Good turn out at the last Architecture chat, including Guy, who hadn't been to one for over a year, and Murray, a new comer.

• Secunia Corporate Software Scanner - How to identify missing patches etc.
• Discussed the 97 things every software architect should know and Beautiful Architecture books - I'll bring them along next time if anyone wants to borrow them.
• Discussed Facebook's key/value database Cassandra.
• Discussed approaches for publishing and consuming RSS, talked about PubSub Hubbub.
• Discussed selecting technologies for building CRUD Apps, and what are good technologies for learning ORM.
• Discussed NHibernate being the Swiss army knife, lots of features, interesting place to learn as you will become aware with almost every facet of ORM nomenclature etc.
• Discussed Summer of NHibernate series of screen casts / tutorials.
• Discussed Entity Framework, Linq2Sql  and others including Lightspeed.
• Discussed difference between highly opinionated vs. non-opinionated ORM's.
• Software Craftsmanship - sparked off by this article in the Herald - general consensus was we didn't agree at all with the article, and that there is an obvious disconnect between the view points of academia and practicing developers.
• Discussed the ideas of Science based engineering rigueur improving software quality and stopping projects running over budget, and it’s rather short-sighted view of how software defects originate / what contributes to overall “software quality”.
• Big discussion was around Software "engineering" - and how far removed from other engineering disciplines we are.
• Discussed fact that most software development focused degrees in New Zealand don't qualify you to join IPENZ - and if we could, most of us wouldn't want to.
• Discussed the laughable Idea of forcing developers to study something every year to “stay current” – everyone agreed if you’re not learning something every day as a developer, your doing it wrong.
• Service Buses & IoC Containers (the conversation got a bit mixed up between these two) – things we discussed were:
• When to adopt, i.e. how big does a project have to be, what problems should you be facing.
• Quite a bit of discussion around the misnomer of "how big" being a reason to adopt any technology, rather then how complex, good fit etc.
• Discussed the dangers of adopting technology and practices prematurely.
• Examples of .Net service bus:
• Mass Transit.
• NServiceBus.
• Discussed the .Net Mailing List - Josh didn't know what it was, which in some way reflects that it’s not longer promoted any more, discussed it succumbing to a slow death, how stack overflow affected question traffic etc. – FYI You can still subscribe to the dot.net.nz mailing lists here.
• Expressed annoyance that dot.net.nz no longer works after the “upgrade” to sharepoint, need the www. prefix.
• Wordpress twitter-like themes/plugins, such as the prologue / P2 theme.
• Pomodoro timers, including tomatoes, footballs, iphone apps and even *gasp horror* on-screen timers.