Next Meeting: Date - Thursday, October 30, 2008. Time - 5:30pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Greg Ogle, Software Engineer, Pilot
Food: Pizza will be provided by TEKsystems

Do you work with ASP.NET Web Forms? Do you ever wonder if there is a better way of organizing your applications? Do you ever wish it were easier to test things closer to the UI? If so, then perhaps MVC (Model View Controller) is the answer to at least some of your development problems.

MVC is an architectural pattern used to isolate business, data, and interface logic for the purpose of maintainability and testability [Wikipedia]. We will explore these benefits as well as the drawbacks of MVC. Then, after investigating the whys, we will dive into the code to see how it is done in ASP.NET MVC. The examples will demonstrate configuring the Controller and Routing. Of course we be looking at the Model and View. We will discuss the transition from Web Forms to ASP.NET MVC.

[Wikipedia] Wikipedia MVC

Next Meeting: Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 6:45pm
Location: EdFinancial Services, 150 N Seven Oaks Dr, Knoxville, TN
Presenter: Josh Carroll, EdFinancial Services

Have you ever been looking at code and fantasized about pummeling the programmer who wrote it? Has that programmer ever been you? Do you have functions and classes in your solution that aren’t used at all? Has making modifications to your existing apps ever felt a little like playing Jenga, because you’re unsure if this change is going to cause the whole thing to collapse?

Test Driven Development is both a philosophy and a programming technique that helps to ensure you never have to answer yes to any of those questions if done properly. We are going to look at how TDD will help you to write cleaner, more succinct code that has full testing coverage. I will show you how TDD done properly can result in better design, and give you the confidence to aggressively refactor your code without fear of breaking existing functionality.

The first part of the presentation will be an overview of TDD, some design principles and patterns involved in effective testing, and the major benefits from using TDD on a project. The second part of the presentation will be a live demo where I will build a small application (with audience participation) using TDD in order to demonstrate the various techniques discussed in the first part of the presentation. We will wrap up the presentation with time for questions and practical steps to implementing TDD in your environment.