Presentation notes

Jeremy Huppatz

Spoke about the divide between dbas and developers, and how VS Database Professional has many new features that try to bridge that gap. It does seem that many of these features are similar to existing offerings from Red Gate though. Not sure if they've all been licensed, or if it's direct competition from MS.

Darren Neimke

Microsoft's "Live". Things I hadn’t seen before included Live Mesh, tafiti (a fancy search engine interface). To roll your own application that leverages the Live platform, you’ll need to set up an App ID. I am wondering what services does Live offer that differentiates it from its competitors? Or is it just playing catchup/keeping even with other offerings. Darren also mentioned even dentists could use Live – which made me wonder how you could go to the Dentist online!

Alan Boldock

A witty and engaging presentation on some of the features of WPF. Alan recently presented at AdNUG, and I'm now sorry I missed it. One tip Alan gave was the use of RentACoder, not just for coding, but for graphic design work. He did say that the specs needed to be very precise though.

Simon Holman

An overview of DotNetNuke. Showed how easy it is to install, and how you can simply extend it by writing your own modules (based on ASP.NET User Controls (ASCX files).

Peter Cornish

Back again this year with another interesting talk on analysing web traffic. He's a big fan of Google Analytics. If you were trying to sell stuff through your website, he’s the kind of person you'd want to hire to make sure you were targeting your market. There's a new feature in Analytics called "Industry Benchmarking" – worth investigating.

Paul Turner

Overview of SharePoint 2007. The relative ease in which it supports i18n was impressive – I hadn’t seen that before.

Me and Timothy

SQL 2008 Change tracking and Sync Framework. (See next post)

Jason Stangroome and Jim Burger

TFS and SubVersion shoot-out. Interesting to see the strengths and weaknesses of both products. Relevant as I was using TFS and were now using SVN at ABB.

Nigel Spencer

SQL 2008 Change tracking and Sync Framework. By coincidence Nigel and I ended up covering very similar ground, but to his credit he used WPF, didn’t mess up the display, and did it all in under 10 minutes (which means he can enter it in the Demo Comp)

Jason Schluter

Unit testing Silverlight. I’ve never used Silverlight, but I liked how the technology is heading to be able to write tests for this sort of code.

Paul Stovell

Ran a quiz using a WPF app hooked up to his mobile phone to allow everyone to enter via SMSing from their mobile phones. (More in next post)

Tea at Marcellina's

About 10 people headed over to Marcellina's for a banquet dinner. Some interesting conversations and a good chance to catch up with everyone over a yummy tea.

Other thoughts…

  • Wireless worked well, though not sure if all the Vista people got in first time. I’m glad I printed out the instructions before I came.

  • Seemed to be about 30 people today. I’m wondering what we could do to get more people to come along.

  • Is a weekend the best?
  • Would a weekday event get more people who are willing to give up work rather than their weekend/family time?

  • Maybe in the middle of school holidays isn't good for some people too.

  • Nice catering job by the scouts.
  • Most sessions ran on time which is good.
  • Great to see RJ, and bumped into Courtney too.