A good friend of mine, Mark Nijhof, will be doing a presentation on FubuMVC at the next European Virtual Alt.NET meeting. Mark is actively involved with the alternative MVC framework for ASP.NET together with Chad Myers and Jeremy D. Miller. Mark will also do a Fubu presentation at NNUG Bergen 27th of May (invitation will be available soon).

If you want to know more about FubuMVC you can check out the interview I did with Chad on InfoQ and of course their public website. I encourage you to download Fubu and try it out, cause it has some interesting differences which I personally like compared to ASP.NET MVC.

Also, Jeremy Miller is coming to Bergen and NNUG in mid June just before NDC (thanks Mark for organizing this!), so I’m really looking forward to that. A lot of stuff happening at the local community in Bergen at the moment!

Is there anything more annoying than standing on a red light, when there is no car, motorcycle or carbon life form in sight? Maybe traffic lights elsewhere in the world are more intelligent, but at least where I live this happens from time to time. So what have this to do with developers? Good question, but let me first try to answer another one: Why do we have traffic lights?

From Wikipedia:

Traffic lights, also known as traffic signals, stop lights, traffic lamps, stop-and-go lights, robots or semaphore, are signaling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations to control competing flows of traffic.

I read: bla bla bla bla… control competing flows of traffic. I would probably have said something like this:

To avoid cars running into each other and avoid have people run over in a cross road. It’s a very logical way of saying stop or drive (red and green). Yellow is the same as green, but for taxis only. Traffic lights are regulated by sensors in the ground detecting where there is traffic and not + a algorithm to give green lights in a predefined order.

Now back to the first question, answered by asking a new one: What’s the equivalent of traffic lights in development? No, not red, green, refactor :-) I was thinking about frameworks, internal DSL’s and the like. Stuff that good developers create, which the not so good developers should use. To keep them from “hurting” themselves or the company they work for. Do you find that to be ok?

Just a reminder that it will be Geek Beer tomorrow (Tuesday 28th) at Biskopen Pub (Neumanns gate 18) from 19:00. No official signup, but by leaving a comment here I can make sure there is enough seats for everybody.

See you all there!

I feel NNUG Bergen is doing great at the moment and I hope our members feel the same. Here’s a brief list of what’s been going on so far this year:

• January started off with DSL’s in Boo and NHibernate/Fluent NHibernate. Two great sessions by Øyvind Fanebust and Mark Nijhof.
• In February it was time to pick up Uncle Bob’s SOLID blast across the community world wide, and Mark stepped up again with another quality session. Next was Torbjørn Marø with his Object Oriented database talk, which was great as well and have made many (including me) make use of object oriented databases.
• March gave us an Introduction to Cloud Computing by John Arthur Berg and I rambled about eXtreme Programming being way better than Scrum.
• In April we got Jimmy Nilsson to do a talk about DDD and had some great talks during his session and after. Christian Weyer should have been this month main attraction, but unfortunately he had to cancel.

I addition we registered NNUG as an organization in the Norwegian Brønnøysundregister to make it easier for our selves and our sponsors. We even got our own official org#: 893 923 802 :-) Only thing we’re missing now is a bank account :-) Know any banks that are willing to give us a good deal? By good deal I mean don’t charge us money.

Looking back I see some really good content, and looking forward is not bad either:

• Beginning of May Mary Poppendieck is hopefully visiting Bergen and we’re planning to invite her to NNUG. She might not know this yet, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed :-)
• The regular May meeting will be Mark’s 3rd contribution this year(!), with FubuMVC! Also a newcomer to the NNUG speaker list is Thomas Pedersen who will talk about Implementing Agile Practices which is based on his recent experience at InfoDoc. I expect TDD, pair programming, CI and the lot.
• And then comes June. This is the month NNUG usually takes a break for the summer, but not this year! We have plans to get Jeremy D. Miller to Bergen before he’s going off to NDC. Really looking forward to that one.
• July IS summer break for NNUG Bergen for sure! I for one needs this break.
• August and the rest of the year is open, so help us out by suggesting content!

I hope you enjoy the effort we put into getting speakers with great content every month. We certainly appreciate the speakers that have made NNUG Bergen a success so far and the people that have showed up for the sessions. I have one wish from you as a NNUG member: It would be great to have YOU contribute MORE. Not necessarily by doing talks (although that is very welcome), but be suggesting content, speakers and those things. What can we do to make that happen?

I’ve had some problems with my Windows 7 Beta (Build 7000) installation. Windows Explorer keeps crashing (since so many things use Explorer functionality this is really annoying), still haven’t got ITunes to work (haven’t tried much though), the IE8 version that came with W7 was not, well… any good and a few other things. It’s Beta, so I wasn’t expecting it to be flawless.

May 5th however I’m hoping all these annoyances will silently go away, as the RC1 of W7 (Build 7100) will be publically available. I’m expecting it to appear on my MSDN Subscriber download anytime this week though.