March Meeting – Open Spaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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