Today's meeting started out with the usuall news on what's been happening on the last month and what has came out of today's PDC. Richard Banks mentioned about Windows Azure, an IoC adapter project in codeplex, and some other web development related stuffs.

The first session is about NHibernate, which was conducted by Damian MacLennan. Its cool to know that NHibernate is a very flexible ORM framework. Its not an implementation of an Active Record pattern, like Linq to Sql is. Its more like an Implementation of Data Mapper pattern. The first few examples was quite understanable, but as it gets deeper to a more complex mapping, its getting kinda blurry. Its a very interesting framework though, definately going to try it sometimes.

In the second session, Ali Shafai talked about ASP .NET MVC. Unfortunately we were running out of time, so the whole presentation was kinda rushed. Having said that, he delivered a very good presentation too. Man, he was a very funny guy. One of the things that I found interesting that he said ASP .NET MVC can be RESTfull. I thought ASP .NET MVC is a bad example of RESTfull architecture, because the URI will actually point to a controller class as opposed to resource location in the server. Let's take this uri www.rwendi.com/store/product/shoe as an example. Now in RESTfull, I would expect to find a "Store" resource location, in which I would expect to find a "Product" resource location, in which I would expect to find a "Shoe" resource location. But in ASP .NET MVC, those are not resource locations, they're merely pointing to a controller class which may contained within a single resource location.

It was a good ALT .NET meeting, enjoyed it alot. Definately looking forward for the next one. You can find the official meeting summary here.

Some of the interesting news mentioned:

• Free version of Hyper-V Server Link
• Common Service Locator (a common API for IoC Containers) - Link 
• DotNetRocks IoC Web Cast - Link
• Utility: Contig - defrag a single file Link
• Crack.Net (access the internals of any .NET desktop application) - Link
• JQuery Intellisense Support - Link Download
• Watin 1.3 (now with Lambda support) - Link

RWendi