Here are some topic suggestions:

• The SOA Manifesto - Pointlessness manifested.
• Pimp My Architecture.
• Willed vs. Forced Development.
• Go or Unladen Swallow?
• InternetNZ announces formation of New Zealand IPv6 Task Force.
• Linq to Sql Profiler Now in public beta.
• Voyage of the Buccaneer Scholar.
• Concurrent programming presentation.
• WPF Memory Leaks.
• ASP.Net MVC 2 Beta 2 Release.
• PDC Stuff, like the Ray Ozzie keynote etc.
• Microsoft open sources the .Net Micro framework.
• It's time for ActiveRecordEngine.Net for ASP.Net MVC.
• Fusion ioExtreme Review.
• Dynamic method bag.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 19th November.

The above topics are just a fall back in case we run out of anything else to discuss.  Note we’ve also taken to devising the list of topics collaboratively on Google wave – This weeks wave can be found here.

Note: If you are a regular attendee and don’t have a wave account yet drop me an email and we’ll see if we can get you an invite.

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

Architecture chat tomorrow, apologies for the late post.

Here’s some possible topics:

• Scala - I've been learning Scala in my spare time... especially as I'm doing the odd bit of Java/JVM work, and well.. Java sucks... Seems like a great grab bag of features that I'd like to see introduced into C# like Traits… Thoughts? Opinions? – and of course there’s Scala.Net to consider too
• Visualising Windsor Components
• Ninject2 (from Peter) faster, smaller, uses CSL, "just works", auto module scanning "just binds", removed bad features such as private and field injections. Still not finished but very useable. Proper support for MVC
• Javascript MVC
• .Net Needs Spring??
• MEF + IoC - Is anyone using both MEF and IoC container, can they shed any wisdom. I know Glenn is hopefully going to enlighten us soon (see his first part in a series on this) -this is becoming important to me as I'm starting to suffer lots of headaches from choosing to use an IoC container as my plug-in/extensibility framework where 3rd parties can write plug ins (i.e. installing stuff into the container is ok, uninstalling it at run time, and educating other developers... not so much) - also what patterns (like generic decorators etc.) aren't suitable when considering modular applications.
• Mauricio Scheffer also mentioned that Krzysztof is working to bridge Windsor and MEF, and that the initial patch looks promising (for lazy component loading).
  
• Literate Programming… Thoughts?
• Horn Get Live – The next step in Horn’s “Evolution” is here – check out the http://www.hornget.net/packages/ website … I think this is really starting to show promise
• Spec Explorer - Model Base Testing Tool
• Watir/watin and Continuous integration – running tests when your not logged into machines etc.
• WPF 4 Changes...
• Roll Top Concept PC
• Units of Measure in F#
• NHibernate & Execution Plans and Andrei Volkov’s in depth post covering the history of this issue

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 5th November.

The above topics are just a fall back in case we run out of anything else to discuss.  Note we’ve also taken to devising the list of topics collaboratively on Google wave – This weeks wave can be found here.

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

The Auckland Architecture Chat is on tomorrow, at 11:30am, Garrisons, in Sylvia Park.

Here a list of some possible topics:

• Five simple database design errors you should avoid.
• VS 2010 Beta 2 available - some useful link posts here and here.
• Role of P&P Team in Microsoft Development?
• Approaches to sanitizing/parsing html, including regexs, sglm reader, hpricot, htmltidy, antixss, xhtml dtd and approaches employed by social sites like facebook and opensocial (such as you might find in say shindig or pesta).
• Do we still, or did we ever really need http. ( and past thoughts of Blackbird)
• Sharepoint 2010 Development content published.
• Microsoft Ajax Minifier vs YUI Compressor.
• Google wave first impressions - as we all get our google invites and have a play - what do we think?
• Evolving the key/value programming model to a higher level.
• Http Archive Specification - now implemented in firebug and httpWatch. 
• Lightspeed 3.0 beta - including goodies like Migration support.
• LLBLGen Pro version 3 sneak peak.
• Linq to sql profiler private beta.
• Nhibernate shards progress report. 
• IntelliJ IDEA Goes open source.
• Nobody wants my code...
• Tim Berners Lee - Admitting // wasn't required.
  

