Beantown .NET Goes NERD-y

Some may say any .NET user group is nerdy, but the Beantown .NET INETA User Group gets the honors of being the first truly NERD-y one.   By NERD here, I mean, of course, the New England Research and Development Center (with the envious acronym) at One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Kendall Square/MIT stop on the Red Line (directions).

The first meeting in the group’s new digs will be on Thursday, April 2nd from 6-8 p.m., with a topic of “Unit Testing Throwdown”:

Oddly, there seems to be almost no consensus about unit testing. Lots of developers think that unit testing is dumb. Plenty are ambivalent. Some love it. Even among those devs who are already sold on unit testing, there’s no consensus. Sure, we might agree about some of the helpful things to do like using the Repository pattern, interface-driven design, and mocking frameworks but ask 10 developers how they’d unit test something and you’ll get 30 different answers.

Well, enough with the armchair quarterbacking. It’s on! You don’t like how I write my tests? I want to know why. Come show me how you do it. Don’t like unit tests at all? Come tell us why. Got some killer technique? Got an opinion about how much logic you put in each test method? Tonight’s the night to bring out The Awesome.

The plan is to show code samples, gather around the whiteboard, and by the end (hopefully) sort out some Real-Life Best Practices for unit testing.

BTW, if you have unit testing topics that you think we should put on the agenda, email them to benday@benday.com .