Yesterday it was the day of the second UGIALT.NET conference in Milano: almost 40 people attending, 8 different speakers/moderators and a lot of interaction (and a free lunch courtesy of the sponsor of the event, Avanade).

Many people were new to the ALT.NET thing, and to the "good design principles" as well, so we decided to try and spread the good news. With that intent the event started, after the welcome speech, with 6 lightning talks (thanks to the Welly .NET UG for the idea) on the basic concepts we would have used in the afternoon for the hands on labs:

• Agility
• TDD
• Mocking
• Ioc/DI
• UI Patterns: MVP/MVC
• ORM

We then played the planning game, with the attendees as client and the moderator as developers, and we discussed which of the users stories we collected through the mailing list to implement.

In the afternoon we split into two groups, one on WinForm and one on Web/ASP.NET, and we went on implementing some of the user stories, with a TDD approach. And during these labs a lot of interesting discussions came out: on the possibility of a UI agnostic MVC implementation, on different approaches of NHibernate mappings, on the different TDD styles of different "coders".

The OpenSpace worked very well in the first UGIALT.net conference, but we were only 10, and all with the same level of knowledge. Yesterday we were much more (40 people) and with different level of knowledge, so I was a bit afraid of this: but nevertheless it turned out really well.

And the event was very useful as personal experience as well: I was in charge of the organization of the event and it was my first time as event organizer. Now that I experienced what it takes to organize such a event I'll not complain any more when I'll attend other community events.

And, as last note, I want to thank all the attendees and all the speakers: see you all sometimes in autumn.

For more pictures have a look at the UGIALT.net conference gallery on Flickr.