Chicago ALT.NET - May 08 meeting summary

Last night we had the monthly meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET group. After a few social/networking and group planning events, this was our first content-bearing event.

We had the pleasure of having Dan Sniderman come and talk about his experience with TFS and how we can build a Continuous Integration process with it. Dan talked about the different components and options in TFS and it was a very useful presentation, especially for me, because I'm going through the process of making CI a fundamental part of my client's workflow.

The discussion was not limited to TFS as it was constantly put in perspective against the other non-MS CI offerings. Knowing what TFS can do in comparison to the existing alternatives like SVN, TeamCity, CruiseControl.net, trac, JIRA, etc will enable me to assist the client choosing the most appropriate option for their team and infrastructure.

I'm very happy with the level of the discussions and knowledge sharing that we got in that meeting. It was not your average user group lecture. I think that is the direction we want our group to follow, not limiting our scope to MS branded products and eventually looking outside of the .Net boundaries as well.

Topics for our future meetings are up for voting, but it looks like we will soon be talking about NHibernate, IoC containers, distributed architectures, TDD, ORMs, rich JavaScript client libraries, etc.

If you want to learn more about the group and attend future meetings, check out our mailing list and our calendar (iCal).