June 5th Meeting

Bad news guys, we can't run our meeting at our regular time this month as the Thoughworks offices are unavailable. Instead we can run it in the first week of June.

Using StackExchange.profiling for fun and profit. - Tiang Cheng

StackExchange wrote a runtime profiling tool called  MiniProfiler to identify bottlenecks in the Stackoverflow family of websites. This results in a websites that are well known for being superfast and responsive. With the 2.0 version being released shortly, it's the perfect time to look at why every .Net web developer needs to know how to use this Nuget tool. 

MiniProfiler will identify code and database bottlenecks in your ASP.NET and MVC websites. It supports database profiling for Entity Framework as well as basic SQL, and WCF. And it also measures client-side performance!

It is part of the holy trinity of  Scott Hanselman "Love and Kittens" toolkit, and he has said on his blog  "this amazing little profiler has become, almost overnight, absolutely essential to ASP.NET MVC.

There will use real world examples to show how you can instrument your codebase to identify bottlenecks. There will be pointers around optimisation techniques, and some of the common performance issues in ASP.NET development. There will be tips on evaluating third party vendor controls, and performance monitoring on production and development environments. It will be awesome. 

Tiang's latest gig involves writing high-volume high-performance business and risk management dashboards for Periscope Corporation, with clients across a number of public and private, state and national enterprise, including the facility management of all Australian post offices nationally. Thanks to MiniProfiler, he has improved the dashboard performance, made new friends, and has become a better developer.

April 24th Code Archaeology : Domain Driven Design Samples

Our speakers fell through this month and no one else had anything for lightening talks, so we decided to go with an interactive session doing some archaeology on some of the DDD samples around.

In the session we will go through the code for some of the DDD samples out there to see how they are put together structurally as well as discussing how they relate to the principals of DDD, how useful we think the principals are and even how effectively we think sample succeeds in illustrating DDD.

One sample has been suggested in http://code.google.com/p/ndddsample/ and I would also like to put forward this one https://github.com/MarkNijhof/Fohjin as another example that I believe uses event sourcing. The event sourcing sample is also backed by this blog post series http://cre8ivethought.com/blog/2009/11/12/cqrs--la-greg-young

(Interestingly both these samples are quite dated! I wonder why? Has anyone got any more up to date samples?)

I'll be interested to see what we come up with! As usual please indicate your intention to attend by voting on the right.

March 27th - Behaviour Driven Development with SpecFlow

This month we have Philip Beadle presenting for us via Skype. Here's Phil's own abstract:

You're all TDD exponents by now and really good at Red-Green-Refactor. But somewhere along the way we still manage to write code that doesn't quite do what the customer wanted. So let's take the TDD idea and step it up one level so that we write code that satisfies a User Acceptance Test rather than a Unit Test. This also known as Behaviour Driven Development - BDD. This session will show you how at DotNetNuke we use SpecFlow and Watin to implement UATDD (BDD) so that we have executable specifications!!

The session will show how we built and abstraction layer for Watin and a reusable library of steps for SpecFlow and how we use these tests with Team City to increase the quality of DotNetNuke continuously.

6pm Star, Beer & Pizza Provided. Please RSVP on the right. See you there.

PS Currently looking for volunteers to present next month, so let me know if you have something cool, know someone cool or if there is anyone else you'd like to hear from let me know & I can contact them.

28th Feb - Alt.Web

So having finally gotten organised for 2012 I'd like to announce our new meeting time and our first event for the year.

Meetings for this year will run on the last Tuesday of every month at the Thought Works offices. See to the about section for details.

And now on to the first event so far we have 4 volunteers willing to present on 5 different alternative web frameworks for .NET.

Adam - Nancy

Andrew - Fubu

Tarn - SignalR

Jim - OWIN & Kayak

If there is anyone else super keen to contribute we might have room for one or two more so please drop me a line.

Should make for an interesting night where you can walk away with a well rounded understanding of what is going on in the alt web space.

Melbourne 2012

Hey guys,

Just a quick not we won't be having a meeting this month I haven't had time to organise everything so we'll start again the last week of Feb.

I also need to change the night to either a Tuesday or a Thursday I think as Wednesdays don't work for me anymore, checkout the poll on the right hand side there to vote for your preferred day.

So for Februaries meeting I think we should finally tackle our Alt.WebFramework showdown so we'll have a bunch of people doing shortish, say 30 or so mins on each of the alt web frameworks out there. I've already spoken to some of you about putting your hand up to do some of these talks so please remind me who you were, and I'll be looking for volunteers to present on the others, first in best dressed!

So far on the list I'm considering:

Fubu MVC

Nancy

OpenRasta (I think I'll do this one)

Manos de Mano

Mono Rail

Anything else?

I was wondering if anyone wanted to look into OWIN and Kayak too perhaps?

Contact me via email if you're interested in presenting.

Code Dojo - November 30th

Hey guys,

I've been away for a lot of this month and I haven't had any offers to present so I thought we could have another attempt at a code dojo. So I'll bring some kata's along and you guys bring yourselves, your laptops and your sense of teamwork. We might even be lucky enough to get few interstate attendees what with it being YOW week and all.

Also I guess this will be our last meeting for the year so I guess we should maybe go grab some dinner afterwards as well? Venue TBA. There will be no pizza served at this event, but we'll still have the beers ;)

Meeting Wednesday October 26th

Ya didn't think I'd forgot did ya?

Well I didn't, this month we have Birger Halfmeier to give us a talk about the new generation of mini ORMs on the rise.

Birgers talk will be "an investigation into how MicroORMs can save you time, prevent errors and make things simpler than completely hand coding your DAL. [He] will look at some of the common annoyances of ADO.NET and how MicroORMs have tried to solve them."

There may be a second more in depth talk on the same topic as well but I'm still trying to finalise that.

As usual beers and pizza c/o our mates at ThoughtWorks.