So here I am at the first meeting of the Maryland XP group - first thing was organizational stuff - who's here, when to meet, all of that kind of stuff. Hey, I got Smalltalk out there as one of the Productive Events ideas :)

The DC group is a little too far a drive to be convenient for me on an ongoing basis - weekly codefests are a long haul. The Baltimore beltway isn't nearly the hassle that the DC beltway is - so even though this is about as far away mile-wise, it's a lot closer time-wise.

So what's the plan? Next time, it looks like an Extreme Hour is going to be organized. I've never actually been involved in one, so that should be interesting.

So on with the meeting itself - Chris Davies reports on attending an ObjectMentor XP class. The class was taught with both C++ and Java. Sounds like they had a good time - listening to Bob Martin hold forth was probably worth the trip all by itself - agree with him or disagree with him (I've done both), he's a very good speaker.

Now I'm paying. I have to look at C++ code..... Looks like if you're doing C++ development with the MS Visual C++ tools, you're still in hell from a refactoring standpoint. Gads, how to people put up with this stuff?

Interesting conversation with the group though. A lot of smart people showed up, with some interesting viewpoints on XP, how to start using XP, how to advocate for XP.

Hmmm. I'm going to have to take a look at this FitNesse stuff that Ward has been working on....