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 22nd October – 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.

The Auckland Architecture Chat is on tomorrow, at 11:30am, Garrisons, in Sylvia Park.

• Lightweight debugging for Hybrid C#/IronPython Apps.
• Asp.Net MVC Preview 2.
• Good Developers Write Good Code Instinctively.
• Texo – Power Shell CI Server.
• Create projects from standard source control templates – Warmup.
• Using seadragon with ASP.Net MVC.
• Duct tape programmers.
• WebsiteSpark Program Announcement.
• XUnit 1.5 Shipped.
• The Visual Studio Documentary.
• Rich Hickey & Brian Beckman – Inside Clojure.
• MySpace Qizmt – Open Source Map Reduce Framework.
• Scratch interface.
• Using a service bus for queries…
• PHP to ADO.Net Data Services bridge.
• Mono touch 1.0 release and the recent monomania on hanselminutes podcast.
• Software transactional memory in .Net 4.0.  Recent podcast on .Net Rocks here.
• Good reason for remove functionality...
• Stack Overflow Careers
  

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 8th October – 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.

The Auckland Architecture Chat is on tomorrow, at 11:30am, Garrisons, in Sylvia Park.

• Codeplex foundation announcement
• Blog Reactions from Miguel DeIcaza, Scott Bellware, Phill Haack (1,2) John V Peterson, Jeremy D Miller, Scott Hanselman.
• Letting things die on the vine.
• Microsoft’s secret “Courier” booklet device unveiled.
• Codecamp / Teched Post-mortem.
• Version v0.16 of Pex released – it’s getting better and better.
• MonoTouch 1.0 went live.
• BDD
• Rob Connery – Make BDD your BFF.
• Mspec.. for Boo!
• Roy Osherove – Steal my book…
• Kata – have you done any lately?
• UncleBob’s Karta (bowling game, prime factors etc.).
• Pragmatic programmers – CodeKata.
• Interesting article on xmpp/google wave opportunities by Jason Kolb.
• 10 Reasons pair programming is not for the masses.
• Google jstemplate.
• SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.
• Technology behind Microsoft TechEd New Zealand 2009.
• Make it easy to refactor…
• Why do ref and out parameters not allow type variation? (something I’d always wondered about)
• Writing a Z-Machine interpreter in C#.
• Wither the repository.
• NHibernate Profiler goes 1.0 – anyone else bought a copy?
• DSL 09 Blog.
• Drawing the line between MVC Controlls and Application Services.

We had a smallish turnout last time that focused on mostly reviewing Visual NHibernate – so most of the topics from the last session are still up for discussion too – you can find them listed here.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 24th September – and the topics above are just there in case we run out of anything else to talk about (which is rare).

Update: Jamie from Slyce software will be demoing the first cut of entity-first modeling support in Visual NHibernate.

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

Thanks to all those people who enjoyed endured an hour of me talking about Domain Specific Languages and Boo :)

Slides

Slides can be downloaded from here, and a zip file containing the code is here.

The DSL Book

If you found this topic interesting and want to learn more about writing Domain Specific Languages with Boo, I strongly encourage you to buy Ayende’s book “Writing domain specific languages in boo”.

It’s very thorough (350 odd pages) – and includes a lot of guidance around not only writing a domain specific language with Boo, but the far larger topic of incorporating a business DSL into real world applications, versioning concerns, batch compilation etc. that must be considered when ever you write a domain specific language to be used in a production system.

Do yourself a favour and buy it today – it’s currently in Mannings EAP (early access program) – but is complete and just undergoing the final editing stages before going to print.

