Weekly meeting cancellations August 26 and September 2, 2009

With the heat of the summer winding down and without any firm commitments from speakers we have decided to cancel these two evenings. See you all in September with Claudio and SOLID.

Zach and John

VAN: Jeremy Miller on Screen Architectures and Separated Presentation patterns on Aug 12

Topic

Jeremy Miller will be speaking again on Virtual ALT.NET this Wednesday (Aug 12, 2009), but this time on Screen Architectures and Separated Presentation patterns (MVP, MVVM). 

Who is Jeremy Miller?

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest shop in all of Austin. Jeremy is also the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller tool for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net. Jeremy is also the author of the Patterns in Practice column in MSDN Magazine. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog The Shade Tree Developer part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#, and very active within the ALT.NET community.

What is VAN?

Virtual ALT.NET (VAN) is the online gathering place of the ALT.NET community. Through conversations, presentations, pair programming and dojos, we strive to improve, explore, and challenge the way we create software. Using net conferencing technology such as Skype and LiveMeeting, we hold regular meetings, open to anyone, usually taking the form of a presentation or an Open Space Technology-style conversation.

Please see the Calendar to find a VAN group that meets at a time convenient to you, and feel welcome to join a meeting. Past sessions can be found on the Recording page.

To stay informed about VAN activities, you can subscribe to the Virtual ALT.NET Google Group and follow the Virtual ALT.NET blog.

Meeting Details

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Wed, August 12, 2009 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Wed, August 12, 2009 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

[kickit]

VAN: Jeremy Miller talking about Screen Activation Lifecycle August 5th

Topic

Jeremy Miller will be talking about Screen Activation Lifecycle.  On his blog he posted the following about the talk:

I will be presenting some preliminary material from my "Presentation Patterns" book on Virtual ALT.NET during the first two weeks of August.  For August 5th I'm going to talk about what I call the "Screen Activation Lifecycle."  Think of an application like Visual Studio that is constantly loading and destroying screens.  How can we activate a new screen and synchronize the application shell to reflect the options for the new screen?  How do you locate and activate an existing screen for a requested subject instead of opening a duplicate screen?  How do you remember state to do web browser type navigation?  And oh yeah, how can you do this in a way that enables you to easily add all new screens later (OCP baby!)?  To start some answers going, I'd like to present some reocurring design patterns I've found useful for these problems.  I'll definitely be talking about a "Tabbed MDI" application shell for the first talk and maybe a web browser style shell (depends on how I do in prepping).  I'll also touch on "View First" vs "Presenter/ViewModel First."

I'm really hoping for some feedback on the material here and I'd love to have any and all criticism or suggestions.  I've got 5 days to prepare as well, so if there's anything in specific about this topic that you're interested, please drop me a comment and I'll see what I can do.  I'm thinking that the second week of August to talk about Separated Presentation patterns.  There's an almost infinite store of good content on these patterns and the important differences between them, but not many developers have a strong understanding of these differences.  I think I'm going to give up and go with MVVM in my nomenclature.  I do think it just MS's renaming of Presentation Model, but I think far more people are familiar with the term MVVM and well, that matters. 

Who is Jeremy Miller?

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest shop in all of Austin. Jeremy is also the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller tool for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net. Jeremy is also the author of the Patterns in Practice column in MSDN Magazine. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog The Shade Tree Developer part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#, and very active within the ALT.NET community.

What is VAN?

Virtual ALT.NET (VAN) is the online gathering place of the ALT.NET community. Through conversations, presentations, pair programming and dojos, we strive to improve, explore, and challenge the way we create software. Using net conferencing technology such as Skype and LiveMeeting, we hold regular meetings, open to anyone, usually taking the form of a presentation or an Open Space Technology-style conversation.

Please see the Calendar to find a VAN group that meets at a time convenient to you, and feel welcome to join a meeting. Past sessions can be found on the Recording page.

To stay informed about VAN activities, you can subscribe to the Virtual ALT.NET Google Group and follow the Virtual ALT.NET blog.

