Next Meeting

September 2010 Meeting

Selenium 101.3: Practical Functional Testing Techniques

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

The intent for this presentation is to either scare you away from ever using Selenium, or show you the most efficient path into it's use. There are bunch of give and take considerations to be made. Knowing this give and take will give you the ability to decide whether functional testing with selenium is right for you or whether it is just a really bad idea. A side conversation about other technologies is encouraged.

The use of Selenium can be extremely beneficial to product lifecycle, and QA folks should really consider selenium as part of their tool belt for projects going forward. Just think about it — 80% of your functional tests being cross browser, automated, and complete regression covering.

Brad Wilkening is a Software Artisan at Geneca in Oakbrook, IL primarily working with the .NET platform.

He has worked as a software consultant, a technical trainer and a professional musician. Best known for his "Questions regarding wagile" in one of the previous Alt.Net meetings, he tries constantly to include other people's input on all of his challenges; recognizing the benefit of collaboration.

His current focus is on cloud, mobile, and enterprise search. Brad believes in the unconference and will do his best to encourage the participation of the Alt.Net community on Sept 8th.

His twitter is @bwilken and he blogs at http://www.NotBrad.com about stuff that is occasionally software related.

When: 9/8/2010 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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Previous Meetings

August 2010 Meeting

Python for .NET Developers

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

The interest in dynamic languages is still growing amongst .NET developers. After all, we barely have been introduced to dynamic features in the 4.0 runtime. The two polarizing alternatives often presented to us are Ruby and Python. Not surprisingly both have strong CLR implementations with IronPython and IronRuby.

Even though Ruby seems to be more frequently mentioned in .NET circles, if you look at some well known research results you'll quickly realize that Python enjoys a considerably larger mindshare.

Python is a general purpose, dynamically typed, multi-paradigm programming language. As the saying goes, Python is programming the way Guido indented it.

This talk will go over the major syntactical, design and philosophical details of the language, contrasting it with Java and C#. This presentation will take a 10,000 foot view of the major aspects of Python including

Fawad Halim is a developer with The Northern Trust working on Java and more recently .NET.

He's an amateur programming language nerd who likes to play with the flavor of the week programming languages for his toy projects. Fawad has also been a regular member of the Chicago ALT.NET user group.

When: 8/11/2010 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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July 2010 Meeting

MongoDB 101

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

MongoDB is a schema-free, document-oriented, and highly performant database system for multiple platforms. Along with many other "NoSQL" databases such as CouchDB and DB40 it allows a new way of thinking about how we store and retrieve data.

This presentation is intended to be an introduction to getting started with MongoDB and will touch on topics such as:

Related Links:

JC Grubbs is a software engineer at Geneca in Oakbrook, IL primarily working with on the .NET platform. He has worked as a software consultant in a number of industries and attempts to bring fresh technologies and ideas to each new project.

He blogs at http://www.thegrubbsian.com and you can find him on Twitter @thegrubbsian.

When: 7/14/2010 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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June 2010 Meeting

Well Behaved JavaScript with Screw.Unit

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm

Come and see how you can use Screw.Unit for front-end testing of javascript code. How you can/should organize your front-end code and how I approach testing of front-end.

Screw.Unit is BDD style javascript testing framework. It is geared towards testing jQuery, but possible to use for Prototype and some other frameworks as well. It has RSpec similar syntax which makes it easy to start working with it.

Screw.Unit is popular because of tight integration with Ruby On Rails using BlueRidge plugin but can be used independently just as succesfully.

Zeljko (Zack) Dakic started developing software on silly gummy keyboard of ZX Spectrum long time ago programming simple games. When online was connecting to BBS, he wrote so called 'doors'. More recently he's been doing consulting under his own flag as Dakic OnLine using both open source and Microsoft technologies. In MS camp he likes VB and C#, while Ruby and PHP and what he uses in his OSS projects. He is proud that he can use best of both worlds. Last two years he's been focused on front-end development more then usual and developed taste for writing javascript.

Zeljko can be found on twitter as @desireco. When not working, aside from raising cute kids, he follows any Sci-Fi show that is current and is avid reader of Sci-Fi as well.

When: 6/9/2010 6:00:00 PM Add to your calendar

Where: Redpoint Technologies, 233 South Wacker Dr, Suite 750, Chicago (map)

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