F# Lab Feedback

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Last night we explored the F# language using an online, interactive tutorial at tryfsharp.org. It’s been very encouraging to hear all the positive feedback. Sounds like everyone enjoyed learning something new. And, perhaps F# struck a chord?

F# can do some crazy-powerful things with very little written code. Yesterday, @RachelAppel tweeted:

Going to start doing a talk titled “Anything C# can do F# can do better” with @rachelreese #ThisIsGonnaBeGood

For those of you that couldn’t make it to the lab, go to tryfsharp.org, click “Learn” and then click “Getting Started with F#.”

Here are more resources. Perhaps we’ll continue exploring F# over the next few labs?

It’s fun to learn! Geek hard!

May 16th Lab: Change of Plans – Intro to F#

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So… “leadership” has failed to prepare for the planned lab. How about we learn some F# instead? Using a series of structured lab exercises (in contrast to the chaos of last month), we will learn some of the fundamentals of F#.

We may choose to revisit building an event calendar with Oak at a later lab.

May 16th Lab: Building a Community Calendar with Oak

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Join us Thursday, May 16, 2013 for a great evening of hands-on learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lab begins at 6:30 PM.

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Lab: Building a Community Calendar with Oak

In this hands-on workshop we will continue to explore the Oak .NET Framework by building a community calendar application. The goal of this lab is really about exploring new approaches to developing .NET applications through the use of dynamics, continuous feedback loops, testing, and other concepts that are more often found in languages outside of .NET. We hope this will be an exciting, challenging, eye-opening experience for developers at *all* skill levels.

To learn more about Oak, visit http://amirrajan.github.io/Oak/

May 9th: AOP for You and Me – Matthew Groves

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Join us Thursday, May 9, 2013 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Location: Vaco Training Room, 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Topic: AOP for You and Me

Cross-cutting concerns are everywhere: caching, logging, transactions, and more. These can make your code a tangled, scattered mess.

In this presentation, I will define cross-cutting concerns, and show you techniques to refactor cross-cutting concerns, including dependency injection; the decorator pattern; and Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) tools like Castle DynamicProxy and PostSharp. I’ll explain the benefits and trade-offs of each design decision so that you will be confidently prepared to master cross-cutting concerns.

Speaker: Matthew Groves

Matthew D. Groves is a guy who loves to code. It doesn’t matter if it’s “enterprisey” C# apps, cool jQuery stuff, contributing to OSS, or rolling up his sleeves to dig into some PHP. He has been coding professionally ever since he wrote a QuickBASIC point-of-sale app for his parent’s pizza shop back in the 90s. He currently works from home on the Telligent product team, and loves spending time with his wife and 2 kids, watching the Cincinnati Reds, and getting involved in the developer community. He is the author of Aspect-Oriented Programming in .NET (published by Manning), and also teaches at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. You can find him on Twitter as @mgroves, LinkedIn, and Google+.

April 18th – Lab: Frictionless Development with Oak

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Join us Thursday, April 18, 2013 for a great evening of hands-on learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lab begins at 6:30 PM.

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Topic: Frictionless Development with Oak

For our next lab, we will begin exploring a C# web framework named Oak. Although the focus will be on the Oak framework, the goal of this lab is really about exploring new approaches to developing .NET applications through the use of dynamics, continuous feedback loops, testing, and other concepts that are more often found in languages outside of .NET. We hope this will be an exciting, challenging, eye-opening experience for developers at *all* skill levels.

What is Oak?

Single page web apps are becoming the norm as opposed to the exception. And with that comes a large part of your code base existing on the client side with a lot of JavaScript, JSON and async HTTP. Oak gives you a way to quickly build these kind of apps by:

  • Bridging language barriers between JavaScript (a prototypical language) and C# (a statically compiled languge).
  • Leveraging C#’s 4.0 DLR to give your classes extremely powerful dynamic and prototypical capabilites.
  • Augmenting ASP.NET MVC to better support consuming and returning JSON payloads.
  • Providing a lean, fast, dynamic ORM to seamlessly save dynamic/prototypical classes.
  • Providing a holistic approach to develop, build, and test single page web apps.

http://amirrajan.github.io/Oak/

April 11th – Bill Zack: Windows Azure Platform

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Join us Thursday, April 11, 2013 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Vaco in Brentwood is our meeting location winner. Given that more and more .NET jobs are located in the Brentwood/Franklin area, Vaco would be a better location long-term. I know for some of you it has been frustrating fighting traffic into downtown Nashville, especially when there are other events taking place downtown.

Location: Vaco Training Room, 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Topic: Windows Azure Platform

Microsoft’s Windows Azure is the computing and storage platform that lets you build and run applications in the Microsoft Cloud, launch them in minutes instead of months and code them in multiple languages and technologies including .NET languages such as VB.NET and C#, Node.js, Java, PHP and Python.

