Alt.net 2nd conference
I just attended my first alt.net conference (some would call it unconference). The story is about a group of 40 people that came to talk about … whatever they decided to talk about. The conference is self-organizing, with no predetermined lectures or lecturers, and with one healthy rule – if you don’t feel you are learning or contributing at the discussion you are currently having, you have to get up and find another discussion.
Here are some of the talks I attended (here is a semi-readable list of all the talks):
Aspect Oriented Programming
Usages other than logging, AOP frameworks.
Mocking/Stubbing
Reiterate the basic paradigm, emphasize on TypeMock. They are considering a UI tool adding to Visual Studio to help create mocks – meant for people just starting with mocking. The intended usage is:
- Write a test, without any mocking
- The test will usually fail because some deep class is not configured correctly.
- You will see the chain of calls that caused the exception, and be able to automatically generate a mock for any class in the chain.
- Rinse & repeat until your test passes
High Scale & Distributed Caches
The discussion focused around what I’d call medium scale – 2-10 nodes that used shared caches like memcached & Azure.
Multithreading
There was a comparison of Microsoft CCR and Parallel Extensions. It seems people still think of parallelization as simply utilizing all your cores, when it’s much more than that. Some applications benefit from multithreading even on a single core machine (think web crawler).
One interesting link – PowerThreading library (see this video for a demonstration of Asynchronous Programming Model using PowerThreading).
