Congratulations to Paschal and co. from the Ireland .NET Developers Alliance (www.developers.ie) for a brilliant event last night. Eamon from Clipcode gave a really comprehensive overview of all the Web Services standards currently in the works. I look forward to getting my hands on the slides - it will serve as an excellent guide to WebServices acronyms! :) Paschal said they would be up on www.developers.ie later, I'll post a link when it arrives.

Here's to more community events like this in the future! Paschal also announced a great line up for INDA in the new year: Nick Grattan from Software Paths will be speaking in January and Ingo Rammer from Thinktecture will be visiting in February. Possibly the most interesting planned event is the Guerrilla .NET 2.0 Coding Party that will be held on January 29th - it is the first event of its kind in Ireland!

One of the attendees last night was Fiach Reid, who has just published a new book called Network Programming in .NET (with C# and Visual Basic .NET), published by Elsevier - Digital Press. It's great to see local developers getting their works published like this. So, if you are thinking of buying a book on the topic - and you would like to buy Irish - do check it out!

If anyone else out there in Ireland has published a book on a .NET topic - let me know, it would be great to put up a list on the MSDN Ireland site.

Fiach's book covers:

• Network programming fundamentals, TCP & UDP
• An in-depth look at HTTP clients & servers
• How to send and receive email, via SMTP, POP3, and the MAPI
• Transferring and receiving files via FTP
• Securing your network application, using rock-solid digital security
• Boosting the performance of your network application with Zip compression & multicast
• Communicating using XML, with Remoting and Web services
• Listening in on network traffic, with packet level networking
• Accessing legacy databases remotely
• Making your computer answer your phone for you, with .NET telephony