Boo & Boo DSL Resources

• http://boo.codehaus.org/
• Boo language google group
• Boo Tutorials
  • Boo Primer
  • Hello Boo
  • Differences with C#
  • Differences with Python
  • Boo Who
• IDE Support / Development Environments
  • Sharpdevelop website (IDE capable of building Boo projects on windows).
  • MonoDevelop (Mono IDE capable of building Boo projects, windows version does not currently support boo).
  • Boo Lang Studio (Boo plugin for visual Studio .net 2008 – fairly alpha)
  • Booish (A boo command line interpreter / REPL)
• RhinoDSL
  • RhinoDSL Tutorial.
  • RhinoDSL on github.
• Ayende’s Posts
  • DSL posts
  • Boo posts

Syntax highlighting Editors

I had a few questions via email / skype about the WPF syntax highlighting component I used in my demos – it was AvalonEdit, part of the SharpDevelop 4.0 project – you can grab the code via subversion from here:

svn://svnmirror.sharpdevelop.net/sharpdevelop/trunk/SharpDevelop/src/Libraries/AvalonEdit

Ayende’s book also covers building a simple script editor using the SharpDevelop windows forms editor control (know as ICSharpCode.TextEditor)… there is an article on codeplex here which describes how to use that library.

Thanks! and Next Architecture Chat

Thanks all for coming to code camp – and for those that are interested, we have an upcoming Architecture Chat this Thursday 24th September at 11:30am – hopefully we might see a few new faces there this week!

Some possible topics:

• Extensible languages like Boo & Nemerle.
• Boo 0.9.2 released.
• Teched NZ 2009 Next Week.
• Why are so many developer tools orange?
• Myth of Software Development – Open vs. Closed.
• On the fly assembly decompression.
• Interesting .Net / Java Integration projects…
• DotWeb 
• ScriptSharp / ExtSharp
• JSC
• Volta (which is dead)
• Advantages / disadvantages of C# vs IL transformation.
• Debugging experiences / other concerns?
• Doloto on DevLabs – and let’s not forget Aptimize.
• NHibernate Commercial Support.
• Nice set of lucene tutorials from Simone Chiaretta.
• Screen Activator Pattern.
• SharpDevelop goes 32bit by default.
• Scott Hanselman’s 2009 Tools List.
• CodeRush vs. ReSharper.
• RhinoMocks 3.6.
• Fluent NHibernate 1.0 RTM.
• Repository Implementation Patterns.

Edit: Some Late Editions from David (who gives his appologies, and wont be able to make it tomorrow).

• Visual NHibernate Beta Release.
• StoryTeller & Preview Release Blog Post.
  

There is also the code camp this Sunday in Auckland, at which I’ll be presenting on Domain Specific Languages, with a side-order of writing Domain Specific Languages in Boo.  I'll post about that tomorrow, and maybe include a little more detail about what I hope to cover.

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday 10th September – 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.

Good turn out at the last Architecture chat, including Guy, who hadn't been to one for over a year, and Murray, a new comer.

• Secunia Corporate Software Scanner - How to identify missing patches etc.
• Discussed the 97 things every software architect should know and Beautiful Architecture books - I'll bring them along next time if anyone wants to borrow them.
• Discussed Facebook's key/value database Cassandra.
• Discussed approaches for publishing and consuming RSS, talked about PubSub Hubbub.
• Discussed selecting technologies for building CRUD Apps, and what are good technologies for learning ORM.
• Discussed NHibernate being the Swiss army knife, lots of features, interesting place to learn as you will become aware with almost every facet of ORM nomenclature etc.
• Discussed Summer of NHibernate series of screen casts / tutorials.
• Discussed Entity Framework, Linq2Sql  and others including Lightspeed.
• Discussed difference between highly opinionated vs. non-opinionated ORM's.
• Software Craftsmanship - sparked off by this article in the Herald - general consensus was we didn't agree at all with the article, and that there is an obvious disconnect between the view points of academia and practicing developers.
• Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur improving software quality and stopping projects running over budget, and it’s rather short-sighted view of how software defects originate / what contributes to overall “software quality”.
• Big discussion was around Software "engineering" - and how far removed from other engineering disciplines we are.
• Discussed fact that most software development focused degrees in New Zealand don't qualify you to join IPENZ - and if we could, most of us wouldn't want to.
• Discussed the laughable Idea of forcing developers to study something every year to “stay current” – everyone agreed if you’re not learning something every day as a developer, your doing it wrong.
• Service Buses & IoC Containers (the conversation got a bit mixed up between these two) – things we discussed were:
• When to adopt, i.e. how big does a project have to be, what problems should you be facing.
• Quite a bit of discussion around the misnomer of "how big" being a reason to adopt any technology, rather then how complex, good fit etc.
• Discussed the dangers of adopting technology and practices prematurely.
• Examples of .Net service bus:
• Mass Transit.
• NServiceBus.
• Discussed the .Net Mailing List - Josh didn't know what it was, which in some way reflects that it’s not longer promoted any more, discussed it succumbing to a slow death, how stack overflow affected question traffic etc. – FYI You can still subscribe to the dot.net.nz mailing lists here.
• Expressed annoyance that dot.net.nz no longer works after the “upgrade” to sharepoint, need the www. prefix.
• Wordpress twitter-like themes/plugins, such as the prologue / P2 theme.
• Pomodoro timers, including tomatoes, footballs, iphone apps and even *gasp horror* on-screen timers.

