Here are two user group events that are happening soon and that I'm directly involved.

July 8^th, Chicago ALT.NET

0-60 With Fluent NHibernate
See the full description of the session over at the Chicago ALT.NET home page. We will have Hudson Akridge tell us all about Fluent NHibernate, a project that has been instrumental in getting people on NHibernate by simplifying a lot of that ORM's configuration chores.

The Chicago ALT.NET meetings start at 6PM in the Sears Tower. Check the website for complete location details.

July 14^th, WI.NET

JavaScript - Beyond the Curly Braces
I'm taking my little JS presentation to the WI.NET UG in Milwaukee. The group's website hasn't been updated with the presentation details yet but it's basically the same presentation given at other local UGs.

The meeting starts at 7PM. Come ready to be surprised.

Today I was reading the latest one of the many excellent blog posts Patrick Smacchia has put out on the topic of code metrics and caring for your code's quality.

The passion this guy has for that topic is such that he has created the best tool for analyzing your code. But he doesn't stop there. He wants to make sure we understand what is going on behind the seemingly magic CQL queries that ship with NDepend. He wants you to understand your code's DNA; with the added bonus that you can actually improve that DNA.

That's Science with capital S.

1. First you understand the problem that you are trying to fight (code complexity/unmaintainable software,)
2. you research ways to quantify it (the metrics,)
3. you create some tool or device to extract that information from your subject,
4. you extract the metrics from a familiar subject,
5. you apply your knowledge of how #2 relates to #1 and improve the subject under analysis,
6. you use the tool to verify the metrics have improved,
7. time shows you that the changes you made indeed reduced the problem at #1

I simply hate when someone criticizes Patrick's posts as being just marketing material for his product. Let me tell you this. If I had that much dedication for software quality, to the point that I had created a great product to empower everyone, I'd also be trying to explain the problem to you using the tool I wrote. Heck, I'm pretty sure if someone else had written NDepend Patrick would still be writing about these things and using the tool in the process.

I like code metrics and static analysis a lot as well, not nearly as much as Mr Smacchia though. I'm very excited that very soon I'll get to use it in our code base, in our CI server. I can't wait to learn more about this science and inflict positive changes in our code. Like everybody else, we know there's dirt and bad smells in our code and it's just awesome that there's a tool that can help us clearly identify, mitigate, and track it.

My hope is that I'll be able to come back here and share what I've learned about my code and how the process we went through to improve it.

As a brief inspection of your RSS reader will quickly tell you, it's Code Camp season. Not to be left out of this party, the developers in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas have a great option this year.

The Chicago Code Camp, which happens on May 30th, is strategically located right between these two cities.

The agenda has been published and it's pretty exciting to see so many interesting and useful topics in a single event.

.NET still dominates the schedule but there's a lot of options for developers of virtually all walks of life. Here's a quick summary (we will have 33 sessions but some cover more than one topic)

• .NET: 20 sessions
• Ruby: 6 sessions
• TDD: 6 sessions
• JavaScript: 3 sessions
• Functional Programming: 3 sessions
• Cloud computing: 3 sessions
• Python: 2 sessions
• Java: 2 sessions

The bad part is that we can't be at all the sessions we'd like — there will be 5 or 6 concurrent talks. Here are some sessions that interest me in particular:

• Haml / Sass / Tenplate
• Firefox Extensions: Making Your Web Application More Accessible
• Guarding your code with Code Contracts
• TDD and JavaScript
• Rails-like development using ASP.NET
• Ruby Kata and Sparring
• Python
• Limelight

Those are only a few of the talks. I'm sure you'll be able to find sessions of your own interest. RSVP below. Hope to see you there.

Next Chicago ALT.NET meeting will bring a practical look at F#, showing that it does not need to be seen as a niche language.

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.

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?

Someone already asked what are five things you'd chop off your pinky toe for. That question yielded a number of interesting answers.

Here I propose a similar list.

What is your list of 5 things you'd be willing to chop off System.Byte for?