The first ALT.NET group in Ireland

This month Slawomir Dorzak has kindly volunteered to give us a talk on Platform as a Service options for .Net:

Platform as a Service is a new hot thing and is revolutionizing the way we write and manage our applications. PaaS lets us focus on what’s important – that is creating and running the application by taking care of the infrastructure. By far the most popular PaaS platform for .NET is Microsoft Windows Azure, but is that it or maybe there are others? In this session we’ll look at some of the benefits and challenges that come with using PaaS. We will also explore some alternatives to Windows Azure that can be used for hosting .NET applications.

Bio: Slawomir Dorzak has almost 10 years of experience in software development. He is programming mainly in C# .NET, recently also in Ruby and Go. Last two years working for Dell Cloud teams he has been focused on open source cloud computing systems as well as cloud oriented application architecture.

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, May 30th in the regular spot: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

It’s a free event as always thanks to our sponsors Wonga but please sign up to the EventBrite event so I know the numbers for the room.

See you there

[Heads up: This talk is on Thursday, 14th March]

[Update: Due to the bad weather, we've had to reschedule to Thursday, 28th March]

Hot on the heels of our last talk, we’re ready for our next meetup. We’re lucky to have author and noted speaker Simon Brown in Dublin this March and he’s kindly offered to give us a talk  on Agile software architecture sketches:

Agility is about moving fast and this requires good communication. A consistent, shared vision is essential in order for teams to push in the same direction, but it’s surprising that many agile teams struggle to effectively communicate the architecture of the software they are building. As an industry we do have the Unified Modeling Language (UML), yet many people favour informal “boxes and lines” sketches instead. The problem is that such diagrams rarely make any sense, usually need a narrative to accompany them and ultimately slow the team down. Although we can argue whether UML offers an effective way to communicate software architecture, that’s often irrelevant because many teams have already thrown out UML or simply don’t know it. Abandoning UML is one thing but, in the race for agility, many software development teams have lost the ability to communicate visually.

This session is aimed at everybody involved in the software development process and is about improving architectural communication in an agile environment. You’ll see some patterns and anti-patterns related to NoUML diagrams and you’ll learn some simple techniques for communicating software architecture using informal sketches.

About Simon:

Simon lives in Jersey (Channel Islands) and works as an independent consultant, specialising in software architecture, technical leadership and the balance with agility. Simon regularly speaks at international software development conferences and provides consulting/training to software teams at organisations across Europe, ranging from small startups through to global blue chip companies. He is the founder of Coding the Architecture (a website about pragmatic, hands-on software architecture) and the author of Software Architecture for Developers (an e-book that is being published incrementally through Leanpub). He still likes to write code too, primarily in .NET and Java. Simon can be found on Twitter at @simonbrown.

Simon was only available on the 14th, so hope you don’t mind I’m shifting the date a bit again to accommodate (last month’s was later than normal – which is why there’s such a short gap this time). Normal service resuming shortly. Update: Simon got snowed in with the bad weather, so new date is the 28th

Happy new year to all

We kick off 2013 with Sean Farmar giving us a presentation covering:

Why would you use a Service Oriented Architecture?

Why  would you chose NServiceBus?

Sean has a lot of real world experience to draw on so it should definitely be an interesting and informative meetup. Hope to see you all there.

When & Where

The talk will be on Thursday, January 24th, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our (new!) sponsors Wonga, but don’t forget to register if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

For the September meetup we’re delighted to have Dan Haywood over with us to give a talk about Restful Objects:

REST architectures are becoming increasingly more common, both on the internet and within the enterprise. Behind most of these REST APIs is a domain model (some anaemic, some less so); the wiring up of that REST API to the model involves lots of boilerplate and lots of testing.

Evolving out of the Naked Objects movement (and by the way, a major Naked Objects app has been very successfully deployed at the Department of Social Protection here in Ireland), Restful Objects is a specification that describes how to expose any domain model over REST. The spec fully documents a set of HTTP URL resources and the corresponding JSON representations that they support; and it fully supports the stuff that REST-heads care about: HATEOAS, media types, link rels, conneg, HTTP headers and arcane response codes; that sort of thing. Restful Objects isn’t just a specification though: there are also two separate open source implementations, a completed one for .NET (running on top of ASP.NET MVC4), and another on the JVM.

In this talk, Dan will explain some of the ideas behind the spec, and will show how you can use it to REST-enable an app in a matter of minutes.

The talk will be on Tuesday, September 18th and not our usual Wednesday, in the usual location: the Central Hotel on Exchequer St. at 6.30.

The event is free as always thanks to our sponsors Beam, but don’t forget to register if you plan on attending so we have an idea of the numbers.

Hope to see you all there