March 3rd, 2005 Meeting Wrap-up

Chris opened with a demo of World Wind. It lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. It is written in C# and you can get the source code on Source Forge.

It is a lot like Google's Keyhole program.

The book Extreme Programming Adventures in C# was recommended.

Author Ron Jeffries demonstrates how to apply extreme programming's key concepts to .NET and C# ? including the use of customer stories, customer acceptance tests, and "Spikes"?and the fundamental techniques of Simple Design, Test-Driven Development, and Refactoring to create practical, .NET-ready applications.

We covered a few chapters in our Design Patterns Explained book. Overall everyone seems to like the book and we are getting a lot out of it. Design patterns does a lot to expand the vocabulary of programmers as we communicate with each other about our art.

• Steve D. covered chapters 11 (Abstract Factory) and 17 (Decorator) and summarized
• Chapter 15 (Commonality & Variability) & 16 (Analysis Matrix)
• Jim covered chapter 14 - Principles & Strategies
• Doug covered chapter 18 - Observer pattern

Doug had a great quote on Abstract classes vs. Interfaces: "It is better to have then to be." *

Next month we will have:

• Mike on Chapter 19 - The Template Method
• Jim on Chapter 20 - Lessons Learned
• Doug on 21 - Singleton
• Steve D. will do a programming language beginning with X
• Steve R. will share a language beginning with U.

*Correction: Doug corrected me on his quote:

Actually, I said that "It is better to have something than to be something", and I should clarify that this goes for classes that have many and/or diverse behaviors. Also, I believe we were actually discussing aggregation vs. inheritance.

I am usually jotting notes pretty quickly and occasionally miss things. Thanks for the clarification Doug!