We have some great meetings lined up for the next few months. Please take a look at the upcoming schedule on the web site.
Test Driven Development has been gaining prominence, and many developers recognize the value it provides. Still, TDD adoption can be a slow and painful process, and often results in early abandonment as challenges mount. Many believe the current body of TDD knowledge puts too much emphasis on testing implementation details, and not enough on testing behavior. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) takes a more focused approach to TDD that can help clarify the testing process, and create a meaningful, readable suite of tests that not only helps you and other developers understand your application, but can be used to show your client that the application is meeting their needs. When developers, customers, and managers can clearly see the value of writing tests, everyone wins.
Brian Donahue is a software developer with 10 years experience with a variety of web application platforms, focusing recently on ASP.NET. His consulting company, Vitreo Solutions (www.vitreosolutions.com), builds custom business software for its clients. A strong believer in Agile and Extreme Programming (XP) principles and practices, Brian tries to promote their use in his work, as well as in the software development community. He recently organized a Philadelphia "ALT.NET" (http://phillyalt.net), a user group focused on exploring the ideas and tools that can help us become better "software craftspeople" on the .NET platform. Principles such as agility, testability, and maintainability are common themes, as well as discussion of open source software and other alternatives that can help make your .NET software development easier, and more fun. Brian blogs at http://persistall.com
Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC platform is coming, and it provides a fundamental change in the way that web applications can be written with .NET. Come see how Microsoft has brought some of the best features of Ruby on Rails and other web platforms to ASP.NET. We'll go through what the MVC framework is, how it differs from standard ASP.NET development, and then develop an MVC application in real time. Learn how this new framework can help you write more readable, testable, maintainable code, and increase your speed of delivery. Jeff Deville: http://jeffdeville.com
Jeff Deville started his development career at Intel, where he began working with the .net framework as a beta product, and was introduced to Agile development principles. Jeff is currently an architect at YellowBook.com (sorry about the commercials), where he manages a team that is in the process of rewriting the site using a restful, MVC implementaiton in .net 3.5.