Day 77: < Insert Witty Title Here >

Dot .Net Dilemmas

There is a sure feeling that summer is on the way in Sydney. The A-league has kicked off again and Sydney FC look like they may just challenge for honours this season. Sydney FC will never replace Bohemian FC in my heart but I guess it’s like a heroin addict just 'getting by' on methadone. The warmer evening make you feel like you should be doing something with your time (other than working full time and working on Project “Something Something”) so, On Monday night I attended my first Sydney Alt.Net “Lightening Talks”. I knew that there was an Alt.Net group in Sydney but for some reason (which I can not explain), I thought that it was invite only. It isn’t so, on the advice of friend I went along. The meeting was held in Thoughtworks offices on Pitt Street and my first impressions were very positive. It’s a big bright open office, good sized monitors with comfortable chairs at each desk, a well stocked kitchen and work space environment conducive to getting things done. The fact that there was beer,soft drinks and pizza on offer too didn’t hurt when it came to forming my opinion.

Since coming to Sydney,I have found it pretty difficult to find other .NET developers in my general circle to bounce ideas off so, to be in a room with 30 or so likeminded people was a good experience. To date, all the decisions on what technologies that I am using for my product are based on my own personal preference, experience and research so it was exciting to see that some of the choices that I have made were somewhat validated as most of the talks were on ASP.NET MVC, Fluent NHibernate, IoC and JQuery. Of particular interest to me was Damian Maclennan’s 10 minute talk on ‘Making ASP.NET MVC simple with Fluent NHibernate with StructureMap’ and James Crisp’s ‘Securing your ASP.NET MVC site against code injection and x-site scripting’. Largely, I think that the type of people that go along to user group meetings are those that have a real interest and passion for what they do, so to hear them discuss and share their positive experiences of the technologies that I am using gave me much needed and timely encouragement to stay on the path that I am on. At the moment I am working my way through the SportsStore web application created by Steven Sanderson in his new book ‘Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework’. When I have it finished, I plan to migrate it to the Azure Cloud as I think that it will be an excellent exercise to ensure that the Frameworks and technologies that I am using work in the cloud. If there is interest, I think that I will offer to present my finding to a future Alt.Net meeting.

Finally, if you are developing a ASP.NET MVC web application, you will no doubt know the importance of the whole concept of Routing URLs. So, if for no other reason than it's like getting your homework done for you, you should read Chapter 5 of Pro ASP.NET MVC where Sanderson ‘gives’ you a full unit test for both inbound and outbound route mappings that you can simply plug into your own unit tests... Excellent..