When: Tuesday 24th January 2012, 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: Minimalist Development with Nancy and Simple.Data

Who: Mark Rendle, MVP, Chief Software Architect at Dot Net Solutions, best speaker at DDD South West 2, author of Simple.Data and top chap.

Why: Because the acronym KISS has never been more important in a world of exponentially growing complexity. Also because Mark is one of the best speakers in the UK - you will learn lots and be entertained.

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:
Traditional .NET development frameworks tend to be big, and cover all possible eventualities, and for many projects this is A Good Thing. But for just as many, if not more, projects, a full web stack like ASP.NET or a complex ORM like Entity Framework or NHibernate is just overkill, and adds unnecessary complexity. This is A Bad Thing. In this talk, I'll look at a two small, lightweight, low-ceremony frameworks, and how to use them to create applications with less code, less cruft and fewer maintenance headaches. For web applications, we'll follow the super-duper happy path of Nancy, .NET's answer to Ruby's ultra-lightweight Sinatra framework. And for data access, we'll use my own Simple.Data library, to provide ORM-like syntax without the code generation or sluggishness. Using these tools, in under an hour, we'll create a working version of the VoxPop site (the full version of which will be active for future DDD events).

Bio:
Mark is currently employed as Chief Software Architect by Dot Net Solutions Ltd, creating all manner of software on the Microsoft stack, including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure, WPF and Silverlight. He is a Windows Azure Development MVP. Mark’s career in software design and development spans three decades and more programming languages than he can remember. C# has been his favourite language pretty much since the first public beta, when you had to write the code in a text editor and compile it on the command line. Those were the days. You kids today, with your IntelliSense and your ReSharpers, don’t know you’re born… Things vying for Mark’s attention lately include functional programming, internet-centric applications, the Azure cloud platform and NoSQL data stores.