Sing this to the Bruce Springsteen version replacing Santa Claus...

Rocky will be in the ATL for a number of meetings, starting Tuesday with a Geek Dinner at 5 Season's Brewery in Alpharetta. 

On Wednesday Rocky will be joining us at ALEMUG to talk about Oslo.  This will be a very interesting discussion based on some of the recent developments in trajectory with Oslo.

If you are unfamiliar with Rocky he is the Principal Technology Evangelist at Magenic, a well known author, and is responsible for the CSLA framework that helps people build business objects.

Do yourself a favor and swing by for one (or both) of these events.  Rocky is a great guy and always has an interesting viewpoint of technology.

The first meeting of the Atlanta Leading Edge Microsoft User Group (ALEMUG) was a great success.  We had a decent turn out considering the rainy weather (not sure why people don't go to user groups when it rains in ATL, but that is another matter).

We had a couple quick presentations on covariance versus contravariance and two talks on new C# 4.0 features.

A giant thank you to everyone that came out tonight and made the evening such a great time!

Sergey Barskiy rocking the dynamic types

Everyone listening intently

Mike Strobel wows the crowd with code contracts

Jeff Ammons (left) shows off his Red Gate swag winnings while I mug for the camera

It has been a little dark here at the blog site due to the arrival of our second daughter.  Things are great and we are starting to get to know the sweet little kid that joined our household.

While I get my data legs back under me check out the new whitepaper written by the highly esteemed Paul Randall on High Availability strategies in SQL Server 2008.

Also, make sure you check our user group at ALEMUG for the coming October meeting.  Should be a great time.

I am very excited to announce the creation of a new user group for the Atlanta area.  The group is the Atlanta Leading Edge Microsoft User Group (ALEMUG) and will begin meeting in October.  The focus of the group will be on technologies in the Microsoft stack that are emerging but not yet mainstream.

An additional area of discussion for this group will be how these technologies apply to business today.  I would hope that anyone who has worked in IT for very long has experienced the great feeling of a well implemented project and the effect it can have on a business.  I have been lucky enough to see great advances in several companies prior to my consulting life and it is what drives me today.  I think we have a responsibility within the community to not only show the shiny hot new technology but guide the delivery of said product(s) to a business conclusion.  Otherwise, what exactly is the point of a user group meeting?

I hope you would join us for what should be some pretty fascinating conversation.  With the group of people involved as of now it will be anything but boring.  More to come.

As promised, here is the Powerpoint and code samples from tonight's AtlantaMDF meeting.  Thanks to everyone who came out and for all the great questions!

AtlantaMDF_Aug10_CDC.zip (1.31 mb)

I will be speaking to the AtlantaMDF group about one of my favorite topics, Change Data Capture,  on Monday August 10th.  If you will/can be near the Microsoft office in Alpharetta swing on by.