Some random notes from last night's Tuesday Extreme Club:

• Jamie Cansdale, an all-round very clever guy, came along for the first time and got a chance to receive thanks from many of the people that had used his NUnit Addin. We had a great chat about Mono, Rotor and the strengths of .NET being a formal standard as well as having a share-source implementation.
• Joe Walnes from ThoughtWorks about message-oriented development, the decorator design pattern, how Aspect Oriented Programming could be thought of as generic decorators.  He also spoke of his joy after achieving his life aim of becoming the owner of a blow-up a bouncy castle (apparently only £250 including generator)
• Joe also mentioned Prevayler that basically removes the need for a data store with projects that use less than 2GB.  The simple idea is that the entire memory space can be persisted to disk.  Each action performed on the model uses the Command pattern to write out a transaction log that can be replayed if the system goes down between persistent writes.  This allows for easy replication of systems between machines as well as meaning that programs don't need a database.  A very simple, but potentially powerful idea.  For small applications, do I really need to struggle with a database, or could I manage it with in-memory objects?
• Tim McKinnon told the story of the invention of Mock Objects. The Pragmatic Programmers have a useful list of 7 reasons why you would want to use Mock Objects. For Steve, the most important was being able to test relationships between objects.
• Tim gave a great overview of the problems with Visual Studio .NET.  Basically it takes to long to locate the right piece of code. His question was why can't use hyperlinks to navigate around the code (Reflector does this brilliantly) or even a Find Type dialogue box that allows you to type in the name of the type you are looking for with IntelliSense.
• Chris Stevenson was at his last meeting before doing the 'reverse-outsource' and moving to India to join the ThoughtWorks team there.  Can't wait to read about it in his blog.