CoffeeScript is primarily about exposing the good parts of JavaScript, and doing more by writing less.

Craig Dunn (@conceptdev) - Fast ANDroid Furious
Quick overview of Mono-for-Android (mono-android.net) and how to build mobile applications for the Android platform using C# (and how you can then re-use that code on iOS and WP7... time permitting:). Covers sys req's, setup, Android basics, Mono features and gotchas.

Joshua Roth - NBuilder
Through a fluent, extensible interface, NBuilder allows you to rapidly create test data, automatically assigning values to properties and fields that are of the type of the built in .NET data types. NBuilder allows you to override for properties you are interested in using lambda expressions and is an excellent framework to use for data generation in your unit tests. This talk will cover the basic features of NBuilder as well as some of the exciting new features that have become available in the latest release. You can find out more at http://nbuilder.org/ and http://code.google.com/p/nbuilder/.

Please RSVP on the poll as usual to help with catering. See you soon!

May - Call for Presenters

2011-05-08T15:00:00.003+10:00

This month, as decided last meeting, we're planning for 2-3 short talks (10-20 minutes each), and a longer social break in the middle. The idea is to have at least 2 different areas talked about on the night, plus more time to mingle and chat.

If you've got something to talk about, please either add a comment to this post or send a tweet to @rbanks54 or @jtcrisp.

So, what do you want to talk about? We want to hear what you have to say! Don't feel constrained to just straight .NET topics. Javascript, Web tech, Mobile, etc all good.

April Meeting - Public Holiday!

2011-04-12T14:33:00.004+10:00

There will be no April ALT.NET meeting as it falls on Tuesday 26 April, a public holiday. Have a great Easter break :-)
Stay tuned for details on the May meeting.

March Lightning Talks

2011-03-24T06:43:00.001+11:00

Here’s a quick list of the subjects being talked about at this months meeting:

Node.js – Aaron Powell
Progressive Enhancement – Wiryadi Adidharma
How to Convince Management to Trial Agile – Tariq Hassanen
NSpec – Shannon Cornish
Writing Linq to Jira – TBC

And we may slip an extra one in at the end depending on how time goes.

So, come along, and don’t forget to RSVP! Beer and food is provided as always so we need to know how many of you are coming :-)

March – Lightning Talks, Call for Presenters

2011-03-08T08:56:00.001+11:00

This month, as promised, we’re up for another round of lightning talks. These nights are always great fun, give you plenty to think about and offer a chance to get up and do some public speaking for those who’ve never done it before.

So if you want to speak then either add a comment to this post or send a tweet to @rbanks54 or @jtcrisp.

And in case you’re wondering a lightning talk is a mini-presentation that lasts between 5 and 10 minutes. If you go over 10 minutes we cut you off :-)

So, what do you want to talk about? We want to hear what you have to say!

February Meeting - Engineering at Google

2011-02-11T10:09:00.005+11:00

This month, we are lucky enough to have @dhanji from Google talking about the development practices there.

In his own words:

The engineering discipline at Google can best be described as the Cowboy Methodology. This is a narration of my experience fighting that tide--trying something new, applying agile methods to a start-up like project inside an Internet giant of some 23k people. Can Agile ever really work outside the enterprise where requirements (though changing) are reasonably well-understood? In a consumer-facing start-up all bets are off--your very reason for existence changes day to day.

In this environment can we succeed? Have we already failed horribly and don't know it? Come hear our strange story and share your impressions.

And a bit about Dhanji:

Dhanji R. Prasanna, Software Engineer at Google

I have worked on Agile projects for several years (at ThoughtWorks and elsewhere) before joining Google as an engineer on Google Wave, working on the Search+indexing pipeline and then on performance and APIs. I have created and contribute to several open source projects including Guice, Sitebricks, MVEL, Maven, and others. My code runs in nearly every Java server at Google and I regularly consult on performance and design questions for various teams.

I am the author of "Dependency Injection" by Manning Publications, and a regular speaker on the Java software engineering circuit.

Please RSVP with the poll on the right, and see you there!

January Meeting - .NET BDD tools, Android Development

2011-01-20T22:58:00.004+11:00

For the first meeting of the new year, we will have 2 short talks the opportunity for discussion. Without further ado, the talks are:

Richard Banks (@rbanks54): a comparison of native .NET BDD tools such as StoryQ and SpecFlow (and maybe StorEvil).

