Blah blah blah thanks for coming. We're all here on a beautiful summer night because we have a passion for creating software (and consuming beer). For me, I love talking to people who are solving problems in effective and interesting new ways.
We've got the room from 6-8. Tap beers are on Ira and me tonight. Some snacks coming at 6:30.
EditDefining ALT.NET:
Sorry but we need to talk about this...
What is ALT.NET is similar to the "what is Agile?" question.
ALT.NET means many things to many people.
Tenets (from David Laribee):
So what is ALT .NET? And how does it differ from the .NET that we already know and love? What are these values that many of us think are missing? What are these alternative tools, techniques, and practices that ALT .NET'ers are espousing? Let's first examine the original tenets of being an ALT .NET developer.
- You're the type of developer who uses whatever works while keeping an eye out for a better way. One of the common topics at the ALT .NET event was closing gaps between requirements, testing, and code. There's still fat in the way we develop software that can be eliminated.
- You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby. In no way does Microsoft or the .NET community have a monopoly on good software development. For instance, Agile processes and Design Patterns started with Smalltalk. Likewise, Inversion of Control tools and techniques originated in Java. And two fundamental Ruby on Rails principles—Don't Repeat Yourself and Convention over Configuration—are ones that we can adopt in .NET.
- You're not content with the status quo. Things can always be more elegant, more mutable, and of higher quality. We're all experimenting with techniques to more closely connect the coding and testing to the business domain. For example, Behavior Driven Development (BDD) refines and extends Test Driven Development (TDD) by specifying the intended behavior of the code in a more readable way than classic xUnit testing. And language-oriented programming has the potential to raise the abstraction layer up to the level of the domain logic.
- You realize that 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 (for example, ReSharper). Furthermore, you feel that the most important qualities of a solution are maintainability and sustainability. Maintainable code means good design. Good design arises from the skillful application of design knowledge. The .NET community has been placing too much focus on learning API and framework details and not enough emphasis on design and coding fundamentals.
EditMeeting Forum:
- Has everyone been to other .NET groups in town?
- What works and what doesn't?
- What are we going to do differently?
EditFuture Meeting Locations:
- Bar
- Classroom
- Private Offices
EditUpcoming Topics:
- ORM showdown (NHibernate vs. Linq2SQL)
- Continuous Integration overview and setup
- Mocking overview (why and how)
- MVC futures
- Unit testing frameworks
- Caching Frameworks (MS Velocity, memcached win32, NMemcached)
Edit.NET Quiz:
EditUse of website:
- Member list and contact info
- Collection of resources
- Upcoming meetings
- Repository of presentation materials