When: Tuesday 11th May 2010, doors open 6:00pm, meeting starts 6:30pm

Where: UWE (University of the West of England), Frenchay, Bristol (see FAQ for directions and a map) - Room 2q49

What: Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC

Who: Steven Sanderson, developer, speaker (top speaker at DDD South West) and author of the best selling book on MVC.

Why: Because Steve literally wrote the book on MVC. Scott Guthrie (no less) said about Steve's book "it is absolutely fantastic". Also because ASP.NET MVC is mainstream now and you have to argue against it instead of arguing for it.

How do I sign up for this meeting: Log in to the site, go to the Meetings page and on the top right hand side you will see a box "Register For A Meeting". Select the month in the drop down and then click on the Register link.

Abstract:
ASP.NET MVC is no longer a niche interest: over the last 18 months, it's moved right into the mainstream of Microsoft web development. During this time the user community has been hard at work distilling down its experience into a proven set of best practices. Microsoft has responded by embedding many of these ideas into the new version 2 of ASP.NET MVC. In this session, we'll recap a few of the core ideas of ASP.NET MVC in case you've never used it before. Then, we'll go beyond the basics of Model-View-Controller architecture, and get acquainted with some up-to-date patterns, tools, and conventions that can add even greater simplicity and maintainability. These include:
 * The Spark view engine - is it a more natural way to generate HTML?
 * SpecFlow, a BDD-style acceptance testing framework
 * AutoMapper, a popular object mapping tool
 * Various new features in ASP.NET MVC 2, such as metadata, scaffolding, and automatic HTML encoding

Bio:
Steven Sanderson is an independent software developer living and working in Bristol, UK. He's sometimes an author or a presenter, but is mainly a programmer with interests in web development, security, and agile principles and practises. Steve recently wrote Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework (Apress), the best selling and top rated ASP.NET MVC book on Amazon. He's a member of ASPInsiders, and regularly blogs and releases open-source code at http://blog.stevensanderson.com.