Tonight I attended our local Los Angeles .NET Developers Group meeting for the first time in years. I pretty much never go to these meetings because I just haven’t found them worth dealing with the congestion of rush hour traffic in the UCLA area, which is really bad. Of course I should probably view user group meetings in the same way Jeff Atwood views conferences - I am not there for the talks, I am there to meet you.

However the local group does bring in some great speakers via INETA. Tonight’s meeting featured Rob Howard, the CEO of Telligent. I first met Rob at Mix06 and it was good to see him again at this meeting. He gave a great talk on ASP.NET tips and tricks. The one trick that stood out to me had nothing to do with his talk. I noticed at one point he had SQL code with expandable regions much like code regions via the #region directive. Instead of the pound sign, they used --region. I just tried that with a .sql file and it didn’t work for me. Probably requires a database project. I’ll have to ask him about that.

I recognized one guy in attendance who happened to be Michael Washington, a member of the DotNetNuke core team. He patiently listened to my constructive criticism and we discussed ideas for improvements to module development. One thing I hope to help him with is incorporating more unit tests into DNN code he is working on. Andrew Stopford will be pleased that I am trying to steer Michael towards MbUnit.

The challenge will be how to integrate unit tests into the ASP.NET Web Site model, since VS.NET Web Developer Express does not support class library projects. This may be a no brainer, but I have never tried it. The tests will probably just be dropped in the App_Code folder, but will TD.NET run all tests by right clicking on App_Code and selecting Run Tests. I assume so, but we’ll see.