In the Perimeter Mall, over by Bloomingdales, there are several seating areas with sofas, coffee tables, and comfortable chairs.  These are great spots to hold a small group meeting, as the Book Club found out.  Several people can easily sit around a coffee table and hold an interesting conversation without having to move any of the chairs around.

Like all the previous book club meetings, the discussions were very free-ranging and open, covering large areas of subject matter.  While not specifically discussing the chapters of the ASP.Net 2.0 book by Dino Esposito everyone is reading, we did talk about website design including 2.0 components such as membership services.  The conversation started out of a discussion between Brendon and Keith – they are talking about their plans to build an events server that helps keep several user group websites up to date.  The design discussions of this events server turned to web services and ownership of data.  The question became, is it ‘better’ to have a central events server which gets directly updated by UG leaders and then sends down to the UG website a self updating calendar, or is it better for each site to be individually maintained and have the events server be nothing more than a central calendar that gets notified of updates by autonomous user group websites.  The basic question here is, who should own the data, the UG website or the central server?  Brendon and Keith (and I, for that matter) feel that UG leaders don’t really want to worry about maintaining their websites – there is so much to do when running a UG, and no one is getting paid to do it.  So offloading a task like the website management (or a portion of the website) to a central server which handles data storage is preferable to each web site being responsible for maintaining their own data store.  There was some dissent in the group initially, but I think we managed to sway everyone to our side.  Look to Keith and Brendon for upcoming implementation details.

We also talked about notification services, or the lack thereof.  One of the group members was complaining that he didn’t know when the new VS2005 Beta was released until several days after it happened.  He was wishing he could have signed up for an e-mail from MS to alert him when this specific event occurred.  A comparison was drawn to the Saturn car company.  Saturn announced months or years ahead of time that it would be developing an SUV and people could sign up for an e-mail when the SUV was released.  Why, the question was asked, couldn’t Microsoft do the same thing.  After some initial bickering over which implementation method was better (e-mail or RSS) we all finally seemed to agree that the difficulty lies in getting an announcement for an event that is not yet defined.  With both e-mail and RSS, unless someone at the company has the forethought to create a subscription point for that particular event, the only option you have as a consumer is to subscribe to a mass mailing list or general RSS feed.  The analogy here is like looking to fill a small bottle of water from a fire hose.  You end up with a listening service and some kind of keyword based raw text search.  No one could think of a way to subscribe to an event that hadn’t been defined yet.  Well, almost no one.  Brendon actually has an idea about this and he’s writing a white paper he plans on submitting to Microsoft.

All in all, this was one of the better book club meetings because we not only discussed technology, but we discussed the technology from the book we were all supposed to be reading.  We all hung around until about 9:00 when we noticed the mall closing around us.  Check back with the book club website, a map of the mall with the meeting location will be posted soon.  We enjoyed the location enough that we’re heading back there next time.

— Matt Ranlett

note – a comment was made in the book club meeting that some of Dino’s examples from the book wouldn’t work with the new Beta 2 due to some framework and tool changes.  Take a look at this post from Shanku Niyogi – the ASP.Net group program manager outlining the Upcoming Changes to ASP.Net 2.0 in Beta 2.