Talked about Venture Capital including Incubators like the Ice House & E-Centre ... organisations such as AintoG (and a brief comment on how small Auckland is, because everyone at the table had bumped into at least one of the guys from AintoG at some point), the Ice House pitch competition and VC climate in NZ and around the world with the current financial situation.

We talked a bit about WPF composability and run time decoration/behaviour extensions (also applies to Web as well) i.e. how do you not only replace or introduce new parts to your application but allow plugin/module/extension developers to adorn and extend existing components of your application (and in such a way to multiple extensions/decorations can be applied to a single component at the same time)... AOP for UI?

Ajax-only applications and the issues involved with unit testing them compared to traditional applications - the pain of regressions when you don't have enough coverage at the integration level and where bugs tend to crop up when you have nothing between your
tags, plus a little disucssion around using 3rd party JS control libraries such as extjs.

The lack of transparency for initiatives like Oslo compared to the other MS projects like MVC, DLR that feel a lot more open.  A number of guys were interested in seeing just what "D" looks/smells like though.

How to learn WPF, and useful resources including using Safari Books online (which I'm going to sign up to this month to give it a try, Keith raves about it :)

A brief whine about DevExpress components (bad documentation, poor performance of controls such as their winforms tree component etc.) - and how with the advent of WPF it's often easier to develop your own WPF controls in-house rather then purchase the equivalent online, and the discussion around how building complex controls would never have been attempted with WinForms in house due to complexity.

The trend of ASP.Net MVC to look a little more like Monorail with every release.

Routing woes (in both Monorail and ASP.Net MVC) and lack of Area support in ASP.Net MVC.

Preliminary builds i.e. check in, say to a private branch, it's merged with trunk, private branch builds on build server, if it passes then the merged changes are applied to trunk (to avoid developers breaking trunk, and allowing for more frequent check-ins) and various approaches that could be used to prevent or lessen the chance of breaking the trunk build (also known as gated check in in TFS 2010).

SVN vs. GIT - the noticeable increase in GIT take-up and mindshare, the lack of mature gui tools, and how/if you could move BA's and designers over to using a tool like GIT and some thoughts around shelving.