James Crisp (@jtcrisp): Starting Android development; the platform, app design and abstractions, the four lettered J word and its eye dee ees, the emulator and some code too.

It's going to be an informal meeting with plenty of chance to chat and ask questions.

As usual, please RSVP with the poll if you want food and beer :-)

November Meeting - Recorded for your pleasure

2010-11-30T22:37:00.001+11:00

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

2010-11-25T13:34:00.001+11:00

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

2010-10-14T16:26:00.000+11:00

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)

2010-09-20T07:05:00.001+10:00

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

2010-08-30T08:48:00.001+10:00

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

2010-07-21T16:24:00.008+10:00

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

2010-06-30T11:39:00.002+10:00

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

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

Lightning Talks for June

2010-05-28T11:45:00.001+10:00

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

2010-05-27T22:32:00.000+10:00

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

2010-05-03T12:49:00.001+10:00

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

2010-04-12T15:13:00.001+10:00

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

2010-03-31T09:44:00.001+11:00

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

2010-03-13T07:53:00.000+11:00

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

2010-03-08T11:05:00.001+11:00

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

2010-02-26T12:13:00.011+11:00

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

2010-02-16T23:51:00.006+11:00

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!

January Meeting - iPhone and MonoTouch

2009-12-04T15:20:00.004+11:00

The first meeting in the new year will be on 19 January (not 26th as this is Australia day). As well as the usual news segment, and pizza, Ali Shafai will be giving us a taste of iPhone development, comparing both Objective C and MonoTouch.

In his own words:
In this session I'm planning to write a simple enough application in Objective-C and explain the structure of an iPhone application. Then we'll write the same application in C# using MonoTouch and we can compare the code and see the differences. I will assume you don't have any Objective-C knowledge, however being familiar with the C syntax is crucial. I will compare the Apple "recommended" pattern (observe the lack of "S" in front of pattern) to develop Objective-C applications to what we have in .Net land. I will at the end come to a conclusion why and when I would choose which tool. This is a real "Alt".Net session!

Also, here's Ali's bio:
Ali Shafai started programming a few months before he could touch a computer, during this time, he was the programmer, the program and the computer. Then he got his hands to real computers and learned COBOL, PL/I, BASIC, C, Prolog, X86 Assembly, C++, Object Pascal, C#, Python and Objective-C in that exact order. He can still remember the first program he wrote and the joy he felt writing it.
He moved to Sydney in 2001, was introduced to XP, TDD, CI and some other acronyms. In 2004 the company he was working for (EDI) won the 2004 Consensus Software Award and Microsoft Realising Potential Award, he then joined forces with Chris Anderson and Mark Wallis and formed PeerPlacements, a software talent management company. He is still enjoying programming and does freelance software development. His latest joy is Silverlight/Prism/Unity + iPhone/ObjC/MonoTouch.

As usual, please RSVP using the poll on the right to help with catering. I'll be sending out a reminder closer to date too to the Facebook group.

Hope everyone has a very merry Christmas and see you in the new year!

It’s That Time Of Year Already

2009-11-12T07:29:00.001+11:00

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

2009-10-01T23:36:00.003+10:00

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

2009-09-23T09:15:00.001+10:00

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

2009-08-11T22:27:00.002+10:00

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:

Package management with horn
Writing maintainable javascript with jQuery plugins
Integration test coding patters with Watin
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

2009-07-29T11:40:00.001+10:00

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

Duration: 10 minutes or less.
Subject: Anything as long as it’s interesting (and probably dev related)
Experience: No previous presentation experience required
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

2009-07-14T09:35:00.001+10:00

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

2009-07-01T09:47:00.001+10:00

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!

Food for June Meeting

2009-06-25T17:05:00.004+10:00

In an exciting break from tradition, we are planning to order gourmet pies from Pie Face for the June meeting. Comment quickly if you're desperate for pizza again :-)

June Meeting – Are You Coming?

2009-06-25T14:38:00.001+10:00

It’s RSVP time. If you’re coming, please let us know so that we can get the catering right.

Instead of posting a comment or replying to the facebook event, this time all you need to do is click an option in the poll on the right of this post (if you’re in an RSS reader just click through to the blog to see it).

Remember, this month we’ve got Mark Needham covering F# and we may also have a dynamic vs static language smackdown as well depending on how the time is going.

See you there!

Do you want an Aussie Alt.Net Conference?

