User Groups at Work

I was presenting on Service Oriented Architecture today to a group of developers from a large Australian wealth management company. There were a number of really cool things about this talk.

Firstly, the group I presented to was an internal user group (or as Dave would have it, an Eye Tee Cee). They meet monthly at lunch time and have technical sessions just like any community user group would.

Next, I used Team Foundation Server as the back-end for all of the code I showed. This wouldn't be so cool on its own, but this was the world's smallest TFS, sitting under Dave Glover's staircase in Melbourne. I was connecting to it over an iBurst wireless card, through the cloud and all with pretty acceptable performance.

Finally, taking a leaf out of Chuck's book, I managed to present for 75 minutes with no slides. All demo. It's fun! We played with the Application designer, the Logical Data Centre Designer and the System Designer in VSTS. We also implemented a Web Service and a VSTO application.

If you're interested in starting a developer group at work, read Dave's post and contact your local Developer Evangelist. If you're not in Australia and you don't know who your local Developer Evangelist is, drop me a note and I'll find out for you.