5 people turned up This week.

Peter kicked off t1he discussion with a review of the Agricultural Field days in a disheartening lack of anything IT there, this sparked an interesting discussion around what's holding back adoption of technologies such as RFID's for animal identification and some possible inhibiting factors, like the cost to early adoptors, education etc.

After this we returned to more mundane things... first off we Discussed Velocity a bit, comparing it to memcached and some of the interesting features like tagging and the current lack of push functionality in the CTP.

Silverlight 2 beta 2 was next... talked about the new visual state manager and designer integration into Expression Blend.  I noticed after the chat that Ivan has posted an

Interesting discussion around why he believes the Visual State Manager isn't a great idea - during the chat we did puzzle a little over why silverlight is diverging from WPF, and just how cross-polination between WPF and Siliverlight will occur.

Other things that interested us about the silverlight 2 beta 2 release were Inking & Stylus support (and incidentally second-hand tablet PC's are becoming dirt cheap, so no excuse not to have one lying on your desk!).

Multi-tile source, which could prove interesting for providing information generated on the fly or integrated with existing GIS sources etc.

Cross-domain support, background thread support for networking and duplex WCF communications - I could see this providing interesting possibilities, i.e. a silverlight control that makes the web client a temporary member of a grid network, perhaps distributed virally as a facebook app.  Not to mention the more mundane business applications.

After talking silverlight for a while Jamie then mentioned the OAuth library I'd written - so I went through what OAuth is/does vs. OpenID (there seems a bit of confusion in some peoples minds of what each of these projects aims to achieve) and then what's been
implemented, and what is yet to come - for more info on the OAuth library check out this wiki page.

A rambling discussion sparked off by Peter mentioning IBM having broken the
"petaflop barrier" and the gradual approach towards a platform for an accurate simulation of the human brain, I made some references to "I am a strange loop" and everyone talked about the general difficulties with artificial inteligence and the current predictions regarding when computers will have enough horsepower to emulate brain function.

Thanks all for coming - see you all in a couple of weeks (Thursday 26th June).