Month: August 2008

Date: Thursday 14 August 2008
Time: 5:30pm-7:30pm (pizza and networking at 5:30pm)
Location: Cliftons, Australia Place, cnr St George’s & William, Perth
Presenters: Chris Padgett (Building WCF Services with WF) & Graeme Foster (Windows Communication Foundation)

If you haven’t yet registered: http://www.readify.net/Default.aspx?tabid=288

Scott Allen has recently posted a blog entry on the pitfalls of premature optimisation; in this specific case, optimizing LINQ queries, but the advice is timeless and technology agnostic:

“The first step in optimizing any code is to take some measurements and
make sure you really have a problem.”

It’s worth reading just for the image! (Now, if only that was Donald Knuth in the devil suit…If you’re curious, check out Knuth’s story of optimising the system idle loop…).

Donald Knuth popularised a quote which is sometime attributed to him, but is actually due to Sir Tony Hoare (probably best known for the development of Quicksort), “…premature optimization is the root of all evil.” The Fallacy of Premature Optimization by Randall Hyde is worth a look over at the ACM site.

We had another great turnout at the Perth .NET User Group presentation last Thursday:

(A handful more people arrived after I took this photo)

Thanks to Dwayne Read for presenting on the topic of Agile and to everyone who attended, and helped out. Keeping to the theme of Agile software development, here are a few resources that you might be interested in:

• Dwayne mentioned the Agile Manifesto which can be found here: http://agilemanifesto.org/
• InformIT have recently published an online Agile Adoption Cheat Sheet

The following books are worth reading:

• Practices of an Agile Developer (in the user group library courtesy of O’Reilly)
• The Pragmatic Programmer
• Ship It! (in the user group library courtesy of O’Reilly)
• Head First Software Development
• Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game (2nd Edition)
• Implementing Lean Software Development
• Agile Estimating and Planning

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, August 7th to hear Dwayne Read compare two of the more dominant agile methodologies, XP and FDD, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. Examples of the application of these techniques at Snowden Technologies in a .NET/TFS environment will be discussed. This presentation is aimed at highlighting the importance of shaping the process to fit the type of applications a company develops, the people/communication side of development and the technologies they utilise.

TOPIC: Agile in a .Net Environment with Dwayne Read
DATE: Thursday, August 7th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Level 2, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome.

More details here: http://perthdotnet.org/blogs/events/archive/2008/07/12/agile-in-a-net-environment.aspx.

There will be a door prize of a ReSharper license (courtesy of JetBrains), and a copy of the book “Practices of an Agile Developer” (courtesy of O’Reilly publishing).