Tonight's meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group was led by Uncle Bob Martin.

This time around we tried a Randori-style coding dojo. The task was to build a clock and, although we fell short of the original goal of having a GUI, there was plenty to be learned in this process.

I felt it was an interesting way to learn about your own performance under a moderate amount of pressure. More importantly, at least for me, was getting exposure to BDD and pairing with other developers that are a few step ahead of me on that particular road.

Once again, because I'm not a Ruby developer by day, I felt a little bit uneasy taking my turn and going up there to code a little bit. But I would not pass the experience, otherwise why even bother showing up for the event at all.

The whole thing was captured on tape. Hopefully the video will be made available and I'll come back and link to it here.

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.

Remember one recent post when I talked about the Code Kata that I attended? Well, Micah prepared a screencast version of that Kata and that video is now available.

It's a short screencast (14') and even if Ruby is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to watch BDD being practiced.

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.