Last week’s meeting was pretty cool. We’re getting more and more people sharing things, which is bringing very good diversity to the topics discussed at the meetings. Here’s a quick summary of what we covered:

• Extension Methods: we’ve seen some more examples of using Extension Methods, and also discussed a little about some guidelines as to when to use them and when not to.
• BDD: quick discussion on extension methods and BDD. This post was mentioned: it talks about Context/Specification and xUnit.NET
• Discussed about typesafe INotifyPropertyChanged with MVVM.
• Houston TechFest 2009 has been announced. It’s going to be on September 26, and like always, it’s FREE!! I’ll be presenting 3 sessions there myself.
• Our buddy JB has been sharing some cool code snippets here (fluent interfaces, extension methods, etc.).
• Functional Programming: this book has been recommended. We’ve seen some examples of monad in Ruby#. Here’s a link to the source code presented.
• Window 7: is going to be released in October. By the time it comes out, it’s going to have been a full year since I start using it. To me it’s first (using a version of Windows before it ships so much in advance). More on this later.
• We’ve seen a quick demo of the preview of Office 10. It looks good. I’m going to have to try it out soon.
• Derick Bailey’s series on “Branch per Feature” has been mentioned. It’d be great if we could get Derick to show up at one of our meetings to talk about his series.

On Windows 7

When I’ve mentioned that I’ve been using Windows 7 since Microsoft released the first bits at the PDC last year, I was asked what I liked about it. So here we go:

• I do pretty much all my development work in virtual machines. My Windows XP machines used to be about 15Gb. My Vista machines? 32Gb! Why? No idea. I always have pretty much the same stuff installed (VS, SQL Server, etc.). There’s no reason for Vista to be such a big monster. When I’ve prepared my Windows 7 machine, I noticed that it was about 15Gb in size, so that was great.
• I noticed that my Vista machines seemed to be slower than my XP ones. I then noticed that my Windows 7 was faster than my Vista one, and probably just as fast, or even faster, than my XP ones.
• Vista is annoying. Several times it happened that I’d create a file in some C:\Temp folder, and then the stupid thing wouldn’t let me delete the file, even if I ran Windows Explorer as an admin. The only way to delete it was to run the Command Prompt as an admin. Lame. That’s never happened to me on Windows 7. In fact, I run my Virtual Machine under a least privilege account all the time, and only run Visual Studio as an admin when that’s really a requirement (like when I’m doing WCF development).
• I really like the taskbar on Windows 7. I like being able to hover over an item on the bar and seeing a “live” miniature view of the screens open for that program. I also like the fact that when I hover over one of those miniatures, Windows bring that window forward and hides all the others, allowing me to either click on the miniature to activate the window, or to just go back to whatever window I had activated before. Notice that these features only work if AeroGlass is active. I must say that I couldn’t care less about AeroGlass in Vista: to me, it was just eye candy without anything really useful to me. This thing with the taskbar has changed the way I feel about it now.

I can’t remember seeing Windows 7 crashing on my machines. The only problem I used to have a couple of bits ago was that the NVidia driver for my laptop wasn’t working right, so AeroGlass would disable all of a sudden, and the whole screen would go all blurry and weird. Everything I’ve installed the Release Candidate bits that problem went away. By the way, on my laptop I’m running the 64-bit version, whereas on my virtual machines I’m running the 32-bit.

I’ll upgrade all my machines to the RTM version as soon as it’s available.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting is today (July 30) at noon (Central Time). A couple of weeks ago somebody asked about Silverlight “out of browser” experience, but nobody else knew much about it. I’ve contacted my Microsoft buddy Jared Bienz to see if he could stop by and do a quick presentation, share his experiences, and take questions on his subject, and he’ll be joing us today!

This is the link to the meeting: http://snipr.com/virtualaltnet

I’ll see you online!