First, I want to thank Jason for letting me have the floor at yesterday’s Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting.  

Since I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have enough content for the entire meeting, Jason asked Jay Wren to cover some of the time.  When the meeting started, Jason introduced us both, and being the comedian he is, showed off some of James Avery’s Photoshop work.   For those that don’t follow me or James on twitter, it was an image of the band Ratt with my head attached to one of the band members.  I still owe him for that one.

Jay gave a 20-30 minute talk on ADO.NET (with a little NUnit thrown in).  Jay is a super-smart guy so if you get a chance to see him speak, you won’t be disappointed.  As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to do my first user group talk on Castle ActiveRecord.  I think it went pretty well and based on the feedback I got from Jason, Jay and Josh, I’ll probably pitch the talk to other user groups and do it again.   My biggest difficulty was feeling like I was tied to the desk since I really didn’t have any way to switch slides without hitting a key on the keyboard.  If I do another presentation I’ll definitely look at getting some kind of presentation mouse so I can get up and move around a bit.

Turnout for the meeting was pretty low, but Jason attributed that to it being February, so I’ll take his word for it.  

After the meeting, Jason, Jay, Josh and I grabbed some drinks and BS’d for a couple hours.  The topics were all over the place…everything from alt.net to CodingHorror’s 80/20 rule to the development community in general.  Good times.  Lots of good stuff came out of those 2 hours (at least for me).  I’ll probably be blogging about some of it soon.

On Tuesday, February 19, I will be presenting at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group in Toledo.  While I’m no stranger to speaking in front of groups, this will be my first real user group presentation.  I’m a bit nervous, but after attending the NWNUG meeting last month, I think it’s a good place to start.

After sitting in Jay’s Castle talk at CodeMash, I was inspired and will be presenting on Castle ActiveRecord.   Here is the abstract I gave Jason:

“Most of us have experienced the fun of writing CRUD applications.  We end up on top of a mountain of data access code, most of it repetitive.  Do you want to spend more time writing actual business logic and less time writing the same old data access code?  In this introduction to Castle ActiveRecord, I will show you can write less data access code and be more productive.  We will explore ActiveRecord and compare it to traditional data access development.”

Maybe not the world’s best abstract, but hopefully you get the point.   If you’re in the area, stop by and check it out.

I’ll post a follow-up after my talk.

Besides twittering like mad (and hanging out in #alt.net), I’ve been hard at work over the past few weeks (since my last post) bringing a side project to life.   I feel really good about it, but now that I’ve released the initial version, I need to find the time to blog about it.  Hopefully I’ll find that time tomorrow or Tuesday.  In the meantime, feel free to check out the site and let me know what you think.

I’m also scheduled to give my first user group talk in Toledo on the 19th so I’ll be blogging about that this week as well.

Finally, I’ve been working on a post off-and-on since CodeMash and I’m really excited to get it wrapped up and published.

Oh…I also created a Yahoo! group (since Google Groups has had major issues over the past week or so) for “announcing and facilitating Developer community events in Michigan.”  Please feel free to join “MichiganDevEvents“.