2009-06-03T07:59:00.001+10:00

We’re currently trying to gauge the level of interest in having an Australian Alt.Net conference on the day before Tech.Ed AU.

Putting a conference together (even an open spaces one) takes quite a bit of effort so before we go down that path please help us out by responding to the poll in the right hand column.

June Meeting – F#

2009-05-28T07:36:00.002+10:00

It’s the first functional language to be included out of the box in Visual Studio. So what’s it all about? What can it do? and why should you care?

This month Mark Needham (@markhneedham) will give a run through of F# based on what he’s learnt through using it. Spread the word and we’ll see you on June 30th @ 6pm.

Edit: I originally wrote "dynamic" instead of "functional" when describing F#. Oops - my bad. I think I've been playing with too many new languages lately :-)

May Meeting - BDD

2009-05-21T07:30:00.001+10:00

According to Mike Cohn, the most critical risk facing most software development projects is the risk of developing the wrong product. He adds that on most projects this risk is entirely ignored.

Do you ever get the feeling, as the change requests start to mount up, that you have been developing the wrong product or wrong functionality? That growing sense of frustration that the customer is making it up as they go, often at your expense? All this despite detailed specs that everyone agreed to.

Over the past few years the idea of using customer facing tests as specification has started to slowly gain followers. Terms such as BDD, TDD, DDD are popping up more frequently. However, judging by forum and blog postings there appears to be confusion in the developer world about how to apply these concepts and how much benefit they really provide.

Ernie Josefik will share some practical experience of applying these ideas over the past 3 years and demonstrate a recent real-world application of customer facing tests.

Bio

Over the past 23 years Ernie Josefik has

deleted 1000's of lines of code (and written a few more)
skydived into a rugby league grand final
run a successful software practice (Dataview Solutions)
slid on his back down an ice mountain (after losing his skis and stocks)
delivered functional and simple to use software on 4 continents
and partaken in numerous other foolish, exciting and terrifying activities

He now spends his time on the equally tough battles of getting his children to brush their teeth and helping frustrated business clients to comprehend the gaps in their software requirements specs.

As usual, please RSVP either via the facebook group, or by adding a comment to this post. See you all there!

What Do You Want Next?

2009-04-28T23:29:00.001+10:00

When we first started the Sydney Alt.Net group we asked you what you wanted to hear about.

Since then we’ve covered a good number (though not all) of those subjects and when we pause and consider how quickly our industry moves you realise that it’s about time for us to take stock and reset the goals for what you’d like to see covered in the coming months.

So help us out and leave a comment on what you want to hear about or, even better, what you’d like to present on.

April Alt.Net Meeting

2009-04-22T18:06:00.002+10:00

A quick reminder that this month’s meeting is on this Tuesday, April 28th.

We’re having two presentations this month

Presentation 1

Do you arrive home after a long day at work to endless requests by family and friends to use the latest application you've been writing? Do local teens make regular visits to your house asking they can have another go of your application? When your colleagues at work finish for the day, do most of them stay on a little longer to use your application just because they enjoy using it so much?

Not so much? Well come and have a chat to Luke as he discusses some of the ways to make applications that people actually want to use.

In-between dodging imaginary attacks, making 'pow pow' noises and singing "We are the champions" throughout the office whilst 'playing' Visual Studio, Luke Drumm, has been known to speak Tech Ed, Code Camp, user groups and Microsoft with only a minimal loss of life, three bottles of 'mana' juice and the passing respect of at least one small child who once saw him almost complete the first level of Tetris.

Presentation 2

Introducing MEF. From concepts to examples.

Sergey will cover the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) a future extension of BCL, explaining high level concepts, and providing examples and possible usage scenarios.

Sergey Klementiev is a follower of CSDD or Common Sense Driven Development ;)

Help us out by RSVP-ing via the blog (add a comment) or Facebook so we can get the catering right. See you there!

March Open Spaces Wrap Up

2009-04-02T09:38:00.001+11:00

On Tuesday we ran our open spaces night and even though it was a smaller than usual turnout it was still a fun night.

The night started by throwing up some suggested topics and we ended up voting to decide the sessions we were most interested in talking about. As a result we had the following:

C# Code Contracts [by Richard Banks]
Seams (working effectively with legacy code) [by Dave Cameron]
Ruby, and
REST applications [both by James Crisp]

As an experiment we also used kyte.tv to do a live stream of the night (excluding the code contracts session) for those who couldn’t be there. If you couldn’t make it you can always catch up on what happened by watching the shows (part 1, part 2). Apologies for the break in the transmission; there was a short dropout of the 3g network connection. And at times the sound isn’t great – we’ll see what we can do to fix that in the future.

