Despite my enthusiasm about finding and participating in a regional .NET user group, the Alt.NET Suisse haven’t got enough traction to keep on rolling and now it’s actually not functioning.

So, to keep my community-and-knowledge-hungry spirit quiet, I keep visiting regional Java User Groups. The last two session I’ve took part where on some emerging topics, not strictly related to Java. For me, a .NET developer, that is a ticket to visit these meetings.

The “Not only SQL (NoSQL)” session at JUG Lausanne on September 9, was interesting not by presentation about NoSQL and the hype around it, but by half-way discussion that hijacked permanently the presentation. But at the end, it was not a bad thing. It was very interesting to hear how people are planning to use or already using NoSQL in real world projects.

“Hibernate – strategies for caching and data loading” was yesterday at JUG Geneve. The topic was somewhat familiar for me, as we’re using extensively NHibernate in our projects. Initially, NHibernate was a .NET port of popular Java ORM – Hibernate. They are still very similar in concepts, features and scope, but I do see that NHibernate got new features that were not ported from his big brother. Linq provider, Futures, fluent/code mapping are first that are coming in my mind.

Few random thoughts and impressions after the session:

  • nothing new for me, but a good recapitulation of options available to improve performance of your data layer
  • I do like C# over Java as a general purpose programming language. It’s easier to read, laconic and just cleaner when compared to Java
  • are the Java guys really struck into XML? I’ve seen yesterday more XML than in whole last few months
  • Alain Helaili, the presenter, used dynaTrace to show how various tweaks are affecting performance in test cases. It’s a kind of instrumentation framework for Java that has an integration point with Hibernate. Functionality is in some parts similar to latest improvements in Visual Studio 2010, IntelliTrace debugging. And it’s a typical example of “developer oriented interface” with all corresponding usability quirks

Overall, I’m very pleased meeting Java community. Looking forward to next sessions that are not too java-centric to make interest for a mere .NET Developer.