Yesterday I went to the first conference of the recent born UGIALT.net usergroup. It was my first time at a OpenSpace conference and I really like it.

We talked about ASP.NET MVC, about UnitTesting, TDD, Mocks, and also about code metrics with NDepend and SourceMonitor.

I was the moderator of the session on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and was nice to see all the other bringing to the table their experiences, especially Gianluca that, for each feature of the ASP.NET MVC, made a comparison with MonoRail. We noticed that ASP.NET MVC lacks of a feature that might be interesting: the possibility to name a field like person.Address.City and have it back in the controller with the Person object initialized with a property named Address that in turn is not a "simple" object but is another custom object with another property named City. I know probably you didn't understand anything from this sentence, so here is a link to a post by Gianluca that explains the problem in detail: the post is in Italian, but the code samples are in English.

I think I prefer this kind of discussion-like meeting than the usual one-way ones, where a "teacher" explains a topic to the audience with little room for discussions.

Here are some pictures I took during the event:

As you can see we were only 10 people, but I guess a good size for the first event of a niche usergroup (and it was also held in Saturday, while all the events in Italy are usually held during the work days).

From the right: Claudio, Emanuele, Roberto, Gianluca, Davide, Matteo, SimoneB, Antonio. Not shown in the pics there were also me (the one taking the pictures) and Alessandro Melchiori which had to leave around midday.

We are now planning another meeting in May/June.