// 6 Degrees Of Code

Garren’s Git

2010-09-02T20:24:00.001+02:00

Thanks to everyone who attended our meeting in Sandton last night!

Garren Smith from Driven Software did an excellent presentation on Git, and he was kind enough to make the presentation and some other resources available on his blog, which you can find here.

You’ll also find details on the Git challenge which Garren is running, with a R400 Amazon book voucher up for grabs – courtesy of Driven Software.

We had our highest turnout to date at this meeting, and I hope we can grow it even more in future. So if you attended last night, and found it informational, useful, or otherwise just fun, please spread the word, and let’s see if we can double the numbers at the next meeting!

Till next time.

Git With Garren Smith

2010-08-25T23:18:00.001+02:00

It’s been a while since our last meeting, but we’re proud to announce that we’ll be having another one next week! Garren Smith from Driven Software will be doing a presentation on Git. The meeting will take place next Wednesday, 1 September.

There’s a significant change for this meeting however, and it’s the fact that we’ll be having it in Sandton (by popular vote). We’re still in the process of confirming the exact venue & time, but these details will be sent through to you (if you’ve registered) during the next couple of days.

As always, please register here.

Hope to see you all there!

Agile South Africa & next 6doc

2010-05-01T10:25:00.001+02:00

The third Agile South Africa event is coming up on 12 May, at BCX in Midrand. Agile is very much in line with the spirit of 6 degrees of code, and so we’d like to see you all there.

You can find details and register here: http://www.agilesa.co.za/gauteng_event3_registration.shtml

We also want to arrange the next 6 degrees of code meeting, but we need some feedback regarding dates. The next meeting will be at least 2 weeks after the Agile SA event, so the guys that plan on attending both can have a breather in between. Would you be able to attend if we planned it for 26 May? Please leave your thoughts in the comments, or give me a shout on twitter (http://twitter.com/jancowol).

April 2010 Meeting Rundown

2010-04-26T20:39:00.001+02:00

If you missed this month’s meeting, you missed out, period! Robert Maclean gave an excellent presentation on Visual Studio 2010, and judging by the post-talk discussions – most people were impressed with what they saw. You can find Robert’s blog at www.sadev.co.za.

Some links:
Visual Studio 2010 Home
Visual Studio 2010 Trial Downloads
Express Versions (Free!)

Look out for details of our next meeting to be posted soon.

What's new in Visual Studio 2010! With Robert MacLean

2010-04-11T23:58:00.001+02:00

*UPDATE: This meeting has been postponed until Wed, 21 April. You can still register, and we will send you an email with further details closer to the meeting date.

So who attended our March meeting? Oh that’s right, no one, because we didn’t have one. This month however, we do have a meeting, and it’s been timed (partly by coincidence, and partly quite on purpose) to coincide with the launch of VS2010!

We’re honoured to have Robert MacLean from BB&D, talking on what’s new in VS2010. So if you haven’t had a look at it yet, you’ll want to get your pizza-ridden, hind-ish regions to this meeting. Robert is a Team System MVP, and is quite active in the developer community. He regularly speaks at Microsoft developer events, and you can visit his blog at www.sadev.co.za.

The meeting will take place on 14 April at 19:00. Register here, and we’ll send you further details via e-mail. Yes, I’m aware that it’s short notice, and for that I give you permission to roast me in the comments.

Oh yeah, rumour also has it that some freebies may or may not be handed out. But you’ll only find out if you attend.

See you on Wednesday.

6doc shirts!

2010-03-15T19:07:00.001+02:00

What do you guys think about the idea of having golf-shirts made with the 6doc logo? Would you be interested and what would you be prepared to pay?

This is our first attempt at a logo. Any suggestions?

February 2010 Meeting Rundown

2010-03-02T09:16:00.001+02:00

I’d like to thank Kevin Trethewey from Driven Software for talking on Agile software development at our February meeting. His talk was very informative, and we had some interesting discussions. Our thanks also to Garren Smith, (also from Driven Software) for his insightful contributions.

Kevin was kind enough to make his slide deck available here, so go ahead and grab it.

Something you may want to take note of: The Agile South Africa Forum was launched late last year, and they will be holding their second event tomorrow at BCX in Midrand. The event will take the form of an open discussion with a panel of experts to answer any Agile related questions. Kevin will form part of this panel, and it should make for an interesting event. Details and registration here.

We’ll see you at the next meeting!

6.D.o.C February 2010 Meeting: “You’re Agile, I’m not. So what!?”

2010-02-17T00:15:00.001+02:00

Due to all-round hecticness ensuing in every shape and form in my life during the past couple of weeks, the February meeting has been shifted to February 24.

This month we’re very fortunate to have Kevin Trethewey from Driven Software as our guest speaker. Kevin is a long-time respected member of the South African developer community, and he’s going to be talking about Agile software development.

Kevin will be tackling the subject of why Agile exists, and some of the problems solved by it. If you want to find out what all the fuss is about, you’ll want to be at this meeting!

