Matthew Podwysocki's Blog

ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle has come to a close.  What a great time it was and it met every expectation if not exceeded them.  Currently I'm in the Seattle airport waiting for my flight home which just got re-arranged.  Anyhow, I'd like to wrap up my thoughts for the first day of the event.

Setting It Up

I arrived one day early for the event to make sure we were set up appropriately.  I was able to meet up with Dave Laribee, Glenn Block, Scott Bellware, Jeremy Miller, Greg Young, Scott C Reynolds, Ray Lewallen, Patrick Smacchia and others.  Everyone was already burned out from the MVP Summit, so I wasn't sure how well people would be for the event.  But it was great to talk to Sam Gentile and I'm glad he's back in the fold with ALT.NET as he announced earlier last week here. 

Even though a lot of people were tired, we had plenty of help to set up for the event.  Of course the joke is that "How many ALT.NETers does it take to go to Costco?"...

Kicking It Off

One couldn't ask for a more prepared and outstanding facilitator in Steven "Doc" List.  What an amazing job he did to bring the Open Spaces together.  The event started with a description of Open Spaces Technology.  if you're not familiar with the Open Spaces, Technology Format, here are the four basic principles:

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it's over, it's over

Well, the day has finally come where I'm heading to ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle.  It's been a long time of planning for this day with all the other guys mentioned on the site.  The weather's not looking so great with a possibility of snow on Saturday.  Not looking forward to that part as I'm leaving sunny, beautiful Washington DC where it is around 75F or so right now.

I hope to be live blogging much of the event, well as much as I can.  I you're on Twitter, you can follow me at mattpodwysocki.  Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Last night I attended the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NovaRUG) meeting in Reston last night with Dave Thomas (PragDave) and Chad Fowler.  It was a completely packed house and the temperatures were a bit hight in the room, but it was well worth the sweating to attend.

Paul Barry presented first on Merb and gave a really good demonstration of some of the capabilities in comparison to Ruby on Rails.  If you're not familiar with Merb, it is a lightweight Model View Controller framework written in Ruby.  It was written by Ezra Zygmuntowicz in response to trying and giving up on making Ruby on Rails thread safe.  You can find his presentation materials here.

It was mentioned that there will be a Ruby conference in the Northern Virginia area upcoming  I'd like to see if we can get some IronRuby in there instead of all those Java guys with JRuby.  We'll see what happens, but for right now, everything seems to be in flux.  Stay tuned!

Next up, Dave Thomas talked about the Ruby object model with a very good presentation.  Below you can find some of my pictures I took from the event.  Forgive the quality of the images, but you can tell that it was a crowded place!  Anyhow, it was a really good talk about the object model, how the scoping of self and the resolution of classes and methods are done deep down in Ruby.  It was an excellent presentation and I was definitely excited by his passion for the community and the technology.

First we have Dave talking about the inheritance chain of Ruby objects.



Then here's Dave talking about the method resolution.



I had a chance to chat with Dave afterwards on F# as he has been looking into OCaml lately, where F# got most of its functionality from.  It's his hope that F# succeeds and I ultimately think it will.  So, I told him to give it a try.  Anyhow, it was a great night and good to reach out to the community.  The DC area has a pretty rich community of .NET, Ruby and Java programmers that's really refreshing to see.  Until next time...

Tonight I will be heading to the Northern Virginia Ruby Users Group (NoVARUG) meeting tonight with Dave Thomas (PragDave) talking about metaprogramming in Ruby.  Should be a great time and I'm sure it will be full tonight.   For those interested in some introduction to metaprogramming in Ruby, here's a good link to help get you started.

Metaprogramming in F#?

One of the many things that has interested me in F# is that it was originally written as a language to write other languages.  This of course leads me to a discussion of F# and metaprogramming.  Is it a fit?  There are a couple of links well worth visiting and then at a future date, we'll come back to the subject.

Before the links, most of the language oriented stuff comes from quotations.  Quotations are a little block of code which turns a particular piece of code into an expression tree.  This language tree can then be transformed, optimized and even compiled into different languages.  There are two types of these quotations, raw and typed.  Typed Quotations contain static typing information whereas the raw do not.  For a good introduction to these, check out Tomas Petricek's post here.

• Leveraging Meta-Programming Components with F# - Don Syme
  Talks about F# with Quotations and LINQ expressions for expressing metaprogramming in F#
  
  
• F# metaprogramming and classes - Tomas Petricek
  Talks about Class Quotations and basic metaprogramming capabilities in F# and its limitations
  

    class Program

Dave Laribee and Jeremy Miller recently recorded an episode on DotNetRocks and was just posted today.  Episode 333 "It's the ALT.NET Show" can be found here.  It's a great show that explains ALT.NET for those who may not really know what it is outside of some of the arguments on the altdotnet mailing list.  This includes discussions on open source frameworks, agile practices, refactoring and so on. 

It's great to see the reaction from this show at least from my perspective.  To see the job we're doing from Josh Holmes, Glenn Block, me and others from within to reach out and also present ideas and bridge the gaps.  It's been very rewarding to be a part of that.

We're only just a few days away from ALT.NET Open Spaces, Seattle.  All of those who are attending should have received a notice of such this morning.  I'll be arriving in Seattle on Thursday afternoon to help set up for the event so if anyone wants to hang out beforehand let me know.

Bringing It To The Community

Anyhow, this weekend I did my best to bring some of those ALT.NET practices to the CMAP Code Camp and we had a pretty good turnout.  This time I talked about refactoring to patterns, dependency injection and inversion of control containers.  I'm hoping to do the same for the Northern Virginia Code Camp coming up on May 17th.  Brian Donahue has been rather successful doing so with the Philly Code Camps as well.  That reminds me that I'm coming up there in mid-May to do an F# session.  Should be a fun time.

I really enjoyed speaking at this past weekend's CMAP Code Camp.  I hope you all enjoyed my presentation on "Loosen Your Dependencies with Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Containers".  It was a great discussion to have with everyone and I like to learn there as much as I teach. 

I also enjoyed teaming up with Scott Allen on his "A Gentle Introduction to Mocking" where we talked about mocks versus stubs, test pattens and mock frameworks such as Rhino Mocks and Moq.  Hopefully we'll be doing some more ping-pong sessions in the future.

Once again, I'd like to plug my DC ALT.NET group that I run.  Our next meeting is scheduled for April 23rd and the topic will be Continuous Integration with Jay Flowers.  We'll announce the location shortly for our group.  You can go ahead and sign up for our mailing list here.

Anyhow, here are some resources that can help point you in the right direction.  This includes articles, blogs and such that I find will be useful in your journey to better understand these things:

• Articles
  • The Dependency Inversion Principle
  • Introducing Castle - Part I
  • Model View Presenter - Passive View
  • Model View Presenter - Supervising Controller
• Blogs
  • Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern
  • MF Bliki - Inversion of Control
  • List of .NET Dependency Injection Containers (IOC)
• Books
  • Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C#
  • Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
  • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

• ASP.NET MVC Preview 2
• xUnit.net
• Castle Windsor
• StructureMap
• Unity Application Block
• Unity Community Contributions

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