ALT.NET Seattle Summary

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:35:48 GMT

Jeremy Miller, Ted Neward, Charlie Calvert in the Fish Bowl.

Fortunate to get the email invite after being on the waiting list, this turned out to be a tremendous experience with participants such as Martin Fowler, Brad Abrams, Jon Lam, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haak, Scott Guthrie (sneak peek), Roy Osherove, the list goes on.

Jeremy Miller convened a talk on the growing pains in dealing with an evolving system over the years. In his development of StructureMap, he highlighted some anti-patterns that caused him much grief (i.e. simple duplication leading to a great headache during refactoring) as well as some principles that saved his bacon (i.e. open close principle, tell/don't ask, double dispatch, etc). What intrigued me was that two of the most qualified individuals (Martin Fowler and Brad Abrams) in the open space did not dominate the discussion and focused on listening to the trials and tribulations of the developer. In a relaxed environment, I saw a level of respect for fellow developers.

The JavaScript Session convened by Eleutian folks churned for a bit with some philosophical debates. But it did turn out with people sharing their pains/experiences developing javascript heavy applications. One guy was highlighting his experiences starting off with a Ajax/DHTML application and subsequently scrapping that for Flex and highlighting pieces that were reusable.

What actually stuck out for me was a VS2008 plugin tool from Justin Angel. Though not yet refined, I'm hoping he makes this publicly available. I think we can all agree that the tooling for javascript is lackluster and this was an attempt to improve some of the DX during his Silverlight 1.0 development days. UX being User Experience; thus, DX shall be the Developer Experience. Yes, it's all about agility. Just like how users don't appreciate un-intuitive and unresponsive UIs, developers also seek that constant feedback mechanism. Nothing like an empty error list or a list of green lights to validate your development contributions.

I was somewhat surprised to see only 5 people in attendance for the PEX talk: Roy Osherove, two Microsoft employees, another attendee and myself. I suppose it's a hard sell when you have Scott Hanselman speaking at the same time slot. Albeit, this talk was no slouch either with the creator of MBUnit, Peli de Halleux and the guy who started this up, Nikolai Tillmann. I had heard about this project and was initially skeptical but was ready to get my hands on this at the end of their demo. As you can probably imagine, this isn't just a random test generator. There are attributes allowing you to specify your object of interest. As PEX avoids branching into BCL and testing the framework, I can see this going further to exclude in-house components. Regardless of this, Roy verified with Peli the ability to mock objects. This is the type of tool you can simply setup and distribute the workload amongst your spare machines. While there is a lot of potential here, there are also two major brick walls:

Lack of support in multi-threaded testing as each test executes on a thread. Although, this problem isn't specific to PEX or its concepts and is a general debugging/testing problem.
There is no ship vehicle for this nifty project. This means that only Microsofties can play with this on codebox right now. Productizing is a long a windy road (strangler application anyone?).

Other highlights included a conversation on Next Generation Architectures and another conversation on Scaling Agile Development. This composed of about 10 people describing their experiences running an agile shop and enforcing different strategies. Finally, Jon Lam's talk on IronRuby was a great example of testing suites in action. To maintain its Ruby Roots, the folks have taken the testing suites of Rubinious and made it pass against IronRuby.

Jon Lam on IronRuby

Aside from all of the above, personal takeaways from this conference include:

Learning more about IronRuby and picking up on new idioms via reading the code of these native speakers
More on Dynamo
Playing with Framework Design Studio Brad spoke of
Learning how to PEX IT!

Looking forward to more of these in the future.

Alt.Net

ALT.NET Seattle Summary

Jeremy Miller, Ted Neward, Charlie Calvert in the Fish Bowl.

Jon Lam on IronRuby