Gojko Adzic

The next OpenSource .NET Exchange will take place in central London (the Crypt as usual) on July 16th, starting at 6:30 PM and ending around 10 PM. OpenSource .NET Exchange is a community event aimed at promoting opensource .NET tools and progressive .NET ideas and practices. It is a chance for UK .NET enthusiasts to network and keep an eye on recent advancements in the community.

This mini-conference is free, but up-front registration is required. Last event attracted more than 200 people, so I suggest registering quickly if you plan to attend. Register on http://skillsmatter.com/event/open-source-dot-net/open-source-dot-net-exchange-iii

The line-up so far looks like this:

Ian Cooper: A First Look at Boo

Boo is a ‘wrist-friendly language’ for the CLR that reduces the ‘noise’ of other CLR languages. It’s also a favorite for writing Internal DSLs In this session Ian Cooper will talk about the Boo language from his recent ‘first look’ at the language. As well as covering the basics of why Boo is different Ian will look at the best way for you to get started learning Boo.

Dylan Beattie: Managing Websites with Web Platform Installer and msdeploy

In this talk, Dylan Beattie will show you how to kickstart your web projects using Microsoft’s new Web Platform Installer, and how you can deploy your websites and manage your servers using msdeploy.exe.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer is a free tool that gives you everything you need to build and host web applications on Windows. It’ll configure your web server and database, install developer tools like Visual Studio and the .NET framework, and supports many popular Web application frameworks including ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Drupal, SubText, WordPress and DotNetNuke.

Scott Cowan: Spark View Engine

Spark is a view engine for the ASP.Net Mvc and MonoRail frameworks. It allows the html to dominate the view in a way your front end developer will love.

David Ross: Introduction to MPI.NET

MPI.NET is a .NET wrapper around the Message Passing Interface which is a used by the majority of super computers and compute clusters for supporting sharing data between compute nodes.

Gojko Adzic: Acceptance testing in English with Concordion .NET

Concordion is an acceptance testing tool that enables developers, testers and business analysts to build executable specifications in free-form HTML. In this talk, Gojko Adzic introduces Concordion.NET, the .NET port of Concordion, and demonstrates it with examples.

Sebastien Lambla: What OpenRasta does other frameworks can’t

Sebastien Lambla will showcase a few strange usages of OpenRasta.

Phil Trelford: F# Units of Measure

The F# programming language has full support for static checking and inference of units-of-measure. In the process Phil show its use with a sample of retro game Lunar Lander.

The next OpenSource .NET Exchange will take place in the Crypt on the green in Central London on July 16th, starting at 6:30 PM. Get involved and propose a talk! We like to hear people speak about their favourite programming tools, present experience reports or discuss ideas that they are passionate about. To propose a talk, send a talk title, short description (1-2 paragraphs) and your bio to gojko@neuri.com. Send your proposals by 15th of May.

OpenSource .NET Exchange is a community meeting of .NET enthusiasts held twice a year as part of monthly Skills Matter OpenSource .NET evenings. The Exchange is aimed to be a larger event
where people from the community can network and exchange ideas. The official programme consists of 6 lightning talks (15-minutes each) focused on opensource .NET tools and progressive .NET practices, followed by lots of community time for mingling (and if we find sponsors
free beer and pizza). The previous event in January attracted more than 200 people. (see the event page and reviews
for more information on the previous event). For more information on
Skills Matter Opensource .NET evenings, see
http://skillsmatter.com/go/open-source-dot-net.

We’re preparing for the next Open Source .NET Exchange, to be held in July in London, and discussing whether to organise it over a weekend or during the working week. If you are interested in attending the next exchange, would it be better for you if it is organised:

1. As before, on a Thursday starting at 6:30 PM and ending around 10 PM
2. During the working week, but starting earlier (eg Thursday at 12 ending around 4-5PM)
3. Weekend, afternoon (starting at 12 and ending around 4-5)

Please take a moment to add a reply on
http://ukdotnet.ning.com/forum/topics/please-readreply-next-open
and give us your preference so that we can make the next event more enjoyable for you.

Thanks very much to everyone who came down to Skills Matter tonight for the “FitNesse.NET tips and tricks” talk. Here are the downloads and links:

• fixture source code and wiki pages
• powerpoint slides
• Suite config file documentation

In the last week of November, Dave de Florinier and I did a talk on Asynchronous .NET architectures and NServiceBus. The sound of the recording was not that good so some readers asked for a transcript. The following is a transcript of my introduction to the talk, encouraging developers to investigate messaging architectures for mid-size and smaller projects. I’ll try to get the rest of the talk published here soon as well.

Today, we use web and web-related services for content distribution, for remoting, for application partitioning and distribution. It seems that HTTP calls have become a default way to think about distributed systems. HTTP and Web services definitely have a lot to offer, but they are not the only way to do things and there are definitely cases where web is not the right choice. HTTP calls are synchronous, stateless (although there is a state simulation with cookie-based sessions) and generally not that reliable. They are also often one-way, which means that any kind of continuous notification always comes down to polling. When you need asynchronous actions, proper state and reliability or event driven behaviour, Web is not the right choice. Unfortunately, lots of people just stick with web services and hack on, trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In cases such as these, a different distribution paradigm can save us quite a lot of time and effort both in development and later in maintenance. One of those different paradigms is messaging.

I’m not sure why, but I got the impression that lots of people think that messaging is only for huge systems in investment banks, not something that a small or a mid-size project should consider at all. This is false and now I’ll try to convince you. Continue Reading »