Gojko Adzic

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.

We have worked out the schedule for opensource .NET talks at Skills Matter in London for the next few months. Here are the dates to note in your calendar - more detail on sessions will follow:

• 25th September: Script #, .NET response to Google Web Toolkit.
  Registration is now open
• 23rd October: Dependency injection with Castle Windsor
• 27th November: Asynchronous enterprise .NET applications with NServiceBus
• 17th December: Test driven development in .NET

We will probably do another Alt.NET evening in January like the one this July. This time we’ll have more time and hopefully a bigger venue. At the moment, we have a slot on 13th Jan available for this. If you attended the July talks, please let me know what you thought of the way that we organised it, what you liked, what you disliked, and what we could do to make it better next time.

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.