As always, please register here, and we hope to see you next week!

January 2010 Meeting Rundown

2010-01-25T23:04:00.001+02:00

My apologies for the delay in getting this post up, It’s been a busy week for me.

Thanks to those who attended the January meeting, I hope you left with some food for thought! I especially appreciated the discussions that ensued after the talk. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’d like to see: Open-minded .Net developers having discussions around best practices and principles.

May I also remind and encourage you to watch Robert Martin’s keynote address at the 2009 Norwegian Developer’s Conference, where he talks about professionalism in software development. Following good practices and principles (like SOLID) is a step towards professionalism in this industry. We will again have all the NDC2009 videos available for your copying pleasure at the February meeting.

As discussed at the meeting, I’ll be posting a list of possible future discussion topics soon. If there’s something you’d really like to see, please get vocal about it in the comments, or contact me here, or on Twitter (@jancowol). As mentioned before, anyone is welcome to speak, on any topic, as long as it falls within the general scope of the group. In other words, if you want to demo the latest drag & drop enabled, write-no-code Microsoft technology, don’t bother.

As promised, here are some SOLID content links to set you on the path:

Meeting content:
PowerPoint deck

Robert C. Martin’s original articles on the SOLID principles:
Single Responsibility
Open Closed
Liskov Substitution
Interface Segregation
Dependency Inversion

Other SOLID publications:
OO Primer – Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz
Pablo’s SOLID principles e-book (Los Techies)

SOLID Podcasts & videos
Hanselminutes: SOLID Principles with Uncle Bob - Robert C. Martin
Hanselminutes: Uncle Bob Martin: SOLID, this time with feeling.
Dimecasts.net SOLID episodes
All the NDC2009 videos torrent. *Note: we have all 30GB worth of videos available at the meetings, just bring an external hard disk.

Until next time.

6.D.o.C January 2010 Meeting: An Introduction To The SOLID Principles

2010-01-13T22:11:00.001+02:00

The SOLID principles is a set of principles that aid in object oriented design. They were formalised some years ago by respected author and software craftsman, Robert C. Martin (affectionately known as Uncle Bob).

The principles aim to address dependency management in OOD, which is probably the single biggest factor when it comes to writing maintainable code. These principles apply to OO languages in general, and is a crucial skill set that every developer should master.

Come and join us on January 20 for our first meeting of 2010, which will feature an introductory talk on the SOLID principles. As always, please register! You’ll receive details (venue & other) a day or two ahead of time.

Hope to see you there!

December 2009 Meeting Rundown

2009-12-10T00:43:00.001+02:00

Thanks to everyone who attended tonight’s meeting. If this trend continues, we’ll need to find a larger venue sooner than we anticipated!

Kobus Brummer did a great presentation on what’s new in C# 4.0, including an overview of the new dynamic typing features and interop between C# and Ruby/Python. Thanks Kobus, I have a feeling we’re going to see more presentations from you in future.

I hope everyone got a chance to copy the NDC videos and VS2010 beta 2. I need to thank Andre de Beer for organising those, and thanks to Andre van der Merwe we also had the Summer of NHibernate screen casts on offer. We’ll also make the content available at future meetings. I’m hoping to organise videos from the recent PDC for next time.

We’ve not yet settled on a date for the next meeting. I really would like for us to meet in January, but I’m not sure when most people will be available again. Would it be viable to hold one in the 3rd week (20 January)? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I’m looking forward to 2010, and I’m confident it’s going to be a great year for 6 Degrees of Code!

6.D.o.C December Meeting Update Notice

2009-12-08T08:25:00.001+02:00

Registrations
At some point during the past week the RSVP gadget on this blog decided to drop the existing registrations. It’s now been replaced with a new registration form and the process is a little smoother. Please re-register here.

NDC Videos
We’ve managed to collect all the videos from the Norwegian Developers Conference held earlier this year, and would like to share them with you! Given the thorny bandwidth issue in South Africa, we know not everyone can download 30GB worth of videos at a whim. Unfortunately we won’t be able to hand out DVD’s (I do have a day job!), but we’ll be setting up a server for you to download from. So bring along your notebook and some free hard drive space to get the vids.

VS2010 beta 2
Seeing as Kobus is going to be talking C# 4.0, we thought it’d be a good idea to also make the VS2010 beta 2 available for download at the meeting! I’m not sure how practical all of this copying is going to be, but lets give it a try.

For those who haven’t attended before, I’ll be sending the meeting location details within the next day, so be sure to register/re-register so I can get hold of you.

See you tomorrow night!

6.D.o.C December Meeting: What’s new in C# 4.0

2009-11-30T22:33:00.001+02:00

As previously mentioned, we were supposed to be doing something on the SOLID principles for this meeting. I have however managed to rope Kobus Brummer into doing a presentation on the new features of C# 4.0, as he was already doing the same presentation to colleagues at work. So if you have no idea what’s going to hit next year, come and join us for an overview of what’s new in your favourite statically typed (soon to be wannabe dynamic) .Net language.

