On Wednesday, March 25, the first meeting of the Madison All.Net special interest group (SIG) was held at Herzing College. The All.Net SIG is all about discussing all things related to Microsoft .Net technologies in an open spaces style meeting. Instead of the lecture hall style room we traditionally use for the Madison .Net User Group meetings, we opted for a classroom style room due to the format of the meeting itself. Aside from a brief survey form I created to get an idea on what people were interested in, we had no set agenda.

Below are the results of the survey, which I took to get a general idea of what people were looking to get out of the group. Just because something didn’t get a lot of votes (i.e. Windows Embedded only got one vote, which was me) doesn’t mean people can’t come to a meeting to ask for help, share their code and participate.

Topics

Asp.Net MVC	8	WCF	5	Windows Mobile	2
Architecture	8	Project Management	5	Windows Forms	2
Silverlight	8	SQL Server	4	IIS	2
Agile	7	Asp.Net Web Forms	4	BizTalk	2
Test Driven Design/Development	7	TFS	4	Other ORM	1
Entity Framework	6	WPF	4	XNA	1
Alt.Net (General)	6	Sharepoint	4	Linq2Sql	1
Domain Driven Design	6	nHibernate	3	Windows Embedded	1

 

Topics – Write-in Suggestions

Scrum, Prototyping, Requirements Gathering and Analysis, Networking (Wired, Wireless, etc), Dynamic Languages (Iron Ruby/Python), Security, WMI, Debugging, Best Practices, Subversion, db40 SQL CE, Sync Framework, Ado.Net Data Services, Azure

Meeting Formats

Group Project	8	Peer Code Reviews	6	Open Spaces	3
Pair Coding	6	Scheduled Topics	6	Guest Speakers	3

After the survey, I talked about the Mix09 conference I attended last week. This was a two way discussion, with lots of good questions, and not a presentation (no power point at all!). We talked briefly about Silverlight 3, Blend 3 (Sketchflow), Expression Web 3 (Super Preview), and .Net RIA services. While we were enjoying some Pizza, we watched a bit of the Bill Buxton/Scott Guthrie keynote, and had a good laugh at Scott’s intro video.

After the Pizza break we started looking at the Entity Framework, and some ideas on a group project. I did a quick tally in my head of the technologies people were interested in, and Asp.Net MVC, ORM (EF, nHibernate, etc), and general architecture were the top 3. I sketched out a pretty lame diagram showing how we could create a project that allowed us to tackle the top 3 (and other) technologies.

The project I proposed was basically a typical 3 tier application consisting of a Asp.Net MVC front end, domain layer (business logic/objects), and a data access layer implemented using a variety of ORMs. The reason for working with multiple ORMs, is that everyone has different needs, wants and desires, and we’re trying to be as inclusive as possible. I think almost everybody has some type of standard they need to use at work, and in addition to pushing the boundaries of technology they be already familiar with, they also want to try new things, and see how things work when implemented with a different ORM.

In order to allow for the use of multiple ORMs, I suggested the use of a repository pattern, which in simple terms, is a in memory collection of domain objects. To implement, you define a set of interfaces in your domain (business layer), and then create concrete implementations of the interfaces for each ORM you wish to implement. This is quite a common approach in Domain Driven design, and in the Alt.Net space, however, it’s usually done to aid in the testability and maintainability of the code base.

The following is my best attempt to create a list of all the web sites and projects that I referenced during the discussion (in no particular order). It is important to note that everyone’s implementation and terminology is a little bit different.

• Jeff Palermo's Onion Architecture
• Code Camp Server – Asp.Net application used to manage code camps
• Foundations of Programming E-Book and Sample Application
• Sharp Architecture – “a solid architectural foundation for rapidly building maintainable web applications leveraging the ASP.NET MVC framework with NHibernate”
• ASP.NET MVC Storefront Starter Kit – It’s listed under sample applications halfway down the page

I don’t believe there was any final decision made on if or when we will start a group project, but I am excited to continue to talk about this. I already got one e-mail from someone who attended asking for examples which is why I included the list above.

Our next meeting should be around April 15th, but be sure to check the MadDotNet web site for the official date and time.