All up it was a fun night and I think everyone got something useful from it. This month we’ll return to the usual session format, so stay tuned to see what April has in store for us!

P.S. My sincere apologies go out for those who received the reminder late and couldn’t make it. I had a small chair to keyboard interface problem that meant I thought I had sent reminders when I actually hadn’t. Ooops! :-(

March Meeting – Open Spaces

2009-03-19T07:24:00.001+11:00

Last month we did lightning talks and the response was really positive - so much so that most of you want to see them done every 3 months! Cool.

When we first put the group together we talked about different formats for the nights and ways we could avoid things getting stale. Lightning talks was one of those options and that proved to work really well. In addition to that a number of you also wanted to see some open spaces nights (similar to how the Seattle alt.net conference is run). With this in mind we're going to make this month’s meeting an open space meeting.

For more information on what this involves check out the wikipedia entry on the subject.

So, what I need from you are some ideas for subjects – topics or practices you would like to see discussed or tools that you'd like to see demoed or talked about. So get your thinking caps on and let us know by adding a comment to this post.

We’ll put a poll on the site next week to help us work out which topics are the more popular ones so we can save a bit of time on the night.

JAOO User Group Night

2009-03-02T22:53:00.007+11:00

If you're interested in a tech evening with a couple of good speakers, you might want to check out the JAOO user group night on March 17. It is $15 to attend, and located in Darling Harbour, from 5-8pm. The main page for the evening doesn't seem to have info on the talks but a printed flyer had a bit more information. The talks are:

Erik Doernenburg on "Taking TDD to the Next Level"
Joel Pobar on "F#"

I've worked with Erik a number of times and seen him speak last year at JAOO. He is both very sharp and experienced - I suspect his talk will contain some real gems. I've also enjoyed a session given by Joel Pobar on F# at TechEd. So, although this is the first evening session JAOO has ever run in Sydney, I think it has the scope to be quite interesting and worth attending.

UPDATE: The JAOO site now has information about the talks. We've also been offered a $5 discount if we have 5+ people coming to the event, so feel free to comment if you plan to come (we'll be given a discount code to use when signing up).

UPDATE 2: Free tickets available for tomorrow night! Contact me for the code.

Feb 09, Lightning Talks Wrap Up

2009-02-25T08:59:00.001+11:00

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.

February Meeting – Lightning Talks

2009-02-10T14:36:00.001+11:00

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 NDepend – Justin King
PostSharp & EntLib, Hand in Hand – Omar Besiso
OWASP.NET – Paul Theriault
Strict Mocks Suck – Anthony Egerton
Getting Started With CI in Less Than 10 Minutes – Mark Wallis
Memory Leaks in Silverlight – Miguel Madero

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

Call for Topics – February Lightning Talks

2009-02-03T16:38:00.001+11:00

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.

The Australian Alt.Net Community is Alive

2009-01-14T12:49:00.001+11:00

You may have noticed that the URL for this site has changed. It’s now http://sydney.ozalt.net. This is because we now have an Australian Alt.Net community at http://ozalt.net with new groups starting in Brisbane and Perth over the next month or so.

There’s also a mailing list just for the Aussies, so if you find the fire hose that is the main alt.net mailing list to daunting, feel free to converse and ask questions in quieter channels with people in your same time zone.

The community is still growing and it’s your community, so feel free to get as involved as you like and help shape the future.

January Meeting – Practical TDD

2009-01-08T17:33:00.002+11:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m sure you all listed doing test driven development as one of your new years resolutions, right? What! You didn’t?! I’m shocked :-)

Well, regardless, come along on this month as Wiryadi Adidharma talks about …

Practical TDD:
- Unit Test guidelines
- Using Dependency Injection for testable design
- Unit testing with NHibernate
- Unit testing with ASP.NET MVC

We’ll also have the usual shenanigans with the monthly news & happenings as well as setting aside a bit of time for a discussion on the state of our profession and how we might improve it (or even if it needs improving in the first place). Make sure you bring your opinions else it’ll be a very short and quiet discussion. I don’t want to have to pull out my “sounds of crickets” recording!