Our space is still a bit limited, so it’s critical that you RSVP using the gadget in the sidebar.

We decided to drop the R20 donation, and instead everyone can just bring their own snacks & drink.

See you there!

November 2009 Meeting Rundown

2009-11-24T01:10:00.001+02:00

Our first meeting (Introduction to Unit Testing) turned out to be a success! First off, a big thanks to Ralph for the venue & projector, and Andre for organising the snacks. Thank you also to all who attended.

Hopefully the guys who weren’t yet testing are going to look into it, or are at least motivated to read up some more. I may have scared them somewhat by saying they need to unit test if they want to be considered professional!

You’ll find the presentation as well as the demos at the end of this post. Demos 2 & 3 may not make much sense to you if you didn’t attend. We’re thinking about the possibility of recording screen casts to get around this particular issue (note: “Thinking about it” - don’t hold me to it). I’m also including links to other tools & useful resources referenced in the presentation.

The presentation was a very quick and very broad overview of unit testing. We didn’t get a nearly good enough look at fakes (mocks & stubs), didn’t talk about code coverage, the context/specification style or BDD, acceptance testing frameworks like Fitnesse and Storyteller, and only lightly touched on TDD. On that point, I strongly believe that if you’re going to test, you should do it the TDD way. Even if you’re not taking the purist view of TDD, at least write your tests first. TDD is definitely on our list of discussion topics for next year.

Our next meeting will take place in a little over 2 weeks (December 9), where we’ll be talking about the SOLID principles. The next post will have more details on that. Oh and by the way, you’ll find your code is naturally more testable if you do it the SOLID way, so don’t miss it.

Hope to see you at the next meeting!

Meeting content:
PowerPoint deck & demos
*Note that the NUnit & Moq framework binaries are included, so you can just unzip and run the tests. You will need a test runner though – have a look at Testdriven.Net

Testing frameworks for .Net:
NUnit
MBUnit
xUnit.net
MSTest (as part of Visual Studio Team System)

Mocking frameworks for .Net:
Moq
Rhino Mocks
NMock2
Stubs – Microsoft Research
Typemock Isolator (commercial)
Tests for comparing mocking frameworks

Tools:
Testdriven.Net

Other content links:
Book: The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove
Screen cast: Free TekPub concepts screen cast - Rob Conery
Video: Unit Testing Best Practices - Roy Osherove
Video: Understanding Test Driven Development - Roy Osherove
Other: StackOverflow post with media links

6.D.o.C November Meeting: Introduction to Unit Testing

2009-11-18T00:00:00.000+02:00

We're having our first ever meeting at 19:00 on November 18, 2009, and I'll be doing an introduction to unit testing.

Unit testing (and TDD to some extent) is fast becoming an accepted, standard facet of the software development process, and a skill you need to master sooner rather later. Although the concept is nothing new, many organisations have not yet started on this practice.

If you've thought about getting into unit testing, but you're not sure how exactly, this is for you! Please RSVP if you plan on coming, our space is a bit limited at the moment. We'll provide you with the venue address as soon as you do.

We don't have any sponsors yet, so we're inviting a donation of around R10 - R20 to cover the cost of snacks & drinks (we'll make you feel guilty if you don't ;) ).

See you there!

The Plot

2009-11-17T23:36:00.000+02:00

So me and a couple of guys decided we're going to start a new developer user group. I've been toying with the idea for quite some time, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that I decided it was now or never. So we got together, discussed how we're going to kick this thing off, and here you have it.

Why would you want to start a user group?
There are a couple of reasons. One of them is me being lazy allergic to driving to Joburg for anything of this sort (I live and work in Centurion). Joburg of course being where these things usually take place. I reckoned there are other developers in the Centurion / Pretoria area that kinda feel the same way. We'd very much like for you to come and join our meetings.

What are you going to be talking about?
Developer stuff; software stuff; things that normal, well adjusted people may frown upon. Feel free to send in your meeting topic suggestions. Feel even more free to come and do a presentation on something you know something about! We don't carry chips on our shoulders, we're just your typical developer folk, always eager to learn.

Are you Microsoft shills?
Most certainly not. Although the group will mostly focus on .Net related topics, we do lean towards the Alt.Net side of things. In short: The group is not about promoting Microsoft technologies, rather, it will be about promoting the following values:

A desire to become better at what we do
Using the right tool for the job
Cultivating a culture of software craftsmanship
Practicing proven software engineering principles

If any of these points speak to you, we'd be honoured to have you.

When and where are meetings held?
The idea is to have at least one meeting, on the second Wednesday of every month, with the very first meeting taking place on November 18, 2009. This is not to say that these will be the only meetings, but we'd like to establish that as a baseline frequency. At the moment, the meeting venue is a private residence with limited space, so we really need accurate attendance estimates (read: Please RSVP). We'll provide you with all the details once we know you're coming. If you or your company would like to sponsor some meeting space, please get in touch with me.

That's enough for now, hope to see you at the next meeting!