The last week of August gave us a preview of September with some cooler than normal weather. As much as I love summer, I love the fall even more! Better weather, less humidity, and colorful scenery (if you live outside of Manhattan. :)) Even better than that, the pace of tech events & conferences picks up as folks return to work from their summer vacations. This September will prove to be no different on that front. Already the calendar is filling up with a whole slew of great events!
There are some new user groups that have formed too! Welcome to the NJ Sharepoint User Group and the new NYC VSTS User Group.
Here’s the line up of area user groups for September:
New Jersey
New York
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| NY Enterprise Windows User Group | New York, NY | 9/4/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| NY PC Visual Basic SIG | New York, NY | 9/2/2008 | Outlook Add-Ins using VS 2008 – David Kulick |
| Long Island .NET User Group | Melville, NY | 9/4/2008 | Gain the Advantage with Performance Point Server 2007 – David Ford, HedgeHog Development |
| NYC SharePoint User Group | New York, NY | 9/3/2008 | Using Social Sites to Extend MOSS with Social Feedback – Ashley Roach |
| NYC Connected Systems Group | New York, NY | 9/8/2008 | Special VS Live Community Event at Brooklyn Marriott |
| NYC .NET Meetup Group | New York, NY | 9/16/2008 | Open Space discussion |
| NYC .NET Developers Group | New York, NY | 9/18/2008 | SQL Server Data Services: An Intro to Microsoft’s Cloud Services – Jim Williams, Microsoft Consulting Services |
| NY Metro SQL Server User Group | New York, NY | 9/25/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| International Association of Architects (IASA) NYC | New York, NY | 9/16/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| NYC VSTS User Group | New York, NY (NEW GROUP!) | 9/30/2008 | Visual Studio Team System Overview and Roadmap – Claude Remillard |
Connecticut
Pennsylvania
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Pittsburgh .NET User Group | Pittsburgh, Pa | 9/9/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Philadelphia SQL Server User Group | Malvern, Pa | 9/10/2008 | Topic 1: Policy Based Management – Sharon Dooley
Topic 2: Database Constraints and Agile Database Projects – Dennis Lloyd |
| Lehigh Valley .NET User Group | Center Valley, Pa | 9/15/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Central Penn.NET | Harrisburg, Pa | 9/16/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Philly.NET | Malvern, Pa | 9/17/2008 | Topic 1: Dynamic Data, LINQ, and AJAX – Rachel Appel
Topic 2: MVC & Web 2.0 – Nick Berardi |
| .NET Valley | Nanticoke, Pa | 9/17/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group | Malvern, Pa | 9/24/2008 | TBD - Check site for updates |
| Philly Office Geeks | Malvern, Pa | 9/9/2008 | SharePoint Features and Solutions |
| Philly Alt.NET | Philadelphia, Pa | 9/10/2008 | TBD – Check site for updates |
Delaware
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow.
Silverlight 2 just had its big coming out party as NBC used it to power their online coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The final release is due soon. Are you ready for it? There will be two great opportunities to get your feet wet and then dive deep on Silverlight during September in New York City!
Opportunity #1:
Come on out for a full day of learning about Silverlight at our Silverlight 2.0 Firestarter in NYC. We’ll start out with an overview of the technology and dig deeper as the day goes on. By the time you leave, you’ll be ready to crack open the tools on your own machine and fire up your own web applications with Silverlight! We have a great line up of speakers on tap, including Shawn Wildermuth, Todd Snyder, and Jason Beres.
We’re still working on the final agenda, and will post it here on my blog once it is finalized. In the mean time, registration is now open and will likely fill up quickly. So…
Opportunity #2:
Shawn Wildermuth, who will be delivering the keynote at the Fire Starter on September 13th, will be returning to New York two weeks later on his Silverlight Tour. Shawn is delivering a 3-day in-depth Silverlight training course September 22-24th.
Shawn taught me most of what I know about Silverlight. I attended Shawn’s 3 day course on Silverlight 1.0 with my fellow Microsoft evangelists last summer. I have no doubt his 2.0 course will be just as exciting and informative!
