Sorry about the late write-up, been a little busy!
Small turn out, with 5 us in all, including new comer Jamie –
a recent graduate from Auckland University, it was great to talk with someone just entering the industry proper and I think everyone else found it very interesting to hear about what's going on at Auckland Uni.
So first off we discussed adventures with alternative
licensing products – Gareth had a few war stories, and mentioned he’s returned
to using .Net Reactor and got a refund on the previous product he tried out
because it just wasn’t living up to expectations, and had some questionable weak points.
We talked about the C5 Generic Collection Library – though none
of us have attempted to use them in anger, a few people had heard about them
recently because it seems to be doing the podcast/blog rounds, even though the
project first debuted at the start of 2006, and was in development well before
then.
The classes were developed at the IT University in
Copenhagen, and feature a large number of specialised collections, as well as
introducing features to provide event handlers and sliding views, support for
clearing collection ranges etc.
There is a recent video on MSDN Channel 9, which is worth a watch as well.
Because we didn’t have it in our hands last year before I
wrapped up the Architecture Chat I discussed the ASP.Net Web Extensions CTP,
mentioning the amount of community interest in MVC and that the Data Services
(Astoria) is looking better and better.
From there we talked about the MVC Contrib. project (and
community) that’s sprung up after the ASP.Net MVC release, which is getting
some New Zealander's attention around the world because of their contributions
of both an XSLT View engine and NHaml View engine – the contrib project is also
providing integration with the popular IoC containers in .Net and a number of
other extensions.
I talked about F# parsing, and my explorations of writing parsers
in F#, especially after reading the series of posts from DevHawk (Harry Pierson), and experimenting
with writing DSL’s in F# by hand. I think my next "goal" is to master integrating F# libraries into my C# code, so I can commercialize on it and start weaving it into my day to day tool set.
I’m not sure I
articulated how elegant F# syntax can be - but hand writing custom parsers in F# with the aid of Active Patterns is much
nicer then the equivalent in a language like C#, If you’re following the
pragmatic programmer guidelines of learning a language a year, you could do
much worse than to learn F# for 2008, it certainly gives the brain a good workout :)
From their I mentioned PEX for use in automated white box
testing – Jamie said he had worked on a 4th year project to do automated
black box testing, and found it interesting that white box testing of this
nature could be made viable/useful... PEX seems to have done it though.
Though it’s not been made available to the general public as
yet (only academia) – I suggest having a listen to this hanselminutes podcast, and then watching
this screencast to get a better idea of just what PEX is doing/aiming to
achieve... I find the support for mocking
particularly interesting, as I’m always sceptical of automated test generation,
as it normally falls apart once you start to work objects when have numerous injected dependencies that are used by the class to do it's work.
Last of all I mentioned TeamCity (JetBrains CI & Build server) Professional Edition is
free, and I’ve been starting to play with it - and considering migrating over
from my current CruiseControl.Net setup for new projects, I’m going to trial it
on a small project and see if it’s worth moving to for what I do.
Last of all – though I forgot to mention it at the time - I’ve
also been looking at Jazz (or more so Rational Team Concert)
lately, it certainly looks to resolve many of the headaches I suffer with
managing concurrent versions of products, especially from the build server
perspective – obviously anything with the name “Rational” is to be feared by
the small or micro ISV because of prohibitive costs – but it’s nice to see just how they approach solving
the problem, as shown in the video "fixing a bug in a previous release".
Not a bad start to the year, hopefully we can make the next one
bigger and better, and maybe get some more long-running architectural discussions going on ... maybe around Behavior Driven Development/Design or maybe Feature Driven Development and what makes it more suitable for fixed-price jobs.
See you all next time!