Richard Hopton, coordinator for the Oxford nxgenug group will be delivering a fact packed talk on why we should write tests before code and how it improves the quality of the shipped code.

Hopefully he'll be able to help with the politics of developing. What politics you say? Well, when you tell your client that they can't have features 21 through 32 because you need the time to write tests and you can't deliver stable code in the time allotted. I've often heard people say they would rather hear the truth but when you say that their software build will take time to be up to quality, suddenly they are a software expert!

As Richard has been doing TDD for some time he knows how to get the quality angle across to clients, or perhaps he just hypnotises them.

I'll be doing a nugget (probably on sitemap generation but I'm not sure yet), more details can be found at the nxtgenug site.

So come along to Shire Hall on Monday the 19th of October 2009 just before 7pm for entertaining education, pizza and swag (including Telerik and Resharper licence giveaways).

The user group I'm part of (nxtgenug) is running a developer day in Birmingham, UK on December the 5th 2009. Everyone welcome and it costs £10 for the whole day (includes pizza, maybe some swag and drinks), you don't have to be a member of the user group but you do need to register first.

It's a Saturday too so no need to take a day off work. I'm going, but don't let that put you off!

See the nxtgen XNA event page for details.

Dave McMahon from Ridgian (and also nxtgenug founder) stopped by last night.

Now Dave knows his Sharepoint stuff, which is good because he was our main speaker last night and was talking about, well Sharepoint. I can see why people get confused with it as from what I saw it is a pretty involved beast with some very confusingly named aspects (for example, Windows Sharepoint Services as opposed to Windows Sharepoint Server).

From creating simple user editable web sites and Intranets to complex multi tiered servers for document storage across a large corporate network it is obvious that Sharepoint can handle it but I'd question the need for smaller sites (such as this) because of it's complexity. If I had to do anything serious with Sharepoint I'd definitely call Dave (did I mention he is a Sharepoint MVP too?). He also covered customisation of the server and creating your own themes.

Joe Collins delivered a very witty nugget on testing and code generation with PEX, the Microsoft Research project that analyses your code and helps build unit tests around the possible paths through it. Joe tells me that the laptop he was using was rescued from a skip, excellent stuff!

We gave away over $1400 worth of software too with licences for Telerik and Resharper, so it's obviously worth turning up for!

A superstar came to Hereford last night, well a star in .Net coding circles (you keep your role models, I'll keep mine). Alex Homer from Microsoft who works in the Patterns & Practices group showed us how to use the Unity framework to handle dependency injection and why we'd need it. Alex showed us how to develop plug-ins to be injected at various points in the processing pipeline.

Richard did a nugget on PLINQO again, showing how to generate masses of data layer code quickly using CodeSmith. This time he got it working!

John Price, treasurer and all round nice guy (he sends us money to pay for the venue and pizza!) visited the Hereford nxtgenug group last night and gave a fantastic walkthrough on integrating Windows Media Centre into your home and home network. I'm really motivated into getting the whole Media Centre set up now, just got to wait until I can build up my hobby fund.

I did a ten minute nugget on how to plug in ELMAH to ASP.Net, a great way to add error logging and mailing without any code changes.

You can find more details on the event at the nxtgenug site as usual.

Andy Wrigley will be stopping by our developer group tomorrow to give us a presentation on developing with Windows Mobile. Important stuff, like keeping power usage down, only turning on the attached hardware (GPS etc) when needed and rigging the code for testing via dependency injection. If you need help with anything mobile based, I'd suggest calling Andy (let me know if you need a direct contact).

Richard Wilde will be losing his nugget virginity and doing a turn on PLINQO. Does he mean PINGU? What childrens TV and penguins have to do with a tech group I've no idea. Maybe it has a USB interface.

Pizza and swag too! Overview of the event on the nxtgenug site.

JetBrains have said we can give a licence for ReSharper away each month at our Hereford software developer group. ReSharper is one of those tools that you can't do without once you start using it and this edition is worth just shy of £150, not to be sniffed at.

