I went to my first Nerd Dinner today. For those of you not aware, our fearless community ninja manager, Scott Hanselman, organizes get togethers for code monkeys and the Microsoft folk that love them. It's a great chance to get out and meet people, find out what they're doing, swap stories, and get a little insight into what's going on around Microsoft as well.
Scott made this a "daily build" meeting, encouraging people from The Empire to bring the absolutely latest bits of whatever it was that they were working on. I didn't get up long enough to find out what other people had, but there were quite a few laptops (and Windows Phone 7's) out. Since the latest build of the MSDN/TechNet forums ins't exactly something to marvel at (we've been concentrating on a lot of back end optimization stuff), I brought POP Forums v9, my open source project on CodePlex, to show and tell, mostly because I've ported some of the more interesting bits to MVC 3. MVC is not "my" product, but it was a lot of fun to share with folks how this new version, even in the preview stage, makes MVC so much easier to test and decouple, with less code! I hope to get some of that code up to CodePlex very soon.
It was really interesting to hear about how people are using our stuff, and it really makes me appreciate the wide range of people involved. I was also very surprised at how excited people are over Windows Phone 7, and we were lucky enough to have one of the WP7 PM's there. There's a lot of excitement over some of the newer and forthcoming stuff too, like IIS Express and SQL Server CE for Web apps.
I really enjoyed meeting some of you! If you're not from the Puget Sound region, but plan to visit, check the Nerd Dinner site to see if there's a meet-up. You can even take your picture with Hanselman!
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