November Geek Lunch Recap

Thanks to everyone who braved some pretty bad weather to make it to today’s meeting. Here’s a recap of what happened:

We started by talking about “Brownfield” development, including strategies for staying disciplined when time and budget are considerations. A great book was suggested: Working Effectively with Legacy Code.  One key strategy to making sure you don’t mess up what’s already working is by setting up Unit Tests. We spent some time looking into how you can use the tools available in Visual Studio to create Unit Test, and WinRunner was also mentioned. Great ideas!

For those walking into a project whose language might not be their, um, preference, we looked at software that converts projects between VB.Net, C#, and Java.  It’s available from Tangible Software. It’s really handy when you get a code sample in one language but need to translate it to another!

We also spent some time talking about the “functional language”, F# and its predecessor, Haskell. It was very interesting to hear  the strengths of F# and how they’re seeping into C# in the forms of the ‘async’ keywork and PLINQ (Parallel LINQ).

Then we got on the topic of NOSQL, why Twitter’s database is not in SQL Server, the Hadoop project, and SQL Server’s promised support for it 2012. Peer-to-peer databases, anyone?

Somehow at the end we got on the topic of guitars, which coincidentally we all at least dabbled in. We looked at some fun software called Rocksmith for the xBox, Guitar Toolkit for the iPhone, and a piece of software my buddy wrote called FretShredder for the PC.

It was a great meeting! Let’s do it again on December 14th!

Alt-n-Bach’s Town Tap
Whalen Lane, behind American TV
Madison WI

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