After an unfortunate cancelation of our last meeting because of the weather, February's meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET Group should be a very interesting one.

Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin looks into XP's rearviewmirror, lessons learned, and the current status of Agile development.

XP: After 10 years, why are we still talking about it?

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

It has been 10 years since Extreme Programming broke upon our industry. In that time we have seen the rise of the Agile movement, and the gold rush for Scrum certification. We have seen the concept of testing do a complete reversal in emphasis; and shift away from heavy planning. But what have we learned? Do we really all program in pairs? Do we really all write our tests first? Do Agile projects really fare better than others? Do we have enough data now to separate the truth from the myth? And why, after all this time, does it still dominate our conferences and conversations. Isn't there something new to talk about?

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

Let's use the discussion time to go over the group topics that were planned for last meeting, which had to be canceled.

• What worked well and what didn't in 2008
• What direction should we take with our group
• Viability of our group organizing a CodeCamp soon
• Global ALT.NET participation: as suggested in this message

If you want to help define our meetings format and group actions, then come and help us in this discussion.

Due to scheduling problems we had to delay this announcement more than we would like to. But we will still have our monthly meeting on Wednesday, January 14^th.

Planning for 2009

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
We had a guest speaker for this month's meeting but unfortunately we had to change plans at the last minute.

Instead of that we will use the opportunity to do some group housekeeping.

• What worked well and what didn't in 2008
• What direction should we take with our group
• Viability of our group organizing a CodeCamp soon
• Global ALT.NET participation: as suggested in this message

If you want to help define our meetings format and group actions, then come and help us in this discussion.

7:45 pm
We have skipped the open discussion portion of our meetings last couple of times. This time, after we cover the items in the agenda, let's make sure we reserve some time for this activity.

There's a chance we have someone from Red Point lead a discussion about Agile development.

We'll update this description if we receive confirmation or not of the Agile discussion.

For this month's of meeting we will be doing something we had been thinking about for a while. With so many members that always bring interesting contributions to our meetings, we will just have an open projector night. I'm looking forward to this one.

Lightning Talks

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
We do not have a set topic for this month. Instead we chose to have lightning talks where anyone can sign up on the spot for a 10 to 20-minute demonstration or presentation about anything he/she considers interesting.

This can also be a nice opportunity if you have never talked to a group and would like to try a short version first.

There's no agenda set for the talks to be given but here are a few that were already proposed by someone.

• LINQ to SQL
• AOP in MVC
• XmlBuilder

If you want to talk, just show up. If you want to include your talk in this page, let us know.

7:45 pm
You may want to stick around after the presentation portion of the meeting and take part in our monthly open discussion. The topic is never arranged in advance but it's common that it reflects the content of the presentation.

Wow, that took a long time to be published, but here it is. This video was recorded during the October's meeting of Chicago ALT.NET that happened almost just about a whole month ago.

The video shows Josh Heyse demonstrating and explaining the works of the AOP framework called Core. What the video doesn't show is who's that voice that also knows a lot about Core. That would be Anthony Green, who developed Core with Josh.

One of the reasons I've been mucking with NHaml is the upcoming meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET group.

The plan is to talk about NHaml and Spark (and maybe Brail), comparing equivalent implementations of a simple website written in ASPX, NHaml and Spark. The meeting is on November 12^th, see registration link below for details.

The Different Views of ASP.NET MVC

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
The default ASPX view engine in ASP.NET MVC is fine and comfortable but as with just about anything in ASP.NET MVC, you can replace it with alternative engines — and there are a few of those available.

We will be giving an overview of some of the alternative view engines, showing how to install and use them, what brought them about, and why would you use them.

• Adam Tybor will be presenting Spark,
• Mike Hall will show NHaml,
• and TBD (not defined, wanna talk?) will talk about Brail.

7:45 pm
You may want to stick around after the presentation portion of the meeting and take part in our monthly open discussion. The topic is never arranged in advance but it's common that it reflects the content of the presentation.