Community Blogs

Next Tuesday, March 24 th I'll give a JavaScript talk at the Rockford .NET user group. This talk will be basically the same one I gave for the LCNUG back in December. The few opportunities I had to give this talk were highly rewarding. It's priceless to see developers realizing how mistakenly they had been using JavaScript, and finally being able to understand why "that bug" was happening in their pages. So, if you live in the area and think there must be something about JavaScript that you're just not getting, please try to stop by and ask your questions. JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces One of the greatest problems with JavaScript is its superficial syntax resemblance of C-style languages. We call it the curse of...

So, the long awaited release of Asp.Net MVC has gone gold, it is in the books and out the door.  This is a great achievement for Phil Haack and the MVC team.  I am really glad to see this thing finally get out the door as I personally feel this is a great new product and will go a long way to allowing developers to create a better, more maintainable web site. Get the bits here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=53289097-73ce-43bf-b6a6-35e00103cb4b&displaylang=en Great job team Till next time, Read More...

In a prior post I announced that we are putting on a Code Camp on May 30th in Chicago brought to you by the ChicagoAlt.Net group and Lake County .Net UG .  In order to create a great event, we need speakers.  So count this as the official call for speakers for the Chicago Code Camp.  Right now we have a temp site put up at http://chicagocodecamp.pbwiki.com/ but we should have the real site up ASAP. What we are looking for in speakers….?  Simple, kick ass, passionate developers who love to teach others on the cool stuff they are doing.  What type of content are we looking for….?  Simple, you name it we want it. Development Practices/Craftsmanship .Net Ruby (Rails) Java PHP Sharepoint iPhone … fill in the blank Unlike...

The ChicagoAlt.Net group and Lake County .Net UG would like to officially announce the Chicago Code Camp which is slated to come to College of Lake County on May 30th.  We are hoping to get more than just the .net community involved, we would love to get sessions from the Java, Ruby or anyone else.  We will be announcing more information in the coming weeks, but if you would like to submit a talk please send an email to derikATgraudo.com More info will be out soon. Read More...

In the next meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET users group we will try an Open Space format — or rather maybe I should say a format with some characteristics of Open Spaces given our time and space constraints. If you haven't been to a meeting held in this format, maybe you think this sounds crazy. I'd encourage you to see it for yourself. The meeting will be on March 11 th . Open Space 6:00 pm Pizza and networking time 6:30 pm This month we will have an Open Space -inspired meeting. Open Spaces are considered an effective meeting layout to find solutions to problems that would benefit from a wide range of opinions. We don't have enough time to do a full-blown Open Spaces event so we will cut some corners. Here's the plan:...

Like so many other people out there I will be packing up and making the trip out west to Seattle for both the Alt.Net conf (Saturday and Sunday only) and the MVP Summit. I am looking forward to this trip for many reasons: Never been to the Emerald City Love meeting all the great people at the alt.net conferences, and there is always so much to learn This is my first MVP summit (and who knows may be the last) Anyway, if you are heading out there and we have never meet, drop me a tweet at @derikwhittaker and say hi and introduce yourself.  If we have meet, and there is no restraining on you (and you know who you are :) ) lets have another beer and shoot-the-***. See you there Till next time, Read More...

For the past few months a group of us at Codebetter.com , Devlicio.us , IdeaVine (with special thanks to JetBrains ) have been working to create a build system for the .Net open source community.  I am happy to announce (here at devlicio.us at least) that as of now it http://teamcity.codebetter.com is officially alive and kicking. I am not going to give a full rundown on the details, as James Kovacs has done a great job of that here .  Check out the post and the site and let us know your thoughts. Also, if you would like to get your project hosted check out this information. Register a user account here . Email teamcity@codebetter.com with the following information: Your user account name, which you created above. Project name &...

Recently I was asked to join the crew (Richard and Carl) on DotNetRocks .  We had a great conversation about my learning NHiberante and using FluentNhibernate.  We chatted about how learning new tools can be painful, but the pain comes with a good result in the end. If you are interested in listening to the episode check it out here . Hope you enjoy Till, next time, Read More...

After an unfortunate cancelation of our last meeting because of the weather, February's meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET Group should be a very interesting one. Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin looks into XP's rearviewmirror, lessons learned, and the current status of Agile development. XP: After 10 years, why are we still talking about it? 6:00 pm Pizza and networking time 6:30 pm It has been 10 years since Extreme Programming broke upon our industry. In that time we have seen the rise of the Agile movement, and the gold rush for Scrum certification. We have seen the concept of testing do a complete reversal in emphasis; and shift away from heavy planning. But what have we learned? Do we really all program in pairs? Do we really all...

Due to scheduling problems we had to delay this announcement more than we would like to. But we will still have our monthly meeting on Wednesday, January 14 th . Planning for 2009 6:00 pm Pizza and networking time 6:30 pm We had a guest speaker for this month's meeting but unfortunately we had to change plans at the last minute. Instead of that we will use the opportunity to do some group housekeeping. What worked well and what didn't in 2008 What direction should we take with our group Viability of our group organizing a CodeCamp soon Global ALT.NET participation: as suggested in this message If you want to help define our meetings format and group actions, then come and help us in this discussion. 7:45 pm We have skipped the open discussion...