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!
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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!
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:
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! :-(
