We returned last month, to basically an intro C# video fest, but it’s got me a little introspective.

I think the best times I have had to learn recently is when I have been cramming to learn something enough to pass on a somewhat educated review at the user group.

I won’t say I’ve learnt anything in depth that I’ve presented – even LINQ I feel like I’m swimming in the shallows of it, but that’s all I have needed day-to-day at work, and in contrast to the guys who don’t get to develop with these tools often, I do feel slightly more advanced.

So what I am thinking of doing, and blogging to at least get it down to motivate me – is to learn a topic a month.  Choose some technology I have been hearing about, and devote enough time that I’d be happy to present some of the basics of it, over the course of a month.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t be learning other things – but I’d try to devote a bit of blog space, actually blog the links and sources I use online and discuss things in more detail.

Anyway, that’s the plan, so I’ll start with the new month!

Any suggestions?

So in the lead-up to the Code Camp in Wagga, that happens around April, I thought I’d put together an aggregated tumbleblog so that news on the lead-up and on the event itself can be found in one place (or at least gets some good links that will provide better Google rankings for those that make the effort).

So what I’m planning on doing there is subscribing to any Google blog search rss entries that mention Code Camp Oz, any twitter entries marked #ccoz, any flickr photos marked ccoz, and whatever else I can find along the way.

If anyone has any suggestions on posts to add at any time to the feed, or another site to aggregate in, then please forward them on to me.

The link blog can be found at: http://ccoz.tumblr.com/

There is another Aussie Dot Net Email list that seems active over at: http://groups.google.com.au/group/ausdotnetlist

I’d suggest if you want to subscribe however, to open up one of the emails on there and use the email subscription link, as Google groups only wanted to allow me to subscribe to the daily digest and not individual emails – and it seems hosted elsewhere.

Mitch Denny and the guys do a fantastic job of giving us Code Camp Oz every year, and same goes for Greg Low and the SQL Code Camp but the rest of the time I think it’s gone pretty quiet (although I don’t get to go to Tech.Ed).

Maybe it’s just me, but since Frank Arrigo moved to Seattle the old Tech Talk Blogs has died off, the last post being over two years ago, everyones moved on to Twitter to a large degree and blog posts “feel” less regular, and I was just wondering if it was a general impression that I’ve gotten or whether it’s something felt by others as well.

For the record, the Microsoft guys I’ve seen or talked to on Twitter are still a bit active and Nick Hodge has offered to come out and talk to us at the Albury/Wodonga .NET Users Group in the past (Dave Glover has actually been to see us in the past also), but I can’t even name the guy that replaced Frank at Microsoft for the Australian Dev community.

That being said, I don’t belong to any of the email groups or anything around.

So I have to ask the question, for anyone who stumbles across this blog, is the Aussie Dev community getting quieter, or is it just my perception of it?

Any recommendations on where the conversations are happening?

Edit:

And in a case of FAIL on my part, Frank Arrigo had actually posted about the new head of Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism division, Gianpaolo Carraro, the day before I posted this, but I was on the road and only just caught up on my feeds!

There is also an email list going on that is not too active at the moment but might gain momentum.

I’m a bit surprised to see the groups created, although I know there is a great interest in furthering learning for development in Australia, as witnessed by the amounts of people that travel from all over the country to attend Code Camp Oz, I wouldn’t have thought there was a whole lot of interest in segregating these groups apart from the Dot Net User Groups already in existence.

I know that the *DNUG system does have some ties to Microsoft, even though our local group has only received passing support occasionally from Microsoft – although they’ve asked if we wanted presenters, it’s not like they have that much to do with us.

But I wouldn’t have thought it’d be that important to start new groups, when I’d personally prefer to see the same ideas behind Alt.NET brought back into the *DNUG groups.  I know in our small group we couldn’t sustain a second group for the township – as well I know that the guys in the group would be open to presentations on anything that could help their .NET development, be it Microsoft technology or anything else.

Anyway, I guess the guys who are behind this have their reasons and I wish the groups well, and hope to hear good things coming out of them – it’d be interesting to see some Aussie guys get involved visibly in the Alt .NET community.

And hopefully some of them might have a session or something back at the Code Camp to let the rest of us know what they’re about!