Update and Meeting Ideas for Melbourne Alt.NET

This is just a quick update to let everyone know that I have been discussing the use of a venue today with a corporate sponsor who is city based. We have discussed holding the first meeting at the end of this month and I hope to have the details sorted out in the next few days.

In the mean time I've compiled a quick, and by no mean exhaustive, list of some topic ideas for discussions and presentations. This is just a bunch of stuff to throw on the table to get discussions going for now. Please feel free to contribute so we can start getting an idea of what we all want from this.

Languages

• C# 4
• VB.Net
• Java
• Ruby
• Python
• F#
• Boo
• General discussions of Dynamic Languages and Domain Specific Languages

General Framework and Platform stuff

• .NET 4
• CLR
• NHibernate
• MEF

Testing Frameworks and Tools

• xUnit
• NUnit
• MS Test
• Rhino Mocks
• Moq

Dependency Injection/IoC

• Unity
• Autofac
• Structure Map

Agile Methodologies and Practices

• TDD and BDD (and any other xDD for that matter)
• Pair Programming
• Extreme Programming
• Scrum
• Continuous Integration

Version Control

• TFS
• Subversion
• Git
• Mercurial

Design Patterns

• MVVM
• MVC
• DI and IoC
• Service Locator
• Open discussions of design patterns du jour. Opinions and experiences - perhaps not for the first meeting :)

A few other random ideas:

• Parallel computing
• DirectCompute
• Refactoring
• "The Cloud"
• LINQ
• Coding Dojos and Coding Katas

That should do it for now. Please put forward your ideas and don't forget to keep spreading the word.