ReSharper adds a ton of functionality to Visual Studio that aids refactoring, unit testing and generally navigating around your code. Yes I know you can do all those things yourself, but you'll make mistakes occasionally, take a LOT longer (ReSharper works almost immediately, you can't type as fast that) and fumble around while someone with ReSharper will have finished their work and be off to lunch (probably eating your lunch).

Thanks to JetBrains we'll be bundling this generous donation into the swag fest at the end of each meeting. If you've already won a licence before then we'll give you a decent bit of alternative swag instead so that someone else can benefit.

Brilliant! Telerik have agreed to sponsor us by giving away a copy of the Telerik Premium Collection for .Net (developer license with subscription and source code) EACH MONTH! If you check the product pages out you'll see that it amounts to $1,300 of software, which is extremely generous of them. So for turning up and learning how to code better, you stand a good chance of winning valuable software that'll make your app shine and save you time.

If you've been in a cave with Osama you might not know that Telerik develops excellent components for WinForms, Asp.Net, Ajax and WPF. The kind of stuff that is genuinely useful, looks good and you wished Microsoft shipped in the box. Check out Telerik TV and the demonstration area to see what you could do with them.

We'll put the licence in the swag mix at the end of each meeting which will add some variety to the normal t-shirt, socks and MSDN oriented loot.

Keep coming to the nxtgenug Hereford group and the odds get better of winning each time because previous Telerik winners won't get a second copy (just some nice swag from other sponsors).

Balsamiq is the modern equivalent of fag packet scribbling (for non Brits, fag is a cigarette, not a slur!), somewhere you can quickly draw your software user interfaces without worrying about how they look. The best designs come from the back of fag packets apparently (perhaps they should have called it fag packet mockups).

If I had this at the height of the dot com boom I’d definitely have been saner and possibly would have made some cash. I ran a software development, web design and nerd creche at the time and we used to design the visuals in full for any sales leads we were going to see. It worked well apart from a few flaws;

1. It would take days to get the designers to come up with good looking visuals.
2. The customer would become fixated on the design (which was the point really, but it got too nitpicky). They would start asking to move this text over there and change the colour of that and could they have their logo animated in 3D. At this point we were still trying to get our foot in the door.
3. If they saw a nice looking visual they would often wonder why we wanted to charge them £40,000+ for the system. After all, it looked finished.
4. The nice imagery was just to get their attention, it had not been thought through by anyone so buttons would exist that did not make sense and the whole workflow thing had not happened yet.

As you can see, mockups looks a bit sketchy and this is intentional, I’ll explain why in a minute.

Along the top you can see the different groupings of UI controls. Selecting one of these will show the toolboxes with the UI elements in them, think of them like Visual Studio toolboxes with the controls in groups.

Hopefully you won’t end up with a design like below (from thedailywtf).

Mockups is not just a designer tool, in fact it is more targeted at developers who can’t do design (I include myself in that) as it takes away any fiddly decisions. For example, you can’t change the typeface from Comic Sans on anything, there is a good reason for this though. It appears that Comic Sans is the only typeface that is properly cross platform. Saying that, they do provide a way of changing the single font in use if it really irks you. By the way, because it is written in Flash and deployed using Adobe AIR it is cross platform and runs on anything that runs Flash (Windows, Mac and Linux, possibly ‘phones).

The documents are saved as XML which means you can write your own code to manage them (possibly translating to Winforms etc). There really is not that much to it, you drag and drop and set a few properties just like the VS designer.

The app is not free though and costs $79 (Monopoly money), real money is £52 which is a pittance really, you can find it at Balsamiq Studios.

Chris Seary from the Oxford nxtgen group will be coming to see us tomorrow at Shire Hall to scare us with tales of SQL injection, WCF abuse (something like meth ampthetamine, or so I hear) and general security woes.

I'll be attempting to demonstrate Balsamiq and interfacing new technology (my MacBook) with steam age stuff (our projector). If they don't work together then it's all on paper!

All will be revealed on the morrow along with copius amounts of pizza, soft drinks and swag.