2010 5th October

The biggest turnout ever I think. I didn't keep a record of everyone who attended.

Stuff we talked about:

14 How to push real-time information to a browser (for a booking system)?
We discussed Comet vs polling with some very good points about how to make comet work in .NET. We also discussed if the given business requirement really needed real-time updates:

There is a discussion about this using Silverlight:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/640488/silverlight-and-push-notifications

ActiveMQ NMS might a way to go:
http://activemq.apache.org/nms/nms.html

ActiveMQ REST might be quite a good canned pure HTTP solution probably callable from Javascript:
http://activemq.apache.org/rest.html

Otherwise there might be a some way to tunnel over HTTP (like RTMPT does).

13 What's with .NET apathy? Are people leaving in droves? Flash, Silverlight or HTML5? Windows vs Dev Division, is WPF finished?
The general consensus was that as many people are probably moving to .NET as are moving away. We discussed the polyglot programmer. It seemed as though there wasn't a great enthusiasm for Silverlight. Scott Barnes' post

11 Udi Dahan's domain events
Udi Dahan's original post. Mike's blog post on this

10 .NET project structure
A good discussion about how .NET projects should be structured.

9 What is MEF, and how and why would you use it?
Managed Extensibility Framework

9 How to version control a CMS database
A discussion how to do version control when your 'code' is data sitting in a database rather than code in a VCS.

8 Do you need bug tracking when you are agile
Gojko's blog post that triggered the dicussion Why I don't use bug tracking software - another interesting discussion

8 Penetration Testing

Stuff we didn't have time for

7 Why are there no alternatives to IIS for running .net on windows?

7 Anyone tried the new MS jQuery templating and data linking plugins?

6 Silverlight Spring.NET Monotouch/Monodroid

6 Coffee table computing - multi-user co-operative development

6 Google do not vet applications released on the market, and some apps have been shown to contain malicious aspects. Thoughts with regards to Apple's vetting their shop?

2 Which development tools would you take to a desert island?