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.
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.
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?)
(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.
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.
September Meeting
UPDATE: Now with extra opinion fodder! Dave Burela has agreed to my request to do a lighting talk on the new Windows 8 developments which I'm sure will spark some good conversation!
This month is our first meeting at ThoughtWorks offices on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth St in the city, we will be starting at 6pm and I think the doors downstairs will be locked after that time so you will have to give either I or Maha (Our new ThoughtWorks host) a call, the numbers will be posted on the door.
For the evening proceedings we have Simon Segal talking about task based UI's:
The user interface can sometimes be an afterthought for many developers and building applications
that fit the business needs should require that our user experience is crafted in a way that explicitly solves
business problems. Task based interfaces give us a great opportunity to address the commands in your domain
and with architectural patterns such as CQS, MVC and event sourcing we can explore the rich opportunities that exist in capturing crucial business context that can often be left behind. We will look at when it pays to think explicitly
and when it’s important to leave the CRUD based user interface behind regardless of whether it will technically work.
I would also like to do a little bit of a retrospective on the group. So please come along prepared to contribute! What have we done so far? What did we like? What didn't we like. Where do we want to take it in the future? And how can we achieve that.
And of course I'm sure we will adjourn to some fine upstanding establishment for some further refreshment and civilized debate afterwards.
Please RSVP on the poll to the right so Maha can get the Pizza and Drinks order right.
Changes Afoot
So some changes are afoot in the group. Andrew is having trouble finding the time to organise and host the events so I have stepped up to do the organisation for now.
Unfortunately this means we can no longer continue to use Salmat's facilities, but I would like to thank Salmat for their support up until now.
Thankfully ThoughtWorks have stepped up and are going to be providing us with a venue at their offices on Collins st as well as pizza and drink! I would like to thank both Mustafa Sezgin for acting as our ThoughtWorks host and Chris Bushell for helping me put all the pieces together.
There will be a short break in transmission as I am unable to organise or attend our next scheduled meeting on the 31st of August due to being out of the country, but we will resume our regular schedule of the last Wednesday of every month from September onwards.
Stay Tuned for details.
Cheers
Jim
@pjimmy
Unfortunately this means we can no longer continue to use Salmat's facilities, but I would like to thank Salmat for their support up until now.
Thankfully ThoughtWorks have stepped up and are going to be providing us with a venue at their offices on Collins st as well as pizza and drink! I would like to thank both Mustafa Sezgin for acting as our ThoughtWorks host and Chris Bushell for helping me put all the pieces together.
There will be a short break in transmission as I am unable to organise or attend our next scheduled meeting on the 31st of August due to being out of the country, but we will resume our regular schedule of the last Wednesday of every month from September onwards.
Stay Tuned for details.
Cheers
Jim
@pjimmy
July Meeting - IoC
This month we are going to have a presentation from Nick Josevski with a summary of the Readify IoC Dev Day he attended back in June that was presented by Nicholas Blumhardt around Australia.
Nick is a senior software developer at a large marketing and advertising company, having previously worked as a consultant at Oakton on a variety of projects in varying business domains. Nick is on twitter as @NickJosevski and blogs at http://blog.nick.josevski.com
Nick’s presentation will focus around the use of Autofac and will try to cover some of the more advanced features the IoC container provides, such as lifetime management, modules with encapsulated configuration and AutoMockingContainer with NSubstitute. Depending on time and audience, could lead to a deep dive session investigating the Autofac source and/or AutofacContrib source.
Please RSVP using the poll on the right so we can organise pizza and beer.
June Meeting Update
I realised I hadn't posted the links from John's talk on Continuous Delivery last at last months meeting. Once again thanks to John for coming along and talking about his experiences. And finally here is the link to the slides.
http://www.slideshare.net/johnb/envato-dev-ops-altnet-melbourne
Enjoy.
http://www.slideshare.net/johnb/envato-dev-ops-altnet-melbourne
Enjoy.
June Meeting - Continuous Delivery
This month we are going to have a presentation from John Barton on Continuous Development and Delivery at Envato.
John is the Development Manager at Envato and was previously a .NET developer at companies such as MyCareer.com.au. He then moved on to the world of Ruby on Rails, and is now a team lead and sometimes coder. He also does the occasional bit of open source stuff over at https://github.com/joho and can be found on twitter as @johnbarton
John will talk about deploying continuously (multiple times a day) to a Ruby on Rails web app with a high traffic load (>3 million dynamic requests a day). With this in mind John will discuss what it is about Envato, the tech team, and the ruby on rails ecosystem that lets them do continuous delivery with a minimum of hassle.
