There are still a few seats left for the next Chicago ALT.NET meeting. The meeting is on April 8^th and we will have a demonstration of FitNesse by Robert Martin.

FitNesse is used by many people for acceptance testing and many in our group wanted to understand it better. So come and see what this is all about.

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.

Next Tuesday, March 24^th I'll give a JavaScript talk at the Rockford .NET user group.

This talk will be basically the same one I gave for the LCNUG back in December.

The few opportunities I had to give this talk were highly rewarding. It's priceless to see developers realizing how mistakenly they had been using JavaScript, and finally being able to understand why "that bug" was happening in their pages.

So, if you live in the area and think there must be something about JavaScript that you're just not getting, please try to stop by and ask your questions.

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces

One of the greatest problems with JavaScript is its superficial syntax resemblance of C-style languages. We call it the curse of the curly braces.

That is also a very large source of frustration for developers trying to learn JavaScript beyond the basics. Thinking that JavaScript is somehow related to Java or even "It's almost like C# but a little simpler" is an unfortunate and common occurrence that can only lead to trouble.

In this session we will analyze some of the fundamental differences between JavaScript and C#/Java. We will highlight the pitfalls that can trap us and the appropriate workarounds for them.

Time permitting and if there's interest we will take a look at Idiomatic JavaScript, which will help us understand how JavaScript is being written these days. Learning about this will also help you when trying to read the source code or even the documentation and samples for popular JavaScript libraries like jQuery, Prototype, YUI, etc.

In the next meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET users group we will try an Open Space format — or rather maybe I should say a format with some characteristics of Open Spaces given our time and space constraints.

If you haven't been to a meeting held in this format, maybe you think this sounds crazy. I'd encourage you to see it for yourself. The meeting will be on March 11^th.

Open Space

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

This month we will have an Open Space-inspired meeting. Open Spaces are considered an effective meeting layout to find solutions to problems that would benefit from a wide range of opinions.

We don't have enough time to do a full-blown Open Spaces event so we will cut some corners. Here's the plan:

• If you have a software development issue (code, design, process, human, etc) that you can't seem to figure out on your own or within your immediate team, bring to the meeting.
• We will have a few minutes for participants to announce their problem and put on the board
• Since we only have time for one session, we all will vote to choose the issue we will discuss
• The issue "author" is expected to facilitate and stir the discussion
• The group can decide the format of the session (panel, fishbowl, moderated, etc)

If the session, for whatever reason, ends too soon we can pick another issue to discuss.

So, come ready with some issue, willing to participate in the discussions, or even just to watch others tackle the problem.

After his presentation, Robert stayed a little more answering questions from the audience.

Here's my small contribution to the current avalanche of Uncle Bob references in the .NET world.

This video was recorded at the February's meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET group. This is the presentation that he will be giving as a keynote speech at the SD West conference next month.

The Q&A part of the meeting has also been recorded.