I had the opportunity to attend the Alt.Net UK conference the other weekend. All in all, I am definitely glad i took the time.
Ian Cooper, Alan Dean and Ben Hall deserve a lot of credit for putting in the effort of organizing and for both RedGate and Conchango for backing the event. They did an outstanding job providing a hassle free environment for those participating.
The best thing about this conference was its focus on discussing better ways to do things, sharing experiences and NOT a lot on Microsoft bashing.
Sessions ranged from conversations on REST architectures to BDD to how to unit test a database. I could attempt to give summaries of each i attending but rather than do that i will just point you to here. This was another great initiative of this conference. Using a wiki and asking participants to help populate information in one place so a more broad audience can benefit and reference is a great idea.
While I am in no way an expert on the subject, I attempted to lead a session on Evolutionary Database Design and how to use tools such as dbdeploy.net to simplify following that style. But I was happy to see the session follow the open spaces concept, and shift to what those attending wanted to discuss more specifically. Some very interesting conversations around how a one click deployment type upgrading of a database could work in a non networked/very locked down environment. It resulted in a "not so sure how that'll work" answer but definitely presented a good challenge to debate. The other nugget i took away was the interesting idea of treating a stored procedures as an immutable object.
While the open spaces concept struggled a little bit, I still think it is the right way to host this type of conference. It was clear that it was a new concept to many and that led to a somewhat passive participation with a few strong personalities dominating the conversations. I expect the next one will benefit a lot from the learnings of the first.
If i happen to be lucky enough to attend the next one, i plan to.
And if you have the opportunity to attend a similar event, I highly recommend it.
Technorati Tags: altnetuk,alt.net, .net
2 comments:
What do you mean by "one click deployment type upgrading of a database"?
I'm imagining upgrade scripts run as part of an .msi or similar package?
The Microsoft ClickOnce story is about clients pulling WinForms apps from a central server. So I guess the major challenge is about different database client versions existing in the wild at the same time. Whether those database clients are web servers or desktops. Is that right?
While there was a lot of context that makes talking about it here somewhat irrelevant, the conversation at the time was exactly that.
Could the database upgrade scripts be applied as part of a click-once type deployment onto a local database.
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