RSVP by…

signing up to the meeting on Facebook
leaving a comment on this blog entry
emailing/tweeting James or Richard

December Meeting

2008-12-10T08:03:00.001+11:00

So at this point you'd be expecting that there might be some mention of what's happening for our December meeting, right? Well, the thing is, we're not having a December meeting.

Why? Simply because the meeting would fall between Christmas and New Years, and almost everyone will be on holidays (including myself).

As such our next get together will be in January and I'll post details closer to the date.

Until then, James & I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a fantastic New Year. If you're having a break enjoy your time off and relax, play games, work on your pet projects and sleep in. If you're working through then at least you can enjoy an easier commute to work each day and maybe even turn up to the office in shorts and a t-shirt.

See you all in January!

Location Change for November Meeting

2008-11-18T08:49:00.001+11:00

There's been a change in the location of the November meeting. It's no longer at the James Squire - we're now at the Atlassian offices; complete with free food and beer.

Details:

Atlassian
6pm for a 6.30pm start
185 Sussex St,
Sydney, NSW
Map: http://tinyurl.com/atlassian-location

See you all there!

November User Group Mega-Meeting

2008-11-16T22:42:00.001+11:00

This month Dave Thomas is in Sydney (see the previous post) so we're going to get all "community like" and combine with a few other user groups at the James Squire Brewhouse to have a listen to what Dave has to say on either Cloud Computing and/or Agile.

So come along as we get ourselves a little outside the Micro-sphere and hang out with the Scrum, SyXPAC and Java User Groups whilst having a listen & chat with Dave Thomas.

This meeting will also be our last meeting for the year. The good thing is that since we're at the James Squire we can hang around and have a quiet drink and a bit of a chat afterwards.

RSVP (so we know numbers) at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1361352 and I'll see you all there!

P.S. The normal group meetings will resume last Tuesday in January as per usual.

November Meeting - Early Heads Up

2008-11-13T17:52:00.001+11:00

This month it looks like we're going to have a guest speaker for our November meeting.

Dave Thomas is in Australia for a few days and has offered to speak to some of the Sydney user groups. It also looks like we'll be having a combined meeting with the Sydney Scrum group and the SyXPAC XP group which should make for a really interesting and fun night.

For those who don't know, Dave is the founder of Bedarra Research Labs, a company specializing in emerging software technologies, practices and applications. Dave himself was a founding director of the agile alliance, is a recognised thought leader and an engaging international speaker and has been involved with development of the Eclipse IDE, the IBM virtual machine and Smalltalk.

Dave has a few talks planned for the night:

Hey! You! Get On To My Cloud - Application Development in the Clouds

In this talk Dave will discuss the issues, technologies/tools and practices for cloud developers including Serious JavaScript, Dynamic Languages, Functional Programming – Map Reduce, LINQ and Erlang, Restful Services (URI, MIME, Stateless, JSON), Schema-less Databases.

Managing Lean and Agile In The Large Software Development -Best Practices for Large Scale Development

Agile Development per se doesn’t speak to large scale development involving many teams, geographically distributed working on complex products or applications where there are hard deliverables 12 – 18 months out. Dave will describe the practices beyond those used in Scrum and XP to articulate requirements, architecture, estimation and planning, team organization and management in challenges of large scale development.

Please note that details are still being firmed up but I wanted to let you know what's going on ahead of time. I'll post again once we have details finalised.

Links for October Talk: ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate

2008-10-29T23:10:00.001+11:00

Damian has made the links for the NHibernate part of the talk available on his blog but just in case you are lazy here they are:

NHibernate home page
NHForge for articles, FAQs and help
The NHusers Google Group
The Summer of NHibernate screencast series
Sharp Architecture is a project by Billy McCafferty to provide a "best practice" starter kit for an NHibernate / ASP.NET MVC project.
NHibernate in Action book from Manning publications.

Ali has also provided the link for the Sydney ALT.NET Assembla space (subversion repository and more). It's at http://www.assembla.com/spaces/AltNetSydney so feel free to go there and grab the source for last nights demo to have a look at.

October Meeting Summary

2008-10-28T23:00:00.001+11:00

It was another great night tonight with over 40 people in attendance and a lot of great interaction between the presenters and the rest of the group. Ali and Damian put on a great talk and I must say well done and many thanks to both of you!

