So we had a bit of a mix up last night.  We thought we had a speaker arranged, but the speaker was arranged for next month.  Opps.  So we improvised and had the first ever NetDug Open Spaces meeting with about 30 people.  We had pizza and when for about 2 hours.

I think it went reasonably well.  I saw a lot fewer blank stares than usual, that is good, and quite a few people got involved.  After a few rounds with the attendees, here is the list of topics we settled on:

• Inversion of Control (selling it to upper management, and what is it)
• ORMs (NHibernate, SubSonic, Linq to SQL, oh my!)
• Behavior Driven Design
• Web Service Security

Obviously you cannot cover all of those topics in depth, but sometimes you don’t need to.  In the course of the discussion we also talked about Test Driven Development, Architecture, when to use singletons and when NOT to, and Active Record Pattern vs Repository Pattern.

Take away’s from the meeting:

• There is a lot of interest in IoC libraries out there, but not much practical experience.
• We also need to have a session on how to get started with NHibernate.

Actually, it was amazing to me how much interest there was in “advanced” topics and best practices.  Hopefully that will continue.

Chris Brandsma