Smallish turnout - but it was right before the start of a 4 day weekend here in NZ, so hardly surprising.

Topics discussed...

• Architecture group structure / communication channels / website etc.
• • Building a better website for the Architecture Chat (Wiki etc.).
  • Taxonomy / themes our discussions often take (i.e. Business, Education/Training, Local/Central Government, ORM's & Domain Driven Design, WPF/Silverlight etc.)
  • Distributing the workload of "write-ups" - by having each discussion topic as a page on the wiki, with each discussion extending that topic - and the ability to continue the discussions outside of the fortnightly meetings.
  • Possibility of somebody donating some design time to set up the structure for the site.
  • Group library
  • Swag / prizes (not sure how this would work just yet).
  
  
  
  
• Beer & Bytes - Peter went along, and noticed how few people had even tried a "hello world" in WPF or Silverlight, and the difficulty of succinctly defining just what WPF is / it's value proposition in a few short sentences (perhaps this is a good question for stack overflow?).
• The generally false opinion (with some anecdotal evidence from Peter) of thinking it's easier to quickly throw a prototype/small UI for an app together in Windows Forms vs. WPF when you're in a hurry, or trying to avoid the additional issues of deploying the 3.5 sp1 framework along with your application.
• Commercial controls for WPF vs. Rolling your own, and the general decline the number of commercial controls you need to build an application.

After that the conversation veered off into boatin stories for the remainder of the meeting - so we decided to call it quits and head to lunch.

I look forward to seeing the rest of our regulars back in a fortnight, and hope everyone is having a good Easter break!