October 2007 Entries

It's coming up fast folks.  For all you Canadians out there, be prepared to book your flights (or change them if they're already booked) on Sunday the 25th so that you can catch the 2:30pm PST start of the CFL's Grey Cup. Jean-Rene is putting DevTeach on in the west for the first time and there are going to be a lot of westerners going for the first time.  You'll be able to catch a beer with Bil, a Shirley Temple with Justice, anything with higher alcohol content that American beer with Dave, Corona's with Steve Yang (get a blog buddy!),...

Today was the day that we held our 2nd annual Code Camp here in Edmonton.  We had about 80 people out attending sessions.  Other than the fact that the parking at the university was a gong show, things have gone quite nicely.  People are attentive and fairly involved.  We held out Making the Development World a Better Place, hand holding, sing-along session this morning and had a turn out of about 15-20 and a nice flow of ideas.  Ideally I would have liked to have had more people participate, but I think we planted a lot of seeds in those...

Edmonton Code Camp is fast approaching and there will be some very interesting sessions this year.  We have a stellar lineup of speakers that are heavily swayed towards an Alt.NET way of thinking.  Bil Simser will be presenting on DDD, Shane Courtrille (making his presentation debut) will hosting a session on nHibernate, Sean Solbak (also making his presentation debut) will be talking about Spring.NET, Steven Rockarts is going to ramble on about Castle Windsor, I'm presenting on MonoRail and James Kovacs is presenting on Alt.NET.  There are other great session too (find them all here). By far the session that holds the most...

The completion of the Alt.NET conference in Austin has created a plethora of conversation on blogs and in the altnetconf Yahoo Group.  Some have been critical of the purpose and intent going into, during and following the weekend.  Others have begged for further discussion on logos, mantras, mission statements, and governence in general.  In some form all have a valid point (with the exception of one, but I'm not going to comment on that one). I went to the conference fearing some of the worst was going to happen.  I thought, with absolute certainty, that there would be at least one,...

Thanks to the folks that setup the Alt.NET Conference.  This is the start of something good.  Like many said, it will be hard to proceed for a while, but we will influence change for the better both during that time and after.  I leave you with one picture of the guy who really sparked the whole thing.

This was a primer for thoughts on DSLs, fluent interfaces, discoverability and where we're at with the concepts.  Have we taken these things to far?  Interesting thoughts in my head, but I don't know how to write them right now.  Hopefully I will in the next couple of days.

This was a brilliant discussion about what we in the Alt.NET community need to do to propogate our message.  The great part was that we had people from the Patterns & Practices group, MSDN Magazine and MSDN Architecture and they were the ones driving the group to be more visible. The thing that was discussed for more than a minute was that we need to tell the world the things that we learned two, three and four years ago.  When we were learning them we weren't good and speaking about what we were learning.  We knew what we had learned, but...

Interesting conversation on the optimal location for behaviour related to the domain.  The discussion was around whether a Transfer of Funds from one Account to another Account should exist in a Domain Service (i.e. AccountTransferService) or right in the Domain entity (i.e. Account.TransferTo(account, amount)). The real question is where does the ubiquitous language belong?  How do we make the code more soluable?  Where is readability at it's optimal state? I think that they pointed out the names for some things that I saw in the last code base that I worked on.  Anemic Domain is when you have a thin Domain model...

Scott Guthrie is showing the yet to be released MVC implementation that will be coming out of Microsoft for preview in the next few weeks, and RTM sometime in Spring 2008.  It's pretty exciting to see Microsoft taking this project on.  Right now it's looking alot like a MonoRail implementation, but it's using some more of the new language features. MS has implemented a tonne of hook , integration and extensibility points in the system.  Although it comes with defaults (i.e. aspx as the default view engine) you can override them with whatever you need.  If you want Brail, you implement with...

The BDD discussion was fantastic.  It was primarily driven by a need for people to understand where it fits into the development process.  One of the primary questions was where does it fall in the lifecycle of the development process and where do you go once you have worked with it?  I don't know that this was answered. We've moved onto how this relates to working with the client.  Should we be working in code to document the converation when the client is in the room?  Should we be exposing them to our side of the world at this point in...

The morning came far to early today, but once I hit the first session I started to get pretty stoked and energized.  We had a very passionate and, at times, heated debate about how to get more passion into the community about the principles that are Alt.NET. So how do we get the developer community at large to be more pragmatic?  That is what Alt.NET really is...a pragmatic approach to software development.  Maybe you choose .NET drag-and-drop in one situation, and another time you may choose Ruby or PHP.  The key with Alt .NET is that there is no one "right" answer.  Each answer is...

Unlike most people I showed up fashionably late to the show.  I managed to squeek in 2 double Jose Cuervos with the nerd herd before retiring to the front lobby to discuss geeky topics.  We indulged ourselves on the possibility of mbUnit becoming the one framework to provide to them all (unit, integration, system and other types of testing), the state of the world and Tom's fascination with men.  Yes, Tom decided to hit on every person in the group at one time.  The first statement went something like "At least you guys are good looking, because you sure ain't smart". ...

If you're looking for an exciting, action packed and woman* filled way to spend Saturday the 20th of October, look no further than the Edmonton Code Camp.  Drop by the U of A and see your favourite speakers**.  The lineup and topics looks great this time around.  I'll be presenting on MonoRail as part of a very strong set of ALT.NET tools and techniques throughout the day.  Tom, James, Steven, Shane and others will be presenting on some fantastic tools and frameworks that will free you from any drag and drop shackles you may be wearing. Register now and ensure your place. *Excitement,...

I knew that Windows ME was built on whiskey (probably corn mash too) instead of good single malt scotch.  I find this cartoon to be true when it comes to developers participating in usability sessions.  A case of beer (or single malt scotch as one's tastes may run) certainly loosens the group ups and produces some remarkedly interesting ideas.  Where I come from it wasn't known as the Balmer Peak, rather the Legend of the Drunken Coder.