Next Meeting

July 2009 Meeting

0-60 with Fluent NHibernate

Time for NHibernate at Chicago ALT.NET. Hudson Akridge familiarizes us with the Fluent NHibernate project, which aims at simplifying NHibernate's configuration.

Hudson's talk was one of the best reviewed in the recent Chicago Code Camp and will no doubt make you happy to leave those XML mapping files behind.

Fluent NHibernate is a framework, that sits on top of NHibernate, which helps to cut down on some of the headaches you will indubitably encounter with picking up such a mature ORM. We'll be discussing how FNH can help cut down the learning curve of using NHibernate as an ORM and how it can benefit existing NHibernate production environments long term.

Hudson Akridge is currently a developer on the Fluent NHibernate team, maintains the tool "NHibernate Query Analyzer", and uses both NHibernate and Fluent in the day to day of a large production environment.

When: 7/8/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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Previous Meetings

June 2009 Meeting

Git Without Puns

This month we will take a look at Git, a distributed version control system that has been gaining a lot of popularity since its introduction.

As with everything that is new and is touted as a replacement for an existing product, it's easy to try and map Git's functionality to Subversion, CVS or TFS for example. To better use Git, we should avoid too much comparison and also try to understand how it was built and how it works under the hood.

Here are the things we will be seeing and discussing in this session.

UPDATE:
The presentation slides are available for download.

Sergio Pereira has been developing software professionally since the mid 90's. After a short period of desktop application development, Sergio changed his focus to web development and never looked back. He's a strong believer in continuous improvement of himself, the processes, and the tools he uses in the software craft.

If you don't see Sergio in front of his computer screen, you will probably find him in front of an even bigger screen watching some live sports or a silly movie. You can find out more about Sergio on his blog or following @sergiopereira on Twitter.

When: 6/10/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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May 2009 Meeting

F# Outside the Lab

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It seems that almost every time we hear about F# being used it is always in a experimental setting or in a niche application. Maybe that's a common trait that F# shares with many other functional programming languages and its roots in the Microsoft Research labs.

Alex Pedenko has been exploring uses for F# for day-to-day programming tasks and he will be sharing his experience with the group in this talk.

Alex will start with a quick introduction to F# but it would work best if you could at least skimmed over some tutorial or video just to get the basic syntax and feel of the language.

UPDATE: Here are some links and source code from the presentation.

Alex has been in software development for about 13 years, starting off on Borland Delphi, then spending about 4 years in Java and finally making the switch to .net around '03

Currently, he is the director of software architecture and chief architect at a healthcare services company. He has used that role as an opportunity to inject some modern ideas into an otherwise lagging industry, moving the company from a classic "giant web-app strapped to an even more giant db", to a distributed, service-oriented environment utilizing RESTful services, and rich-client applications.

He has spent roughly 6 months researching f#, its applicability to business systems, and viability in a commercial environment.

He adds:

I like long walks on the beach... er.. wait, that's for a different site :)

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion (if the 1st portion doesn't run late). Functional programming, either in a real functional language or in C#, JavaScript, Ruby, etc, which support some of the same constructs, is making inroads on software development. Is it the next big thing or just one more thing in our toolbox?

When: 5/13/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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April 2009 Meeting

Collaborative Acceptance Testing with FitNesse

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Robert Martin is back, this time to talk about FitNesse, an Acceptance Testing turned into Wiki framework built on top of Fit.

Who else would you want to see talking about FitNesse? Uncle Bob, was one of its creators and is its maintainer. In this session he will explain what Acceptance Testing, Fit and FitNesse are, why they are useful and how to best use FitNesse in your process.

He'll also show off Slim, the new test-system that supersedes Fit and enables a whole hose of new features and capabilities.

Robert C. Martin has been a software professional since 1970. In the last 35 years, he has worked in various capacities on literally hundreds of software projects. He has authored "landmark" books on Agile Programming, Extreme Programming, UML, Object-Oriented Programming, and C++ Programming. He has published dozens of articles in various trade journals. Today, He is one of the software industry's leading authorities on Agile software development and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows. He is a former editor of the C++ Report and currently writes a monthly Craftsman column for Software Development magazine.

Mr. Martin is the founder, CEO, and president of Object Mentor Incorporated. Object Mentor is a sister company to Object Mentor International. Like OMI, Object Mentor is comprised of highly experienced software professionals who provide process improvement consulting, object-oriented software design consulting , training, and development services to major corporations around the world.

7:45 pm

Time for our monthly open discussion. Aside from any specific topic that anyone wants to bring to the group, we can continue the discussion on Acceptance Testing and report the progress on the effort to produce the Chicago Code Camp.

When: 4/8/2009 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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