Speaker: Paul Cowan

Paul Cowan is currently a development manager who remains very much hands on with respect to coding for Continuity2, a business continuity firm that provides a software product range that automates collation and notification services for business continuity problems.

Raised in Belfast Paul now lives in Glasgow. He previously spent 4 years working for twentysixlondon, working as a technical architect where he worked mainly on public facing websites such as Volvo Ocean Race, Waitrose, Closer, Abercrombie And Kent

The Volvo Ocean Race website tracked a round the world yacht race through ten months of race time. During race time, the website was updated with live race and telemetry boat information in as real time as possible.

Before twentysixlondon Paul spent his career working for Fujitsu in Belfast where he worked on numerous government projects.

Paul’s hobbies include Boxing and modern literature.

Session: An overview of ALT.NET Technologies

An attempt to raise both awareness and interest in technologies that have evolved from other sources apart from Microsoft.

I am currently interviewing candidates for a developer position. I have been a bit disappointed that very, very few of the candidates have any experience of some of the concepts that I think are important in respect to creating maintainable software. The main concept being unit testing.

In my opinion most of the patterns and practices that come out of Redmond A.K.A Microsoft are purely to get a response from attendees of conferences like MIX. The same old drag and drop demo ware is both untestable and unmaintainable.

Examples of such demo ware are the CAB application block, SCSF (smart client software factory), ObjectBuilder (a very poor IOC container) and the Entity Framework which many believe to be the catalyst for the ALT.NET movement.

The recent ASP.NET MVC framework appears to be an acknowledgement from Microsoft that they want to embrace some of the ALT.NET concepts.

The discussion will outline some of the following techniques and frameworks by way of a code review. Attendees are encouraged to participate with questions throughout the duration of the discussion.

Some of he concepts and frameworks include:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Nhibernate (Object Relational Mapper)
• Castle Windsor (Inversion Of Control or Dependency Injection)
• AOP(Aspect Oriented Programming)
• ASP.NET MVC Framework
• JQuery (a write less JavaScript library from a very talented team).