2010 7th September

Clockwise around the table: Keith, Iain, Duncan, Mark, Paul, Steve, Mark, Dave, Shaun, Steve, Gareth, Mark, Mike.

Stuff we talked about:

10 The Pragmatic Programmer recommends learning a new language once a year. Does anyone do this? If so what ones?
A straw poll showed that we are a very .NET centric bunch, and not surprisingly the most popular non-dotnet language to learn was javascript. Lua was mentioned as was Haskell - as a way of getting deeper into functional programming.

10 Legacy Code: what strategies do you use?
Plenty of horror stories with this one. Micheal Feather's book and Brownfield Development were both suggested as good reads.

9 How to provide plugable custom logic for our clients all running from the same application - is there an alternative to Structure Map's profile configuration?
We dicussed Multitenancy and some IoC based techniques, including Windsor's IHandlerSelector Microsofts Managed Extensible Framework (MEF) was also mentioned as a possible solution to certain situations that require additional plugins to be dynamically added to code at run-time.

8 Getting approval for open source tools in large corporations
We discussed the fustrations of getting open source tools accepted in conservative organisations.

7 Caching proxies: anyone tried them? Use them?
Lots of good ideas here including: nginx, StrageLoop, Aptimize, lab.js, Akamai, Cloudfront, Rackspace CDN.

6 OpenRasta in the wild: anyone used it, seen it used, etc..
No one had much experience with it. Some discussion about restfull frameworks including oData.

6 How to minimise NHibernate domain queries
We discussed the best way to factor NH queries in code. Talked about not using an ORM for querying, using CQRS instead.

Stuff we didn't have time for:

6 Is Iron Ruby/Python dead now MS has reduced the devs on the DLR?

5 What is everyones preferred IoC container for flexibility? E.G. Ninject, Structuremap.

4 What do you think will be announced at PDC?

3 Are you a Microsoft fan boy?

3 What features does an eCommerce app need?

2 XSLT or Linq to XSD or other?