Apologies for the late posting, there is in fact an Architecture Chat tomorrow, at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park (Thursday 26th March 2009).

Some topics that have interested me lately which we might want to discuss:

• Some M debates going on – Ayende has a interesting post “M is to DSL as Drag & Drop is to programming” and there’s also James Clark has an interesting post on Getting involved with M.  If nothing else It doesn’t seem like the entire M story has revealed itself yet (but where have we heard that line before?) and we’re plagued with examples that aren’t really solving business problems or demonstrating technical beyond what I could achieve with boo or ANTLR.
• There’s a couple of M DSL’s that appeared last week – MUrl, a DSL for restful clients and MService – not great examples in my opinion, but interesting none the less.
• Azure Fabric Controller.
• IronRuby 0.3 Released.
• ASP.Net MVC 1.0 release – has asp.net webforms just become a legacy platform?
• Self Tracking Entities in Entity Framework.
• Fluent interfaces - are they potentially doing more harm then good, is there a well understood sweet spot between discoverability and efficiency / being concise. What do we think of things like the NUnitEx project?
  

Also we only had 3 people including myself turn up last time, a new low (a flight of the conchords band meeting basically ;o) – but one of the participants had driven all the way from Hamilton just to attend, so well done there!

..which also means I’ll be recycling many of the previous topics we didn’t cover last week as well:

• Relational data features to come to Azure (via TDS no less, so nhibernate/lightspeed/EF etc. on Azure are a reality) and REST to go away. My first thought is will it scale, or do we still need to fall back to an EAV approach when dealing with huge datasets?
• T4 Support in Mono. I’d also be interested in talking about who’s using T4 and for what.
• Moq 3.0 has gone RTM.
• DevHawk has an interesting series of articles on writing an IronPython debugger.
• Ivan Porto Carrero is making good progress on his IronRuby MVC implementation.
• Gem/package/dependency management tools for .Net emerging and existing/dead – ngems, rocks, horn, nmaven, NPanday, Byldan or even just using ruby gems itself…  What’s going on in this space, how it might improve .Net adoption (and some of the thoughts people have blogged about the subject after the alt.net conf).
• Casey Charlton is starting to blog about a sample DDD application, the DDD Parcel Service, which should be an interesting exercise to follow.
• Dr Dobb’s Journal (DDJ) is dead – though I haven’t bought an issue in a few years, and really they were too expensive in NZ currency terms for what little you got, it seems a little sad… are there any print magazines left for the developer?
• Roy Osherove is surveying to see what unit testing / mocking frameworks people are using – hopefully this will get enough responses to be somewhat balanced.
• Recent Alt.net Conference in Seattle … what went on, some interesting thoughts from people like Scott Hanselman, Ayende, Simone and an interview on the alt.net podcast with Scott Bellware.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Tomorrow (Thursday 26th March 2009) – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

For more details on the location and write-ups of previous sessions you can consult the associated wiki.