This should be a really interesting talk on what is currently generating a lot of discussion in the software development community and a topic which has also sparked the DevOps movement. So drag yourselves out on a cold Melbourne winters evening for some pizza and beers, but do go and RSVP first over on the poll to let us know if you'll be coming along.
John is the Development Manager at Envato and was previously a .NET developer at companies such as MyCareer.com.au. He then moved on to the world of Ruby on Rails, and is now a team lead and sometimes coder. He also does the occasional bit of open source stuff over at https://github.com/joho and can be found on twitter as @johnbarton
John will talk about deploying continuously (multiple times a day) to a Ruby on Rails web app with a high traffic load (>3 million dynamic requests a day). With this in mind John will discuss what it is about Envato, the tech team, and the ruby on rails ecosystem that lets them do continuous delivery with a minimum of hassle.
This should be a really interesting talk on what is currently generating a lot of discussion in the software development community and a topic which has also sparked the DevOps movement. So drag yourselves out on a cold Melbourne winters evening for some pizza and beers, but do go and RSVP first over on the poll to let us know if you'll be coming along.
May Meeting - Functional Programming (Take II)
Since I had to cancel the April meeting (apologies once again), we can simply continue with the functional programming themed evening as planned from last month. (see below).
So please go and RSVP over on the poll so we can get an idea of numbers. >>>>
See you there.
April Meeting - Functional Programming (canceled)
Regretfully April's meeting is going to have to be canceled as I am unwell and unable to make it to open the room. :(
April Meeting - Functional Programming
April is Functional Programming Awareness Month. Don't believe me? Nor would I. However we're going to make it the theme for the April Alt.NET meeting. So the idea will be to stick to the topic of functional programming but make to the evening a mixture of Lightning Talks, general discussion or even working through a problem if there is time.
To start with we will have a bit of an introductory discussion on functional programming. Then we will move onto some talks by Tarn (@tarnacious), talking about Erlang, and Andrew (@adbrowne), talking about Scala.
So if think you have something to add to the evening (like being able to explain monads in 5 minutes) or are simply interested learning more about functional programming, come along for some learning, pizza and beers. And please don't forget to RSVP over there -->
To start with we will have a bit of an introductory discussion on functional programming. Then we will move onto some talks by Tarn (@tarnacious), talking about Erlang, and Andrew (@adbrowne), talking about Scala.
So if think you have something to add to the evening (like being able to explain monads in 5 minutes) or are simply interested learning more about functional programming, come along for some learning, pizza and beers. And please don't forget to RSVP over there -->
March Meeting - Wrap up
Thanks once again to Jim for his presentation on NServiceBus and SOA.
Below is the final slide from the presentation with links to various resources.
The source code used in the presentation (CrazyJimsSOA) can be found over on github
Below is the final slide from the presentation with links to various resources.
•Other Mailing Lists –
The source code used in the presentation (CrazyJimsSOA) can be found over on github
March Meeting - Winning with NServiceBus: Making your systems run on Tiger Blood (TM)
This month we will have Jim Pelletier Mystic Jim (@pjimmy) giving a talk on NServiceBus and SOA.
Jim will be giving us a two part talk, with the first focusing on the NServiceBus framework, it's API and the messaging patterns it enables. While the second part will provide a look at how to architect SOA style systems that can be deployed as a collection of autonomous services. You will be surprised at how far towards solving some of the most common problems in enterprise and LOB development this approach can take us.
This promises to be an interesting evening, so please go and RSVP on the voting panel on the right so that we can get an idea of numbers. And don't forget the new location for Melbourne Alt.NET. Look forward to seeing everyone there.
Jim will be giving us a two part talk, with the first focusing on the NServiceBus framework, it's API and the messaging patterns it enables. While the second part will provide a look at how to architect SOA style systems that can be deployed as a collection of autonomous services. You will be surprised at how far towards solving some of the most common problems in enterprise and LOB development this approach can take us.
This promises to be an interesting evening, so please go and RSVP on the voting panel on the right so that we can get an idea of numbers. And don't forget the new location for Melbourne Alt.NET. Look forward to seeing everyone there.
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