Notes From OpenSource .Net Exchange III

Really enjoyed the meeting - there was a good buzz about it. Nice venue and the beer and pizzas were a good touch. Something to consider for AgileYorkshire. Gojko has posted a good overview here so I wont repeat that but other things which I made a note of were:

• Check out the universal test runner Gallio which was mentioned during the presentation on Concordion. This would be useful if we started to run several types of tests (Unit, Integration, Acceptance, etc) during CI or just developers.
• Check out the new tools from MS - "Web Platform Installer" and "Web Deployment Tool". Seems like it might be a useful as a way of getting a replica of the live environment. One comment was that it has a steep learning curve but was very powerful once mastered. There are several OSS applications (e.g. wikis) available in an "application store" which might be useful. Also seems to be the way you should get and install ASP.MVC
• I was also interested enough in OpenRasta to want to do a bit more digging. It seemed really powerful and that it might be possible to start using it in an existing ASP.NET app so that it is inherently more testable and with no requirement to restructure folders etc.
• During the presentation on MPI found myself wondering if this is a way of making the processing of vehicle geolocation data (velocity, events, distance etc) in a more scalable way but suspect that this would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut - there are probably better ways based on message queues and services. Interested that it will run on Mono which opens up cheap linux servers to be used for processing but in an MS environment.
• Spoke to Wendy from SkillsMatter about potential collaberation with regard to sponsorship, speakers and technical help. I need to get in touch with them with some concrete proposals.
• [Added later] Had a conversation in the pub afterwards with a guy who had raised the question in the meeting about the view engines regarding what the reaction of designers was when given a view to develop. I'd always assumed that you could give a designer a view and a collection of view data and they would be happy to use this data (with iterations, conditionals and other programming structures). Turns out this may be very far from the case and many designers would baulk at this. He felt that it was better to get the designers to mock something up and for the developers to add the view data later preferably as a paired task with a designer. There does seem to be an impedance mismatch between the designer and developer parts of generating a view which I had not appreciated.
  

Written on the train on my way home (posted the following day). Notes on the BBC visit to follow.