Blog Moved to http://podwysocki.codebetter.com/
In my previous post, I talked about some of the happenings from the day two experience. Day three was only a half day with only two sessions. So, it was best to make the best of times anyhow. Once again, it snowed again, rather heavily at times, so nature's cruel joke on ALT.NET. Impromptu Sessions One of the best sessions was an impromptu session with Jeremy Miller on the StoryTeller tool and his future plans for it. If you're not familiar with it, it is a tool used to manage and create automated ......
In my previous installment of recapping the events from ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle, I covered pretty much the opening ceremonies as it were. The weather was definitely interesting the entire weekend. Who would believe that we had snow, hail and rain for most of the time we were there in the latter half of April? Mind you it didn't stick, but if you believe in God, there is something to be said of ALT.NET coming to town. Coverage Galore Jeffrey Palermo was gracious enough to capture the opening ......
Now that we've somewhat recovered from ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle, it's time for another DC ALT.NET meeting. I'm currently finishing up my wrapups for Seattle still and I'm sure I have months worth of material from there. Anyhow, this time Jay Flowers will be talking to us about Continuous Integration and CI Factory which was postponed from last month due to schedule conflicts. As always we have the first hour or whenever the conversation ends for our main topic and the rest is Open Spaces. Food ......
ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle has come to a close. What a great time it was and it met every expectation if not exceeded them. Currently I'm in the Seattle airport waiting for my flight home which just got re-arranged. Anyhow, I'd like to wrap up my thoughts for the first day of the event. Setting It Up I arrived one day early for the event to make sure we were set up appropriately. I was able to meet up with Dave Laribee, Glenn Block, Scott Bellware, Jeremy Miller, Greg Young, Scott C Reynolds, Ray ......
Well, the day has finally come where I'm heading to ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle. It's been a long time of planning for this day with all the other guys mentioned on the site. The weather's not looking so great with a possibility of snow on Saturday. Not looking forward to that part as I'm leaving sunny, beautiful Washington DC where it is around 75F or so right now. I hope to be live blogging much of the event, well as much as I can. I you're on Twitter, you can follow me at mattpodwysocki. Looking ......
Last night I attended the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NovaRUG) meeting in Reston last night with Dave Thomas (PragDave) and Chad Fowler. It was a completely packed house and the temperatures were a bit hight in the room, but it was well worth the sweating to attend. Paul Barry presented first on Merb and gave a really good demonstration of some of the capabilities in comparison to Ruby on Rails. If you're not familiar with Merb, it is a lightweight Model View Controller framework written ......
Tonight I will be heading to the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NoVARUG) meeting tonight with Dave Thomas (PragDave) talking about metaprogramming in Ruby. Should be a great time and I'm sure it will be full tonight. For those interested in some introduction to metaprogramming in Ruby, here's a good link to help get you started. Metaprogramming in F#? One of the many things that has interested me in F# is that it was originally written as a language to write other languages. This of course leads ......
Time for another adventure in F#, covering some of the basics of functional programming and F# in particular. Today we'll manage to look more at regular .NET integration and .NET programming. With the previous efforts, we've looked more at functional programming and in turn F# specific things, but want to show that you can do anything normally in F# that you can in C#. To me, F# is the perfect all-purpose language because it can do a lot of the things C# can do, but in turn, F# can do things much ......
Dave Laribee and Jeremy Miller recently recorded an episode on DotNetRocks and was just posted today. Episode 333 "It's the ALT.NET Show" can be found here. It's a great show that explains ALT.NET for those who may not really know what it is outside of some of the arguments on the altdotnet mailing list. This includes discussions on open source frameworks, agile practices, refactoring and so on. It's great to see the reaction from this show at least from my perspective. To see the job we're doing ......
I really enjoyed speaking at this past weekend's CMAP Code Camp. I hope you all enjoyed my presentation on "Loosen Your Dependencies with Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Containers". It was a great discussion to have with everyone and I like to learn there as much as I teach. I also enjoyed teaming up with Scott Allen on his "A Gentle Introduction to Mocking" where we talked about mocks versus stubs, test pattens and mock frameworks such as Rhino Mocks and Moq. Hopefully we'll be doing ......
Now that Unity has been released into the wild, there has definitely been a bit of interest swirling around it. One of my key wants for a good IoC container is basic interception capabilities. My criteria for evaluating a container usually comes down to the following: Configurability (XML, DSL, Code) Dependency Resolution, usually opinionated Lifetime Management (Per Thread, Pooled, Singleton, Transient, etc) Extensibility for Interception So, I realized that Unity was missing some of these things ......
Well, Brad Wilson and Jim Newkirk must really be busy lately. After I talked about the release of xUnit.net RC2, just today, Brad announced the release of RC3. As always, you can find the latest bits here. This fixes a number of bugs and adds CruiseControl.NET and ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 support as well in addition to the Resharper 3.1 and TestDriven.NET support. For more information about it, check out Brad's post here. More or less, they are feature complete for version 1.0 and the only that I think ......
I want to thank the fine folks at the Rockville .NET Users Group (RockNUG) and Dean Fiala for giving me the opportunity to speak last night. It was a record crowd last night, so I'm glad that people were interested in Loose Coupling, Design Patterns, Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development and Inversion of Control containers. I hope everyone got some good information, and if not interested in using containers, design patterns and such, at least know they exist and have their use. Based ......
The Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NoVARUG) will be holding their next meeting next week with a special speaker in Dave Thomas (PragDave). Dave is in town teaching Advanced Rails Studio in Reston and will be kind enough to come talk about the Ruby Object model and how it facilitates metaprogramming. The details are as follows: Subject: Dave Thomas - The Ruby Object Model and Metaprogramming Date: April 16th, 2008 - 7-9PM Location: FGM Inc 12021 Sunset Hills Road Suite 400 Reston, VA 20190 Hope ......
As Chris Tavares mentioned in his blog, Unity 1.0 has been released a couple of days earlier than the April 7th release date mentioned by Grigori Melnik earlier. Scott Densmore also announced this as well as working on porting the inteception from ObjectBuilder2 which I talked about earlier in some of my Unity and IoC containers posts. Looking forward to that post as we've shared some emails on the subject. Would You Like To Know More? For those looking for my posts on the matter, I've covered it ......
UPDATE: More posts on the subject xUnit.net RC3 Just Released Earlier this week, I wrote about the latest release of xUnit.net RC2. Since that time, Brad Wilson and Jim Newkirk released a new version to fix some of the issues with regards to TestDriven.NET integration and ASP.NET MVC integration. You can read more about the issues here. As always you can get the latest bits here. The Installer If you browse to the releases page of xUnit.net, you will notice an installer. This installer will help ......
Time for another adventure in F#, covering some of the basics of functional programming and F# in particular. This is intended at looking at the foundations of F# as well as how it relates to .NET and IL on the back end. I realize I need to spread more of the F# goodness around, so I'm hoping that I can work to bring it at least to the FringeDC user group. Their main meetings are every three months, so hopefully I'll get some time in to do that. Once I get that set up, I'll be sure to let everyone ......
It's interesting that a flurry of releases of testing frameworks have been released lately with Gallio, xUnit.net and of course NUnit. Charlie Poole recently announced on a lot of the discussion boards I belong to recently that NUnit 2.4.7 was recently released. You can read all about what's been added here with the release notes. What's New and Interesting? What's interesting about this release? Well, NUnit no longer depends on log4net, thus getting rid of some dependency issues with regards to ......