As you may have heard, ThoughtWorks, home of CruiseControl.net, has just released Cruise, their commercial product for CI and beyond.

As soon as we heard that news we immediately thought: It would be great if we had someone from TW give us the scoop on that product — especially considering that they already host our meetings. ThoughtWorks was completely on board with that idea and immediately offered to have someone fromt he Cruise team talk to us.

I think we will have a very good presentation and debate. If you are in the area, come join us.

Continuous Integration with Cruise

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
Come see Robert Norton, tech lead of ThoughtWorks Cruise CI/Release Management product, talk about Cruise and how it helps managing software builds and deployments. ThoughtWorks is the force behind the Open Source CruiseControl.net and this new product is their commercial offering in this segment.

7:45 pm
After the Cruise presentation, let’s delve into more discussions about CI and configuration management. Bring your questions and experiences.

• How complete should CI be?
• How frequent?
• How fast?
• What tools are we using for CI?

Chicago ALT.NET meets this Wednesday, July 9^th again at ThoughtWorks. You can register and get more information about the event at the link below.

Mock Objects In Practice

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
This month's topic is Mock Objects, or simply "mocking". The agenda to guide the discussion is not set yet, but below is a list of items we'd like to cover. Feel free to add more to this list by making your suggestions in the mailing list.

• We want to see code, not just talk
• What and how hard or easy to use mocks are?
• Are they just for testing?
• Aren't they just noise?
• Tools
• How to do mocking well
• Does the habit of using mocks lead to good design? Or the reverse?
• Is TypeMock evil?

The Chicago ALT.NET crowd will be meeting on June 11^th. This time we have a new location with the space graciously offered by ThoughtWorks. You can register and get more information about the event at the link below.

If you haven't been to one of our meetings yet, you should know that this is not your average user group meeting. The talks are not formal presentations and there's a lot of participation from the attendance. Bring your questions and, most importantly, your opinions.

After the talk, you're welcome to stick around and socialize at a nearby restaurant. Food and drinks make for great fuel for more tech and non-tech talk.

Resharper versus CodeRush

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
Join us and watch while Ryan Rinaldi and Adam Tybor demonstrate how those invaluable addins can boost your productivity and help you write better code in Visual Studio.

After the demo let's open the floor for discussions on a topic to be determined in typical Open Spaces style

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).

ALT.NET Conference, take two. When I signed for this conference for the second time I didn't honestly think it was going to be as good as the first one. Boy was I wrong. I got the feeling that the attendees came incredibly prepared. Prepared to stand up and voice their opinions instead of simply watching. Prepared to listen diverging point of views. Prepared to take part in spontaneous conversations, in the conference rooms, in the corridors, in the shared rides, in the hotel lobby, in the restaurants, in the frigging airport waiting to board the plane. And, most of all, prepared to be surprised. I was surprised at so many different levels. Who would have thought that a discussion around JavaScript would spark so much interest? I was certain that the participants that came straight out of the MVP Summit would be all geeked out, but no. I was surprised to see a few MVPs that chose to fly in only for the ALT.NET event and not the summit. I was also surprised to see that some of the greatest talks happened not during the conference hours, but late in the night after a few drinks. Maybe if I start drinking I will become one of the smart guys? From the sessions that I stopped by, several discussions and questions came back with me for further processing.

• Microsoft v 1.0 vs Stable OSS
  • Is that decision based only on risk assessment?
  • MS is clearly happy with OSS built with .Net. Brad Abrams and ScottGu were there to assure that.
  • Are we lacking a corporation (not-MS) to back OSS, like Canonical, Red Hat, mySQL AB, etc?
  • Too many questions, no clear conclusion
  
  
  
• Functional Programming: Great talk. As you may or may not know, I am interested in this type of stuff. Just to reiterate, I think FP has its place and we are just seeing the beginning of it in the .Net universe.
  
  
• ASP.NET MVC update: Among all the surprises in the conference, this was the most intriguing one. I went in as a MVC believer and got out happier with webforms. Weird. Some of the upcoming changes in webforms will address important annoyances, like the id munging and routing for urls.
  
  
• Innovation: I arrived late at this discussion and was kind of shocked to hear Scott Hanselman question (or even suggest) that we already have enough implementation of OSS alternatives for many things and maybe there's nothing left to be innovated there, maybe we should just move on instead of creating another mock framework or another blog engine. I think this is kind of absurd. A great part of the innovation is powered by lower level innovations. My example: we didn't seem to need Moq, but now that we have lambdas in .Net, Moq could innovate in that area. As long as the CLR and the language teams keep feeding us new tools, we will keep using the tools in new and creative ways. Anyway, the central point of the discussion was supposed to be if there's innovation in .Net or if we are only porting existing projects from other languages.
  
  
• JavaScript tools and patterns
  • JSUnit - this is slow. too slow.
  • Do we need a JS-specific test runner?
  • We felt that we lack some guidance and some patterns
  • Watch for a new community around these premises