• Discussed the Pomodoro technique, David's been doing it from the start of the year (And finding it working well), Jamie started a couple of months ago, Josh started a couple of weeks ago.   Here's the book, and here's a whitepaper.
• New Zealand most peaceful country.
• Study identified software developers as generally being healthier then people working in other industries.
• Mylyn Eclipse Plugin.
• Discussed Pipe Networks cable, and there was some debate that it had been both started or stalled...  Some older Articles mentioning arriving at Austrlia, but not NZ.   There's also a wikipedia page for PIPE Networks.
• Discussed Distributed source control, including..
• • Git & Git Hub
  • Mecurial
  • GitSharp (and it's current status)
  • SVK - Josh is using it, but hardly anyone else knew of it's existence.  Here's the wikipedia article for it.
  
  
  
  
• Peter and Josh put out the call to arms - if you haven't tried a DVCS, now is the time!
• Java in legacy lockdown - we discussed the rate of change / addition of new features in Java vs. C# as flagship languages for their associated JVM & CLR.
• • Also discussed the current trend (At least on blogs / podcasts) to identify a Java v.Next, such as Scala.
  • Are java's days really numbered when being considered for developing green-fields apps (as a language, obviously not as a platform).
  
  
  
  
• Automapper - Updated group of experiences after using it in a recent project, generally nothing but good news to report.  Did discuss configuring mappings when using an IoC container or plugin model.
• Discussed Firefox weave.
• WPF Event Manager - we discussed why events in WPF are potentially quite slow.
• • Discussed the contrast between the winforms event model and WPF.
  • Also discussed how the windows forms event model was generally inefficient, and sometimes like sucking on a fire hose, relying on efficient handling to avoid issues.
  • Discussed how the Reactive / Rx Framework might help to simplify some of the problems we face today.
  • Discussed the Drop of the Rx (Linq To Events) In Silverlight 3 - see here for a great write up.
  
  
  
  
• Discussed the interesting timing of Lightspeeds announcement of SQL Function support and EF 4.0's ;o)
• Discussed open source projects
• • The statement "if I don't know about your project, that's your problem" - Amen, open source is not just about throwing code up on a public accessible repository.
  • Discussed community.
  • Discussed educational materials, having up to date examples etc.
  • Discussed the interesting mix of the hugely greatful and downright rude people you interact when running an open source project.
  • Distinguishing the scratch an itch i.e. casual open source project (normally written by just one person) verses the more organised attempts to create lasting pieces of software and community.
  
  
  
  
• Discussed Google Pub Sub.
• Peter raised the question of writing services that render directly to the client i.e. using RDP or VNC protocols - talked around if this was a good idea, the feeling that it was a little like x-windows 15+ years ago and that there are some devices or applications that might already be doing this using the VNC protocol (?).
• Discussed Internationalization & user customisation, including:
• • Implementing the functionality to allow users to create custom "languages" for products so they can change labels, terminology etc.
  • The costs of doing this at the start of a project vs. after shipping.
  • The impacts of certain languages on layout.
  • Why are our web dev frameworks not built with a degree of customisation out of the box i.e. moving the order of fields on screen, changing widths etc.
  
  
  
  
• Big vs2008 patch? (Not sure what this was, think Peter mentioned it being rolled out about a month ago).
• Entity Framework 4.0 features etc.
• Talked about the problem of too much content being delivered as video, including:
• • Not having the time to actually sit down and watch it - we need more transcripts and audio-only podcasts/content!
  • Main culprit was identified as Microsoft with Channel 9 & Mix, love the content - but there need's to be more pure Audio and transcripts.  Round the table most people had hours and hours of videos on their "must watch list" with more and more piling up every day.
  • Peter raised the question "what are you missing out on by not watching them" - none of use could really answer, gut feeling was probably not much if you keep an eye on twitter and blogs anyway.  Also it seems "big picture" stuff is often easy to grok when in video format (or at least more engaging), but video is too slow for anything else.
  
  
  
  
• Talked about Fibre round NZ - the ongoing "suck" that is Auckland's internet situation, and discussed what's involved what would be involved in setting up a wifi network for smaller NZ towns, to provide high speed access to fibre.
• Talked about NHibernate's codebase, why it is the way it is, and the advantages it brings i.e. ability to incorporate associated projects like shards, search etc.
• Microsoft futures video - discussed the video, it's "vision" of the future, and contrasted it to videos of the future from 10 years ago, how much was right, how much wasn't etc.
• Discussed the Hudson CI Server, and why a few of us like it More the CC.Net and Teamcity.
• GWT .. also mentioned some of the interesting bits in GWT 2.
• Discussed Eclipse vs. Mono Develop.  Was interesting how divided it was, some people really don't like Eclipse, others quite like it.  Also discussed the FUD around Eclipse vs. Mono Develop features.  Quite a few of us are using Eclipse for something i.e. PHP or Java development.
• We asked the question of "why?" Teleriks ASP.Net MVC Controls even exist.
• Discussed learning Groovy / Grails, and my dabbling with Groovy as a replacement for Jelly script in a project I was working on (though I think I mistakenly called it Jettyscript at the time - what a java noob I am! ;o)
• Discussed Suse Studio and Matt Richards Mass customisation etc. concepts - and how this could be applied to delivering custom applications.
• Polyphonic C# was discussed - including the concept of Chords - there was some debate around whether this project became part of c-omega as well (according to the web page, it did).
• Discussed Parallelization, PLinq etc.
• We discussed Rob Howard's "legacy" of the provider model, how it came about, community server, and why for many of us the provider model was either an underwhelming or unsuitable set of extension points.
• We talked about Horn, Josh mentioned my "Love letter to Horn" ;o) - and I talked a little about why I think this is important
• David started a discussion around Peer to Peer Banking, including this interesting article from Jason Kolb.
• Discussed if Shards exists for NHibernate.  Yes and no from the looks of it, it's in Contrib, but appears to be incomplete / non-functional.
• Discussed Caliburn WPF framework, and it's yield goodness.
• Discussed codeplex making their Wiki engine available.
• Talked about writing DSL's - including Boo, Oslo's M, and Jetbrains MPS.
  Contrasted differences, and why Boo can be quite appealing to developers compared to developing complex grammars for External DSL's.

There were lots more discussions, but I'm finding the conversations too interesting lately so I'm not taking as many notes as I should - If anyone recalls any other discussions / topics, just leave a comment on this post and I'll update it with the relevant details.

See you all next week!