Some Possible Topics:

• HawkCodeBox – interesting DLR syntax highlighting text box.
• Sustainability verses Maintainability?
• Oslo team merging with Data Programmability Team.
• Simpler Transactions – which is really part of a larger topic, of “abusing using”.  Though something I do on occasion, is it really a good idea? (I link to Phil’s post because there’s a good discussion on this point in the comments).
• Moonlight 2.0 goes beta.
• Tokyo Cabinet,Tokyo Tyrant and Tokyo Dystopia.  There’s a .net implementation of the Tyrant wire protocol here.  Just starting to experiment with these..
• How to get the maximum performance out of your Plinq query.
• Fundamentalist Functional Programming.
• Quantity is not a measure of quality.
• Writing great unit tests – best and worst practices.
• The application and application services in silverlight 3.
• What do you do about inaccurate data?
• Arrays of arrays… or, why language design is never easy.
• Government plans to filter the internet – now in official draft.
• Tips for rich client development.
• How to be a software professional or craftsmen? (From David).
  

We’ll be meeting at the usual time of 11:30am @ Garrisons, Sylvia Park, Thursday  27th August – 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.

• Discussed the Pomodoro technique, David's been doing it from the start of the year (And finding it working well), Jamie started a couple of months ago, Josh started a couple of weeks ago.   Here’s the book, and here’s a whitepaper.
• New Zealand most peaceful country.
• Study identified software developers as generally being healthier then people working in other industries.
• Mylyn Eclipse Plugin.
• Discussed Pipe Networks cable, and there was some debate that it had been both started or stalled...  Some older Articles mentioning arriving at Austrlia, but not NZ.   There’s also a wikipedia page for PIPE Networks.
• Discussed Distributed source control, including..
• Git & Git Hub
• Mecurial
• GitSharp (and it's current status)
• SVK – Josh is using it, but hardly anyone else knew of it’s existence.  Here’s the wikipedia article for it.
• Peter and Josh put out the call to arms – if you haven’t tried a DVCS, now is the time!
• Java in legacy lockdown – we discussed the rate of change / addition of new features in Java vs. C# as flagship languages for their associated JVM & CLR.
• Also discussed the current trend (At least on blogs / podcasts) to identify a Java v.Next, such as Scala.
• Are java’s days really numbered when being considered for developing green-fields apps (as a language, obviously not as a platform).
• Automapper - Updated group of experiences after using it in a recent project, generally nothing but good news to report.  Did discuss configuring mappings when using an IoC container or plugin model.
• Discussed Firefox weave.
• WPF Event Manager - we discussed why events in WPF are potentially quite slow.
• Discussed the contrast between the winforms event model and WPF.
• Also discussed how the windows forms event model was generally inefficient, and sometimes like sucking on a fire hose, relying on efficient handling to avoid issues.
• Discussed how the Reactive / Rx Framework might help to simplify some of the problems we face today.
• Discussed the Drop of the Rx (Linq To Events) In Silverlight 3 - see here for a great write up.
• Discussed the interesting timing of Lightspeeds announcement of SQL Function support and EF 4.0’s ;o)
• Discussed open source projects
• The statement “if I don’t know about your project, that’s your problem” – Amen, open source is not just about throwing code up on a public accessible repository.
• Discussed community.
• Discussed educational materials, having up to date examples etc.
• Discussed the interesting mix of the hugely greatful and downright rude people you interact when running an open source project.
• Distinguishing the scratch an itch i.e. casual open source project (normally written by just one person) verses the more organised attempts to create lasting pieces of software and community.
• Discussed Google Pub Sub.
• Peter raised the question of writing services that render directly to the client i.e. using RDP or VNC protocols - talked around if this was a good idea, the feeling that it was a little like x-windows 15+ years ago and that there are some devices or applications that might already be doing this using the VNC protocol (?).
