April Meeting

On Thursday 2nd April we had our 3rd Brisbane Alt.Net meeting at the Hyro offices.

Again BIG thanks to Hyro for sponsoring the cold beer and hot pizzas. Much appreciated!!

This time we looked at Design patterns and how we can apply them in the real world. I kicked it off by showing a real world validation application that used the Chain of Responsibility Pattern to dynamically string together different validation rules. Each rule could be developed and tested in isolation, making maintainability a breeze.

Steven Burman then introduced us to the Specification Pattern. He showed us how we could wrap Ling to NHibernate queries into Specifications, which we could then later string together in a meaningful way. Again the main advantages that I could see was that each of these specification could be tested in isolation and then be reused through out the application.

I have come to really look forward to these meetings. At first I was worried that the small numbers would lead to awkwardness, but actually being an intimate group means that the level of interaction is very high. Being able to interject and change code and point out thoughts etc meant that I could really take a lot away from these meeting. Instead of just getting served the main points of an idea, and then left to my own devices to figure out the detail, we can actually deep dive into these ideas, and really get to understand them.

Thank you in particular to Liam and Steve. You bring a wealth of knowledge and experience and it is much appreciated.