Gojko Adzic

I had a really great time yesterday at the Alternative .NET tools evening. We had more than 120 people registered and from what I could make out, about 100 people attended the talks. Looks like we are doing something good here. Thank you all for coming and I hope that you all enjoyed it.

I especially want to thank Mike Hadlow, Sebastien Lambla, Ian Cooper, David De Florinier, Zi Makki and Chris Roff for speaking at this informal conference and everyone from Skills Matter for organising it. The talks really did a good job showing the variety of Alt.NET tools on the market today, from market leaders to those that were coded during the first few talks and from opensource to those produced by Microsoft.

I think that the evening was a great success. The room was a bit too hot for me and we overran the planned time for about a hour, but in general I am very happy with everything else. Considering that this was the first time we did this, it turned out to be great. I had a chat with Wendy from Skills Matter after the talk, it looks like we’ll be organising something similar again in six months.

For those of you who came to the conference to learn what Alt.Net is about, here are the links that I promised to put online:

• AltnetPedia.com — an online wiki about Alt.NET tools
• AltDotNet.org
• AltNetUK.com
• Skills Matter Open Source .NET page

If you missed the conference, the video podcasts for the talks should be online soon at Skills Matter web site.

Where next?

Ian Cooper is going to do a longer talk on NHibernate on the 12th of August, so if you liked his 15 minute introduction, pencil that date into your diary. Seb is organising an Alt.NET beers event in August (I think that he mentioned 12th as the provisional date as well, but that’s probably going to change if Ian is doing the talk on the same day), so if you were interested in Alt.NET meetings, monitor his blog.

Monthly opensource .net talks at Skills Matter proved to be very popular, so we are now doing the plan for the next six months. If you are especially interested in any of of the tools presented yesterday or want to attend a session on any particular .NET tool over the next six months, please drop me an e-mail or leave a comment in the box below.

So far, we have this planned out:

• Testing Web Applications with Selenium and Selenium RC on 28th August
• Script#: The .NET response to the Google Web Toolkit on 25th September

I will also be giving a talk on Agile Acceptance Testing as part of the Agile London Month on 18th September.

Next week, I’ll be at Agile 2008 in Toronto. Marisa Seal and I will be talking about practices for effective database TDD and presenting DbFit on Thursday at 16 hr at Hall B. If you are there as well, stop by to say hello.

We are organising a gathering of Alt.Net enthusiasts on the 31st this month at Skills Matter offices. We’ll do seven talks in total with beer and pizza during the break, and then go out for beers and socialising. Here’s the programme for the talks:

NHibernate – Ian Cooper
PowerShell – Zi Makki
OpenRasta – Sebastian Lambla
Castle Windsor – Mike Hadlow
Rhino Mocks – Chris Roff
NServiceBus – David De Florinier
Subversion – Gojko Adzic

The event is free but the number of places is limited. Apparently about half of the places are already taken and Skills Matter have not yet started to advertise it seriously, so if you were planning to come to the event make sure to register soon. For more info and to register click here.

See you on 31st.