While the Fire Starter will give you a taste to get you started on Silverlight development, Shawn’s course will help get you to the next level and be ready to build real world applications. For more details on the Silverlight 2.0 Tour, visit http://www.silverlight-tour.com
Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation on the ASP.NET MVC framework at the NYC .NET Developers group last week. Your questions were great and it was a joy to have such an interactive audience. I apologize that I had to rush the ending, but we had to keep the meeting on schedule so the group’s sponsor could close things out. I have posted the slides I used on SkyDrive. You can find them here:
In other MVC related news, Stephen Walther just announced a series of new MVC videos has been posted on the ASP.NET MVC Website. I took a quick browse through these last night and they look pretty good. The 5 part series with Stephen and Charlie Poole on using Pair Programming with the ASP.NET MVC framework looks awesome! This is exactly the type of development process that the new MVC framework enables, and even helps promote.
If you haven’t been on my blog recently, see my other posts that link to MVC resources.
After quite an exciting Heroes Happen Here Launch, MSDN Events are here again! This quarter we have some tantalizing new content for you to enjoy, and my colleague Lindsay Rutter is kicking it off in a couple of weeks in New York City and Edison, New Jersey.
Due to some unresolved venue selection, our msdnevents.com site isn't updated with information yet, but you can register directly for the events by going to http://www.microsoft.com/events and searching for In-Person Events. Here are the links for registering for the NYC and Edison events, and the abstracts of what will be covered:
August 26th, 2008 - New York, New York:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383953&EventCategory=1&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
August 28th, 2008 - Edison, New Jersey:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032383955&EventCategory=1&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
Demystifying WPF
Today’s applications need to do more than simply work. They need to draw in the user, and provide a differentiated experience. This means moving beyond battleship gray forms, boxy UIs, and providing a positive user experience. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides powerful capabilities to develop a compelling user interface, the kind that makes an application stand out. In this session, we’ll examine the core concepts of WPF such as layout panels, data binding, styles and control templates, and we’ll use them to develop an application UI from the ground up.
Ten reasons your applications will be more secure when deployed on Vista
Reputations are tough to shake – particularly in the software industry. While Microsoft Windows has enjoyed great market share, especially in the desktop OS space, its industry position has made it a target for hackers worldwide. Microsoft leadership recognized the need to develop a security engineering approach that could withstand global Internet scrutiny, and Windows Vista is the first desktop operating system to embody this significant philosophy shift. Vista is built from end to end with security at the very forefront of the project. In this session, you'll learn 10 reasons why your application is more secure when it's deployed on Vista. We'll also cover new capabilities designed to protect memory, minimize privilege and provide resource-oriented access control, plus a plethora of additional security enhancements.
Developing applications with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
Service Pack 1 and Visual Studio 2008 introduce a wide variety of new features for targeting Windows, Office and the Web. This includes more controls, a streamlined setup, improved startup performance, fresh graphics features, improved AJAX support, and much more. We’re also introducing the ADO.NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services, which are designed to simplify application data access by providing an extensible, conceptual model for data from any source, while enabling this model to closely reflect business requirements. Don’t miss this lively session and learn how to use these powerful new features in your applications.
Hope to see you there!
