User Groups

DC ALT.NET Meeting 4/23/2008 - Jay Flowers and CI Factory

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:38:51 GMT

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 will be served as well.

Below are the details for the meeting:

Time:
4/23/2008 - 7PM-9PM

Location:
2201 Wilson Blvd
Arlington, VA 22201Archstone Aparaments

Parking/Metro:
Best parking on N. Veitch St
Courthouse Metro the best bet

As always you can find out more by joining the mailing list here. Hope to see a great crowd there and to continue some of the great discussions that were held in Seattle. Until next time...

NOVARUG with Dave Thomas (PragDave) Recap

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:29:31 GMT

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 in Ruby. It was written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz in response to trying and giving up on making Ruby on Rails thread safe. You can find his presentation materials here.

It was mentioned that there will be a Ruby conference in the Northern Virginia area upcoming I'd like to see if we can get some IronRuby in there instead of all those Java guys with JRuby. We'll see what happens, but for right now, everything seems to be in flux. Stay tuned!

Next up, Dave Thomas talked about the Ruby object model with a very good presentation. Below you can find some of my pictures I took from the event. Forgive the quality of the images, but you can tell that it was a crowded place! Anyhow, it was a really good talk about the object model, how the scoping of self and the resolution of classes and methods are done deep down in Ruby. It was an excellent presentation and I was definitely excited by his passion for the community and the technology.

First we have Dave talking about the inheritance chain of Ruby objects.

Then here's Dave talking about the method resolution.

I had a chance to chat with Dave afterwards on F# as he has been looking into OCaml lately, where F# got most of its functionality from. It's his hope that F# succeeds and I ultimately think it will. So, I told him to give it a try. Anyhow, it was a great night and good to reach out to the community. The DC area has a pretty rich community of .NET, Ruby and Java programmers that's really refreshing to see. Until next time...

Metaprogramming in F#

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:19:20 GMT

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 me to a discussion of F# and metaprogramming. Is it a fit? There are a couple of links well worth visiting and then at a future date, we'll come back to the subject.

Before the links, most of the language oriented stuff comes from quotations. Quotations are a little block of code which turns a particular piece of code into an expression tree. This language tree can then be transformed, optimized and even compiled into different languages. There are two types of these quotations, raw and typed. Typed Quotations contain static typing information whereas the raw do not. For a good introduction to these, check out Tomas Petricek's post here.

Leveraging Meta-Programming Components with F# - Don Syme
Talks about F# with Quotations and LINQ expressions for expressing metaprogramming in F#
F# metaprogramming and classes - Tomas Petricek
Talks about Class Quotations and basic metaprogramming capabilities in F# and its limitations

I hope when I get a further chance, I'll dig into it a bit more here. Until next time...

ALT.NET on DotNetRocks and the Community

Matthew Podwysocki — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:12:09 GMT

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 from Josh Holmes, Glenn Block, me and others from within to reach out and also present ideas and bridge the gaps. It's been very rewarding to be a part of that.

We're only just a few days away from ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle. All of those who are attending should have received a notice of such this morning. I'll be arriving in Seattle on Thursday afternoon to help set up for the event so if anyone wants to hang out beforehand let me know.

Bringing It To The Community

Anyhow, this weekend I did my best to bring some of those ALT.NET practices to the CMAP Code Camp and we had a pretty good turnout. This time I talked about refactoring to patterns, dependency injection and inversion of control containers. I'm hoping to do the same for the Northern Virginia Code Camp coming up on May 17th. Brian Donahue has been rather successful doing so with the Philly Code Camps as well. That reminds me that I'm coming up there in mid-May to do an F# session. Should be a fun time.

CMAP Code Camp Wrap Up - Dependency Injection and IoC Containers

Matthew Podwysocki — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:45:14 GMT

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 some more ping-pong sessions in the future.

Once again, I'd like to plug my DC ALT.NET group that I run. Our next meeting is scheduled for April 23rd and the topic will be Continuous Integration with Jay Flowers. We'll announce the location shortly for our group. You can go ahead and sign up for our mailing list here.

Anyhow, here are some resources that can help point you in the right direction. This includes articles, blogs and such that I find will be useful in your journey to better understand these things:

My presentation materials have just been uploaded to my SkyDrive. The PowerPoint presentation can be found here and the code samples can be found here.

If you note, I my code uses the following products in order to get it to run:

Feedback is always appreciated.

xUnit.net RC3 Just Released

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:37:38 GMT

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 really is needed at this point is a decent GUI runner and that's well acknowledged as something they are working on. Visual Studio integration would be nice as well...

For my other posts in this series, check them out here:

If you were in attendance at last night's RockNUG appearance, all tests for my demos were using xUnit.net, so I am actively using it right now and will be for my CMAP Code Camp appearance this weekend. However, I did not show the GUI runner because, well, it's not there yet, and instead, the console runner works just fine, thank you. So, go ahead and pick up the latest bits and give the team feedback!

