Next Wednesday, September 10^th, is the next meeting of the Chicago ALT.NET user group. This time IoC containers will be the topic du jour.

Expect to see an introduction to this technology and learn why IoC isn't just overhead. Don't expect to leave with just another introduction to some technique that you'll never want to use.

Inversion of Control for the masses

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
John Nuechterlein (a.k.a. jdn) puts Inversion of Control (IoC) containers under the spotlight. If you have been noticing the increasing buzz around this technology but never had a chance to see what it is and how it can be used, this is your chance to see:

• An overview of what IoC is, using StructureMap as the example
• Why one might want to use IoC
• How one can implement IoC
• When one might not use IoC

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.

Last night I attended another LCNUG meeting. I think it's great that we have this new group forming in the northern suburbs of Chicago. It's definitely not easy for us suburbanites to attend CNUG's meeting in the West 'burbs or even the Chicago ALT.NET meetings downtown. It's special convenient for me because it's only 10 minutes from home.

This time the presentation was about Silverlight. Tim Stall gave us a very nice and engaging rundown of this new technology — it was not your off-the-mill introduction talk. The questions from the audience were very interesting and Tim was very honest about the strengths and shortcomings of the tool. It was especially interesting to discuss ways to bring SilverLight into your organization.

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.