I will be at the Codeapalooza on Saturday, September 6th. This will be a free event with numerous sessions covering many different topics.

I haven't made up my mind yet on which sessions I will attend but I'll be helping the event organization in some capacity. I already noticed that two of my friends Aaron and Chris will be presenting at the same time and, worse, two topics that interest me a lot. I'll probably just be in and out of sessions throughout the day.

One of the best things about being at these events is the chance to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. If you are in the Chicago area and attend Codeapalooza, come and say 'hi' or, if you're like Chris, you can say 'ol&aacude;'.

This week I experienced something that made me feel more confident about the viability of JavaScript as a first-class language in ASP.NET development. And I'm not talking about JavaScript's capabilities — those I have re-discovered long ago — my concern had always been how well other developers in my team would receive it.

For the last few days I've been meeting with a few other developers in my group, transitioning the support of one of my applications to them. Thanks to our quasi-regular brown-bag sessions, the understanding and acceptance of some architectural traits of the application, like the Repository Pattern and use of IoC containers (Castle Windsor in our case,) were fairly painless.

I always carried that uncertainty that when I started reviewing those .js files with them things could get ugly. These developers are pretty bright, real .NET ninjas, but hadn't yet used a JavaScript library like Prototype (or YUI or jQuery or MooTools or [insert favorite here];) and I used Prototype and script.aculo.us heavily in this project — which should not come as a surprise given some of my involvement with that library.

Unfortunately, without getting into too much analysis of teams and project management, I worked pretty much solo on this project, without enough code reviews and, heaven forbid, zero pairing sessions — again, that's not the point of this post; it's definitely the big reason behind my anxiety, but let it alone for now.

The day finally came for me to explain the UI portion of the application. Everyone thought the richness of the UI, the carefully applied visual effects, and the generally pleasant user experience were very interesting and they were curious to learn how it had been done. They knew I was using some JS library thing but I'm pretty sure they had never seen JavaScript applied to that extent.

I started explaining what is the most important thing for me, that you definitely need to use JavaScript libraries and that it is important to understand the language a little better. Without getting into a JavaScript lecture, we started discussing some of the basic features of Prototype, its global functions, why it does what it does to the native objects, and how JavaScript makes all that magic possible.

As soon as I started showing how clear and well-structured good JavaScript code could be I could see the light bulbs go off and some of those folks — that I knew feared JavaScript for being an unmaintainable mess — suddenly realized that there was this whole new world of production-grade, nice on the eyes, and expressive JavaScript code and techniques that they had been missing out the entire time.

I'm not done showing all the Prototype features used in the project yet, but I'm sure we will cruise through them and also script.aculo.us. Who knows? Maybe we even spend some time understanding JavaScript and its oft-misunderstood prototypal-inheritance model.

The second half of the meeting was an open discussion that revolved around practices of Agile teams. There's also an entertaining rant by I'm-still-Brad in the middle.

This video was captured at the Chicago ALT.NET August 13th meeting. This first video is the Cruise presentation.

This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available somehow.

As previously mentioned we started off with a presentation of ThoughtWorks Cruise, where Robert Norton explained the idea of CI server, Agents, Pipelines and went through many of Cruise features, system requirements, and futures. He also clarified his company's position regarding CruiseControl.net, which will most likely not receive a lot of attention in terms of funding, being left for the community to keep it going.

Cruise seemed promising to me but it's clearly a typical version 1 product that needs some work to get enthusiastic thumbs up from me. Hopefully they move quickly and release a few updates before the year is over to make the product top notch. I don't mean to say Cruise in unusable. It's definitely usable and does things in a very smart way. Given time I'm sure they will take care of the rough edges and have a chance to answer customer feedback. My particular concerns tend to be on the side of ability to integrate with other systems in the enterprise, like your bug/feature tracker.

After the presentation portion we all sat together for an open discussion. The fallback topic was CI practices but what the group really wanted to talk about was Agile teams and their dynamics, so that's what the discussion became. As usual, that's my favorite part of the meeting and it's a pity that only 50% of the attendance stuck around for it.

It's nice when you go to a meeting like this and can take home a lot of new knowledge.