DC ALT.NET Wrapup and CI Factory
Well, due to the weather beyond our control, the crowd was a bit smaller than expected at the February meeting of DC ALT.NET. It seems people panic in the Washington DC area if there is even a hint of moisture in the air or a snow flake hits the ground. It was a smaller crowd, yet passionate and I'd rather have that then a big crowd that wasn't involved at all. We had such people as Craig Andera, Jay Flowers, Kevin Hegg among others who attended. But the topics were great talking about functional programming, with Craig and Lisp and me with F#, continuous integration, the complexity of .NET and what's coming down the line, Domain Driven Design and managing complexity in projects. Not once did a laptop nor PowerPoint show its head, instead just passionate people talking about technology and ways of thinking.
I want to thank the people at Stelligent and Jay Flowers for making this happen. It couldn't have been better timing as he just released version 1.0.1 of CI Factory yesterday. If you aren't aware of this product, I've blogged about it in the past here. What it does is it creates an out of the box CI environment which is really important to have in an agile environment. Even teams as small as one person can benefit greatly from continuous integration.
Tools supported by CI Factory include:
Jay and Scott Hanselman did an episode on DNRTV about CI Factory here. Of course Scott was being a little snarky for Jay's spelling, but oh well. So, go ahead and give it a try. I've found it very useful and pretty easy to use even for some of the smaller side projects I've done.
