I am going to be making an effort to get out there more and start going to more user groups. In the spirit of this effort I attended the Chicago .net users group last night.

I must say I was surprised, first of all the meeting was extremely well attended, there had to have been over 100 people there, from my experience with user groups thus far I think that is a HUGE turn out. The topic was SOA, WCF and ESB, all popular topics I am very interested in. The presentation was not completely what I was expecting but very informative none the less.

The presentation was done by Chad Thomas from Neudesic, the presentation was supposed to be done by Sam Gentile but could not make it. I thought that Chad did a great job, I was impressed with both his speaking ability and his ability to really interact with and connect with the audience.

There was way too much information in the presentation and resulting discussion to go over here, but I believe that you can download the presentation from here

http://samgentile.com/files/folders/presentations/entry2306.aspx

Chad did a great job expressing the benefits of SOA, web services, and he did not fully know it but BPM and blackpearl as well. I find it fascinating when different people form different experiences can take different paths to the same message and not even realize it. I have attended a fair amount of presentations on process, development, SOA, Web Services and the like and you can believe me when I tell you the talk will only get louder and more frequent. Especially with smart people like Chad out there preaching the message, and doing a great job of showing the value.

I just want to point out a few of the points I liked the most out of the presentation

1. Great job showing the progression and convergence communication and reusability to factors that are really driving SOA and the like. Take a look at the presentation, it really has some interesting perspectives.
2. The importance of aligning IT and the business. This happens to be something I personally as well as K2 feel very passionate about and put a lot of stock in. I believe that increasingly this will become more and more important and as the business user community matures and increases in their skill this will become easier as well as become more critical for success
3. Domain Driven Design. Very interesting concepts thrown around and Chad made some good references to a few good places to learn more
   1. http://martinfowler.com/
   2. Eric Evans
4. NHibernate. Something that I have heard very little about but that was talked about AT LENGTH in this session. From what I gathered a lot of people love it. So take a look http://www.hibernate.org/343.html

Hopefully the rest of my usergroup trips will be just as rewarding. Hope to see you out there