We Edmontonians were out in fairly large numbers tonight to see John Bristowe, of DNIC and Plumbers fame, talk about stuff.  Sure it wasn’t just stuff, but there was a lot of stuff to be talking about.  The ever ambitious man that he is, John tackled not one, not two, but three major topics in one presentation. 

We heard about Visual Studio Team Systems for Database Professionals, which John suggested we call VSTS for DB Pros because ‘it rolls off the tongue better’.  I hate to disagree with the man, but Data Dude is even slicker.  Alas, the marketing guys won out.  Although the crowd seemed to be least interested in this subject, I think it’s a great tool and it solves some of the biggest dilemmas that we work around when developing data centric apps.

As this was a talk on stuff, what kind of presentation would it be without diving into LINQ?  Everyone always sees LINQ as a new way of doing data access.  I’m starting to believe that there is more power in it (with help from extension methods) as a provider of syntactic sugar for rich domains.

Finally, John went like a caffeine addict who’d just finished a 6-pack of Jolt to squeeze in the ADO.Net Entity Framework.aspx).  We didn’t get to touch on this very much, but it’s safe to say that MS is working on a strong competitor to nHibernate.

All-in-all, a good meeting, with a good turn out.  Watch for upcoming Edmug events…especially our April 2007 anniversary meeting.

Update: Apparently the April 07 anniversary meeting was construed as April 7th.  That’s not the case.  It was supposed to mean April ‘07 (or April 2007).  All fixed now.