Things have been unfortunately quiet on this blog lately, as I’ve been too busy with other engagements this fall to spend much time blogging. Hopefully I’ll be able to make amends for that this Christmas as things quiet down for the holiday season – so please don’t unsubscribe from my feed quite yet :-)

Until then, if you’re in Bergen this week be sure to drop by the local NNUG meeting on Wednesday where I’ll be giving a presentation about ASP.NET MVC 2. Details are here (in Norwegian).

Come March, Microsoft is taking the MSDN Live tour on the road again. As usual they'll be visiting Stavanger (5th), Bergen (10th), Trondheim (12th) and Oslo (19th). This round marks the comeback of everybody's favorite Norwegian speaker Jonas Follesø, who has returned to Norway from his year down under to share his expertise on building enterprise applications with Silverlight. The agenda also covers WPF, Windows 7 and Windows Azure, so there's a lot of cool stuff  that you don't want to miss out on this time around :)

Microsoft Geek Squad

New at MSDN Live this year is the Geek Squad. At each event you'll find easily identifiable technology experts (look for people wearing Geek Squad sweaters!) walking around, whom you can grab a hold of to talk to. In Stavanger I'll be on the Squad, so if you want to have a chat with me about TDD, design patterns, Scrum, ASP.NET or anything else (or just want to say hi), then don't be shy!

GeekBeer!

The evening before MSDN Live in Stavanger (so that'll be Wednesday March 4th), a bunch of us are getting together to socialize and share a few pints. Anyone is welcome to join! If you would like to come, then please RSVP on the Facebook event (or if you're not on Facebook, just leave a comment over on Glenn Henriksens blog). A location hasn't been chosen yet, but will be announced on the event page (and Glenn's blog) soon.

I believe GeekBeer events are being planned in Bergen, Trondheim and Oslo as well, but I've not got any info on those, sorry. If you know something, leave a comment :)

On February the 5th I´ll be giving a talk about Test Driven DevelopmentDesign at the local .NET user group here in Stavanger, where I now live. My talk will focus on the design aspect of TDD, showing how testability is one of the benefits of applying solid design principles (which are covered in Glenn´s session before mine).

The full agenda for the night is as follows:

16:30 – 17:00: Pizza & mingling
17:00 – 17:45: MCTS 70-536 Exam preparation session by Niall Merrigan from ErgoGroup
17:55 – 18:40: Best Practices: SOLID Principles by Glenn Henriksen, ErgoGroup
18:45 – 19:30: Test Driven Development/Design by Fredrik Kalseth, Capgemini
19:40 – 20:30: Behavior Driven Development by Glenn Henriksen, ErgoGroup

As always NNUG events are free – all you need to do is sign up and show up!

Last weekend, the Channel 9 guys released an open source blog engine called Oxite, built using ASP.NET MVC. This went by fairly unnoticed (for me at least), until Rob Conery shared his thoughts about it over on his blog earlier today. Not long after his post, Twitter was buzzing with opinions - here are what some people have had to say about Oxite so far:

“wow, the Oxite codebase is an example of the MVC anti-pattern. WOW” - @DerikWhittaker

“Oxite: No DI/IoC, not at all SOLID, i.e. typical MS sample software :)” – @mikehadlow

“Oxite will be used by developers first, and will introduce initiates to all kinds of irresponsible design” - @bellware

“Oh dear, look at Site.Master in Oxite.” - @chadmyers

“Oxide fails as both an example and as an application. It's damaging for us guys trying to push the methodologies that mvc aids” - @chriscanal

You can catch up on the entire discussion using this Twitter search query. Erik Porter (@HumanCompiler) is one of the guys behind Oxite and has been doing his best to defend it – I almost feel bad for the guy :)

I think what worries everyone the most is that since this is something released by people who work for Microsoft, it will get a lot more attention than it would merit on its own. Through its connection to Microsoft it automatically gains credibility, and novice developers will falsely look at Oxite as some kind of ‘Microsoft-approved’ guidance on how to build (ASP.NET MVC) applications. Given the current state of the codebase, these developers will be led astray, and potentially pick up bad practices and anti-patterns.

It shall certainly be interesting to see how all the feedback will affect the future development of Oxite.

If you’re in the vicinity of Oslo on Friday Thursday the 18th of December, then drop by Oslo Mikrobryggeri to meet up with fellow developers for a pint or ten:

I’ll be the guy at the bar getting served.