South Houston .Net User Group

We have moved to Facebook

admin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:33:03 +0000

South Houston .Net User Group has moved to Facebook. You can find us here.

Take a minute to jump over to our page and click the ‘Like’ button to become a fan. Once we get 25 fans, we get some more features and nice URL to give out.

As you know we have not been keeping this blog up to date, and we are hoping that moving to Facebook will help increase our ability to communicate with you and, more importantly, increase your ability to communicate with us. We meet once a month, but I think there is a lot of value in staying connected between meetings. Between the Twitter and Facebook, I’m hoping we can accomplish this.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter. @shdnug

Thanks,
Aaron Dargel

TDD and SOLID Coding Dojo April 24th

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:51:48 +0000

SHDNUG will be holding its first TDD and SOLID Coding Dojo on Saturday April 24th at the Freeman Branch library (16616 Diana Lane Houston, TX 77062 - (281) 488-1906) from 10:00 am - 2:00 pm in the large meeting room on the first floor.

I really want this dojo to be focused on refactoring and we’ll be discussing the SOLID Principles as we go. Many times we get the tests passing and then move on to the next thing, but that’s really defeating the purpose of TDD. We want to stop and look at what we wrote and refactor it towards greatness. This process will be slow at first, and that’s the point of a dojo. We have no deadline for delivery and I want everyone involved to ask questions, write some code, have fun, and walk out feeling like it was worth your time.

Once a test is passing we will stop and ask the following questions:

Is it DRY?
Does it have one responsibility?
Does everything in it change at the same rate?
Does it depend on things that change less often than it does?

These questions will help us apply the SOLID principles when we start to refactor and it is a nice list to keep us honest about the quality of our code. We’ll also discuss what these questions mean briefly before we really get going.

Here are the tools we will be using:

NUnit - Good old NUnit…
Moq - The Mocking framework with attitude…
WatiN - I will click no more…
NBehave - Oh…Behave (or SpecFlow, I can’t make up my mind)
ASP.Net MVC 2 - This time we mean it…
.Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 - No weekend would be complete without a little VS in your grill…
EF or NHibernate (if we have the time) - ORM you glad I didn’t say LINQ-To-SQL, or worse DataSets…

We will go through the process used on real Agile projects using BDD, and working from the outside-in. We start with a feature and feature level test (using NBehave and WatiN), and then start to work our way down to Unit Tests for different components, finishing with a passing feature. I hope we can do all this tomorrow and look forward to seeing everyone there.

We are still looking for sponsors for this meeting, but sponsor or no, there will be food and drinks for all. I’m really looking forward to this dojo and know that it will be a lot of fun.

See you there,
Aaron

User Group Meeting March 31st

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:16:58 +0000

This month we’re looking at jQuery and how to use it the “right” way in WebForms and MVC applications. We’ll be taking a deep dive into selectors, commands, and plugins. It will be a lot of fun. If you haven’t used jQuery, or you have, but are still a little new to it, or if you are a certified jQuery Ninja Master, you should come out to the user group meeting on Wednesday, March 31st from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM. We will have food and drinks for all. It’s @ 16616 Diana Lane Houston, TX 77062 - (281) 488-1906. We will be meeting upstairs again this month.

This class is being led by Kevin Lee, you can checkout his blog here: http://www.chewyq.com/

You can follow SHDNUG on Twitter and get updates and random musings faster than anywhere else… | @shdnug
View SHDNUG’s Calendar

We’re Back!!

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:18:52 +0000

With the help of Kevin Lee, co-worker and SHDNUG’s new Director, we’ve been able to get more organized and really focus on growing SHDNUG this year. We have speakers coming in from all over Houston, including Zain Naboulsi (Microsoft Evangelist, @zainnab), Todd Anglin (Chief Evangelist, Telerik and Microsoft MVP, @toddanglin), Claudio Lassala (Senior Developer, EPS Software, @claudiolassala), and many, many more.

One big change is that we have moved the meetings from the first Wednesday of the month, to the last. Our first meeting is going to be on February 24th @ the Freeman-Branch library (we will be meeting in the upstairs conference room this month and the next, and then we’re back in the large conference room downstairs). Zain Naboulsi will be there from Microsoft speaking about debugging in Visual Studio. It will be good to see all of you again after our short break, and regroup. I hope that this year SHDNUG grows rapidly, and we are doing everything we can to keep the community together between meetings.