News

Various Interesting Things:

Free version of Hyper-V Server Link
Common Service Locator (a common API for IoC Containers) - Link
DotNetRocks IoC Web Cast - Link
Utility: Contig - defrag a single file Link
XHTML 1.1 Templates project - Link
Crack.Net (access the internals of any .NET desktop application) - Link
JQuery Intellisense Support - Link Download

New software releases:

Rhino 3.5 - Link
Mono 2.0 - Link
Silverlight 2.0 - Link
Vista SP2 Beta - Link
StructureMap 2.5 - Link
DataDude GDR RC - Link
Watin 1.3 (now with Lambda support) - Link
Watin 2.0 CTP (firefox support) - Link

If you come across anything interesting, drop me a line or let us know at the next meeting.

What's Coming Up Next?

At this stage we have penciled in two talks for the November meeting on advanced TDD techniques and Aspect Oriented Programing (AOP) using PostSharp. This will be confirmed a little closer to the date so keep an eye on the site.

Also, with the growth in numbers we may need to think about moving to a new venue in the new year. We'll see how it goes, but if you know of a larger (and free) venue we might be able to use then please drop me a line.

P.S. Links for resources from tonight's talks and the SVN repository location will be made available on the site shortly.

Liberation Day: See Steve Ballmer - 6 Nov in Sydney

2008-10-23T17:40:00.002+11:00

I have a number of invitations available for the Sydney ALT.NET user group members to see Steve Ballmer talking in person about cloud computing and Microsoft's strategy in that space.

Following Steve's keynote, there will be two
demo sessions on the new technologies
being announced at the Professional Developers Conference.
On the Cloud side, Gianpaolo Carraro,
Senior Director, Microsoft Corporation, will
discuss Microsoft's vision for Cloud Computing
and how its various components come together.

On the Client side, Tim Sneath,
Director, Microsoft Corporation, will show you
technologies that work hand in hand with Cloud to
liberate you to build the applications
you dream of – for Windows or the Web.

If you want to book yourself a spot contact me for a registration code either via Twitter or email (rbanks54@msn.com) and I'll get you the code and registration URL ASAP.

Registration's close on Monday, so hurry!!

(And if you can't make it you can watch it online Click Here For Details)

October's Meeting - Tuesday 28th

2008-10-21T07:22:00.001+11:00

Our next Sydney ALT.NET meeting is on next week so stick a reminder in your calendars, put a post it on your monitor about it or tie a piece of string around your finger - what ever works for you :-)

On Tuesday 28th we'll have the following agenda:

6:00 pm - Welcome & News (including a group chat about whatever has come out of PDC)

6:15 pm - Pizza & Beers

6:45 pm - Session: "Using ASP.NET MVC with NHibernate" presented by Ali Shafai & Damian MacLennan

In this session Damian and Ali will dissect (yes, there will be blood) a not so imaginary ToDo application to show you how you can use NHibernate to map your database entities to C# classes and use the ASP.NET MVC framework to present and interact with them, and then persist the changes.
For those not in the know, NHibernate is a port of the popular Hibernate ORM framework from Java and the ASP.NET MVC is Microsoft's shiny new web development framework that enables applications to built around the MVC pattern in a much simpler way that ASP.NET does.

Ali is an architect and developer working for PeerPlacements Pty Ltd. He loves developing for mobile and portable devices and challenges they bring to his day. Ali was introduced to XP in 2001 and later to Agile, he’s done unspeakable things ever since. He loves making sarcastic comments.

Damian has made technology his career for the best part of ten years. He has spent a lot of time working as a Microsoft based web developer, a Solutions Architect working in the media management and delivery field and is currently employed as the Director of Technology for Inspire, a non profit based in Sydney. Outside of that, his passions are guitar and cycling.

8:00 pm - Go home (promise!)

To help with catering we'd appreciate an RSVP:

sign up to the October event on Facebook
leave a comment on this blog entry
drop a line on the LinkedIn group
send a tweet to http://twitter.com/rbanks54
or email Richard Banks

So there you have it folks! Stick Tuesday October 28th in your diary and we'll see you there - and don't forget to tell your friends!!

Links for September Talks

2008-10-01T15:27:00.001+10:00

Downloads from last night's talks are now available for you to grab at your leisure:

James Crisp's Ruby session

Richard Banks' Rhino Mocks session

Enjoy!

And We're Away!!

2008-09-30T22:13:00.001+10:00

Wow! What a great turnout tonight for the Sydney ALT.NET group! We had around 35 in attendance and lots of interaction during the presentations which was fantastic, plus a few of the guys were live tweeting during the night.