One last note regarding Brad, he was recently interviewed by Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell over at How Software Is Built and gives some interesting insights in the open source world inside and outside Microsoft and his contributions to it. Very good interview and well worth the time to read.

RockNUG IoC Container Presentation Wrapup

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:10:21 GMT

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 on the feedback I've already received, it was warming and why I like presenting at user groups, so that both of us can learn.

Once again, I'd like to plug my DC ALT.NET group that I run. Our next meeting is scheduled for April 23rd and the topic will be Continuous Integration with Jay Flowers. We'll announce the location shortly for our group. You can go ahead and sign up for our mailing list here.

Anyhow, here are some resources that can help point you in the right direction. This includes articles, blogs and such that I find will be useful in your journey to better understand these things:

After my CMAP Code Camp session over the weekend, I will go ahead and post my slides and code samples for your enjoyment. So, if you're in the Columbia, MD area this weekend and haven't signed up, go ahead and do so. Hope to see a great crowd there!

NoVARUG April 16th - Dave Thomas (PragDave)

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:43:40 GMT

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 to see a good crowd there! I know I'm very interested in this subject and hope to dive deeper soon. That reminds me I need to do some of metaprogramming in F# as well.

DC ALT.NET March Meeting Wrapup

Matthew Podwysocki — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:59:41 GMT

Another month and another highly successful DC ALT.NET meeting. I want to thank Kevin Hegg for hosting the event as he was a very gracious host. We had a better than expected turnout which was very cool. It's good to associate names to faces after chatting, emailing and whatnot. I also want to thank Phil McMillan for stepping up to the plate at the last moment to backfill for the lack of the scheduled speaker. It's even more refreshing to not have any Death By PowerPoint (DBPPT) (TM). I appreciate Phil's talk even more due to the fact that he had a laptop meltdown the night before, so we talked about concepts and implementations without showing any real code.

What Did We Talk About?

Our format that we follow is that we have one hour for our scheduled topic and the rest is Open Spaces. Bring a topic and talk about it. So, for the first hour, Phil led the discussion around interception facilities in Castle Windsor in regards to handling a Unit of Work pattern for a custom written WPF application. There is a lot of headache that comes with undo logic in WPF controls, so using interception and the unit of work pattern can get around this, although not the cleanest code written to man. Also, we talked about the headaches of registration inside IoC containers whether it be in code or in XML. We talked about Binsor and whether that was an answer to the registration headaches caused by massive XML config files. Craig Andera just loves bringing up Lisp and Lisp macros as they solve all programming problems ever invented by man.

The second hour was an open spaces discussion where we had pretty lively debate about:

Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and its uses and extensibility model
Design by Contract
Functional Programming with Lisp/Scheme, Functional Javascript, Erlang, and F# and the value proposition it has
Finding the right developer for your organization
TDD/Test First Development
ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle topics

How We're Different

Like I said before, we tend to be different than most user groups in the Washington DC area due to the fact that we're an Open Spaces event, for at least half of it. We don't really do PowerPoint presentations, instead a more intimate environment where everyone participates. I don't think anyone stayed silent during the meeting. Instead of being lectured to, you're part of the conversation. We want passionate developers to attend, those who are looking for a better way. It's even effective when not looking at code, nor slides for any given product. I feel we can augment any discussion from any user group in the DC area, and not here to compete, instead compliment them with a more intimate and passionate discussion.

Where We Go From Here

After the March meeting, we're looking to hold the next meeting the week after ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle. That should bring some lively discussion and wrapup from the event. We also look forward to having Jay Flowers make it to the event to discuss Continuous Integration and CI Factory. Stay tuned for details on our next meeting. April is going to be a busy month for at least me with the CMAP Code Camp on April 12th, speaking at RockNUG and ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle as well as our own DC ALT.NET Meeting.

Wrapping It Up

If you're interested in a better way, to discuss .NET or related topics and you're in the ALT.NET mindset, then come and join the conversation. We're always looking for passionate individuals to come and join and be a part. Join our mailing list and find out more here.

Adventures in F# - FringeDC User Group

Matthew Podwysocki — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:34:16 GMT

During my Adventures in F# series that I've been posting, I've always wondered where the interest in these languages come from. Sure, we have a lot of user groups in the Washington DC area, just to name a few that I've been to or belong to:

But, what I was noticing is lack of where the true language geeks hang out. Craig Andera pointed me in the last DC ALT.NET Meeting to a group that does just that while he was looking at Lisp and Scheme in the past year. This group is called FringeDC which is not interested in the mainstream languages such as C#, C++, Java, Ruby and so on. Instead they focus on fringe languages such as Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, OCaml, Squeak and so on. I'm sure we could pile F# and Scala on that bandwagon as they both are fringe-ish and not mainstream just yet. If you're in the Washington, DC area, go ahead and check them out. I'll be sure to attend some of these when time permits. And if they're interested in some F# stuff, I'm sure I could deliver.