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 video from the talk that Dave and I did last month at Skills Matter on developing Ajax Web applications with Castle Monorail. You can download slides and find links from the talk here. (if the video does not load in the embedded player, see it on google video)

I really enjoyed talking about Developing Ajax web applications with Castle Monorail yesterday at Skills Matter. It was great to see so many familiar faces — thanks for coming again and I hope that you enjoyed it as well. Here are the downloads and links that Dave and I promised to put online: Continue Reading »

One of the best things about Castle Monorail MVC engine is that it allows us to test controllers from the IDE, without actually deploying anything to the web server. A major problem with most web development environments, including classic ASP.NET, is that the workflow and session logic can only be tested through the UI. User interface testing is slow, pain to maintain and generally does not pay off as much as code unit tests do. Monorail’s programming model allows us to test workflow and session logic from the code, leaving only the actual rendering outside the reach of unit tests. That is how Monorail empowers us to really apply agile principles to web development, and saves us even more time and effort. Continue Reading »

In the third part of the Castle tutorial, we look into the features of Monorail that allow us to save a lot of time and effort when developing web applications. We explore advanced Monorail concepts that help us delegate error processing and authentication to the framework and reuse templates. We also look into how Monorail integrates nicely with ActiveRecord to automatically load and modify database objects based on HTML forms. Continue Reading »