lunes, septiembre 15, 2008

Sydney ALT.NET Group

The newest user group in Sydney will have it's first meeting on September 30 at the Thoughtworks offices. Richard Banks published the agenda and details in the group's blog, but what exactly is an ALT.NET Group? Why do we need another one if we have generic groups like Sydeny's DNUG and RDN or technology specific groups like OzTFS and OzSilverlight? 

ALT for Alternative has caused a lot of controversy that lead to misunderstanding, so let's better start for what it's NOT, it's not the anti-microsoft group, its not the open source community tired of Java wanting to use something better (altough some of them might be part of the group), its not a group that loves NHibernate and hates Entity Framework.

Simply is a group of developers that like to look for better ways to do their work, keeping a "get things done" approach and commonly identified with agile practices, continuous improvement and the pragmatic thinking, people who "use what works while keeping an eye out for a better way".

If you feel identified with these ideas, come and join us or if you're not in Sydney, find an ALT.NET User Group or create a new one.

In our first meeting we will have talks about Ruby and Mocking.

Recommending reading/listening:

martes, septiembre 09, 2008

C# and more dynamic features (C# 4.0?)

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    dynamic
    {
        object myDynamicObject = GetDynamicObject();
        myDynamicObject.SomeMethod();         // call a method   
        myDynamicObject.someString = "value"; // Set a field
        myDynamicObject[0] = 25;              // Access an indexer
    }
}

How cool is it? I don’t know, probably will be something dangerous if not used with care, C# depend a lot of compile time checking.

To see more about this see Charlie Calvert’s Blog