You can follow SHDNUG on Twitter | @shdnug
View SHDNUG’s Calendar

What’s going on??

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:37:35 +0000

I think it’s due time for an explanation of what’s happening with SHDNUG.
First of all, we are not going away. In fact, I’m working on getting some more help running the user group and growing attendance at the meetings. I have recently taken on a new project and just bought my first house. So, naturally, things are a little crazy right now. My thought is that the next meeting will take place in November or December where we will get a great overview of using jquery in asp.net forms apps and maybe a little peak at using them in MVC. Speaking of MVC, I’m working on getting a great speaker for early next year, but no promises yet. To sum up, SHDNUG is alive and well. I hope to be back in the next month or so, with some more support and goodies to give away. I want to thank all of you for sticking around and checking out the site. Keep checking in, we’ll be back very soon.

August Meeting (Wednesday August 5th 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM)

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 21:57:42 +0000

Wow! Time really flies when you’re having fun. Here we are about a week and a half from the next meeting. I think this time we are going to do something a bit different; we will have a coding dojo. I don’t expect anyone to get hurt, as this does not involve practicing our ninja like fighting skills. Instead it is a way to practice our ninja like coding skills. For about 6 months now, we have focused on having a speaker come in and teach us something new. The speakers have been terrific and I know I have learned a great deal from the past meetings. This time, however, we are going to teach each other. A coding dojo is a practice zone for TDD (Test Driven Development), and more than that it is a way for all of us to learn from each other. We will be writing code, everyone that wants to get up and code will have the opportunity to do so. Coding dojos can be intimidating at first, but remember all of us can learn something from everyone else, no matter what the skill level. So I would encourage everyone to get up and give it a try. I have attended several dojos and they are always a lot of fun and I never walk away without learning something new. For more information on coding dojos I must redirect you to my friend and coworker’s blog, who has been running coding dojos for some time now, Mr. J.P. Hamilton’s Blog.

So the big question now is what to code in this dojo. I figured we get a little (artificially) intelligent and tackle the problem of finding similar people that like the same movies you like. This is the kind of algorithm behind Amazon’s purchase suggestions and Netflix’s movie recommendations. We will use a very simple algorithm called Euclidean Distance to measure the similarities between one persons movie reviews and those of several others. The result will tell us which reviewers are most likely to share similar interests in movies. We will start the dojo by going through a simple review of the alogorithm and collectively creating the components that load the data in preparation for the algorithm. Then we will start the dojo full force.

If you have never participated in a coding dojo, I really encourage you to attend. If you don’t want to code in front of others, feel free to sit back and observe. There should be no pressure, and above all, no hurt feelings. We are all friends and share the same passion for development. So come in with an open mind and be ready to have fun and quite possibly learn a great deal of new things.

Hope to see you there,

Aaron Dargel

We meet at the Clear Lake City-County Freeman Branch Library

16616 Diana Lane
Houston, TX 77062
281-488-1906

August SHDNUG Meeting iCal Reminder

July Meeting (Wed. July 1st)

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 19:21:54 +0000

Because of all the activity for the summer, the library will not be available for July. I thought we might do something a little different and head out to Russo’s New York Pizzeria on 646 by the Chick-Fil-A from about 6:30 - 8:30 PM on July 1st. If anyone wants to meet me out there you’re welcome to. We won’t have a formal agenda, just take some time to hangout and chat about whatever topics we happen to think about. I think this will be a great opportunity for us to have a more informal meeting and just get a chance to meet each other on a more personal level. If you are planning on attending, just leave a comment so I can get an idea for how many people will be there.
Russo’s New York Pizzaria Location

Add to my calendar

SHDNUG 2.0

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:54:24 +0000

Well, the new upgrade is complete for now. I hope that the new site will be little more effective than the last one. There is a members page that will show all the members that have signed up as well as give each member a little dashboard when they log in. I haven’t explored all the features yet, but I hope that you will register as a member of SHDNUG and subscribe to the RSS feed while your here so that you can receive the latest news from SHDNUG.

Thanks to all,

Aaron Dargel