The next Brighton ALT.NET Beers will be held at the co-working venue ‘The Skiff’ at 7.00 pm on Tuesday 1st June. I’ll be hosting again.
The address is: The Skiff, 49 Cheltenham Place, Brighton, BN1 4AB
The format will be the same as usual, a quick round of suggestions for topics, voting and then an evening of beer and geekery.
What better way to recover from the rigours of the bank holiday weekend?
I had a lot of fun yesterday at the ALT.NET UK (un)conference. Ian, Alan and Ben do a great job organizing it and they managed to raise a lot more sponsorship money this time which meant that they could hire a larger venue, Conway Hall.
Friday night was spent suggesting sessions. There was some kind of dance thing going on in the main hall and it was difficult to hear what was going on at times but there was still a huge range of ideas put forward. Later we retired to the pub where I had some great conversations. I especially enjoyed hearing Sebastien Lambla talking about his open rasta RESTfull web development framework. I've heard him presenting about it before, but maybe it needed a couple of pints of Czech larger for it to make sense. I'm awaiting its release with some anticipation now.
Saturday morning kicked off with a 'park bench'. I'm not sure what the subject was since I spent a little too long enjoying the hotel breakfast and complementary FT. BTW good choice of hotel Ben! I think it was something like 'what does ALT.NET mean?' There was a suggestion that we needed a list of principles somewhat like the Agile movement, but I have to agree with Alan here; I think it would be a bad idea. I didn't get to the bench, but to me ALT.NET is really simple, it means building a community around .NET development that is not controlled by Microsoft. You don't need ALT.Java because that market is diverse and competitive enough that no single vendor is perceived as the single source of tools and guidance. But that is exactly the case with .NET development. The majority of .NET shops simply look to Microsoft for both. ALT.NET provides a convenient label for the .NET community to coalesce ideas around. This is good for .NET development in general, but also good for Microsoft itself.
The first session I attended in the morning was covering ORM use. We had a great discussion of the pros and cons of NHibernate vs Linq-to-SQL vs EF. I ranted a good deal about how any ORM in the .NET space had to have a LINQ provider. We also had a good discussion around repository patterns, where LINQ fits into the specification pattern and DTOs. We stayed in the same room to talk about Multi-tenanting. There were three or four people present who were actively involved in developing multi-tenanted applications so this was a very useful discussion. It mostly revolved around database sharding vs multiple-database patterns and security concerns.
During lunch we had a very interesting and wide ranging chat about IoC containers that then became a discussion on the horrors of sharepoint development.
Ian Cooper lead a very good session on Domain Driven Development in the afternoon. I've heard Ian talk about DDD several times now, but I always seem to learn something new. I would love to see a project that he'd worked on.
This brings me to a suggestion for future ALT.NET conferences. There are some excellent conversations but I do think that it would help if more people brought laptops and we had some projectors available where we could demonstrate real code. Talking about code is very difficult without having examples in front of you. I don't mean that we should be giving presentations, but that at least we should all come prepared to show off something of what we're doing. Of course this is problematic with the commercial code that most of us work on, but being able to fire up Visual Studio (or notepad Peter :) and show rather than tell would be a huge advantage. So Ian, Alan and Ben, if you want to know what to do with the sponsorship money next time: projectors!
I really enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame at last night's ALT.NET meeting. It was great to meet everyone, and I'm only sorry that I couldn't hang around for the after show drinks. Such is the cost of provincialism.
All the talks were good, but I especially enjoyed Seb Lambla's Open Rasta presentation, a very interesting RESTfull approach to ASP.NET. David De Florinier's talk on NServiceBus was also interesting since it's a tool I haven't had a chance to look at.
My talk was on Castle Windsor. You can download the slides here:
Powerpoint 2007
http://static.mikehadlow.com/The Castle Windsor Inversion of Control Container.pptx
Powerpoint 2003
http://static.mikehadlow.com/The Castle Windsor Inversion of Control Container_2003.ppt
I just got back to Brighton after spending last night and all of today at the ALT.NET UK open spaces conference. It was inspired by the US ALT.NET conference that took place last summer and ably organized by Ian Cooper, Alan Dean and Ben Hall. I was more than slightly suspicious about the idea of a load of programming geeks turning up with no agenda and just seeing what happened. I did come away thinking that this kind of event is no substitute for something with prepared speakers, but it was great; I really enjoyed myself. Without dressing it up in 'open spaces' language, it was a fantastic opportunity to get together with like minded uber-keen developers and chew the cud.
The night before we all put our suggestions for topics on the white board wall (see the photo above) and then retired to the pub. Ian, Alan and Ben organized them into topics the next morning. To kick off the day in one room, I'd suggested the topic of IoC containers after my talk at DDD. I briefly introduced the subject by describing how I'd come to the IoC game via TTD and Dependency Injection. Uber blogger Roy Osherove (who'd come all the way from Israel) then started up a really interesting discussion around the limits of IoC, or rather how doing TDD forces you to do DI rather than giving you a choice. It was a very good point, and one that hadn't really struck me before. Of course Roy works for Typemock, so he obviously interested in showing how Typemock can alleviate TDD's arm lock on your architecture. Personally I'm still in my honeymoon period with IoC containers and TDD and haven't found the edge cases yet where I feel like enforced DI is dragging my architecture or productivity down enough that I need to do something about it. The discussion continued about the depth of unit testing that's appropriate, how to test legacy code and tradeoff between integration and unit tests. All good stuff.
I hung out in the room discussing F# and all things functional for the rest of the morning and learnt a lot about the why-of-functional that I hadn't really appreciated before. I must fire up the F# shell again and have another play. During the afternoon I failed to attend any sessions at all. Firstly I got into a very long and interesting conversation with Michael Foord. I've been reading his blog for a while and I caught his talk at Mix UK last summer, so it was good to get to chat to the man in person. He showed me Resolver, the python code generator / spreadsheet that his company is building. It's a very impressive piece of work that brings together the immediate graphical data manipulation of a traditional spreadsheet and any managed code that you want, all glued together with python. You can imagine building component-oriented financial software and binding it together under the spreadsheet front end. Or, building a model with the spreadsheet and simply taking the python code it generates, sticking it an assembly and then harnessing that model from your application. We also chatted about his upcoming book, Iron Python in Action, which I'll be getting a copy of as soon as it hits the (virtual) shelves.
For the rest of the afternoon I just stayed in the lobby area chatting. That was probably the best thing about the event for me, just being able to meet other .net geeks and talk about coding all day. Usually when I do that, even with many people who's full time job is coding, I tend to see eyes glazing over, but not today :) Hey, I'm already looking forward to the next one.
There's a wiki: http://altnetpedia.com/ that's going to act as a record of the discussions today. Hopefully, along with the mailing list, it can act as the nucleus of a growing UK ALT.NET community.
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