Created a Meetup Group

This group will now be managed at Meetup.com please join http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-ALT-NET/ for future announcements

July 31st Meeting

Lightening Talks

This month we will be doing a number of lightening talks. We have 2 talks planned so far but are keen for more. If you have a topic please contact me via twitter, the comments or the mailing list.

Agenda So Far:

• Versioning New & Existing Databases with DbUp - Jim Pelletier
• DBDeployer - Tiang Cheng
• Knockout.js - Andrew Browne

June 26th - Real world testing

Without anyone stepping up this month I've gotten together with two of the usual suspects at Melbourne alt.net Nick Josevski and Andrew Browne to come up with quite a cool topic.

Real world testing. That's right we're going to be showing production code and tests and we'd love you to bring some along... if you dare :)

This will be an informal workshop type session with lots of interaction and many hands at the keyboard!

Start time is 6pm as normal, pizza and beer provided.

June 5th Meeting

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.


Cucumber is Bullshit (and other rants) - James Bach

Since 1982 I have programmed computers for a living. But for most of that time I have used my coding skills in the service of testing. I have managed test tool projects and written test tooling. My team created one of the first code coverage analysis tools for the Macintosh. I thought that I invented data-driven automation in 1988, but later learned that everyone invents it. It's like a rite of passage. I am on a test-support programming project right now. My point is: my experience with tool-supported testing is extensive... and yet I think Cucumber is a silly, wasteful, irresponsible tool; TDD is not a best practice; tests cannot be automated; and testability is my salvation.

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.