Architecture chat tomorrow folks (6^th November) 11:30am at Garrisons in Sylvia Park.

Here's some possible suggestions for topics (if we run out of anything else to talk about) that have caught my eye over the last week or so:

• PDC Has been and gone - plenty to talk about there!
• Crack.Net - interesting tool for taking a look at the internals of an executing Winforms or WPF application (and allowing you to make on the fly changes with IronPython...).
• Chess - Ability to reproduce heisenbugs in concurrent programs - Also
  got a mention on hanselminutes #136.
• New DevLabs site/portal for projects like Pex, Chess and no doubt some more soon.
• The new .Net logo - what do we think?
• Windows 7 - First look at the UI...
• Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0 - First CTP is available.
• More info on VSTS 2010 features came out at PDC.  A good overview is here.
• Windows Azure - microsoft cloud computing platform.
• MS Surface SDK now open (well sort of, if you weren't at the PDC session you'll need to spend around $13,500 US to get a development table, which gives you 5 seats for the SDK).
  • Tables are now available to everyone though.
  • .Net Rocks show #389 also had a good talk on Surface development in general.
  
  
  
  
• "Geneva" Claims Based Accesss Platform. Interesting logical next steps after Cardspace and in light of the other Authentication / Authorization standards out there.
• The Castle project is splitting into more of an umbrella foundation (ah la Apache foundation).  You complained about no V1, now your going to get 20 V1's ;o) - One of the positive outputs of this is that some of the smaller projects will now have leaders and a clear roadmap, rather than just organically growing with patches and immediate needs of the committers.
• Visual State Manager for WPF (well an early peek at least).
• NHibernate Profiler - something every NHibernate developer needs at some point (and developed by Ayende).
• Linq to Sql possibly slated for retirement? JD also has a write-up.
• Mozilla Prism (formally known as WebRunner) - let's you run your web app as an "application" (i.e. similar experience to Air, but without proprietry technologies) - this could provide some interesting opportunities when developing an ajax-only application (i.e. nothing between the  tags).
• Interesting href="http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2008/10/23/our-opinions-on-the-asp-net-mvc-introducing-the-thunderdome-principle.aspx%20">Opinionated ASP.Net MVC post from Jeremy Miller - I think what's worth taking from this is that MVC is something you need to spend a little time on to "make your own" rather then just using what's in the box.

If anyone else has any suggestions feel free to leave a comment or message/email it to me directly, otherwise I'll see you all there tomorrow.

Links to write-ups for previous chats, and information on the location etc. can be found on the wiki.