If you’re not checked out on vacation, check out some of the great meetings going on this month in the local .NET community:
New York
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| NY Enterprise Windows User Group | New York, NY | 8/7/2008 | Windows Server 2008 Installation – Boris Nisenbaum, Microsoft |
| NY PC Visual Basic SIG | New York, NY | 8/6/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| Long Island .NET User Group | Melville, NY (New location! Check the site for details!) | 8/7/2008 | Spring .NET with a focus on DI/AOP – Mark Pollack |
| NYC SharePoint User Group | New York, NY | 8/6/2008 | SharePoint Alerts – Wes Bryan, Bamboo Solutions |
| NYC Connected Systems Group | New York, NY | 8/4/2008 | Programming with REST & WCF – Jon |
| NYC .NET Meetup Group | New York, NY
New Group! | 8/19/2008 | Developing Speech Automation Systems – Brian Colavito |
| NYC .NET Developers Group | New York, NY | 8/21/2008 | All About the ASP.NET MVC Framework – Peter Laudati (yes… ME!) |
| NY Metro SQL Server User Group | New York, NY | 8/28/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| International Association of Architects (IASA) NYC | New York, NY | TBD | No Meeting this month |
Connecticut
Pennsylvania
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Pittsburgh .NET User Group | Pittsburgh, Pa | 8/12/2008 | Using Windows Workflow Foundation to Express Business Processes – Mike Snell |
| Philadelphia SQL Server User Group | Malvern, Pa | 8/13/2008 | Topic 1: Partitioning in SQL Server 2005 – Sharma Jonnalagadda
Topic 2: Using File Groups in SQL Server – Vince Napoli |
| Lehigh Valley .NET User Group | Center Valley, Pa | 8/18/2008 | ASP.NET Dynamic Data with Rachel Appel |
| Central Penn.NET | Harrisburg, Pa | 8/19/2008 | TBD – Rachel Appel |
| Philly.NET | Malvern, Pa | 8/20/2008 | Topic 1: SharePoint Workflow Integration – Diamond Technology
Topic 2: Applied MDX in BI environments, SSRS/Performance Point – Kevin Goff, Common Ground Solutions |
| .NET Valley | Nanticoke, Pa | 9/17/2008 | Off for the summer. Next meeting September 17th |
| Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group | Malvern, Pa | 8/27/2008 | TBD - Check site for updates |
| Philly Office Geeks | Malvern, Pa | 8/12/2008 | MOSS Search Walkthrough |
| Philly Alt.NET | Philadelphia, Pa | 8/13/2008 | Integrating Deployment Packaging into the Agile Development Process with WiX – Ben Greenburg |
Delaware
For those of you who attended the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter we hosted in NY last month, you know that the product team is moving quickly on this technology to get frequent releases out for feedback. On Monday, Scott Guthrie announced that Preview 4 of the ASP.NET MVC Framework had been released on CodePlex. There are a slew of new features being introduced in this new update. “The Gu” covers them in his post. For additional notes, see the posts from Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack on their blogs.
Get the bits here!
As with most new/beta technologies, documentation is light, and the good information is contained spread out amongst many blogs. Simone Chiaretta has posted a good list of links about the new Preview 4 release on his blog: ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Links Collection
Following along in the spirit of aggregating all the information out there, Dan Hounshell has set up a really good ASP.NET MVC news site:
ASP.NET MVC: News, Announcements, and Information
While we’re on the topic of new releases from the ASP.NET team, they also recently released an updated “roadmap” document on what the future has in store for ASP.NET AJAX. Take a read through, and you’ll see that there’s plenty of good stuff to come!
Based on the success of similar events at Tech Ed and other .NET user groups, the NYC .NET Developers group is presenting “Speakers Idol” this Thursday night in NYC. “Speakers Idol” is modeled after it’s eponymous namesake American Idol with the winner winning a world tour and a recording contract. Only in this case, there will be no world tour, and no recording contract. There will be some cool prizes for the winner of the contest though (and for the audience too!).
What’s in it for you? There will be a smorgasbord of knowledge on hand with five speakers giving you 15 minutes each on the topic of their expertise. Stephen Forte will be reprising the role of Ryan Seacrest for the evening as your emcee. It wouldn’t be a contest with out a panel of judges. We have no shortage of talent on the panel either: Andrew Brust of 26NY, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet, Kathleen McGivney of IBM, and Peter Laudati (moi :) from Microsoft.
