Well, we had another great DC ALT.NET meeting last night. I want to send a special thank you to
CMAP, Randy Hayes and
Chris Steen for allowing us to crash the architecture special interest group. It was much appreciated and we'll have to do this again. But of course we have our roving location and pub-club model, so we'll continue to mix it up! Of course
Scott Allen missed our event and instead went to Redmond. Where are his priorities??? :-)
We had some great discussions on Test Driven Development and the evolution to Behavior Driven Development, Aspect Oriented Programming, and Design by Contract with Spec#. Phil McMillan from Entropy-Zero consulting walked through some examples of TDD, the strategies, when to mock and when to double. The mock versus double is an important one to note as many people's code gets littered with them instead of properly creating test doubles, and only mocking the only thing you are testing the interaction with. Also talked about effective teams as well with Agile methodology which was pretty enlightening to see how everyone else's organization runs.
Topics we'll be looking at next time can include:
- ASP.NET MVC
- Domain Driven Design
- Behavior Driven Development
- Inversion of Control containers
- Continuous Integration
- Agile Methodologies
- O/RM tools (NHibernate)
We're going to open it up next month, but I hope to have it somewhere in the Northern Virginia area. Look for an announcement soon. Better yet, join the mailing list and find out more
here!