Gojko Adzic

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.

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.

I attended CloudCamp last week in London. CloudCamp was a mini-conference for people interested in cloud computing, and turned out to be quite interesting. Continue Reading »

As always, it was a real pleasure to talk at Skills Matter yesterday. Thanks to everyone who attended the talk. There was quite an interest in this talk, and we might do a re-run for the people who could not make it this time. If you’d like to attend a re-run of the talk soon, drop an e-mail to the organisers and I’ll be happy to do it if there is enough interest.

Here are the slides from the talk. The video should be online at skillsmatter.com soon as well (subscribe to the RSS feed to get notified about that).

These are the links that I mentioned in the talk:

• Spring/Hibernate rollback example
• DbFit project pages on FitNesse.info

You might also be interested in checking out Scott Ambler’s agiledata.org site.

I’m doing a talk on effective test driven database development this Thursday in London (near Farringdon station, stating at 18:30). I’ll talk about unit testing stored procedures, test data management and best practices for java/.net integration testing that involves a database. In the talk I’ll also give a technical demo of my DbFit database unit testing library that provides DB management/unit testing capabilities to FIT/FitNesse.

The event will be organised by Skills Matter, and it is free but registration is required. For more info, see:

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/open-source-dot-net/effective-test-driven-database-development

See you on Thursday!