Here's a few photos from last nights NIMTUG meeting. Sam Gentile gave a talk on eXtreme.Net and stayed behind afterwards answering questions. We had a turnout of 45 which is our best so far.

A good turn out :)

Myself (left) and Sam

Garth McFarland: one of the lucky winners of the meetings draw. Garth's prize was Writing Secure Code and a USB mobile phone charger.

The reception after the talk

At next months NIMTUG meeting Benjamin Mitchell will be talking about Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. The talk will be in Dukes Hotel from 19:30 - 21:30 on Monday 22nd August 2005.

Talk Summary: This talk with be an A-Z of tips and tricks that will save you time and make development easier with Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0. We’ll cover how to deal with common real-life hurdles, and how to effectively utilize the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, by presenting a set of tools, tips, tricks, best practices, utilities and ideas that can enhance your productivity significantly. We’ll tour the new features of the Visual Studio 2005 editor for both VB 2005, such as the new Visual Basic lightweight application model for client applications, the My namespace, Data, Settings and Resources, as well as refactoring, IntelliSense improvements, Code Snippets and enhanced navigation.

Register for the talk (free) or find out more information about the talk

Sam Gentile is in town and will be giving a talk on Extreme Programming in .Net to NIMTUG members on Monday 25th July at the Dukes Hotel, Belfast.

Talk Summary: Extreme programming practices such as Refactoring, Unit Testing, and Continuous Integration have now become mainstream. This code-intensive session shows you to how to use XP practices with VS.NET 2003 and tools such as RefactorIt!, Nunit, NAnt, and CruiseControl.NET. We'll develop some code and use the tools to create unit tests, refactor, and automate the build.

For more information and to register for the talk (free) check out the NIMTUG site

Paul Fallon will be giving a talk on Idigo at the next NIMTUG meeting (Monday 20th June). For more information and to register for the talk visit http://nimtug.org/20-june-2005.aspx. If you're not a member you'll have to join first before registering for the talk. Membership and registration for the talks are free & there's usually a social gathering after the talk with some food & drink.

Kieran Lynam will be giving a talk on ASP.Net 2.0 to NIMTUG members on Monday 16th May in Belfast. For more information and to register for the talk (which is free) visit http://nimtug.org/16-May-2005.aspx

Tonight we had Microsoft's Robert Burke giving a talk on SQL Server 2005. Like the true .Net evangelist he is not even a forgotten USB cable or dodgy Virtual PC image could stop this guy giving a great talk. Rob covered most of the new feature but due to time constraints could only demo some of them, even so it gave us a good indication as developers of what to expect from Microsoft's next SQL Server release which should be with us shortly. Rob will be sending me the files/slides and related links from the talk shortly which I’ll be posting no the NIMTUG site, he also had a couple of interesting questions which stumped him but which he will be answering in his blog shortly.

We had a turnout of 33 and afterwards about 20+ of the talks attendees meet up afterwards for a drink and some food which was really good craic. Allot of good ideas came up with everyone getting together and talking which is something we'll hopefully be doing on a regular basis from now on.

If you have any follow up questions for Rob please post them on the NIMTUG forum

I've updated the event page for Robert Burke's talk to include the summary and Robert's bio. You can register for the event and also post any pre-talk questions you may have which you want Robert to cover in his talk.

http://nimtug.org/11-april-2005.aspx