Jon and I attended the London .NET User Group meeting on Thursday (June 23rd). The two guest speakers were excellent.
First up was Charlie Poole, lead developer for the NUnit project. Charlie's laptop had almost run out of batteries and nobody had a UK adapter, so instead of running the risk of his power giving up partway through the presentation, he asked the audience what they wanted him to talk about. This approach worked absolutely perfectly, Charlie has around 30 years of development experience and has a lot to say about testing and development methodologies. Charlie had just come from presenting at the XP2005 conference at Sheffield University, so we were treated to some of his thoughts on Extreme programming and agile methodologies as well. It was a real shame that he had to stop speaking as I think we could have listened to him all night.
Second up was Benjamin Mitchell, who gave an excellent introductory presentation to Indigo, he gave people who had never heard of Indigo before great insight into its usage and extensibility. Benjamin is an excellent speaker and communicates the topic very well.
I went to the Geek Dinner in Crowborough on Wednesday (22nd June). It was a really interesting event and great fun to be able to talk to other Geeks over a curry. The conversation centred less on programming issues, although that was a significant part of it, but more on the history of computing over the years and those early days using a ZX81 with its keys made of some kind of 'dead skin'.
Simon Harriyott was interested in source control for his SQL Server database scripts, an area where he felt the tool support was lacking somewhat. We talked about a number of options, but it seemed that the closest we could get was to code SQL inside of Visual Studio (Simon is lucky enough to be targetting his apps at .NET Framework 2 and thus he develops inside Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2).
All in all a great event and I am looking forward to the next one.