In fact, we had so many discussions and conversations during the sessions that we ran a fair bit over time. It was probably the only downside to the evening and I sincerely apologise for it and for the rush job in the rhino mocks session. I'm very conscious that people take private time out for these nights so I don't like running over. That said we did learn a lot about the group and the dynamics tonight so I'm sure we'll improve next time around.

News

Here's the links for the items mentioned during the news section.

ALT.NET Mailing List - Link
ALT.NET Wiki - Link
VSTS Database Edition now available for MSDN Subscription/Software Assurance customers - Link
JQuery to be included in ASP.NET MVC & Visual Studio - Link
DevSta Competition - Link
Clone Detective - Link (screen shot)
VS Snippet Designer - Link
Cobra programming language - Link
Cosmos OS - Open Source C# OS project - Link

If you find out about anything interesting this month, remember to bring it up during at news time during the next meeting.

Twitter Hashtag

For the twitter users out there, the official hashtag is now #altnetsyd. You can follow this on twitter using this link and subscribe to an RSS feed from there if you wish.

What's Next?

We had a retrospective for the evening to see what went well or not so well, and to get some suggestions going forward. Here's what came up, in order of popularity:

NHibernate
Dev practices - SOLID
Castle Windsor
Open spaces meeting
Lightning talks session
BDD/DDD
OSS alternatives to TFS
TDD
F#
WPF
Agile & Scrum session
RESTful architecture

So we'll be having a presentation on NHibernate at the next meeting, and maybe one other subject. Given the discussion levels we had tonight, I'm wondering if trying to get through 2 sessions in a night is asking too much? What do you think?

Looking forward to next month now!

One week to go! Are you coming?

2008-09-22T08:53:00.002+10:00

Our first meeting occurs next week. Not long to go now!

To help us with organising the logistics (i.e. food, etc) we'd like to know if you are coming or not, so if you are planning on being there (and we hope you are!) can you please do one of the following:

sign up to the September event on Facebook,
leave a comment on this blog entry
send a tweet to http://twitter.com/rbanks54
contact either myself or James Crisp

Continue to spread the word that the group is starting, and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Sydney ALT.NET on Facebook

2008-09-11T08:47:00.001+10:00

The Sydney ALT.NET user group now has a group on Facebook, as well as a home on this blog. So now you have a way to get to know your fellow ALT.NET'ters outside of just the meetings (don't let that scare you too much!)

Head on over to http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=26531372700 to join.

September 30th - What's going to happen?

2008-09-10T14:00:00.001+10:00

We now have our content organised for our first ALT.NET meeting on September 30.

Here's the draft agenda for the night:

6:00 pm - Meet & Greet time and then Kick Off!

6:30 pm - "Ruby, Rails and IronRuby from a .NET perspective". Presented by James Crisp

7:00 pm - Munchies & Drinkies

7:30 pm - "Mocking with Rhino Mocks 3.5". Presented by Richard Banks.

8:00 pm - Wrap up & go home.

During the night we'll be looking for your input on what you want to see during future sessions so bring your ideas along.

Sydney ALT.NET First Meeting will be September 30th

2008-09-08T21:42:00.001+10:00

I'm happy to let you know that we now have some details for where and when the ALT.NET user group meetings will be.

We will be meeting on the last Tuesday of every month at the Thoughtworks offices in Sydney. Many thanks go to Thoughtworks for letting us make use of their facilities. Their generosity is greatly appreciated.

Where:

Level 8, 51 Pitt Street
Sydney NSW 2000 Australia
[Map]

When:

Tuesday, September 30th
6pm - 8pm

What:

Welcome & Latest Happenings
Presentation 1 (30 mins)
Break for food & socialising
Presentation 2 (30 mins)

We'll have the 2 presentations finalised in the next few days, however if you've got anything you'd like to see discussed, please bring your ideas along.

We look forward to seeing you there and please spread the word!

Welcome to the Sydney ALT.NET Group

2008-09-01T15:47:00.001+10:00

Welcome to the home of the Sydney ALT.NET group.

For those of you who don't what ALT.NET is all about here's a simple definition that defines the sort of person who might be considered "alt":

You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles

We're currently organising our first meeting and will post updates here on the site as they become available. If you're interested in coming along or would like to suggest a date and time or some content you'd like to see then either subscribe to the site feed or leave a comment.

You can also catch up with myself (Richard Banks) or James Crisp during Tech.Ed this week if you just want to have a chat.