Open Source .NET Exchange: Emerging Tools and Practices

The first Opensource .NET exchange mini conference, held on the 22nd of January, attracted roughly 200 .NET enthusiasts to the iconic Crypt on Clarkenwell green. The event was organised by Skills Matter and Neuri as a wrap-up of a very successful year of organising “in-the-brain” .NET evening events. The topic of this conference was “emerging tools and practices” and six speakers presented lightning talks on various technologies and ideas that are not yet commonplace in the .NET world but make programmers more productive.

I’m very proud to have been part of this and helped with the organisation, and this write-up is long overdue (sorry about that). First of all, I’d like to thank Skills Matter again for all their help with logistics of this event and all the other events we organised together during 2008. With at least one event a month and around 1100 different people that registered for at least one of those events in 2008, we made a huge step forward and built up a real community around opensource .net ideas, tools and technologies. The January meet-up was the first event we organised under the name “Opensource .NET Exchange”, although it was technically a continuation of the “Alt.NET community evening” event from July 2008 and organised in a similar way. As the monthly meetings are becoming more and more popular, we had to close registration on quite a few of them in the second half of 2008 a week before the event, so we’ll plan to organise these bigger meetings twice a year. The next OpenSource .NET exchange will be in July 2009.

At the mini-conference, we also announced the start of several important initiatives for 2009. First of all, Skills Matter is starting to offer professional training courses on Castle, NHibernate, NServiceBus and popular opensource .NET tools in general. Another important thing announced at the conference is the Web Tech Exchange in May with two days of great sessions on building better, bigger and faster web sites preceded by three days of practical workshops with two .NET workshop tracks. Members of the opensource .NET community were offered huge discounts for both these events (if you were at the exchange and did not catch the promotion codes, contact me and i’ll send them to you).

Dylan Beattie presented first on JQuery, demonstrating how easy it is to animate web page elements with. He then talked about syntax shortcuts that experienced JQuery programmers apply and demonstrated how a whole animation script can be (and often is) written as a single very unreadable line of code. Working backwards from that example, he discussed how to make sense of that cryptic code. After the session, we joked in the audience that the conclusion of the talk should be “Jquery makes animations easy and code obfuscation obsolete”.

Next in the line was David Ross, talking about Aspect Oriented Programming, especially with PostSharp. David demonstrated various techniques for implementing AOP functionality and compared PostSharp with some other popular solutions.

David De Florinier demonstrated messaging with NMS and ActiveMQ, a very popular messaging system for Java. Apache ActiveMQ is a very lightweight messaging broker system that supports message multicast with topics so it is an interesting addition to the functionality that MSMQ provides. NMS is an opensource library that allows us to use ActiveMQ from .NET.

Mike Hadlow introduced the Repository pattern, the preferred way of connecting to persistent object storage in Domain driven design. He then compared that pattern to several generic repository implementations, discussing Rhino Commons and Fluent NHibernate versions in particular. You can see a write-up of his talk on his blog.

Russ Miles then gave a talk on Spring .NET and applying best practices in .NET using that application Framework. His talk was focused on how Spring.NET doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel but helps use existing technologies and tools easier. In the talk, he mentioned that Spring.NET will support ASP.NET MVC with some significant improvements over the standard platform, but did not go into any details about it.

Sebastien Lambla closed the event with a very lively demonstration of Fluent NHibernate and how it helps manage persistent storage for objects and makes object-relational mapping easy. Starting with a classic NHibernate example, he worked his way through eliminating the configuration files and storing the configuration in code, so that it can be easily refactored, then demonstrated features of Fluent NHibernate to automatically generate the schema and mappings on the fly based on object properties without any Hibernate specific configuration.

Judging by the feedback forms, most people had a really good time and liked the 15 minute lightning format. We’ll organise the next OpenSource .NET Exchange in July. You can view the videos from all the talks on the Open Source .NET exchange web page.