Meeting Details

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Wed, August 5, 2009 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Wed, August 5, 2009 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

[kickit]

VAN: Lessons learned building NH Profiler with Ayende Rahien, Christopher Bennage and Rob Eisenberg Oct 21 and Oct 28, 2009

Topic

A three way conversation with the main collaborators who created NH Profiler. This tool enables developers to gain a deeper insight into profiling their applications communication from NHibernate(.Net) and Hibernate(Java) through to the database.

Who they are

Ayende Rahien contributed efforts on the back-end development.

Chris Bennage and Rob Eisenberg contributed their efforts to the front-end.

Time and location of the meetings

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Oct 21 and 28, Each week 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Oct 21 and 28, Each week 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

VAN: Claudio Lassala presents a series on the SOLID Principles to Virtual ALT.NET

Details

Claudio will be presenting five consecutive meetings discussing each principle outlined below with samples and then open discussion. It is hoped that we can have an active discussion on each of the topics with an open sharing of sample code, experiences and thoughts. He would like you to contact him through his blog if you have suggestions and ideas that can make the meetings as valuable as possible. More details to follow so stay tuned.

Who is Claudio?

Claudio Lassala is a Senior Developer at EPS Software Corp. He has presented several lectures at Microsoft events such as PDC Brazil and various other Microsoft seminars, as well as several conferences and user groups across North America and Brazil. He is a multiple winner of the Microsoft MVP Award since 2001 (for Visual FoxPro in 2001-2002, and for C# every since), an INETA speaker, and also holds the MCSD for .NET certification. He has articles published on several magazines, such as MSDN Brazil Magazine, CoDe Magazine, UTMag, Developers Magazine, and FoxPro Advisor. More detailed information regarding his presentations and articles can be found in his MVP Profile.

Summary of dates and Meeting topic

• Sept 9: SRP (Single Responsibility Principle)
• Sept 16: OCP (Open Closed Principle)
• Sept 23: LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle)
• Sept 30: ISP (Interface Segregation Principle)
• Oct 7: DIP (Dependency Inversion Principle)

Time and location of the meetings

Times below are Central Daylight Time
Start Time: Wed, Each week 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
End Time: Wed, Each week 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours
Attendee URL: Attend the meeting (Live Meeting)

VAN: Jeremy Miller discusses Presentation Patterns for Virtual ALT.NET in August 2009

Topic

Still being fleshed out. Jeremy would like your votes on the content. Here is the list of topics as a start. Check out his post and add your vote and comments.

1. Separated Presentation patterns. You know, what are your options, why are they different, and when would you choose one or another for a particular scenario. Model View Presenter variants and Presentation Model (MVVM).
2. "Screen Activation Lifecycle" -- Design patterns and the system responsibilities for systems composed of multiple screens
3. DSL development within a desktop application.
4. Test Automation strategies. How testability impacts design
5. Event Aggregation
6. Managing the application shell
7. Using an IoC tool within a desktop application for extensibility

Who is Jeremy Miller?

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest shop in all of Austin. Jeremy is also the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller tool for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net. Jeremy is also the author of the Patterns in Practice column in MSDN Magazine. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog The Shade Tree Developer part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#, and very active within the ALT.NET community.

Meeting Detail

The month of August. Exact dates and times will be confirmed in a few days.

VAN: An evening with Scott Bellware discussing the myth of developer productivity August 19, 2009

Topic

The myth of developer productivity.

Scott’s Bio

Scott Bellware is a software product designer, developer, manager, and agile coach living in Austin, TX. He speaks at software industry conferences and teaches agile development practices and software production methodologies in workshops in the US, Canada, and Europe. He is the founder of the Lean Software Austin and the AgileATX communities of software practitioners. He is the organizer of the upcoming MonoSpace, ALT.NET Open Space, and Continuous Improvement conferences in Austin, and has served as the content chairman for the agile development track at the DevTeach conferences, as well as the chairman of the INETA Speaker Committee. He is the recipient of Microsoft's Most Valuable Professional award.

Meeting Details

Times below are expressed in Central Daylight Time

Start Time: Wed, August 19, 2009 8:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours

End Time: Wed, August 19, 2009 10:00 PM UTC/GMT -5 hours

Attendee URL: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet (Live Meeting)