Last night I finished up my final presentation on a tour of the Maritime User Groups.  This was the first time that I'd been out to the Maritimes and I had a blast during the whole trip.  Unfortunately, the need for travel from one town to the next pretty much meant I wasn't getting to see anything along the way.  Luckily the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick leg of the trip was done via car and I was able to see some of the landscapes during the trip.

I started out in St. John's Newfoundland at the St. John's User Group and fololwed that up with stops in Halifax Nova Scotia at the DevEast group, Moncton New Brunswick at the DevEast group and lastly the Fredericton .NET User Group in Fredericton New Brunswick.  In all places I met passionate, practical developers who are looking to do the best that they can to grow and deliver software.

For those that attended and would like the slide deck, it can be downloaded here.

Thanks to Derek Hatchard for setting up the tour and the UG leads (Derek, Amanda Murphy, Jason Row and Daniel Crenna) for having me at their groups.  If you're in the Atlantic provinces of Canada and are a developer, these are the people that are driving your community forward.

It seems that every spring and fall the developer world seems to ramp up and developers around the world flock to conferences and user group events.  For me this usually means I'm out and about for the better part of 2 months straight.  If you're interested, here's my schedule for the next couple of months.  Some I'm speaking at (presentations listed) and others I'm just an attendee.  Either way, if you're going to be around at any of these events shoot me a note and we'll hook up for a drink and conversation.

October

16th @ 7pm in Victoria BC -- Victoria .NET Developer Association -- ORM Fundamentals 

20th in St. John's Nfld -- St. John's .NET User Group -- TBD

21st in Halifax NS -- DevEast -- The Big OO

22nd in Moncton NB -- DevEast -- The Big OO

23rd @ 7pm in Fredericton NB -- Fredericton .NET User Group -- The Big OO

30-31 in Austin TX -- KaizenConf

November

10-14 in Barcelona -- TechEd EMEA

December

1-5 in Montreal PQ -- DevTeach -- ORM Fundamentals, Refactoring to Logical Layers, Fluent Interfaces

I've had a problem with the anonymous access settings for my VisualSVN installation that is hosting IglooCommons.  It just didn't work without prompting for credentials.  Understandably, no one seemed to care until the other day when Sebastijan shot me an email claiming that he wanted to take IglooCommons for a spin.  Interestingly, Rob posted a fix for my problem on the same day, saving me the pain of having to figure shit out on my own.

So now, IglooCommons has been released to the masses!  I expect the race to download to be tantamount to a snail race!