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"as an impressive display of feasting as I've seen in a quite a while was put on by the attendees."
Dave McMahon
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Typemock provides unit testing tools for developers worldwide, to make unit testing easy. We are passionate about helping developers, giving them the easiest and best tools to ensure code integrity. We're committed to developing software thate delivers the benefits of quick and east unit testing to .NET developers around the globe - making sure you get quality code, with the minimum amount of debugging, and maximizing your efficiency.
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NxtGenUG Article
Dave McMahon Friday, January 25, 2008
The first meeting of NxtGenUG Birmingham in 2008 was a busy affair, with 29 attendees, 8 Pizza, 2 Tam O'Shanters and a Swag-Distribute-O-Meter.
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Monday 21st January 2008, the start of a new year of NxtGenUG meetings in Birmingham and what a great turnout. A room full of 29 keen as mustard developers and suchlike gathered to greet long distance traveller Craig Murphy and chat about Test Driven Development (TDD).

The Attendees Settle Down

The evening started with attendees arriving to the tune of "500 Miles" by The Proclaimers that heralded a swathe of jaunty Scottish tunes including "Donald Where's Your Troosers", "Bye Bye Baby" by the Bay City Rollers and the all time classic "Hoots Mon" by Lord Rockingham's 11.

Quite obviously feeling at home especially wearing his Tam O'Shanter, Craig admired and inwardly recited the wonderful poetry now displayed on the screen written by his legendary countryman Robbie Burns. "To a Mouse", "Tam O'Shanter" and "Address To A Haggis", 3 classic poems by the aforementioned poet paraded themselves on the screen adding to the atmosphere of a now buzzing room.

Craig On The Catwalk
6.45pm and after the briefest of notices, and an awesome introduction by myself (so modest ...), Craig was off and running, and in between posing (see right) for the camera, managed to give us the introduction to his session on Test Driven Development. Craig's aim was to take the mystery out of the subject and he certainly did that, showing that TDD is a logical process, and with the breaking down of larger problems into simple steps, a robust application can be built.

How did he do? Well feedback suggest pretty good. I certainly got the idea, so chalk up one major victory for Craig.

No Haggis, due to catering constraints, but the Pizza was marched in and laid out with dutiful solemnity, and as an impressive display of feasting as I've seen in a quite a while was put on by the attendees. Within the space of 10 mins, 8 family size Pizzas were reduced to crumbs and empty greasy boxes alone ...

So onwards with Part 2 and a straightforward review of FinalBuilder with a number of impressive demos of its capabilities. Time was pressing, but a plea for more time was answered in the affirmitive and with the all round agreement of the gathered throng. I particularly liked the ability to easily interact with the whole build process via simple scripts. Nice!

Its Getting Serious, Enough Of That!

With the final Questions and Answers done, it was on with the 'Swag-Out' and another outing for the now legendary 'Swag' Distribute-O-Meter written in XSLT that paragon of languages. Swag was farily and equably distributed although somehow Mr Andrew Maggs of Ridgian seemed to get some swag again, maintaining his 100% record. Rounds of applause greeted swagged members, and spirits were high. Even the deliberate 'bug' in the Swag machine was not enough to dampen spirits and the people departed, full of knowledge, Pizza and Swag.

In all seriousness, a great big thank you to Craig for travelling "500 Miles" to speak to us, it was a great evening, enjoyed by everybody I'm sure.

The PowerPoint slides for both of Craig's session are at the links below.






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About Dave
Dave works as Chief Architect for .NET Development at Ridgian Limited, a privately owned software house based in Central Birmingham. Ridgian are a Microsoft Certified Partner and specialise in Business Intelligence Solutions and Custom Software Solutions. He is very active in the Microsoft community speaking at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper conferences, and at numerous User Group meetings around the country on such topics as SQL XML, SQL 2005 Security, Regular Expressions and his favouritte technology XSLT and XPATH. He has recently published articles on SQL Server 2005 Security in International Developer Magazine and on Vista and Office 2007 in the Microsoft Beta Newsletters.

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