• Discussed Internationalization & user customisation, including:
• Implementing the functionality to allow users to create custom "languages" for products so they can change labels, terminology etc. 
• The costs of doing this at the start of a project vs. after shipping.
• The impacts of certain languages on layout.
• Why are our web dev frameworks not built with a degree of customisation out of the box i.e. moving the order of fields on screen, changing widths etc.
• Big vs2008 patch? (Not sure what this was, think Peter mentioned it being rolled out about a month ago).
• Entity Framework 4.0 features etc.
• Talked about the problem of too much content being delivered as video, including:
• Not having the time to actually sit down and watch it - we need more transcripts and audio-only podcasts/content!
• Main culprit was identified as Microsoft with Channel 9 & Mix, love the content - but there need's to be more pure Audio and transcripts.  Round the table most people had hours and hours of videos on their "must watch list" with more and more piling up every day.
• Peter raised the question "what are you missing out on by not watching them" - none of use could really answer, gut feeling was probably not much if you keep an eye on twitter and blogs anyway.  Also it seems “big picture” stuff is often easy to grok when in video format (or at least more engaging), but video is too slow for anything else.
• Talked about Fibre round NZ - the ongoing "suck" that is Auckland's internet situation, and discussed what's involved what would be involved in setting up a wifi network for smaller NZ towns, to provide high speed access to fibre.
• Talked about NHibernate’s codebase, why it is the way it is, and the advantages it brings i.e. ability to incorporate associated projects like shards, search etc.
• Microsoft futures video – discussed the video, it’s “vision” of the future, and contrasted it to videos of the future from 10 years ago, how much was right, how much wasn’t etc.
• Discussed the Hudson CI Server, and why a few of us like it More the CC.Net and Teamcity.
• GWT .. also mentioned some of the interesting bits in GWT 2.
• Discussed Eclipse vs. Mono Develop.  Was interesting how divided it was, some people really don’t like Eclipse, others quite like it.  Also discussed the FUD around Eclipse vs. Mono Develop features.  Quite a few of us are using Eclipse for something i.e. PHP or Java development.
• We asked the question of “why?” Teleriks ASP.Net MVC Controls even exist.
• Discussed learning Groovy / Grails, and my dabbling with Groovy as a replacement for Jelly script in a project I was working on (though I think I mistakenly called it Jettyscript at the time - what a java noob I am! ;o)
• Discussed Suse Studio and Matt Richards Mass customisation etc. concepts - and how this could be applied to delivering custom applications.
• Polyphonic C# was discussed – including the concept of Chords - there was some debate around whether this project became part of c-omega as well (according to the web page, it did).
• Discussed Parallelization, PLinq etc.
• We discussed Rob Howard's "legacy" of the provider model, how it came about, community server, and why for many of us the provider model was either an underwhelming or unsuitable set of extension points.
• We talked about Horn, Josh mentioned my “Love letter to Horn” ;o) – and I talked a little about why I think this is important
• David started a discussion around Peer to Peer Banking, including this interesting article from Jason Kolb.
• Discussed if Shards exists for NHibernate.  Yes and no from the looks of it, it’s in Contrib, but appears to be incomplete / non-functional.
• Discussed Caliburn WPF framework, and it’s yield goodness.
• Discussed codeplex making their Wiki engine available.
• Talked about writing DSL’s – including Boo, Oslo’s M, and Jetbrains MPS.  Contrasted differences, and why Boo can be quite appealing to developers compared to developing complex grammars for External DSL’s.

There were lots more discussions, but I’m finding the conversations too interesting lately so I’m not taking as many notes as I should – If anyone recalls any other discussions / topics, just leave a comment on this post and I’ll update it with the relevant details.

See you all next week!