Here’s the line up for the evening:
| Topic | Speaker | Bio |
| Introduction to F# – We will see what F# is and what features/differences there are between F# and “imperative” languages like C#. | Zino Lee | Zino has been working on wall street investment banks for the past 12 years, and doing .NET for 4 years. Currently the VP and manage a group that takes care of all GUI work for a trading desk. In graduate school at NYU James did some OCaml work when F# project started. |
| Castle Monorail
MonoRail is a MVC framework for Web Development inspired by ActionPack. It is part of the large Castle Project which includes the Windsor IoC container and the ActiveRecord data mapper. | James Curran | James is a Senior Developer at BarnesAndNoble.com and as a hobby, the Owner/Operator of NJTheater.com which is being converted into a MonoRail based site (under-development version viewable at www.njtheater.org). Previously, he was a Microsoft MVP for VisualC++. |
| Upgrading Legacy Code
Learn how to read the code and determine a path of action to be taken with the code upgrade. See how to evaluate what could be upgraded, what to rewrite and when to start all over from scratch. | John Carnevale | John is working at Purvis systems stationed at the FDNY converting legacy code to .NET for the Starfire system. |
| Arithmetic in Generic Classes
Bill will show some examples of the benefits of doing arithmetic in generic classes and some utility classes and interfaces that make it extremely easy to do so | Bill Fugina | Bill works as a software developer for Coleman Insights, a music industry market research company in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. He visits the office three or four days each month and otherwise telecommutes from his home office in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. |
| Casual and More Hard-Core WCF
In his demonstration, Gerard is going to quickly build a pair of WCF client applications to demonstrate the use of the MVP design pattern to guarantee a contract with the clients and facilitate unit testing | Gerardo Arevalo | Gerardo is relatively new to the New York (Tri-State) area. He is from El Salvador, lived in North Florida, then packed up for the North East to be closer to the techno |
The case for .NET/Java interop at Morgan Stanley Investment Management group
The technology stack at Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) varies from .NET to Java and back providing us to use the best of both worlds in development solutions but at the same time exemplifies the need for integration between them. We present a case study of .NET/Java interop with .NET VSTO and Java Web Services that has enabled us to develop SOA-based solutions for MS Office for our financial users. | Gautam Arora | Gautam is a Masters of Science - Computer Science student at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He is currently working as a Technology Summer Analyst Intern at Morgan Stanley Technology and developing VSTO solutions integrated with Java Web Services. |
As per usual, the evening will start off with networking and free pizza. So come on out this Thursday night for a good time at the NYC .NET Developers group. The group meets in the Microsoft NYC office at 1290 Ave of the Americas. Due to building security requirements, you MUST register for the event here.
For meeting details and directions, visit the NYC .NET Developers group website at: http://www.nycdotnetdev.com
Summer has finally kicked into high gear! The long Independence Day weekend is here! I love the 4th of July. It’s the best holiday of the year in my opinion. Warm weather, BBQs, beach, pool, family, friends, endless nights. It just doesn’t get any better than that. It can’t shake a stick at Thanksgiving where it’s cold and everyone is crowded around a dinner table for a few hours before they all go home.
With summer underway, some user groups in our area may be taking temporary breaks. However, there’s still plenty of meetings scheduled for this month. Here’s the lineup for July:
New Jersey
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| NJ MS Developers Group | Iselin, NJ | 8/7/2008 | No meeting this month! Next month: Building Virtual Earth Applications – Sujit D’Mello, Microsoft |
| Northern NJ .NET User Group (N3UG) | Parsippany, NJ | 7/8/2008 | An Introduction to ASP.NET Dynamic Data – Rachel Appel |
| Central NJ .NET User Group | East Windsor, NJ | 7/10/2008 | Planned Agility – David Laribee |
| Central NJ .NET Agile Group | East Windsor, NJ
New Group! | 7/17/2008 | The Central Jersey group is going to host an interactive-style meeting the 3rd Thursday each month with open discussion and demos. |
| NJ SQL Server User Group | Parsippany, NJ | 7/15/2008 | TDD Principles for Database Development – Dennis Lloyd Jr. |
| ACGNJ .NET SIG | Scotch Plains, NJ | | TBD – Check site for details. Group may be dormant. |
| PhillyNJ.NET User Group | Greenwich, NJ
New South Jersey Group! | 7/31/2008 | Topic TBD – Sam Gentile |
New York
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| NY Enterprise Windows User Group | New York, NY | 8/7/2008 | No Meeting for July. Happy 4th of July! – Next month: Windows Server 2008 Installation |
| NY PC Visual Basic SIG | New York, NY | 7/2/2008 | Mobile Applications using VS 2008 and .NET Compact Framework 3.5 |
| Long Island .NET User Group | Melville, NY (New location! Check the site for details!) | 7/3/2008 | Intro to C# 3.0 – Dan Love |
| NYC SharePoint User Group | New York, NY | 7/2/2008 | Governance Over Share Point Environments – Chris Ott, NextLabs |
| NYC Connected Systems Group | New York, NY | 7/14/2008 | TBD – Check site for details |
| NYC .NET Meetup Group | New York, NY
New Group! | 7/15/2008 | OLAP & Business Intelligence – Kent Geoffrey
This new group follows the interactive-style of Meetup.com groups. Instead of lecture-learn style, it’s all about discussion and demos. Come on out and participate!
