Gojko Adzic

From February 2009, Skills Matter will start organising public Alt.NET courses (first in London and then across Europe).

Opensource .NET tools crash course

The first will be a three-day crash course on tools and practices aimed at .NET developers that want to learn about Alt.NET tools and Java developers that are migrating to .NET and looking for good equivalents to the tools that they are used to working with. The course gives an overview of the most popular opensource .net tools and introduces modern development practices that these tools promote, such as test driven development, continuous integration, dependency injection, object-relational mapping and web development using the model-view-controller pattern.

Learn how to:

• Implement TDD in .NET using NUnit, MBUnit, Rhino Mocks and FitNesse
• Utilise Aspect oriented programming and Dependency Injection using Castle Windsor
• Efficiently build Web applications using the MVC pattern in Monorail and utilising Monorail and Script# for Ajax and test them using Selenium Remote Console.
• Manage persistence easily using ORM tools such as ActiveRecord and NHibernate
• Introduce continuous integration in your projects using CruiseControl.NET and CI Factory

See the full programme.

Agile Web Development with the Castle Framework

The second one is a two-day course on Agile Web Development using the Castle project, teaching the basics of the Castle Framework and helping people develop a solid understanding of its benefits. Over the course of the two days, attendees will create a simple but complete web application using agile Web development practices such as Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming, Object/Relational Mapping and applying the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Learn how to

• Apply agile web development practices like MVC and dependency injection
• Use ActiveRecord to manage the object-relational mapping and the database layer
• Use the Monorail MVC engine to create web applications that are easy to maintain and test
• Explain the basics of Monorail views, layouts, rescues
• Use the NVelocity view engine to build web UIs for Monorail
• Apply Windsor Microkernel to configure and wire application components
• Unit test the data access layer with Castle
• Unit test web controllers
• Describe how Castle components come together to help us develop web applications easier
• Explain why this approach is much more effective than ASP.NET
• Apply best practices, common pitfalls, and tips and tricks for Castle Web development

See the full programme.

Here’s the final programme for the OpenSource .NET Exchange on 22/Jan in London:

• Dylan Beattie : JQuery
• David Ross: PostSharp
• Sebastien Lambla: Fluent NHibernate
• David de Florinier: ActiveMQ and NMS
• Mike Hadlow: Implementing the Repository pattern
• Russ Miles: Spring .NET best practices

After the talks, we are planning to have a discussion panel to compare Castle and Spring.NET and work out when to use what.

We have a larger venue this time, and free beer and pizza is the perfect excuse to come.

For full details and to sign up, see the event page on skillsmatter.com.

I just got the e-mail that my proposal for a session on Enterprise .NET Development with Opensource .NET tools was accepted for the Software practice advancement 2009 conference. The conference will take place in London in April 2009.

This session will be presented as an experience report from several enteprise .NET projects I have been involved in over the course of the last two years, which all included extensive use of opensource tools. Most of the innovation today in software happens in the opensource community and it is driven by opensource tools, but the attitude of software companies in the .NET market towards opensource tools is a lot worse then in the Java world. Using opensource tools on .NET project allows us to harness the innovation years before equivalent commercial tools appear. It also causes a lot more political and personal opposition, from lawyers that are concerned about licensing to contractors who refuse to do it because “it’s not .NET”. In this session, I will present the benefits that my teams got from the Castle project stack, NServiceBus, NHibernate and the like, what problems we faced on the way, how we solved them, how to shorten the learning curve for people with a more traditional .NET background and how to convince managers and lawyers that this is not a danger for them.

Here’s the video from the talk on dependency injection with Castle Windsor that Mike Hadlow and I did last month at Skills Matter.

in the first part of the talk, Mike introduces Dependency Injection and explains how to apply that pattern in practice with Castle Windsor. Then he talks about Castle component lifestyles and implementing common architectural and design patterns using Castle Windsor component model. In the second part of the talk, I present strategies how to manage component configuration effectively for production. After that, I explain how to use Castle facilities to extend the framework, integrate third-party services and manage components easier.

download the slides and the source code from the talk.

It was really great to talk about Castle Windsor today in front of a full room. Thanks very much to all of you who showed up and especially thanks to Mike Hadlow for participating in this event. Mike will probably post his source code and powerpoint slides on his site soon. Here are the links and the source code from my examples:

• source code
• Castle project main web site
• Automocking container
• Method validator facility

I also mentioned the new UK .NET Events site, where you’ll find a calendar of .NET-related events.