Thanks to everyone at NextGenUG for letting me come up to talk about Monorail last night.

Just to let you know that registration for DDD6 is now live. Usually it fills up fast, so you may want to register now. There is a little bit of lag getting the agenda up... soon.

Uncle Bob has posted about the old saw of whether acceptance tests should precede unit tests or vice-versa. He comes down on the side of writing the acceptance tests first, and he follows the XP approach of customers writing the acceptance tests at the beginning of the iteration for developers to implement when they begin work on  a story.

We're still bad at this and tend to lean toward both developers writing acceptance tests and acceptance tests are coded after the unit tests. I know, bad Ian no biscuit.

We have never really got on with FIT. The idea, that we have a format we can exchange tests descriptions with customers in, is great, but the implementation is clunky and constrained. We have tended to rely on homebrew front ends that exercise specific scenarios, calling into our back-end. Similar in principles to FIT, but different in execution. But that can add a lot of effort. So I'm more and more interested in some of the tools emerging from BDD like NBehave as they, to me, seem to be a better way of expressing the acceptance test requirements.

Greg Young had an interesting post recently about the relationship between BDD and DDDs ubiquitous language btw and particularly the danger that BDD may inhibit the formation of DDD's ubiquitous language because communication about the model is expressed via BDD's abstraction and not the shared abstraction of the domain. Food for thought, though I'm not sure that we do not actually have two distinct domain languages in play: one concerned with how we validate the other.

So one positive take from the altnetconf is the suggestion that folks hold their own local altnetconf. Franchising the idea seems to be a good way too avoid accusations of elitism and empower instead. I have been talking about an Agile and Open source conference next year, but it make some sense to look at this meme as well. Obviously there is crossover in format with BarCamp, but I don't think that having a .NET focused event as well would hurt as I suspect we don't draw the same audience. With Tech Ed and DDD on the horizon I suspect that it makes no sense to hold this before next year, but we could think about putting one on in January 2008.

Interested?

Having spent a number of years programming in C++ with libs like MFC and ATL I grew used to being able to step into the framework source when debugging. It can be inordinately helpful when the framework behavior defies your expectations. So it has always been a little bit of a trial in .NET that the closest you can get to this is to go spelunking with Reflector.

So its great that Scott Guthrie has announced that MS will be releasing the source to the .NET framework for use with VS 2008. Now you will be able to look under the hood at issues as you hit them. We've been asking for this for a while, it's great that the hoops (usually around cleaning up the source for distribution) have been overcome.

Zi is putting together another geek dinner. Sign up via his wiki. Hope to see a lot of the LDNUG regulars there.

While I was away we announced the dates for DDD6. It will be on the 24th November. DDD is a premier UK community event, free to attend and held at a weekend. It it always over-subscribed, so fix the date in your calendar and watch this space for more.

As usual we are looking for community speakers to submit sessions. Once we have a full agenda we will ask the public to vote on those sessions that they would like to see. Remember DDD is a conference that you, the community, shape both by proposing the sessions and by deciding which sessions happen.

Looking forward to seeing you there.