I’m happy to include this group in the monthly line-up! |
| NYC .NET Developers Group | New York, NY | 7/17/2008 | Speaker Idol! Come catch multiple experts get their 15 minutes of fame. (Oh, and learn a few things too!) Special judges panel, including Mary Jo Foley.
Topic 1: Intro to F# – Zino Lee
Topic 2: Castle Monorail – James Curran
Topic 3: Upgrading Legacy Code – John Carnevale
Topic 4: Arithmetic in Generic Classes – Bill Fugina
Topic 5: Casual and More Hard-core WCF – Gerado Arevalo |
| NY Metro SQL Server User Group | New York, NY | 7/24/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| International Association of Architects (IASA) NYC | New York, NY | 7/15/2008 | How Does Business Architecture Fit In? – Bob Hughes, Cogentes |
Connecticut
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Fairfield/Westchester .NET User Group | Stamford, CT | 7/1/2008 | Automated Developer Testing Panel – Paul Lockwood, Jason Sliss, and David San Filippo |
| Fairfield/Westchester .NET SQL Server User Group | Stamford, CT | 7/9/2008 | Database Development with VSTS DB Pro 2008 – Benjamin Day |
| Southern Connecticut .NET SIG | Shelton, CT | September 2008 | Off for the summer – Next meeting in September on: .NET 3.5 with C++/CLI & boosting .NET application performance |
| Connecticut .NET User Group | Farmington, CT | 6/24/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| Fairfield County Share Point User Group | Fairfield, CT | 7/22/2008 | New Group! WSS v3.0: Site Administration, Navigation, and Permission Best Practices – Neil McIsaac |
| Fairfield/Westchester Share Point User Group | Stamford, CT | 7/16/2008 | New Group! Using Content Query Web Par to Create Business Solutions - Paul Galvin & Natalya Voskresenskaya |
Pennsylvania
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Pittsburgh .NET User Group | Pittsburgh, Pa | 7/8/2008 | TBD - Check site for details |
| Philadelphia SQL Server User Group | Malvern, Pa | 7/9/2008 | Topic 1: SQL Server Reporting Services for DBAs – Jason Hall, Quest Software
Topic 2: New SQL 2008 DBA Toys – Sharon Dooley |
| Lehigh Valley .NET User Group | Center Valley, Pa | 8/18/2008 | No July Meeting – Next month: ASP.NET Dynamic Data with Rachel Appel |
| Central Penn.NET | Harrisburg, Pa | 7/15/2008 | Developing Controls & Control Extenders Using ASP.NET AJAX and the AJAX Control Toolkit – Brian Mains |
| Philly.NET | Malvern, Pa | 7/16/2008 | Topic 1: A Beginner’s Tour of WPF and Silverlight – Billy Hollis
Topic 2: WPF and Silverlight in the Real World – Billy Hollis |
| .NET Valley | Nanticoke, Pa | 7/16/2008 | Off for the summer. Next meeting September 17th |
| Philadelphia Area SharePoint User Group | Malvern, Pa | 7/30/2008 | TBD - Check site for updates |
| Philly Office Geeks | Malvern, Pa | 7/8/2008 | Open Panel Discussion:
Afshin Zavareh - Perficient
Tony Testa - Perficient
Dani Diaz - Microsoft
David Mann – MOSS MVP
Stacey Bailey - Unisys |
| Philly Alt.NET | Philadelphia, Pa | 7/17 | Building Maintainable Applications with WPF – Jon Graves |
Delaware
| User Group Name | Location | Date | Topic & Speaker |
| Delaware .NET User Group | Newark, DE | 7/31/2008 | ASP.NET Dynamic Data – Rachel Appel |
| Northern Delaware .NET User Group | Newark, DE (NEW LOCATION!) | 7/31/2008 | ASP.NET Dynamic Data – Rachel Appel
NOTE: This is not a TYPO! Rachel will be speaking at both user groups on the same day on the same topic. The Northern DE group meets at Delaware Technology Park in the evening. The Delaware .NET group meets on the U of Del campus during the day time. |
Thanks to everyone who attended the ASP.NET MVC Fire Starter event in New York City on June 7th. That was the first time we’ve hosted an event on the new MVC framework anywhere on the east coast. Special thanks goes out to Jess Chadwick, Todd Snyder, and Brian Donahue for helping assemble and deliver much of the day’s content.