This presentation will provide an overview of the key features of the platform and the tools used to develop applications that run on the platform. It will also cover determining the applications that are appropriate to move to the cloud and will discuss Cloud implementation models such as Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Speaker: Bill Zack

Bill Zack is currently an independent Consultant specializing in Cloud Computing and Microsoft .NET technologies. He has acted as a Senior Architect and Consultant with a major New York consulting firm where he drove Cloud strategy, architecture and execution for customers on both Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services. Previously, as a Principal Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, he worked extensively with customers and partners to help them design, build, and move applications to the Windows Azure Cloud Platform. He is an author and a frequent public speaker at conferences and user groups on Cloud and .NET technology. He also is one of the leaders of the NYC/NJ Windows Azure User Group, the NYC .NET Developers Group, and the New York Chapter of the International Association of Software Architects.

Poll: Meeting Location

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For the past few meetings we have met at Vaco’s new training center in Brentwood. A number of you have expressed the desire to continue to meet in Brentwood, as it being closer to work or home. We certainly recognize many .NET developers work in the Brentwood/Franklin area. Can you help us by answering the following question?

Where would you prefer to meet?





Comments?



March 21st – Lab – Test-Driven Development

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Join us Thursday, March 21, 2013 for a great evening of hands-on learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lab begins at 6:30 PM.

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Test-Driven Development Lab

Test-Driven Development is a software development process which lends itself to building highly flexible and maintainable code. For this lab we’ll cover the following topics:

  • Let’s look at the requirements
  • Let’s write a test based on the requirements
  • Let’s make it pass
  • Refactor, Repeat
  • Pairing with a friend

About Colin Callahan

Colin Callahan is the CEO of Acklen Avenue, an agile software development company focused on delivering flexible code through an iterative process. For 12 years Colin has been building software for clients around the Nashville area. He is also the co-founder of Nashville’s Geek Jam were software developers and other geeks get together and play music.

About David Sulpy

David Sulpy, the CISO of Acklen Avenue, moved to Nashville from Atlanta to study Computer Science and Information Systems. After undergraduate school, he began his career immediately as a software engineer building experience before returning for a Master’s Degree in Information Security. Taking an interest in information security and best practices as they relate specifically to software engineering has become Sulpy’s passion. Outside of work, he enjoys coaching and playing ice hockey, supporting the Preds, playing ultimate frisbee, and all things neuroscience related.

March 14th – Colin Callahan and David Sulpy: Test-Driven Development

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Join us Thursday, March 14, 2013 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven Development is a software development process which lends itself to building highly flexible and maintainable code. For this lecture we’ll cover the following topics:

  • Tools
    • Mocking frameworks
    • Test frameworks
    • Code refactoring and productivity tools
    • Dependency Injection / IoC frameworks
  • Writing a test in MSTest with the Arrange Act Assert test pattern
  • Red, Green, Refactor
  • Refactoring your test
  • BDD
  • Writing a BDD style spec in MSpec
  • Pairing with TDD/BDD
  • Wiring it all up with your favorite DI framework

About Colin Callahan

Colin Callahan is the CEO of Acklen Avenue, an agile software development company focused on delivering flexible code through an iterative process. For 12 years Colin has been building software for clients around the Nashville area. He is also the co-founder of Nashville’s Geek Jam were software developers and other geeks get together and play music.

About David Sulpy

David Sulpy, the CISO of Acklen Avenue, moved to Nashville from Atlanta to study Computer Science and Information Systems. After undergraduate school, he began his career immediately as a software engineer building experience before returning for a Master’s Degree in Information Security. Taking an interest in information security and best practices as they relate specifically to software engineering has become Sulpy’s passion. Outside of work, he enjoys coaching and playing ice hockey, supporting the Preds, playing ultimate frisbee, and all things neuroscience related.

February 21 – ASP.NET Web Services

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We hope you join us in Brentwood at Vaco’s new training room for free food and learning! Come at 6:00 PM for food and get to know other developers in our area. The meeting starts at 6:30 PM and will run to 8:00 or later, depending on how much get into our subject.

Topic: ASP.NET Web Services
Facilitator: Clay McKinney
Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027
(The meeting room is on the first floor next to the bathrooms.)

Lab: Web Services 101

This lab is aimed at ASP.Net (web forms) programmers who have never created a web service. Beginners are welcome. We will create a simple web service and consume the service from an ASP.Net web page. We will then use the service from an HTML page with jQuery’s Ajax method. We will talk about the difference between SOAP and JSON. We will talk about why web service techniques are useful and how to apply them to your work and projects.

About Clay McKinney

Clay McKinney has been working with the web since 1999, and with ASP.Net since 2006. He has been the Lead Developer at StrategyCorps since 2011.