NxtGen UG Cambridge Last Night
A big thank you to everyone at the NxtGenUG meeting last night for making it such an enjoyable experience despite the traffic chaos in Cambridge. When I arrived at the station there was such a queue for taxis (and no taxis) I decided to walk towards the centre. Still no taxis and a 30min wait if you called one so I decided to brave the wild west of Cambridge and walk the rest of the way (3 miles or so). Not such a big deal but pulling a wheelie bag makes it trickier especially given [a] the volume of people in Cambridge centre and [b] the state of their pavements!
Turns out there had been some major incidents in and around Cambridge yesterday with the various major arteries closed resulting in traffic chaos. Around 6.15 we were beginning to worry this would seriously affect turnout (given there were only 4 of us there!) but not long after people started to arrive in dribs and drabs and we had a really good crowd in the end - especially for a first meeting of a new group.
Don Syme gave a very interesting presentation on F# - aside from anything else the support for simplifying the standard .NET asynchronous programming pattern was enough to make me sit up and take notice. I did an hour or so on Silverlight but my main learning from yesterday is that an hour is nowhere near enough to try and describe what Silverligtht is, what its target use scenarios are, its core capabilities and also how to try and build anything with it!
Thanks again to Chris and Allister (Chris, I sincerely hope I didn't call you Simon at any point - there used to be a Simon Hay at Microsoft UK and my mind gets muddled very easily). And apologies to Derek for forgetting the Tablet PC I'd promised to bring along (bit late to remember it once I'd boarded the train).