Since the event took place, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback on it. My team is looking at hosting more of these around the area. We are considering dates in Philly (Malvern, Pa), and New Jersey (Iselin) for later in the summer or early fall. Stay tuned here for details on any future events when we announce them.
The content from the June 7th, 2008 MVC Fire Starter has now been posted online. You can find the slides and some of the sample code at the links below:
| Time | Session | Speaker | Content Links |
| 9:00 – 10:30am | Intro to ASP.NET MVC | Peter Laudati | Presentation:
Code:
The code demonstrated in this session is the “sample” project that is created when you open a new ASP.NET MVC project in VS 2008. |
| 10:30 – 11:00am | C# 3.0 – Syntactic Sugar | Peter Laudati | Presentation:
Code:
The presentation and code in this session was based entirely off of an EXCELLENT series of blog posts and webcasts put together by Daniel Moth and Mike Taulty. You can find those here: The Moth: LINQ Resources
|
| 11:00am – 12:15pm | UX Patterns and Principals | Todd Snyder | Presentation:
UX Patterns and Principals.pptx (199 KB) |
| 1:00pm – 2:00pm | Intro to Test Driven Development | Brian Donahue | Presentation:
Code:
|
| 2:00pm – 5:00pm | MVC Deep Dive | Jess Chadwick & Todd Snyder | Presentation:
ASP.NET MVC - Deep Dive.pptx (524 KB)
Code:
ASP.NET MVC Ajax.zip (811 kb)
Jess Chadwick has compiled the links to the various other code samples he used here:
http://www.jesschadwick.com/downloads.mvc |
Some other links of interest:
In the “Syntactic Sugar” session on C# 3.0 language features, there were lots of questions about “real-world” examples of using Lambda Expressions. I discovered this blog post from Andre Loker that shows how Lambda Expressions can be used to help remove string literals from your source code:
Getting rid of strings with Lambda Expressions
One benefit of using the MVC is the ability to easily add/implement “mobile” views to your existing web application to support mobile browsers. Here are two posts that show how to use the ASP.NET MVC framework to build sites that target the iPhone:
Rock the iPhone with ASP.NET MVC – Aaron Lerch
The Weekly Source Code 28 - iPhone with ASP.NET MVC Edition – Scott Hanselman
In April, I posted my ASP.NET MVC presentation from the Microsoft Health & Life Science conference. In that post, I had a bunch of MVC links which I am including again in this post:
The MVC framework is barely 6 months old, yet there is already a LOT of information about it out there. Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how you view it), it's not in the documentation. As with any new technology that's in beta, the documentation is a little weak at the current time. That will improve over time. But for now, most of the good information is out there in blogs from both the MVC product team and the community.
To get started, visit the ASP.NET MVC Framework web site at: http://www.asp.net/mvc At that site, you will find the latest MVC installation download and official product documentation. For some of the best information, follow the blogs from some of the folks involved with the development of ASP.NET MVC Framework:
From there, you'll want to check out some of the other MVC resources out there. There's a lot of great blogs about MVC outside of Microsoft too. Chris Shoemaker has put together a decent MVC link list here:
47 ASP.NET MVC Resources to Rock Your Development
Finally, DotNetKicks seems to have at least one or two new MVC posts listed everyday. You can see all MVC posts on DotNetKicks aggregated here.
Some folks are sports junkies. You know who they are. These are the folks constantly checking their phones for the latest scores