Happy Birthday Edmug!

Well yesterday was the the Edmonton .Net User Group aka Edmug’s 1st Birthday. While there was no birthday cake or singing but there was an interesting presentation and lots of cool prizes.

The event itself was held downtown at the Maverick Brewery. Personally I really enjoyed the location. The seating was comfortable and there was a good view of the screen from pretty much every spot in the place. It would definitely be cool to have other events at this location (especially if it’s a bigger name coming..?)

As for the presentation the topic was Domain Specific Languages. I’ve heard about these a bit in the last while, including the Microsoft DSL tools. In fact I’m pretty sure there is a project targeted at helping with NHibernate that uses it. I just can’t find it right now. Christians Izquierdo is a very good presenter and kept the audiences attention even though the subject itself can be a bit dry. The one problem I see with the presentation is that there wasn’t much discussion about how you could actually use a DSL. Or more specifically problems that have been solved using a DSL. Knowing about the existence of DSLs is definitely a good thing but it helps to see how people are actually making use of them. Well okay there was mention of 4 existing DSLs but not much discussion about them.

As a side note, Martin Fowler has a good presentation online called Introduction to Domain Specific Languages . I recommend giving it a watch if the subject interests you.

At the end of the presentation prizes were given out. There was a ton of licenses for software. There were 5 licenses of the JetBrain’s pack which included dotTrace and Resharper, 10 licenses of CodeSmith (of which I won one!) and 2 licenses (don’t quote me on that #) of the ComponentOne pack. There was also some hardware given away. A couple keyboards, a few mice and most importantly an XBox 360 Premium of which I am the new proud owner!! A special thanks goes out to the guy who won this puppy first but decided to pass up on it because he already had one.

So with that I congratulate Edmug on a very successful first year and expect many more to follow!

Another amazing User Group Night

Well the Edmonton .Net Users Group had Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo appear again and I was once again blown away. The original title for the night was Enterprise Patterns but it was so much more. The actual main patterns we were shown that I can think of right now were Passive View and Mappers. While that in of itself was a treat more important for me was being shown a full end to end refactoring of existing code. The original code that JP started with was something you would see on your average web site but by the end was a thing of single responsibility beauty.

At the end of the night it almost looked like JP wouldn’t be able to pull it off before security kicked us out but a little smooth talking from Don saved the night. JP was able to pull off a very interesting implementation that has definitely helped continue to open my eyes. Of course JP has been doing that all week for those of us lucky enough to be in his week long development course (of which I’ll be blogging on once it’s all over). But for those of you who have seen JP let me just say to you.. Yes it is as amazing and fun as you think it would be.

So my hat.. well if I had a hat it would be off to Don and JP (and everyone else who helps make the Edmug nights so successful). Thanks guys!