Category Archives: Community

I attended the Houston C# User Group monthly meeting last Tuesday evening. There were about 18 in attendance.

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Below are the notes I took

Book: Accelerated C# 2010 – Trey Nash

Operator Overloading

Common Operator Overloading

• Concatenating strings
• Hooking and unhooking events

Design methods instead of overloading operators

Exception Handling

Bobby demonstrates the basics of exceptions through sample code. He defines the Try, Catch and Finally blocks as well as how to create your own exception.

Who should handle exceptions

Catch where you can fix the problem

Avoid using exceptions to control flow

Exceptions are expensive to generate and handle

void ExceptionNeutralMethod()

{

     //block 1 all code that could thro exceptioms

     //block 2

     //chages are commited

}

Disposable and deterministic destruction

Some system resources need to be returned to the system pool when finished

The garbage collector doesn’t necessarily get around to destroying the resource in a timely manner

Disposable objects can guarantee deterministic destruction. (mostly easily done with a using() statement)

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Gang Of Four – Design Patterns

http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/Patterns.aspx

Patterns discussed tonight

• Observer
• State
• Strategy
• Template Method
• Visitor

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As always – Free Magazines

I attended my first ALT.NET Houston Open Spaces Conference this weekend. It was very different than any tech event I have ever seen. This kind of conference instills a sense of collaboration which is a really cool thing.

The process is quite ingenious if you ask me. On Friday evening, the attendees come together to suggest topics and then vote on the suggested topics. Next, the facilitators basically set up the agenda for the next 2 days.

Four Principles of Open Spaces

• Whoever comes is the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it’s over, it’s over

The Law Of Two Feet: If, during the course of the gathering, any person finds him or herself in a situation where they are neither learning nor contributing, they must use their two feet and go to some more productive place.

 

Sessions I attended

• Git
• NoSQL MongoDB
• Virtual Brownbag – One Year Later
• Build Scripts w/Powershell
• Promoting an Atmosphere of Refactoring
• Design Patterns

Links and Resources

• ALT.NET Houston Wiki
• Twitter Search (#altnethou)
• My Event Photos

I will definitely be attending this conference in the future and highly recommend for any developer.

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