The future lecture and lab announcement will be at our new meetup site.

We are moving to meetup site; please join us and RSVP at NashDotNet meetup!

Join us Thursday, September 11th, 2014 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Where: Vaco Training Room, 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

ServiceStack is a config-free, code-first web and services framework embraced around Martin Fowler’s remote-service best-practices in idiomatic C#. Its message-based design provides the most advantages for remote services encapsulating them in their most re-usable form allowing the same service to be called in REST, SOAP, MQ services enabling .NET’s most succinct, end-to-end typed API.

ServiceStack’s Web Services Framework is an alternative to WCF, WCF/REST, .asmx, Web-API, MVC, WebForms, WebPages, CSF, WSE, WCF DataServices, RIA Services, and System.Messaging.

We’ll dive head first into ServiceStack and show how quickly we can build a full Web API from scratch using the ServiceStack Framework and ServiceStack’s own ORM, OrmLite.

About Lydon Bergin

Lydon Bergin is a Senior Consultant at CTS, Inc. Lydon has over eight years of experience in multiple areas of systems analysis, design, and implementation leveraging a variety of technologies and techniques. He has been responsible for project leadership, requirements gathering, process automation, systems integration, software development, database design and analysis, and systems testing in several industries such as finance, banking, insurance, transportation, medical, and retail. He is also an accomplished disc golfer.

Join us Thursday, August 21st, 2014 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, and the lab begins at 6:30 PM.

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Last week we have learned from Josh Bush about CQRS and EventSourcing. Now let’s kick the tires and take it out for a drive. Bring your laptop and let’s hack the code together, discuss, and share what we have learned!

Demo from tonight's talk is here: t.co/r50ei5YJrt Go rip it to pieces and make something awesome! +@nashdotnet

— Josh Bush (@digitalBush) August 15, 2014

Join us Thursday, August 14th, 2014 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Where: Vaco Training Room, 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

As kids we learned everything we already need to know about Event Sourcing, just follow the breadcrumbs! Real world applications are rarely simple enough to fit into the mold that cookie cutter tools provide. What happens when the requirements for that “simple” piece of software grow in a direction that is unexpected? Often the end of a project becomes a series of tradeoffs between performance and maintainability.

How can we write clean code that will solve our basic use case now and have enough flexibility to adapt to future requirements? Event sourcing allows us to see not only what changed with our data, but the reasons why it changed. In this talk you’ll learn how Event Sourcing and CQRS can keep you out of the oven. Along the way, I’ll share some lessons learned from building a real application using these techniques.

About Josh Bush

Josh Bush is a Sr. Software Engineer at Firefly Logic. He has 10 years experience developing software for the healthcare and financial industries and is passionate about web technologies, functional programming, and distributed systems. Josh has developed and maintains a few open source projects which you can find at https://github.com/digitalBush. When he’s not coding, you can find him fixing a leaky faucet around the house or playing legos with his two kids. You can read the occasional blog post from Josh on his website at digitalbush.com or follow him on twitter @digitalBush.

Please RSVP and note the event location.

Join us Monday, July 14th, 2014 for the special event, presented in conjunction with NashFP and Nash F#!

Location: Healthways Inc (Tech Meeting Room) 701 Cool Springs Blvd Franklin, TN 37067

In software development, we often face the same problem over and over again. For example, when designing user-interfaces, we need to specify the layout of components; when designing financial systems, we need to detect various patterns in changing prices. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) approach is to design a language for the specific problem domain and then use it repeatedly to solve multiple instances of the same problem.

In the talk-part of the meetup, we look how to think about DSLs in a functional way. This lets us focus on the domain. Rather than worrying about the syntax, we start by understanding what problems we actually want to model and what is the best way to do so. Along the way, I’ll show three DSLs – for composing 3D objects, for working with Markdown documents and for detecting live price patterns.

In the hands-on part of the meetup, you’ll get to use and extend the DSL of your choice. Do you want to create some 3D fractals using F# and add animation? Or do you want to process and render Markdown documents? Bring your laptop with Windows, Mac or Linux and F# installed – just follow the guide on www.fsharp.org!

About Tomas Petricek

Tomas is a long-time F# enthusiast, Microsoft MVP and author of a bookReal-World Functional Programming which explains functional programming concepts using C# 3.0 and teaching F# alongside. He leads functional programming and F# courses in London, New York and worldwide. He contributed to the development of F# as a contractor at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and helped create data-manipulation library Deedle while working at BlueMountain Capital in New York. Before starting PhD at Cambridge, he studied in Prague and worked as an independent .NET consultant.

Join us Thursday, July 10th, 2014 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, the lecture begins at 6:30 PM, followed by a drawing for free stuff. Everybody likes free food and free stuff, right?

Where: Vaco Training Room, 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Inspired by Steve McConnel’s “Code Complete”, Uncle Bob’s “Clean Code” and Andrew Hunt’s “The Pragmatic Programmer”, this session reviews best practices for writing code in a style that’s easy to create, maintain and understand. We have a lofty goal: programming style as documentation. We’ll discuss concrete methods to get you there and give you a vocabulary for pragmatically evaluating code quality.

Various refactoring techniques, code smells, anti-patterns, and rules of thumb are discussed including fail fast, return early, separation of concerns, arrow code, magic numbers, the boy scout rule, being “stringly typed”, DRY, the stepdown rule, table-driven methods, the importance of staying native, techniques for finding subtle redundancy, reinventing the square wheel, when to create a method, doing comments right, horizontal and vertical density, and simple design patterns. Part of this session involves refactoring a confusing and ugly chunk of code into something beautiful, easy to read and maintain. While examples are in C#, coders in any language should be able to follow along and apply the principles discussed.

About Cory House

Join us Thursday, June 19th, 2014 for a great evening of learning and connecting with other developers. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, and the lab begins at 6:30 PM.

Location: 5410 Maryland Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027

Abstract

For those of us who have spent most of our careers building business applications, the prospect of creating an e-commerce storefront can be quite daunting. Not only do you have to deal with calculating tax, estimating shipping and accepting payments, but employees need a way to manage products, discounts and marketing content. Thankfully, there’s an open source e-commerce solution written in Microsoft ASP.NET MVC5 named nopCommerce that provides all this functionality and much more.

This workshop was designed to ramp everyone up on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, introduce advanced concepts used throughout the site such as Dependency Injection, and walk through the process of working with nopCommerce. By the end of the evening everyone should have first-hand experience building plugins that can be packaged and sold online.

About Gaines Kergosien

Gaines Kergosien is a senior solutions architect with Vanick Digital and serves as a board member for the Nashville .NET User Group, the INETA Mentor for TN and speaks at software development conferences throughout the United States. With over 12 years in solutions development using Microsoft technologies, his work includes consulting for such companies as Deloitte, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), American General (AIG), Lexis Nexis, Gibson Guitars, and Cardinal Healthcare.