Michael Earls, Brendon Schwartz, and I went out for snacks and beer (mostly beer) after the Mobility UG tonight and sat there chatting until after midnight.  While most of the talk hovered around career paths and war stories, one of the topics of conversation might be interesting to the rest of the Atlanta .Net User Group attending public.  We were talking about what kinds of topics we wanted to see in the near future.  We sat there brainstorming and blurting out ideas.  I thought I'd list a few that we mentioned and then open the comments up to the general (blog-reading) public to see what interests the community at large.

Here are a few of the topic ideas we discussed:

• Biztalk - Microsoft is on the verge of releasing Biztalk 2006.  Do we all understand the value of Biztalk in general?
• Sharepoint - this communication and collaboration tool has helped to shape ASP.Net (webparts)
• Analysis Services - what good is having data in a database if you can't understand what it's telling you?
• WMI scripting - system administrators understand the value of this tool.  Do developers?
• Typed Datasets verses Objects and abstracted data - an architectural decision you can't make until you understand both concepts

What technology topics (not just development topics) do you want to see?  Do we want to get ever deeper into code like we have with the CLR team and our recent discussion in the Atlanta Mobility User Group about delegates or do we want to learn more about some of the tools that Microsoft is providing to make coding easier?  Don't be silent - let your voice be heard!  This is about all user groups in general and not a single user group specifically.

-- Matt Ranlett