Szymon Kobalczyk's Blog

Since February I work as independent contractor, and so far I like it a lot but the only thing I miss about working from home is face-to-face contact with other developers. So after listening to Scott Hanselman's podcast on how to become a better developer I decided to take one of his advices and organize a geek dinner. I invited few friends from my past jobs and our Kraków .NET User Group. We met in nice indian restaurant near Kraków's market square and had great time discussing all maters mostly related to .NET (but the food was good too).

Here are some things we talked about (some links are in Polish):

• Second Life and how people are making money out of it (Kraków is one of the first cities in Europe introduced to SL).
• What we like and don't like in TFS and some workarounds (also hosted TFS, Subversion and Exchange).
• Community Server and using other application frameworks (Share Point, DotNetNuke) to quickly create applications instead of building them from scratch.
• How we like Acropolis, and why we need application services on the client.
• New stuff in Orcas and .NET 3.5 (including AppDomain isolated add-ins)
• Of course we had to talk about Silverlight vs. Flash, but this also led us to Dynamic CLR (also here and here).
• How BizTalk Services can simplify WCF service deployment on internet (and don't get confused by BizTalk in the name - it is good for any WCF app)
• We also shared some trick on sharing large files over internet
• And finally, check out the NASA Photosynth

I would like to thank Bartek, Marcin, and Michał for taking their time to talk. I think that from now on we would organize this regularly every month. Next time I'll post info in advance here, so if you live anywhere near Kraków and would like to join us feel free to drop by.