When: Tuesday 10th July 2007, doors open 6:00pm, meeting starts 6:30pm
Where: BAWA, Filton, Bristol (see FAQ for directions and a map) - Ground floor, room 4
What: Developer Tools And Development Practices
Who: Adam Towler and members of The .NET Developer Network
Why: Because no one knows so many tools that they can't afford to know about one more and because no one has the art of software development so nailed that they can't afford to learn from their peers. Also because this is what a user group is all about - interaction, integration, discussion, debate and argument with similar-minded members of the community.
How do I sign up for this meeting: Send an email to meetings at dotnetdevnet.com and quote your user name and the July meeting
Abstract: (The evening is split in half with Developer Tools first and Developer Practices second)
1) Developer Tools
A set of 4 grok talks by DotNetDevNet members about development tools:-
- Chris Myhill – DevExpress ASP.NET Tool
- Will Holley – MbUnit
- Mike Doherty – Resharper
- Jeremy Nevill – Beyond Compare
2) Development Practices
The second half of the evening is a group discussion on development practices led by Adam Towler of Bluewire Technologies. Here's an outline of the raison d'etre:-
What defines software quality, and what does that term mean? In this group to date we’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at the latest shiny new geek technology and tools, but how do they improve the quality of our work? What are their commercial benefits / disadvantages? Do we need to use them right or is it, in fact the case that all problems are best solved by XML until 2007, when the’re best solved by LINQ? We all know developers who moan the’re stuck using VB -0.5 etc (actually not sure if VB did negative floats before version 3.0) in contrast to many of us early adopters, but what are the issues / pitfalls of early adoption? We’ll explore the range of perspectives and experiences on that in the group.
Developers complain about managers who make stupid decisions, but if developers took more ownership of the concept of quality could we manage managers better? Where do contractors fit into quality (knowledge transfer, ability to share learning points from other places, forcing you to produce maintainable code / documentation versus short termism, unmaintainable code, wtfs or motivation that is solely financial). What about testing? What is the role of developers in testing or is that something we give to the test department? How do we measure quality and / or developer performance?