I discovered this morning that there are no buses or trains that go to the city early on Sunday mornings. Thankfully my wife was able to drive me in instead!

Ben Mackie

ORM overview. A pity this wasn't before my LINQ talk yesterday, but hopefully it helped people understand the theory behind mapping objects to relational data.

Dave Glover

Overview of features in Windows Mobile 6. Dave made use of Pocket Controller in his demo. He also mentioned using CompressSoapExtension to compress data with SharpZipLib going through web service calls.

Peter Cornish

A good presentation on the sales process, and how important it is that your web site is found by Google. I now have a better idea about "organic" (aka 'Free') search and "Paid" (aka AdWords) search.

Peter pointed out that for quick changes and campaigns, paid search is the way to go, as Google will display your new ads immediately, rather than waiting weeks or months for your site to get re-indexed.

Don't forget that keywords are what the client/customer types in to Google - they might not be the same names as you use in your business yourself.

Jey Srikantha

Talked about K2 and MOSS, but I missed this session as I had to do some birthday present shopping.

Greg Low

Screenshot of SQL Server Management Studio, showing Reports menu DMV's - dynamic management views in SQL 2005. These views were originally developed for the SQL Team at Microsoft to aid in their internal debugging and diagnostics. They live in the SYS schema.

Greg showed how you can use CROSS APPLY to run a TSQL function for each row of a result set.

There's also a new feature in SQL 2005 SP2 that let's you view reports of your databases (you don't need Reporting Services for this to work).

James Chapman-Smith

An overview of NHibernate (seems like there's a bit of an ORM theme this year). Greg asked a good question about dealing with concurrency. As an NHIbernate user myself, I'll have to research this a bit more.

Yes, it was ironic that James - self-confessed Database non-fan was sandwiched between the two Greg SQL gurus :-)

Greg Linwood

SQL Server execution plans explained. Greg really knows his stuff and it was very worthwhile to see this talk, which was similar to his presentation to the Adelaide SQL group last year.

Remember, execution is serialised, read execution plans from top-right to bottom-left, and clustered indexes aren't always the best choice.

Darren Neimke

A talk about how Readify manage all their staff who are out there developing remotely.

They use Scrum, but the stand-up daily meetings don't really work if you're not all in the same place, or if you're all working on separate things.

They really like WSS v3, and use SharedView to share documents and screen views (eg. do pair programming remotely)