Sergio Pereira : Community, Automation

[ANN] Chicago ALT.NET shows Rake and Albacore

sergiopereira — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:35:00 GMT

I haven't mentioned our meetings here in a while but our group has been going strong and enthusiastic all this time.

Tomorrow, March 10^th our topic will be build scripts for .Net projects using Rake and Albacore. I've been using Rake and a little bit of Albacore in my own projects and I'm ready to say that it will take a very serious event to make me go back to NAnt or MSBuild.

Introduction to Rake with Albacore.NET

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

How would you to write your build scripts using a scripting language instead of XML? In this month's meeting we will see how the ease of programming in Ruby can be used to create a much more pleasant and extensible build script.

Rake isn't just for Rubyists or Alphageeks anymore. Albacore helps bring the power and expresiveness of the Ruby language to the world of .NET build automation. Using Rake it's never been easier to handle build automation, test execution, continuous integration and just about any task you need to automate for your build.

Michael D. Hall has been developing software on the Microsoft platform for over a decade. He's been an Alt.NETter for years and is really enjoying the exposure to different ideas and concepts beyond the safe confines of the .NET world. Currently he's a consultant working with Obtiva and has started a Cloud Developer's Group that meets monthly in McHenry county.

Mozilla Add-Ons in Chicago

sergiopereira — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:38:00 GMT

Later this month I'll be attending the Mozilla Add-Ons Meetup in Chicago.

I'm continually impressed with the extensibility of Mozilla applications and the amazing things people are doing with it. I'm interested in both the extensibility model and in writing a few custom extensions myself, even if it's just for my own use. Given that it's mostly XML and JavaScript, it should be right up my alley.

After seeing a presentation about building Firefox extensions earlier this year I decided I had to look into that more seriously.

So if you're in the area and wants to see what this is all about, this meetup might be a good way to get some info to get going.

Cruise and Agile discussed - videos forthcoming

sergiopereira — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:05:00 GMT

Update: The videos of the presentation and discussion have been posted.

This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available somehow.

As previously mentioned we started off with a presentation of ThoughtWorks Cruise, where Robert Norton explained the idea of CI server, Agents, Pipelines and went through many of Cruise features, system requirements, and futures. He also clarified his company's position regarding CruiseControl.net, which will most likely not receive a lot of attention in terms of funding, being left for the community to keep it going.

Cruise seemed promising to me but it's clearly a typical version 1 product that needs some work to get enthusiastic thumbs up from me. Hopefully they move quickly and release a few updates before the year is over to make the product top notch. I don't mean to say Cruise in unusable. It's definitely usable and does things in a very smart way. Given time I'm sure they will take care of the rough edges and have a chance to answer customer feedback. My particular concerns tend to be on the side of ability to integrate with other systems in the enterprise, like your bug/feature tracker.

After the presentation portion we all sat together for an open discussion. The fallback topic was CI practices but what the group really wanted to talk about was Agile teams and their dynamics, so that's what the discussion became. As usual, that's my favorite part of the meeting and it's a pity that only 50% of the attendance stuck around for it.

It's nice when you go to a meeting like this and can take home a lot of new knowledge.