That's right, it's time for another Architecture chat Tomorrow

So as I mentioned last week - The Architecture chat is being held this thursday, 11:30am at Sylvia Park in Auckland (at Garrisons), all are welcome and encouraged to come along and share your views.

Some topics / announcements that have taken my eye over the last 3 weeks which might make good discussion fodder:

• VS 2008 RTM released to MSDN Subscribers.
• Visual Studio 2008 SDK with the new isolated/integrated shell support (offers some interesting opportunities for start-ups and unique product ideas)
• Parallel FX CTP released (with the associated details on the Parallel Computing Developer Center on MSDN)
• Microsoft MVC preview release slated for later this week.  The routing engine is nice.
• The Silverlight version shift from 1.1 to 2.0 – all sorts of good stuff announced (extensible control framework, 2 way data binding, and more than one layout container for starts – Microsoft people must’ve been eavesdropping on the previous architecture chats!)
• The Oslo initiative from Microsoft... Not so much an announcement as a hint/warning of things to come ;o)
  
• The Empower enrollment site is finally back up after being down for a month (for any of you budding start-ups out there).
  

And some conversational topics related to what I've been working on lately...

• Agile model driven development and just how can you combine model driven architecture (MDA) with test driven development and code-level refactoring.
• Writing parsers using F#, leveraging pattern matching & Active Patterns – and integrating with other languages like C#.
• Visual DSL’s – the good and the bad, and at what point does it become justifiable to roll your own for specific business needs?

If anyone has any topic suggestions either leave a comment or email/IM me (IM details are on the left, in the "Who am I?" section).

See you all tomorrow!

Edit: and as a late edition, I've also had a play/look into the very recently released Volta if anyone is interested - if you've got the time before xmas, I'd definitely suggest doing their quick start tutorial - interesting.