Fear and Loathing
Gonzo blogging from the Annie Leibovitz of the software development world.
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 3 - Frameworks Fishbowl
We had a lively discussion with everyone on day 3 around what frameworks you would use (Microsoft or otherwise) and how to decide. Some of the converstations get a little heated thanks to various individuals and the original fishbowl morphs as more chairs are added in the middle (as opposed to being taken away). Should be an enjoyable watch.
BTW, I screwed up editing this thing (thanks Windows Movie Maker, you know how I feel about you) so the beginning starts about halfway through (around the 25 minute mark) then it jumps back to the beginning. Sorry about that.
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 3 - Coupling and Decoupling your Applications
Here we are at day 3 at ALT.NET Canada. This session was hosted by Donald Belcham and focused around discussing techniques and designs to decouple your solutions. As with most of the sessions this weekend, the conversation went to other places like deployment tools and techniques, coding to interfaces, and talks around how to introduce these techniques to your teams. Enjoy the vid:
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 2 - Noah, build me an Ark!
Saturday at ALT.NET Canada kicked off with a talk on the build process. The discussion was centered around build files and asks the question if NAnt has outlived it's usefulness, or are we putting too much into our build files? Lots of discussions of alternatives (Boo, Ruby, etc.) and products. The second half of the conversation shifted more to the deploy side, but as you'll see it's all related. Great stuff to start off the day. Here's the vid:
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What videos would you like to see?
Tomorrow is the last day of ALT.NET Canada and there are some great topics lined up. So I thought I would throw it out there for you guys to pick what sessions I video capture. What do you want to see? I can only be at one in each time slot, let me know what you think would be a good one to capture.
Here are the choices:
10:00
- Is convention over configuration important to .NET developers?
- Introducing good decoupling practices to a team.
- SOA. Are people still heading in this direction?
11:30
- What can we as ALT.NET do to enhance and foster the Canadian Developer Community.
- What did Microsoft do wrong in 2007-2008?
- How to choose frameworks? Is the Microsoft one always right or wrong?
- Why choose Agile and how to do Agile without failing?
Please leave your choices in the comments on this post. If there are any votes I'll video capture the ones with the most, otherwise I'll flip a coin or something and pick one randomly.
Thanks!
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 2 - DDD and more D
Today was DDD day at ALT.NET Canada as we had several sessions on Domain Driven Design. There was a chalk talk hosted by Greg Young, a talk on Distributed Domain Driven Design (DDDD) that I initiated, and a Birds of a Feather style chat towards the end of the day (including the topic of "where the f**k do you put business logic"). It was a healthy discussion that went to a lot of great places. Here's the video for the chalk talk:
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 1 - The Marketplace
Here's the schedule of sessions for this weekend at ALT.NET Canada that the group came up with Friday night (aka The Marketplace)
Saturday
10:00 11:30 2:30 4:00 Which Presentation Technology do you use? What are web technologies going to be in 2012? Telecommuting - Who wants to wear pants to work? What approaches to use for occasionally connected applications? Volunteering our software development skills to more than just open source software. Building extensible frameworks leveraging framework consumer selectable IoC containers. Source Code Best Practices Behavior Driven Development - Tools, Practices and introducing BDD to a team WCF Build Files - Time to give XML a break. Deployment tools, approaches, ideas. How to minimize deployment pain. Domain Driven Design chalk talk How do we design/build DDD systems across the Enterprise. Command/Query separation patterns and best practices. Domain Driven Design Birds of a Feather. Business Logic - Where the fsck do you put it? Skills, practices, platforms, and interest in mobile apps. How can I introduce messaging to my team? Educating business about investing in sound long term software development lifecycle management. How do we bridge the IT-Business gap? WPF. Experiences, learnings, advice. Sunday
10:00 11:30 No session scheduled yet. What can we as ALT.NET do to enhance and foster the Canadian Developer Community. Is convention over configuration important to .NET developers? What did Microsoft do wrong in 2007-2008? Introducing good decoupling practices to a team. How to choose frameworks? Is the Microsoft one always right or wrong? SOA. Are people still heading in this direction? Why choose Agile and how to do Agile without failing? Some really awesome topics here and should make for some amazing discussions this weekend!
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ALT.NET Canada - Day 1 - Immersion
It's the first day in Calgary and the launch of our first (and hopefully not last) Open Spaces event on ALT.NET (Canada style!). We're pleased as punch to have Steven "Doc" List up here facilitating the weekend and generally keeping us nerds in check. It was a great turnout tonight with a full house and lots of great participation, questions, and discussions.
I didn't get a chance to write down this weekends sessions but they were pretty cool, ranging from DDD to build files, who needs them? I'll post the session list tomorrow morning when I get back to the University.
It was no Beijing launch events (and we didn't even have a single protester) but it was fun and friendly and it worked. I captured the opening kickoff by Doc and will continue to fill up my hard drive for some of the sessions this weekend (and then posting them online here) so you can get a sense of what Open Spaces is all about and how our little version of ALT.NET goes.
So here's my very first video capture and mini-production. Maybe future ones will have a little more polish to them. Hope you enjoy it!
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What can you expect from ALT.NET Canada this weekend?
(image courtesy of Greg Young, laughter courtesy of John Bristowe).
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Off the grid
I’m taking a bit of some downtime in the British Columbia for the next week so no blog or project updates. I’ll be on email/twitter/facebook intermittently via my CrackBerry (wherever there’s reception) otherwise I’ll be back sometime next week with new and exciting adventures in the digital land.
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Public Terrarium Server Available
I’ve put my own server up and running for you to connect to with the new Terrarium Client and upload your critters to. It’s available at http://www.terrariumserver.com (and will be the default new server in the next build).
To configure your Terrarium Client to talk to the new server, on the main screen find the icon (2nd one in) that will take you to the settings screen:
Click on this and you’ll see this dialog:
Enter in the values you see above (http://www.terrariumserver.com) and you’ll be good to go. The server is running right now and waiting for creatures to be uploaded so good luck and please use it. Please don’t be abusive as this is a free service and I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time maintaining this guy.
I’m working on two additional sites. http://wiki.terrariumserver.com will host a public wiki that you can exchange design tips, ideas, and strategies with each other. http://creations.terrariumserver.com will become a Digg like community for creatures where you can showcase your work and vote on other peoples animals.
Watch for the new sites to come online in the next week or two (just trying to get the wiki setup before I leave for vaction but having site creation problems).
Enjoy!