Here are the materials from the presentation. Included is the sample app with the 5 build files, as well as the presentation without my company swag.

Here is a list of links for the various tools we discussed.

Thanks everyone for attending last nights ctdotnet presentation. The group first started with a career fair, spearheaded by SB, and it seemed to be quite a hit. SB brought in a few recruiting firms, let them all speak to the group, and then all of the group members took an hour or so to network with the recruiters, and themselves. It seemed to be quite a hit, but I would also love to get some feedback from people in the group that may have liked, or disliked the career fair.

While others were off "careering", I was putting the finishing touches on the presentation. The career fair ended a little late, and then it was my turn. I was quite nervous. My nerves settled a little as I began talking, but I'm sure it was obvious in the beginning. The presentation seemed to go pretty well. I'm anxiously awaiting the results of the evals. We started by talking about build systems in general, and why a development shop may want to investigate one. We then moved on to source control, where we spent alot of time talking about Subversion, as there seemed to be quite an interest in svn. I saw lots of people nodding when I was talking about some of the issues VSS users face. SVN isn't a holy grail, but it can certainly help.

We then moved on to build scripts where I discussed the high level of nant, and then went through a few sample build files, adding various features as we went down the line. We then talked about continuous integration, and I showed off cruise control.net a bit. I was worried about filling up the entire hour at first, but when it was time to go I think we went a little over an hour, and I sped through a lot of things I would have liked to spend more time on. I'm debating doing a more polished version at code camp.

Thanks again to all the attendees, and please feel free to leave career night or presentation feedback here, or any questions you may have in regards to the materials. I will be releasing all the materials from the presentation this week, as well as a long list of links that I used to prepare. If your interested, SB has already posted some pictures here.

Oddly enough, I noticed MSN Virtual Earth was up at tao of mac. I had been waiting for Virtual Earth since I saw early screenshots, so I had to take a couple minutes to jump to some 10 minute conclusions.

My first impression was missing tiles. Of course it just launched, so I expect slowness, but missing tiles are still annoying. I like the size of the browsing window.

Other things I Liked :
Scratch pad.. fancy mini-bookmarks
Quality of photographs.. Most of the photos from my local area are much higher quality.
Mouse wheel worked for zooming in both firefox and ie

Things I didn't like :
Zooming and moving just isn't as fluid as google.
Color photos would be nice.

Overall I gotta say, virtual earth is quite nice. When I just want to zoom around and have fun I think google earth will still take the cake for now, but for utility I think I might find myself using virtual earth more then google maps. Congrats to the virtual earth team on launching a great new product!

Looks like there is already a site up dedicated to developers and virtual earth.. Excellent.. ViaVirtualEarth

Next week I will be giving a presentation to the ctdotnet group on creating a .net build system using open source (or free) tools. I have an hour to talk, so expect things to go pretty quickly. I hope to walk through making a simple app with unit tests, adding it to subversion, building it with nant, and add it to ccnet, leaving breadcrumbs along the way of other things you may want to look at. I will also touch a bit on what is coming in Whidbey that may replace some of the tools I'll be demoing.

For those that don't know, this will be my first presentation. I mean sure, I've talked in front of people many times, but never outside of a business context. Also, the content has never been my responsibility either. This should be interesting :) So if you're in the area, feel free to stop by and watch me ramble. At least if the presentation bombs, the members has a neat career night beforehand ;)

Rick Strahl has written an excellent post on the internal workings of asp.net and iis. Obviously not new information, but put together very well, in a very technical manner. Any asp.net developer should read this, twice.

wincv.exe.. who knew?!..

[18:01] <NothingMn> really dig into System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory
[18:02] <NothingMn> wincv.exe
[18:03] <tranqy> wtf
[18:03] <tranqy> where did this wincv.exe shit come from, and how did I not know about it earlier
[18:03] <tranqy> this is awesome
[18:03] <NothingMn> haha
[18:03] <NothingMn> it is it is
[18:03] <MuteThis> yeah, but its public only
[18:03] <NothingMn> i shipped in like v1.0
[18:03] * NothingMn smacks tranqy [18:04] &lttranqy&gt lol
[18:04] <Rivan> lol
[18:04] <Rivan> damn you tranqy.... its a MUST know.. :p
[18:04] <tranqy> no shit
[18:05] <tranqy> thats gonna cut my google traffic in half I think :)

Years of coding .net, and it took 15 seconds of dropping in the chatroom to find a huge timesaver.. thanks guys..
[edit] check the comments for a more complete description of wincv, as well as a link to a followup conversation.

Sorry for the silence latley. I'll be back soon..

Walking by a co-workers desk I heard him say un-refactor. Then we started the discussion.. is it...

• un-refactor
• defactor
• de-refactor
• unfactor

Now one may ask why the whole subject even came up. ;)

Rails has fascinated me since I first read about it. A simple MVC system that makes creating sites almost too easy, all based on Ruby. I haven't had the time to investigate it as much as I would have liked, but some people have, hell, others have based businesses on rails.

The windows folks have taken notice too. Although I don't have an post on it, I get alot of search traffic with people looking for IIS Rails. Some have even taken matters into their own hands, and created a rails like framework for .net, enter Castle Monorail. I'm yet to even download this puppy yet, but already have pretty high hopes. To top it off, it is open source, and appears to be under a nice apache license. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this.

Via The Server Side .net

Come Dec 28th we will have our first new addition to our family. It's been quite a ride so far, and I know we haven't even begun to scratch the surface. Later this week I'll try to update the post with a picture of the best little "future developer" shirt I got at teched. MS knows how to get them young :)

Joel Pobar has written an interesting post with some thoughts on targeting the CLR with a dynamic language, a la IronPython. Then Corey mentions IronRuby. I was joking about the same thing with a co-worker Friday.

Via Corey's Ramblings

Sept 24th and 25th in Waltham. Be there.

Don't let a long day of BBQ and beer make you miss Richard Hale Shaw speaking on new language features in c# 2.0. This special presentation brought to you by the CT .net developers group is happening next Tuesday, July 5th from 6:00 - 8:00. Richard Hale Shaw is a phenomenally energetic speaker, who really knows his stuff. If you are at all interested in 2.0, and really, who isn't, make sure not to miss this one!