Jim Wooly was out of town so he called on the Regular Guys to take over and run the meeting.  We were only too happy to oblige.

I started the meeting out by turning it slightly on it’s ear and asking the people at the beginning of the meeting what they might like to hear presentations on.  I took part of the list we read out at the end of the year and re-presented it to the group.  I mentioned topics like debugging SQL stored procedures from Visual Studio.Net, garbage collection, message queues, the FileSystem object vs System.IO, generics in Whidbey, and Reflection.Emit.  Those are actually larger presentations, and we had some interest in something Paul Lockwood called “Code Bruise” – where groups of people each present small 10 or 15 minute presentations on immediately practical code.  Examples of interesting topics were how to put an app into the system tray as an icon, how to serialize something, shallow vs deep copying, how to register a DLL to the GAC (and why).

Paul was our first presenter and he showed us NUnit.  We’ve actually seen NUnit once or twice before but there were several reasons to revisit this.  First of all, this is a free tool which will make your code more stable, solid, and therefore easy to work with.  FREE TOOL = EASY CODE!  Second, developer level unit testing is a huge topic, seen in MSDN at least once every few months and is being built into VS.Net for C#.  Third, Paul champions a much more maintainable approach to NUnit than what was originally presented (by myself) months ago.  His approach is to do black box testing, that is to say testing of large areas of functionality as opposed to the extremely granular approach I took with my white box testing of every single function (although his demo was too short to really expound on this).  Paul also showed us how to create a brand new project and add an NUnit test.

My presentation followed Paul’s.  I showed off some of the free tools from SysInternals.  This time, in a break from my normal type of presentation, I only had 4 slides and some demo code.  I mostly showed off the ProcessExplorer.  Great developer tools freely available from www.SysInternals.com.  The demo code had some small problems, but what demo code doesn’t?  The main problem was the total lack of error handling.  Oh well – lessons learned for next time.

Following the meeting, Brendon, Dan, and myself retired to Chili’s for some food and conversation.  Most of the conversation this time was development-centric.  We spent a lot of time discussing the upcoming code camp.  I’m very excited about this event!  I’ll blog more about it when more details are public.

— Matt Ranlett