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!

Food for June Meeting

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?

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?

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#

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 :-)